Michael

It would be a good twist if Rachel LIKED the idea of Sarah and Brady so much that she actually supported it.

The baby was named when Roman was believed to be her father.

I thought they navigated the budget and productions issues decently. As was said above, I'd rather have had five days of visitors and memories than one single episode. I enjoyed this a lot more than the 50th, which had higher highs but much lower lows (like half of Salem being picked off right around the anniversary).

Sami unleashed Jan Spears on Belle & Shawn again when she got Jan sprung from the institution to testify against Nicole in... 2020? Whenever they were all arguing over Allie's baby, I think. That reignited the Belle/Sami animosity. Then Sami caught EJ & Belle in bed together, and it's been like this since.

They've pulled out some great, less common flashbacks for this week! Even if the transitions in and out of some of them have been... heavy-handed, I'll take it. I only got about halfway through Tuesday's episode this morning and will have to finish later, but I was actually surprised that Sami forgave Lucas so easily. I assume this is the new regime's way of clearing the decks there. Just very un-Sami to accept an apology so readily. I'm not sure what to make of this thing with her being engaged, except... Maybe something toward the end of the episode invalidates my theory, but I'm trying to make sense of why they threw that in there.

Thanks for sharing the info. I find it helpful to have it laid out so clearly.

That mostly does seem to be it, but

They've really leaned into the "Anna is kooky" thing since... maybe not her return in the 2000s, but since Tony's death in 2009 for sure. And yes, this weird little Tony interlude reeks of an Andre swap. Ugh. Did anyone catch that establishing shot of the neighborhood that the Horton home is allegedly in? It looked like a planned subdivision or a golf community or something. Such a weird mismatch. I did like a lot of the dialogue between JJ/Theo and Jen/Chad, though!

I think the chest is supposed to carry the character for us. The novelty of that wore off about eight years ago for me, but here we are. Also, I just waded through this ridiculous back-and-forth about women in their late 30s (if that's even the age these characters are) conceiving children, and I keep seeing people mention that Sophia committed arson by starting the dorm fire. Did she?! We saw Holly knock the candle into the trashcan. I feel like I'm hallucinating. Was this revealed at some point?

I'm two days behind, so there might be info I don't have, but Tony didn't buy DiMera back, right? He used the information about the fraudulent letter as leverage to get Xander and Philip to GIVE him DiMera back.

The optics of the JJ/Theo storyline continue to be really messy. As was just mentioned, the original storyline did this annoying thing where it gestured at an important social issue but didn't actually engage with it. Theo was committing a robbery at the time of the shooting. JJ was trying to stop a robbery in progress, not targeting a random black person. He also knew Theo personally -- which of course doesn't prevent or erase bias, but this wasn't someone he was only judging based on race or appearance. It was like they wanted credit for a topical storyline but without doing any of the work to engage with the real ugliness of the actual issue. The scenes in this revisit of that storyline have been strong, but they don't entirely make sense if you actually remember what happened. I do think JJ acknowledging his implicit bias wasn't supposed to be an admission of guilt, per se -- it was protecting him by having him acknowledge that all white people have implicit bias, and acknowledging it is the first step toward correcting behaviors. So for him to deny having it would've been more of a red flag for Jada, I think. Also, unless you're suggesting a triangle in which Theo is torn between Ari and JJ... Ari and JJ are biological cousins, so they couldn't play that a pairing there. The dialogue among Johnny, Chanel, and Holly was driving me nuts today. I know they were trying to string the whole thing out for dramatic effect, but Sophia sent those photos "this morning" so that they'd arrive while the social worker was there. Johnny said that they were sent "last night," which wouldn't make any sense unless he hadn't checked his phone AT ALL since the night before. Or am I losing it? And if those were the first messages or photos he'd allegedly gotten from Holly, how would the Anonymous Birth Mother have witness Holly sexting Johnny long enough ago to write that letter? They set up all these specific details and now they're playing fast and loose with them.

To be clear, I think the blackout mostly sucked and the logistics were executed poorly. I just think they mostly explained the timing of Sophia’s dumb plan. And it is DUMB: she is already worried about being connected to that baby… so she writes an anonymous letter identifying the mother as someone who knows both Johnny and Holly — well enough to have seen what Holly was texting.

The timeline didn't really make sense. The social worker came 30-45 minutes early, then they sat around eating pastries. Meanwhile Sophia sent the text and was later informed by Ari that Holly's whole episode happened "around 9 a.m." so... once again, time is a flat circle in Salem.

They showed a flashback to Sophia overhearing the exact time of Johnny and Chanel's scheduled visit from the social worker, so I presume she sent it at that time so it would pop up during the visit. That's about the only part that DOES make sense. Convenient that it arrived right as the anonymous letter was being read. And either the photo came from Holly's phone, which means Sophia stole it, or it came from Sophia's phone which would be easy to track. I wasn't clear. I assume the reason Holly was hospitalized in the morning was so that it'll eventually come out that Sophia set this all up since Holly couldn't have sent the photo, thereby clearing Johnny's name.

This is the intensity I was hoping for.