Michael

Which doesn't even make sense considering he barely knows this woman!

The stairs disappeared about a decade ago. The larger Town Square was only around for maybe a year and a half; as mentioned above, the last thing I remember there of any significance was Nicole falling down the stairs and pretending Jen had pushed her, causing that miscarriage. We've had that condensed HTS set ever since.

I somehow have NO memory of Dave returning for that 2000-04 stint even though I was watching pretty diligently during that time!

It was Kinsey or Kinzie or something like that.

Just about! I still have no idea why they did that Jada/Eric pregnancy, although I appreciated that a female character chose to have an abortion and hasn't been made to suffer for it. (One could argue that being paired with Rafe is the ultimate suffering, but you know what I mean.)

You'd think Eric, the unemployed 50-year-old who did prison time for vehicular homicide, is publicly drinking even after that, and has impregnated four separate women in half a decade, would be the problem with the adoption...

Okay, this is an unexpected treat!

This is the unhinged soap news I didn't know I needed today. What in the WORLD.

Days bungling a personnel situation? Shocking...

She's almost 40 years old and hasn't been on the show since 2009. Of course she's aged. Weirdly, she was booking a lot of acting work throughout the 2000s, but that seems to have come to a somewhat abrupt stop around 2017. I wonder if she'd be open to more of a long-term return to Days given those circumstances. I also wonder if they'll play her as pregnant, since they mentioned during Bo's return that Chelsea is expecting.

I was honestly worried we were going to get a bunch of Daniel flashbacks.

I definitely wish we'd gotten more flashbacks of Maggie with Alice. Maggie was even the first person to learn of Alice's death, and she came downstairs and told... I think Jennifer.

Frankly, they could just have characters sit around and talk about old events and show flashbacks to stuff that aired pre-2000, and the show would immediately improve by at least 50%.

Ohhhhh, gotcha. I'm still dying for any confirmation on that. It's SO obvious.

Marlena remembering Victor is in the preview for next week. It's so weird they keep marking these anniversaries with the death of someone in that person's generation.

@Cat You make good points about both Carole and Heather Gay!

That's how I feel about Heather, too -- which is actually not too far from how I felt about Carole later in her RHONY run. She's high on her own supply and has lost sight of why people liked her in the first place. The whole black eye thing was horrible Housewifery and annoying as hell, and the way she handles confrontation is bizarre (though kind of fascinating from a psychological perspective).

Yeah, JL filmed some kind of short stint, and the recast happens when that concludes. It's interesting they got JL at all if this was the plan, honestly. This show is... something else.

The Whitney/Heather drama is NOT working. It was exhausting last year, it was exhausting on RHUGT... I feel like they think this is some Bethenny/Carole [!@#$%^&*], and it is not.

I think they just saw a plane crash as a more "powerful" ending for Victor, the same way they didn't have Stefano just pass away in his sleep. (Yes, they completely fumbled the ball with Joe Mascolo's final appearance, and the Hope/Rafe/Andre part of his final "death" was a mess, but having one of our heroes shoot him to death was a decent idea.) I don't for a second think they are even considering recasting.

Dylan Patton came to mind immediately for me, as well.

@jam6242 Thanks for pointing that out. I have absolutely no memory of him or his character, but that's awful on its own, and to think it was tied to Days is horrific. Alarr didn't come onboard at Days until 2003, so I'm not sure his stint overlaps enough to know for sure, but it's truly horrible if so.

I feel grotesque even typing this but... is there an actor in Days history who died by suicide prior to 2017? That feels like the most identifying detail in that blind. I believe the allegations about Albert, but that blind sounds even more dramatic and dire than what we've heard from the Days set.

This is such a cycle with Corday, too. I mean, not to this degree (that we know of) -- but every Plan to Save Days is like, "I hired someone, put the show in their hands, and one day I came in from the golf course and turned on the show and it was unrecognizable! Who knew that checking in once every six months could have that result?!"

The haircut thing (which is absurd and abusive but less salacious and traumatizing) made me think of the kid who's been playing Joey. He had longer hair on Beyond Salem and then showed up with shorter hair on the main show, but they've shown him less and less since that first appearance...