Is General Hospital’s Emma also an operative trying to get close to the professor?

General Hospital’s Joss (Eden McCoy) is struggling with her first WSB mission. She’s supposed to get close to the mysterious professor Henry Dalton (Daniel Goddard) and secure a position as his research assistant. But she entered the in-demand class late and is having trouble getting caught up. Dalton has already told her she’s not going to be his research assistant.

Dalton has definitely noticed Emma Scorpio-Drake (Braedyn Bruner), though. Emma impresses the professor with her work and has already let him know how much she wants the research position. The professor seems to like Emma quite a bit, and she has made sure he notices her and her work.

Is Emma just really into environmental physics, or could she be running the same kind of mission as Joss, just for a different group?

The timing of Emma’s return

One of the biggest clues that Emma might be on her own mission targeting Dalton is the timing of her return. She appeared just before Christmas in Port Charles without telling anyone, even her grandmother Anna Devane (Finola Hughes) was in the dark about it.

Professor Dalton was also relocating to Port Charles during that time so that he could start teaching at PCU. It’s got to be more than a coincidence that these two arrived in town from the same school and the same place at around the same time, although they didn’t seem to know each other previously.

Now Emma is taking Dalton’s environmental physics class and is determined to become his summer research assistant even though she’s not shown this kind of interest in science before. Is that because she is on a mission to find out information about Dalton?

Who else is interested in Dalton?

The WSB assigned Joss to get close to Dalton, so there’s obviously something that Dalton is doing that is significant to law enforcement. But what if the WSB isn’t the only group that is interested in whatever Dalton is doing? Another group could have recruited Emma to go on a similar mission to get close to Dalton and get information about what he’s doing.

We know that Emma is very interested in animal rights, and wants to stop animal testing. It’s possible that Emma is working with an animal rights group to get close to Dalton for some reason, maybe a reason related to his research. They could be hoping to sabotage his research, especially if his research involves animals.

Another possibility is that a law enforcement shadow group like the WSB recruited Emma for this mission after her previous brushes with the law. Emma’s been arrested several times. It’s possible she was given a choice between helping this group and going to prison, so she chose to take the undercover assignment.

It could be the WSB

It may not even be a separate group that has recruited Emma. It could be another office of the WSB that has recruited her and put her on the same mission as Joss, in case Joss fails. Jack Brennan (Chris L. McKenna) was in California, maybe he was there to get a briefing about Emma being assigned to get close to Dalton.

It would make sense for the WSB to put another agent on this mission in case Joss fails, since it’s her first mission. She was assigned to this mission late, and she has a lot of catching up to do because the course material is tough.

It’s possible that Emma was assigned to the mission first, and Joss was given it later as a way to test her readiness to be in the field alone. Or, Emma’s mission could be related to Dalton, but not directly.

The WSB could be investigating the animal rights group that Emma has worked with in the past. What if she has been infiltrating the animal rights group, and her arrests were just a way for her to build credibility with the group? It would be bonkers if Emma turned out to be a WSB agent too, but I could see that happening.

What if Emma is the target?

Another intriguing possibility is that Emma is Dalton’s target, not the other way around. That’s plausible. Dalton moved to Port Charles around the same time as Emma and took a job teaching at PCU.

What if he has been stalking Emma, and he took the job at PCU to get close to her after she left California? If she had been experiencing stalking in California, maybe she left to get away from her stalker and just hasn’t wanted to tell her grandmother, the police commissioner, about it.

It’s a little suspicious that Dalton just happens to hit on Anna at the Savoy. He was pretty aggressive about asking her out as well. Maybe he wants to go out with her to get close to Emma. And if he does pick Emma as his research assistant for the summer, she could end up in real trouble if he’s been after her all along.

Joss and Emma

The rivalry between these two seems to be winding down, and after their talk, when Joss helped Emma out of the dumpster, it seemed like they might be friends at some point. But if they are really both on missions related to Dalton, they could become even fiercer rivals than they were before. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. One thing is certain, Dalton is the key to figuring out what Emma is really doing in Port Charles.

New episodes of General Hospital air on weekdays on ABC. If you miss an episode, you can catch up on Hulu.