Actress Returning (Again)

Some fun news about someone I’m always happy to see pop up on Days again. Head behind the cut to find out who I’m talking about…

Far From Heaven

Yeesh, that was an abrupt transition from Days of EJ and Stefan Switching Glasses to Beyond Salem 3. Not that I’m complaining! I mean, I will complain sooner or later, because that’s my primary hobby, but I can’t say I minded the switch. If nothing else, that final sequence on Thursday’s episode where everyone was at various doors and then Kate burst out of Megan’s lab and ran into Bo was thrilling. Like, classic Days cliffhanger, and it’s been some time since we got one of those.

It was pretty clear from the jump that something’s up with Bo. I’m not sure I buy that Kate wouldn’t have been like, “Well, you can stand here and fret about it, but I’m getting the F outta here!” Wasn’t she ready to let Marlena go down to the Hot Place as long as her own soul would be spared? But I did enjoy how they used Kate’s history with Andre — who knew Megan growing up, which is what the “golden girl” stuff was all about — to connect her and Megan.

And look who’s here! Not that I have any idea where “here” is, because I don’t think it’s the same building where Megan, Bo, Rolf, and the Undead Trio are. But she’s here, and she might be deep undercover, but she remembered to pack her Chanel jacket.

I had to laugh at alleged super-spies John and Steve standing there with their backs to an open door gabbing with their old pal for, like, 20 minutes. I know Hope technically had eyes on the door, but this is a woman whose attention to detail is so poor that she has apparently missed all texts and calls informing her that Marlena, Kate, and Kayla died months ago, so I’m not sure we need to be putting our safety in her hands.

Since this is the ISAARP we’re talking about, we’ve got a bunch of folks hovering around retirement age out in the field tracking down the bad guys, while the agent in his 30s does his desk job and then clocks out to go deal with his personal life.

I like Colton Little as Andrew, and it was great to see Paul on the main show again, but this all had to feel so random and rushed for anyone who hasn’t seen Beyond Salem 2. I like that they’re integrating it like this, but perhaps a little more setup would’ve been nice. Mostly I’m living in terror that Christopher Sean is only around for a quick stint and then Paul will be off the show, leaving Andrew to fall prey to Leo. Ugh.

Quick shoutout to those Belle and Shawn scenes, too! How generous to finally give Marlena’s daughter some time to process her mother’s death with her own husband. They might not be the most dynamic couple (and a lot of that is on the writing!), but hoo boy, will I take an hour of them grieving their parents over more of the clownery with those assholes at the Spectator.

‘Days’ Receives Two-Year Renewal

It’s official! Days of Our Lives has been renewed for two years on Peacock, which will take episodes up to September 2025 — meaning Days is renewed almost up to its landmark 60th anniversary, which will take place in November 2025.

Cue the trumpets 🎺#Dool #DaysofourLives @peacock pic.twitter.com/dUnPJoYXuu

— Days of our Lives (@DaysPeacock) March 15, 2023

Of course, there’s no guarantee what the hell is going to happen with Peacock — or streaming services in general — over the next two years, but this is about the best news we could get today. Now, uh, can we focus on writing some dynamic long-term stories centered on characters we actually care about?

The Old Switcheroo

Many (most?) of us are aware that there’s some fresher, theoretically-more-fun stuff coming later this week, and it can’t get here soon enough. There’s only so much of this incoherent cat-and-mouse game between EJ and Stefan that I can take.

Let me see if I’ve got this. In the space of, oh, three weeks, the following has occurred:

• Stefan drugged EJ, who made a major blunder at an offscreen interview, tanking DiMera stock.
• EJ and Nicole realized that Stefan was drugging EJ and decided to turn the tables on him and drug him back.
• Johnny and Wendy found a vial in the DE offices and suspected that EJ was using drugs.
• Using Tripp’s credentials, Johnny got access to lab results that showed Stefan was being drugged and tipped him off.
• Stefan and EJ switched their glasses about 40 times each during the space of Mr. Shin’s visit to the mansion.
• Stefan and EJ came clean with one another, resolved to call a truce, and went back to secretly plotting against one another.

So all of that happened, at strangely breakneck pace, only for us to wind up… exactly where we started? I assume this is supposed to be an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride, but the only thing I’m on the edge of is a coma.

