-
-
The afterlife wardrobe, particularly for Marlena, Kayla and Kate, is awesome. I’m eager to see what further twists and turns are awaiting these three!
I feel bad for Sarah, as I know she’s hurting and even moreso because of Xander immediately going back to a woman who deliberately tried to fry her brain, but her expectation about how she wants Xander to feel about Gwen is just not realistic. It would be one thing if Sarah were divorcing Xander but saying something like, “I still love you but I can’t live like this,” but she’s treating him like a pile of dog crap she stepped in and just wants to wipe from her shoe as quickly as possible. Of course Xander would want to be with someone who thinks he’s good enough as he is and doesn’t treat him like he’s awful.
ReplyCopy URLSoap Opera Digest is reporting that Lindsay Arnold, Zach Tinker, and Chandler Massey are all out at DAYS, which is a shame but certainly not surprising, considering that both Lindsay and Zach recently dropped to recurring status and Chandler isn’t really on the show in a regular capacity anyway. But it’s sad, as Allie, Sonny and Will are all characters that I really like. All of the tumult with Allie and Chanel has been entertaining, and I wish we could have gotten more of this kind of drama with them that wasn’t ramping up to an exit from the show.
It’s funny how the very sight of Chanel and Johnny together is driving people to hysterics. Wendy is mad to see them together, even though she ditched plans with Johnny to go hang with Tripp, who she knows was into her. Allie still thinks she has a leg to stand on with being mad about Chanel and Johnny walking into Small Bar together, even though she and Alex were getting hammered with their faces basically connected at the mouth, after he left is underwear in their apartment the night before! It’s a little crazytown.
The show seems to be having more and more pairings hooking up that I don’t really like: Eric/Sloan, Xander/Gwen, Sarah/Rex (ugh), Stephanie/Chad (UGH), and Alex/Allie. It’s all very messy, and the two couples in these spheres who actually would go well together — Chanel/Johnny and Nicole/EJ — are showing restraint and not sleeping together, for the moment.
That said, I really liked the Xander stuff in yesterday’s episode. He was totally right in his conversation with Jack. It’s one thing for Jack to be a crappy friend to him and write him off without so much as a conversation, but Jack doesn’t have a leg to stand on as far as his decision to disown Gwen over this. So of course I loved it when Gwen and Xander decide to blackmail Jack for The Spectator. It’s absolutely what he deserves.
ReplyCopy URLThis show is starting to drive me crazy. Even when a lot of the broader strokes of the story beats make sense, the specifics really don’t or just aren’t satisfying. For example, I am enjoying the story with Marlena, Kate, and Kayla in the afterlife, and I’m happy to go along for that ride, and I also understand Steve dreaming about Kayla on their anniversary/Valentine’s Day, but Steve essentially being visited by Kayla’s spirit, while he is asleep, and her telling him the exact specifics of what’s happening with them? Extremely stupid. I think the audience’s goodwill about far-fetched plot developments has made the writing team think they can throw anything on the screen, and as long as it’s a character the fans like okay, they’ll eat it up. Also very stupid is Sloan, as Li’s lawyer, waltzing into the police station and claiming out of nowhere to also be Rolf’s lawyer (surely there are laws against this type of conflict of interest?) and advising him, as his lawyer, not to sign his statement against Li. Like, on what grounds? I can’t imagine anything Sloan could have said to make this make any sense at all, especially since Rolf has subsequently just been detained. It just doesn’t make sense. The writers need to understand the distinction between asking the audience to suspend disbelief for an entertaining story and assuming the audience is too stupid to realize that what they’re watching is stupid.
I like the idea of the show exploring Xander’s emotional struggle of whether or not to lean into his darker side or continue being the better person he sort of became during his time with Sarah. But the way that was executed last week/earlier this week, with Xander first getting yelled at by Johnny and deciding he’s a decent person, but then seeing Sarah with Rex and deciding he’s a bad person, is just juvenile and silly. The show also doesn’t need to be in such a hurry to play out these situations, especially when it makes them skip beats that feel important. I would have loved to see a few scenes of Jack explaining to Jennifer how he disowned Gwen because she refused to turn Xander (and herself) into the police. Do you think she would have seen the hypocrisy of Jack taking a hard line with this when he was so eager to have her cover up Jennifer’s crimes? Maybe slow down and think about different conversations and interactions these people would have and let the audience see that. If that would make the plot fall apart, then it’s a bad plot to begin with and shouldn’t see the light of day.
