Michael

Is that why that kid is named Donna? Now I feel like an a*shole for snarking on the name. The child still should not exist, though!

I'm actually not minding the Abe kidnapping thing as much as I've minded... 75% of what we've had to watch over the last year, but I do agree that I'd like to understand Whitley's motivation and plan better. I'm a little nervous that "lonely cat lady but they're all stuffed cats" is supposed to be shorthand for "she's crazy and that's your explanation!" I liked a lot of today's episode, though. It wasn't incredible or groundbreaking, but there was a heart to it that was nice to see.

I had somehow completely missed that side agreement before this week. Interesting.

It's so weird. As much as I don't care for Harris, her trying to hire him to kill Megan felt like a Kate Roberts move, which I greatly prefer to "Katie Brady" or whoever this has been.

Christopher Sean isn't available to be on contract. I don't know why they've basically tethered Andrew to him, since they've known that for years.

Chad works at "SJPR" with Stephanie still, right? He and the kids do still live at the Horton house, as far as we know.

Good for LVP. This model seems like a better fit for her brand and business model, and it'll also minimize her tacky tourist traps for straight girls in the heart of WeHo. Pump cannot close soon enough.

I found the reunion almost unbearable by the third part, too. Ariana has every right to be pissed at Sandoval and Raquel, of course. (I know there's some amount of hypocrisy considering how she and Tom got together, but she wasn't professing to be Kristen's close friend, so it's also a very different situation.) And this was the first time she'd seen Raquel since it all came out, I think, so it makes sense she'd go in on her. But it got to the point where Andy would ask Tom or Raquel something, and immediately Ariana, James, and Lala would be all screaming over them the second they opened their mouths. It was exhausting and monotonous. I don't even want to sound like I'm defending Raquel, but she came on that stage to do her job and answer questions, so at least shut up long enough to let her do that -- it isn't like she showed up at Ariana's front door in the dead of night insisting on telling her side of the story.

That story was in 2011 (around the time of the MarDar "reboot"). Abe first ran for and became mayor in 2008, though. It was around the time that Theo was diagnosed with autism, and there was some half-assed story about Lexie not liking the attention that his campaign brought upon the family because of Theo's diagnosis or something.

It's Blake.

This is just so sad. I, too, really thought he'd turned a corner. I know recovery isn't always linear, but to have another public incident just when he seemed to be piecing his reputation back together... I hope he's able to find the resources to receive treatment and that he's able to commit to it fully.

I'm with you, @carolineg. She's not even a good mother! I like what they're doing with Rachel, but Kristen is basically manipulating this kid into being a little psycho. And this started when ED first returned -- and got worse with Haiduk -- but they keep doing this sex kitten thing with her that feels like her one note now. She's always preening and moaning and vamping. If they're going to do it, they could at least explain that it's because she found a reason to use her sexuality as a weapon or... I dunno.

Probably! Maybe they could've told us that, LOL. She also didn't really owe them the orchid -- she had it, they wanted it, and she didn't demand actual money for it, so... who the hell knows!

I hear you re: Kristen's sentence (whatever it was, because as you point out, she just went from being in police custody to being back in jail), but there was a whole bunch of hand-wringing around the time the women "died" and how their deaths were on Kristen. She was arrested for their deaths, and once they turned up alive and Megan's involvement was revealed, it also became known that Megan, not Kristen, had stolen/taken the orchid. They all knew she had it prior to that -- she was holding it as collateral and then it vanished and she was accused of making it disappear, right? So Kristen wasn't responsible for any of what happened, or the part that she was responsible for happened way before she was taken into custody. I guess the real answer is that the writers don't understand it any better than we do.

Kristen just seems so deranged that I can't take her seriously as a character at this point. She runs around mugging and sneering like she's Heather Webber, and she's in and out of prison three times a year. And she seems like an idiot, which is not how Kristen ever was. Why did she just sit around in jail waiting for Megan's help getting out once she learned that the three women didn't actually die? Kristen Blake -- or someone with an even functional IQ -- would've hired a lawyer to get her out of there the minute she found out that Marlena, Kayla, and Kate hadn't died as a result of her actions.

Yes! I knew there was something I was forgetting, the bit with Simone's brother. Thanks.

I still can't believe they aired that story. Whew. They actually *did* have Lani address being a Black woman who was also a police officer. This was perhaps in the year before she left -- I can't recall the full context, maybe she was talking to Chanel? It felt a little like a "Ah crap, we need to address this somehow," but it was nevertheless one of the more interesting things they ever gave Lani to say just because it vaguely made her seem like a real person for a scene or two. It never came into play in a larger way.

Thanks! I'm gonna have to dig into this a bit. I had completely blocked out the entire Jason Olive "Frank" era in the early 2000s, too. Was there even anything to connect Cornelius's Frankie to that earlier iteration? He had something to do with Mia, maybe?

I never knew that about Frankie Hubbard's (re-)re-introduction and him not having been that character at first! That reminds me of how Days had Theresa and Paige cross paths several times, because of their mutual connection to JJ, but at no point did they recognize one another, despite soon being revealed to be aunt and niece (due to Theresa's half-sister Eve being Paige's mom). Paige was definitely not going to be the daughter of Eve Donovan when she first arrived. They never did much of use with Paige's retconned Hernandez connection, either. I do think Gabi as a character holds an interesting spot on the Days canvas, but as @dc11786 points out, it's more her potential than what's been done with her. They haven't done nearly enough with her, Sonny, and Will in the past few years -- they throw in a mention here and there, rather than letting their stories all bounce off one another -- and tossing her into these nonstop, half-baked CEO wars hasn't exactly helped the character sing. (I remember the rumor that Josh Duhon, who was just coming off GH at the time, had auditioned for Will. I originally thought they would pair Will and Melanie, too, just based on Basic Soap Math, but the decision to cast Dylan Patton really solidified Will as being about 15 at that time. There was also that weird jockeying of "Which one is Carly's kid? Melanie or Mia?" that seemed to bring onscreen the tension in choosing one of those characters to run with.)

I'd put Gabi Hernandez in this bucket, too. She was a random, nondescript younger sister of Rafe and Arianna who was brought in to fill out the teen scene with Will, Mia, and Chad. She just kind of existed until they hit on the pregnancy and the pairing with Nick Fallon, which elevated her to a lead. When the first Gabi showed up in 2009, there's no way I would've thought the character would still be around in 2023.

That absolutely reeks of Tech People coming in and "innovating" in a way that flies in the face of not only tradition and decency, but also the legal agreements that these companies have with the WGA and DGA. Ridiculous.

Yeah, if SAG-AFTRA's board moves ahead and authorizes a strike, actors can't work on signatory productions. Everything's going to shut down, daytime included.

Addiction is a disease. Certain people legitimately have their brain chemistry and receptors revamped by substances such as alcohol. Yes, it's a disease where one of the "cures" is to make the decision not to drink anymore, but it's a chemical disorder on a biological level.

Yikes. This type of recklessness is inexcusable.

Doug Davidson found shaking