I’ll throw them an errant point for having both Brady and EJ call out Stefan’s non-consensual relationship with mentally ill Abigail, but it’s not like they’re doing anything with that besides having Stefan shrug and say he regrets it. Especially since Chad is perfectly chummy with him now.

Luckily (HAHAHAHA — just kidding) there are other stories going on right now.

I’ll be damned if I could tell you what those stories are, but I guess other stuff was happening in Tuesday’s episode. Like, uh, spending an entire episode getting Leo’s reaction to Gwen sleeping with Alex. Whyyyyyy is this character getting so much focus? This is a comic relief character who has, for some reason, been elevated to a lead, and despite having no story of his own, it feels like he’s in every episode and every story. Is… is Leo the new Daniel Jonas?!

And if Leo is the new Daniel, then Alex might be the new Max (“Uncle Fucker“) Brady. There was a lot of chatter about Alex and Xander being cousins, but what went unmentioned was the fact that Gwen is also Alex’s cousin. This makes her the second cousin he’s banged since arriving in town. If we’re going to have Lady Whistleblower shoved down our throats (not like that — which is exactly the joke Leo would make!), can he at least get other characters’ opinions on that?

Pour It Up

How many drinks has Stefan served EJ and Nicole in the last 24-48 hours? A hundred?

Good thing the two of them always just happen to be hanging around and so eager for a cocktail or coffee or prune juice. I know poor Stefan just got his brains mashed up with a panini press a few days ago, but he probably should’ve caught on to EJ’s plot without needing a heads-up from Johnny.

Maybe Mr. Shin will drink the drugged beverage and, uh, see some benefits in his acting skills. Because based on those scenes between him and Wendy… it looks like Li comes by his lack of theatrical talent honestly!

Okay, I’ll lay off this crew now and go back to trying to figure out why there are random cubicle walls in the middle of a (/the only) room at the Spectator office…

I Got New Rules

Stop the presses!

Nicole looks fantastic this week!

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the matter of actual presses, some of which are being stopped for the final time. Maggie Kiriakis, who’s been CEO of Titan since this morning, has taken the axe to Bella magazine — the company’s original and perhaps only remaining known property (what happened to Mad World and Countess W?!), named after her husband’s deceased daughter. I assume this was supposed to make her appear cutthroat and Savvy At Business, but it kind of just makes her seem like… an asshole?

Elsewhere, however, print media is thriving!

The first issue under the new leadership of Gwen and Xander was such a success that they were able to afford to put up some cubicle walls in a pre-existing set! Sure, it was the first issue of a daily newspaper that presumably people already subscribed to, picked up out of habit, or grabbed out of morbid curiosity about the leadership change, but clearly these are metrics that we can hang our futures on. I’m sort of annoyed at myself for genuinely chuckling when Alex stormed out and Xander asked, “What’s her problem? Uh, sorry — I’ve been hanging around Leo Stark too much.”

And while Gwen was making out with Xander in their ill-acquired offices, Abe — a man who dated and then married a woman who was a fellow officer until she went to Overnight Medical School!!!! — instituted some kind of anti-fraternization policy at the Salem PD. In general, maybe not a bad idea, but a) LOL, it’s Salem and b) I’m pretty sure Rafe is the police commissioner and thus shouldn’t be dating anyone on the force because they all report to him. And while I want to like Jada, I have almost nothing to base that on, and she might be the most random character ever to get a sibling short of the time Willow Stark got a weird brother named Jed who was around for about two weeks.

Around We Go

Oh dear. Sarah has discovered that she’s pregnant by a man who, for a variety of complicated reasons, she can’t be in a relationship with, and so she’s going to keep the news to herself and possibly pass the baby off as being another man’s–

–wait. Did I accidentally just copy and paste a paragraph from a 2019 recap? No? We’re actually just doing this story again? Cool, cool. I know nostalgia is big and all, but I can think of about 5,000 stories I’d prefer to revisit before we have to redo this one. It also just makes me think about how they could do so much more with the fact that Rachel is the little girl who Sarah raised as Mackenzie for a year-and-a-half, but aside from a few scenes when Rachel got sick last year, it’s like that never happened at all.

On the plus side, it seems like she and Rex are going to be heading offscreen for a bit, so lemme stop complaining.