Another minor quibble: I’m sure that the writers are tired of typing Marlena, Kayla and Kate into the script in talking about what happened to them and want to start shorthanding it, and probably the actors are tired of saying all their names together, but you can’t have people like Brady start referring to them as “the women” or “the three women.” This is basic and not very hard. If you want to temporarily kill three characters at the same time, then I’m sorry, but you still have to treat them like their characters and not names you’ve checked off on a list.
Another frustrating thing is that characters seem to want to blame the easiest target for things rather than the person who was at fault. Why is Stefan making it his full-time job to poison and sabotage EJ but doing absolutely nothing to Kristen and Li, both of whom actually had him brainwashed and one of whom tried to kill him? It really doesn’t make sense. The same is kind of true with people blaming Xander for Susan’s death. I guess most people don’t know the details, but certainly EJ knows that Susan showed up at that airfield of her own accord and not being held hostage by anyone, so Johnny, whose encouragement and support of Ava and feuding with his father on her behalf is at least as responsible for what Ava ended up doing as anything Xander did, should not be in the town square threatening Xander about all of this. I know she ended up in a psychiatric facility with a mental break, but as a viewer, it’s really unsatisfying to have seen her face so little consequences on screen, after a string of crimes that included framing Rafe for corruption, helping kidnap Abigail, impersonating an imprisoned Sarah, fraudulently claiming to be married to Jake and collecting on that, having Susan kidnapped, murdering her, and trying to kill a church full of people with a bomb, compared to people constantly crowing about how terrible Xander and Gwen are. It’s kind of like when everyone was up in arms about Craig being with Leo, but it took months before anyone seemed to care about Nancy dating child-molesting, drug-dealing murderer Clyde.
I’ve seen a lot of complaints online that the show has too many characters and a bunch need to go. While I agree that there are too many characters on the show, a lot of characters should feel like a bonus rather than a burden. The real problem is that the show has too many storylines and is trying to feature most of these characters too much. Not everyone has to be a leading part of a story or be on once or twice a week. When Stephanie showed up, she should have just played into Paulina’s storyline and settled in for a while, rather than immediately being thrown into a triangle with Alex, who had enough to do when he arrived with the Titan stuff and just settling back into his family, and Chad, who should be quietly grieving his wife in the background. If a character does something awful, it’s okay to have them get caught and then write them out. Li does not still need to be around, and certainly shouldn’t be having Valentine’s Day dinner with Gabi after what he’s done. Not every criminal needs to get away with it, especially not ones who have only mattered in the storyline where they committed the crimes. Gwen should have been written out after she had the redemptive moment of helping Xander get the serum to reverse what was done to Sarah. If you’re writing what should be a huge umbrella story, like the poisoning and subsequent deaths of three prominent characters on the show, let that story actually play out with the ways it affects those characters’ families and friends, instead of writing other stories where those characters basically ignore what has been happening to them.
Overall I’m just very frustrated with the show and whining about it. On a positive note, I am looking forward Hope and Bo’s return, though already I’m hearing people say it will be a pretty short story that basically allows the two of them to have the happy ending they deserve.
ReplyCopy URLI don’t mind that they didn’t show the funerals for Marlena, Kayla and Kate (although the state of their bodies seems relevant given that they’ll eventually be coming back to life), but the show really shouldn’t have spent the last six episodes talking about the the funerals are “tomorrow.” They also could have taken advantage of the fact that they weren’t showing the services to actively pretend that a bunch of people who are clearly not showing up on camera were there. They could have just skipped the entire day and talked about it as if it had happened the day before. This would have also avoided the tackiness of Will and Sonny (and Allie) going to three funerals and leaving immediately afterwards. The fact that we’ve gotten zero scenes with Will, Sonny, Gabi and Arianna, in a genre that is ostensibly about family, is absolutely criminal. We don’t even see the conversation that Sonny has with Gabi to convince her to let them take her daughter with them to New Zealand. (I have questions about the custody arrangements among the three of them, but it has always seemed like Sonny was the custodial parent, so it would be weird for him not to have Arianna, despite being her one non-biological parent.) Also, I hope yesterday’s episode wasn’t their final episode. At the very least, we need Allie to say some goodbyes to Chanel and John (and Alex and Johnny).