We do have something original happening, which is that elderly former restauranteur Maggie Horton Kiriakis has now been placed in charge of a volatile international conglomerate.

Sure, the woman has run businesses, as she pointed out — like Tuscany and Chez Rouge, the latter of which might still be operating today in some dimension that we never see, and also that spa where people were kick-boxing in the lobby for six months before everyone forgot about it. But I wouldn’t say that experience qualifies her to run Titan (not that a lack of experience has ever stopped, oh, 80 percent of the people who have been CEO of Titan or DiMera in the last decade). I know I should be celebrating the idea of women succeeding in business, especially older women, but this feels very… not Maggie, doesn’t it?

No one tell Brady and John that she’s running the place, by the way, or they might show up and trash the Titan offices the way they did Tuscany that one time. I’m sure Brady has his Zorro costume in storage somewhere.

It also appears that we said goodbye to Jack and Jennifer this week, or at least as much as we ever say goodbye to anyone, and in a town where death simply means you’ll be out of commission for a few months or years, this feels more like a “see you soon.”

They almost got to something I could appreciate with Jack and Gwen, but he was way, way too soft with her. I suppose they’re trying not to paint Jack as an asshole here, which is good in theory — however, Gwen has been such an absolute monster to him and his family that it’s like… he shouldn’t be saying goodbye to her. And I want them to live in the pain of Jack having no choice but to cut this daughter out of his life completely (if he isn’t going to fight for his newspaper), rather than just act kinda sad about it and then shuffle back to Boston, home of the Little Paper Jack & Jen Need to Save as well as all of Laura’s crap. Once again, it shows that they’re misunderstanding how to use Gwen: she should be an accessory to Jack and Jennifer’s story, not the other way around. Whatever. May she do a terrible job running that newspaper out of her hotel room while Leo gets them slapped with all manner of lawsuits and Xander settles for her as his second choice. Just don’t make us witness any of it.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn

For today’s post, I’d like to borrow a framework from those modern-day sages, The Real Housewives of New York City. Surprisingly, I have quite a few things to praise — and I also have some criticisms and WTFs. So let’s make like Countess LuAnn and, for every positive (a “rose”), also name a “thorn” to go with it.

Rose: They actually explained why no one bothered to tell the larger Salem populace that Megan Hathaway, thought to have died in 1985, is very much alive and committed all manner of kidnappings, heists, and attempted murders last summer. The ISA didn’t want word to leak out because it would harm their chances of tracking Megan down. Cool, that works. Bonus points for Megan calling Hope “Frowny Face.”

Thorn: Did they refer to Andre as Tony’s twin? Because that is not in any way the situation. We still don’t know who Andre’s mother was, or who his father was thought to be (presumably one of Stefano’s brothers), but he was a cousin who had plastic surgery to look like Tony. Then again, these two characters are basically just a tangled ball of retcons at this point, so what’s one more?

Rose: Not only did they address the fact that Wendy’s roommates ditched her, but we also received clarification that there are three bedrooms in that apartment! The place is now going to be inhabited by Wendy, Tripp, Li, and Gabi, not that this makes a ton of sense when one considers the history of said apartment — Will originally rented it for himself and Paul, and then it was taken over by Eric, who moved in Nicole and Holly, and later there was enough space for Allie, Henry, and Chanel. It also sprouted that “office” where Alex crashed the time he lost his underwear (ugh), yet both Johnny and Wendy had to sleep on the couch. But hey, we have a vague sense of the layout of this spot. Now maybe we can address the floorplan of John and Marlena’s townhouse…

Thorn: This one’s for reader Lisa+B, who tried to warn me! I still gasped when I saw Wendy for the first time on Tuesday, as she decided to celebrate her move from couch-dweller to Lady of the Manor by switching to a look that could best be described as… something a member of a 90s grunge band might’ve worn with Doc Martens? If those spaghetti straps and the lacy trim on the bust don’t scream “moving day” or “I.T. professional,” I don’t know what does.

Rose: As ridiculous as Stefan’s brainwashing has been, that moment when Brady tried to give him CPR and Stefan woke up screaming in horror was genuinely hilarious.

Thorn: What was with that mention of needing to track down Kristen? Last we saw, she was in jail. Where did she go? If she’s on the loose, shouldn’t we have heard about it sooner? And shouldn’t Brady be keeping a closer eye on Rachel?!

Rose: The show marked the 25th anniversary of Arianne Zucker’s debut as Nicole Walker with a walk down memory lane that included flashbacks to her early days and her very first episode, including Jensen Ackles as Eric!

Thorn: The sum of Nicole’s time has been more than feuding with Kate and her relationship with Eric, who was absent from the show for over a decade while she had some of her most significant story. I could’ve done with some flashbacks or direct references to her marriage to Victor and her rivalry with Sami, if nothing else. And of course this was another instance of someone realizing, “Gee whiz, it’s been X number of years to the day since this relatively insignificant thing happened!” I guess Nicole recalling the exact date that she met Eric makes more sense than Doug somehow knowing it had been exactly 50 years since Julie called her grandparents from out-of-town, though…

Up Where We Belong

Do you think that when Jackée Harry signed on to do Days, she imagined she would be shouting to a costar through an urn?

This was ridiculous! I also couldn’t help but think about how, upstairs in the very same pub, Dr. Rolf was using all manner of the kitchen’s gear to perform some kind of experiment on Stefan’s brain. Good thing the lights didn’t flicker for Paulina… and that no one wanted a meal that required that waffle iron.

I’ve been a very harsh critic of this afterlife business, but they did manage to hit some solid notes when Jake appealed to Nick’s humanity by invoking Julie.

Blake Berris’s face said so much, even without the dialogue. Crazy that when you take a break from the wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff and let a talented actor tap into real emotion, things work a bit better!

It appears we’ve officially turned a corner in this story, as the three women’s souls were released and they woke up in a lab… just as John and Steve deduced that it must be Megan Hathaway who took the orchid.

Thirty eight years after her brief initial run on Days, Stefano’s daughter Megan — who first reappeared in 2022’s second season of Beyond Salem — is back. I’m a little unclear on why it took John and Steve so long to think of her as an option, as they were kidnapped by her less than a year ago and were pretty shocked to see her alive and on some kind of evil rampage. We’ll see how this plays Monday, but it seemed like they remembered encountering her last year (I thought maybe their brainwashing had wiped it?), so I guess this is just another case of these alleged super-spies being a little slow on the uptake. And even if they didn’t remember… did that useless-ass Hope not even bother to phone home and report that she’d nearly been killed by yet another wayward DiMera?! She really does keep earning the nickname Flaky Face.

Weird Science

The time has come for us to receive an answer to the burning question of 2023. No, not “Did Stefan also slip something into the drinking water at the Days of Our Lives studios?” I’m talking about the other burning question: “How will Marlena, Kayla, and Kate magically come back to the land of the living despite being dead-dead?” It’s seemed for a while like we would be in for some major twist. Would it be magic? An actual turning-back of time? On Monday’s episode, we got our answer.

And that answer is: they were never dead.

Oh. So they’re just cryogenically frozen, but their three consciousnesses have traveled to some alternate dimension where they can interface with Satan, his minions, and notable angel Jake Lambert, as well as shouting through the void to speak to their loved ones. Did they somehow just write an even shittier Melaswen?!

Per Orpheus, we now also know that a DiMera stole the orchid, and anyone who’s seen Beyond Salem 2 or seen any casting news can probably guess where this is all headed.

I did have to laugh at John untying Orpheus once they’d decided on a course of action and immediately turning his back on this dangerous, vengeful lunatic. Did you learn that move at Super Spy School, John?

This whole thing has been such a ridiculous flop. I guess they kinda-sorta explained what’s going on, in that [redacted DiMera] stole the three women’s bodies and put them on ice, and Satan saw an opportunity to capture their souls and thus swooped in. But explaining it doesn’t make it work. I’m actually aghast at how dumb and meaningless this turned out to be. It didn’t help that, by the end, it turned out to just be a weird parade of people who’ve had dual roles being crammed into the afterlife. I’m surprised they didn’t bump into Chris Kositchek or that Greek lady Helena whom Deimos and Victor fought over up there, too.

After this idiocy — and maybe because my standards have plummeted so low they’re about to fall out the other side of the Earth — the rest of the week hasn’t even seemed that painful to get through.