ReplyCopy URLNow that the afterlife portion of the story with Marlena, Kayla and Kate has concluded, I will say it was a lot of fun, but also a little off the rails. Can I believe that maybe it was easier for Kayla and Kate to make mental contact with their husbands because of their loving bond and also because, as revealed last week, the women are actually still alive and were pulled into the afterlife prematurely? Sure. But there’s really nothing to make sense of Kate speaking to whoever happens to be present near her urn and the show treating it like a long-distance phone call, especially since just a couple of episodes earlier, Kate spoke to Roman and Anna couldn’t hear anything Kate was saying.
But an absolute highlight was getting to see Blake Berris as Nick again. Blake was fantastic as always as Nick acted as Satan’s henchman and looked really good doing it. I feel like it’s kind of nuts that Jake is in heaven and Nick is being treated like he was Andre DiMera level evil, but at least the writing of Friday’s episode brought some balance and history to that.
Also, LOL that no one bothered to tell the other DiMeras that Megan Hathaway is alive and apparently using DiMera Enterprises tech to do some very DiMera things.
While I don’t mourn the loss of Eric and Sloan’s tenuous and ill-advised relationship, I will miss Eric just hanging around Sloan’s apartment without a shirt on for episodes at a time. I hope Eric finds a new hookup buddy soon. Maybe he can work his way through some of Salem’s bad girls and hook up with Gwen. Or maybe he gets back together with Sarah and gets revenge on Xander by pretending to be the father of his baby, just as Xander had done to Eric at Sarah’s urging, since it looks like Sarah will turn out to be pregnant and assuming the show doesn’t make the silly mistake of having Rex be the father. He’s always clearly doing nothing to take care of the baby he has with Mimi.
ReplyCopy URLI want to defend this show where I can, but some of the writing is so sloppy. The last time we saw Kristen, the police had taken her into custody, and then last week, they just started talking about how they can’t find her and don’t know where she is. So I guess she escaped at some point?
The show is constantly writing characters as rather unlikeable and seemingly thinking the audience will enjoy them and want them around. I groan any time Rex shows up, and the thought of Sarah going to Chicago with him is somewhat nauseating. I also have to say that after I was liking Alex for a while, he’s taken a turn for the worse for me. A character who is unrepentantly slutty should be a lot more fun (like Sloan, who sometimes frustrates me with her questionable lawyering, but is definitely a hoot). The way Jack and Jennifer are being written out is also pretty silly. They bought a newspaper in Boston and have been running it for like a year. The show wanting to sideline them for a bit makes perfect sense, but I don’t see why it’s such a shock that Jack would not be editor of the Spectator anymore. He’s running another newspaper. And I get so frustrated having to hear things like Sarah, in her yelling at Xander about whatever he and Gwen did to get the newspaper, saying things like, “Jack is your best friend!” and just letting that hang there, where Jack dumped Xander without even wanting to hear his side of the story and disowned Gwen for not wanting to turn him in to the police, extremely hypocritical since he was more than happy for her not to turn in Jennifer. The show really should have just left Gwen in prison, and, having gotten her out, I can’t believe they just threw her back together with Xander. It sometimes feels like Ron and company have never seen a soap opera. I know not every character who commits a crime can be expected to face legal consequences, but certainly some of them should, and a character like Gwen who never really caught on with audiences is a good candidate. Li is another example of someone who shouldn’t just get away with the things he did. He’s not an important enough character to warrant making the police looks like morons to keep him out of prison. It can’t continue to be the show’s default position that everyone should just get away with everything.
ReplyCopy URLHonestly some episodes I love and find to be a lot of fun, and others make me want to strangle someone.
I think we’re currently in a better place than we were a few weeks ago. TO my mind, there are more of less three parts of the show, one that is mostly working and with soapy stories, one that is bananas but really enjoyable, and one that is frustrating and not working. Two out of three ain’t bad?
Obviously the bananas part is everything happening with Marlena, Kayla and Kate, which includes John, Steve, Roman, Megan, Tony, Anna, Abe, Paulina, and presumably all the incoming characters including Hope, Bo, Harris, Ciara, Paul and Andrew. This portion of the show is not getting much screentime, but surely will be soon. The part that is really the best functioning soap opera is the one that includes all the parents to kids or young adults and their love lives: EJ, Nicole, Eric, Sloan, Brady, Chloe, Stefan, Li, Gabi, Rafe, Jada, Belle, Shawn, Johnny, Wendy, Tripp and Chanel. Most of the things happening here are based on the characters’ personalities and ambitions and their relationships to one another. The last part and what really doesn’t work is most of the story surrounding the Hortons and Kiriakises and their trials and tribulations: Sarah, Xander, Gwen, Leo, Alex, Stephanie, Chad, Jack, Jennifer, Julie, Doug, Justin, Bonnie, Maggie, and Rex. These storylines are full of persistent problems, character behaviors that don’t make sense for them or for any human being, and very poor prioritization of characters and families, with the Hortons having become essentially an afterthought.
So on the bright side, the show is improving somewhat, but the downside is that the show doesn’t seem to know what the bad parts are/who the bad characters are, and some of the details are slipping through the cracks. Last week, we were told several times that Kristen was missing/on the run, even though when we last saw her, she was in police custody. This week, Belle said Kristen is in prison. What will they even say next week? Who knows.
ReplyCopy URLI saw so many complaints online about the last couple of episodes, and honestly I’m a little confused. I understand that people don’t love the story where Maggie is CEO of Titan, but if you accept that Victor did make Maggie the CEO — and I don’t really think he had any option that was clearly better, despite Alex thinking the job was his to lose — the rest of this makes sense. The fact that Alex has spent the last six months pumping time and resources into a struggling print magazine is a little surprising. Maggie wanting to reallocate those resources to something that might be more profitable feels like almost a gimme as a CEO move.
Aside from that, I think things were moving along nicely. There was some movement in the Johnny/Wendy/Tripp triangle (and I think Victoria Grace really shines as Wendy), that tied into the brother vs. brother with EJ and Stefan. Those shenanigans were amusing and reminded me of the “but they don’t know we know they know we know” episode of Friends. If EJ weren’t so dedicated to his need to outmaneuver people, he could have just called Stefan out and had him busted in front Mr. Shin, which would have been pretty damning, considering that Stefan drugging EJ has caused actual harm to the company and the stock price, but of course not.
ReplyCopy URLIt’s such a joy to see Hope and Bo back on the show! As well as Paul and Andrew. And I’m looking forward to soon seeing Ciara and Ben as well. The Thursday and Friday episodes last week felt like an upshift from where we’d been before. These episodes looked more like episodes of Beyond Salem, with some exterior shots worked in, a bunch of sets we’re not used to seeing, and big name returning stars. Apparently, Thursday’s episode was the first one produced for Peacock, and it really showed. Of course, the show really hasn’t learned its lesson about what to do with a returning actor like Peter Reckell when you have them for a limited period of time. When he came back for the story where they killed Bo years ago, we spent weeks with Bo completely separated from anyone else in the cast and then had the briefest of reunions with his loved ones before he died. Now that he’s back, Bo is brainwashed. Great. I know the show has to build up the drama, but there must be a better way than having Bo be a Megan-loyal robot. Still, I’m excited for this era and the great stuff coming up.
I read on SOD that the original intention for picking up this story was another Beyond Salem, but while they were pitching that, NBCU/Peacock was considering moving the show exclusively to Peacock, which would mean just doing the story on the main show. Because of the time it took to make and adjust to that decision, there was a period of time where Ron and company essentially had to stall between Marlena, Kate and Kayla appearing to die, which they’d already written, and them waking up in Megan’s facility, which was supposed to be the next arc of the story but couldn’t be written until everything was settled with the move to Peacock. The whole story in the afterlife with those ladies, Nick, Jake and Satan was because the writers had to find something to do with those characters while they waited.
ReplyCopy URLApparently Louise Sorel said in an interview that she’s back filming at DAYS, so that’s awesome. I hope Vivian gets out of prison, and also that this means Sorel will be the last person who plays Vivian when she finishes this stint. I love both Robin Strasser and Linda Dano, but there’s no good reason to have anyone else play Vivian after this.
ReplyCopy URLSince yesterday’s episode told us that Dr. Kimberly Brady-Donovan is a psychoanalyst for the ISA and, at the end of yesterday’s episode, Harris seemed to agree to work further with her on breaking Megan’s programming, does that mean we’ll be seeing Kimberly and Patsy Pease sometime soon on screen? I’ve heard absolutely nothing about her returning so far, but with Bo now having come back to life and Kimberly’s son Andrew involved in the story, it would be a good time for her to be back.
ReplyCopy URL
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
