Michael

BLOOP. No lies detected. Karen is and always has been a clown. I've never really understood the deference to her, as if she's some paragon of class and virtue. She's good reality TV, don't get me wrong, but the level of delusion is STRONG, and her behavior in the aftermath of the DUI has been both embarrassing and bad for the show. Not once has she shown any remorse over what she did or the damage it could've caused. Anyone who dares to voice that drunk driving could have injured or killed someone else gets hit with a tone-deaf, "And it could've killed MEEEEEEEE!" She's finally shown her ass for real.

I thought the Julie/Chad scenes were great as well. Chad works really well in this mode.

Fair! I'm only defensive because I feel like Julie's emotions are about the only thing that does make sense lately. I do wish they'd connect her easy acceptance of NuDoug to how readily she took in Eli upon learning of David's death.

I don't know if I'd say Julie is alone in the world. Yeah, her husband and son have passed, but she has Eli and Lani and their kids, Hope, Shawn, Ciara, their children, Jennifer and her family, Maggie, Marie, Steven... she's a widow, but she isn't alone just because she's one of the last surviving members of her particular generation.

At the point they wrote the stuff that's airing, they thought Drake was coming back. Given his diagnosis, though, it seems very strange and even tasteless to have done another "John is under deep cover and has left Marlena alone" thing. Just say he's away on a mission and have Marlena go visit him a few times.

The fact that no one is mentioning adoption is insane. It’s such a glaring hole in these conversations. Brady could offer to pay for Sophia to have the best private tutors to finish high school while she goes through the pregnancy and prepares for the adoption.

"Big Momma" is how they've always referred to Olivia. And Allie was established as dating a man quite a while back. I know @janea4old and @carolineg beat me to it, but for once, those are actual consistences in the script writing.

This preview basically confirmed all my feelings on Janet Drucker and on what we're going to get with this new head-writing team.

Yeah, I could be over-stating it, but I just found a quote where he said he didn't get "a fair chance to show [his] ability" and was critical of "the collaborative process" at Days and then immediately said he wasn't talking sh*t and just being honest. It felt like a lot of that around the time of his exit. I'm sure some of it was trying to save face, too.

He made some comments in the media about how he was better than the show, etc. Then I think tried to beg his way back into the job later. Nathan would be very recastable. As mentioned above, he was engaged to Stephanie, Maggie's his grandma, Sarah's his aunt, Holly is his cousin, he had a little rivalry with Philip, plus he has the Horton ties *and* a dad who was never identified. Mostly he could be a useful relatively blank slate.

Thank you, @JAS0N47! This is awesome. Appreciate all your hard work and responsiveness.

Thanks for the clarity! Would be so cool if you happened to have any more detail on the Mike/Linda stuff.

I think Margaret Mason was the original Linda. And yes, that Mike event gets a lot of chatter online -- I'd be curious to see how it really played at the time. Elaine Princi took over as Linda in the 80s, I believe.

Wasn't Phyllis the Anderson wife, at least originally? They had her get with Neil and lose a child with him, I think. Some of the stuff with Linda/Bob sounds pretty delicious and soapy, at least from my reading. That mid-80s return of Linda as a madame always struck me as insane.

Sounds pretty accurate to me. They were a solid B-family who kind of ran their course. In some ways, folding Melissa so fully into the Hortons *was* the way of bringing the Anderson clan forward into the 80s era. The Brooke/Stephanie character, Bob's other daughter, always reads to me like she could've been the real standout, but they killed her off that second time. And it doesn't sound like she had a ton to do after she came back as "Stephanie" with the new face.

The directors don't really direct performances anymore, though. They handle blocking and guide camera moves and make sure coverage is handled. There's no time to direct performances.

Didn't the whole thing with Amanda Howard and the brain tumor (which was Neil's intro, no?) ALSO happen in that short period?

These are good ones! They definitely seem forgotten rather than purposely kept to reveal later.

Based on what Julie just did with the Horton house post-fire... maybe it's okay if she stays away from the decorating. 🫢

The other thing JER did that drove me nuts was that a night would go on for so long that someone would go to bed, and later that same night, they'd be out for a fancy dinner.

It's Salem o'clock. Semi-related: I wish we had more episodes clearly set at night. Nighttime and darkness are so dramatic. It's always high noon on Days in recent years. I was thinking the same thing about this serum and that bit from the promo. That could actually be sort of interesting and reality-adjacent.

Jennifer had one on Days in 1998. It was right before she and Jack left the show. It was some kind of setup to get Peter to confess his crimes or something.

That loft lived on into JER 2.0. It was where Belle and Philip lived when they were married, and Shawn and Mimi had an apartment across the hall (which later was redone into Sami & Rafe's place and then into the Ciara/Claire/Tripp apartment). I'm guessing the last time we saw the loft was maybe 2006-07?

I loved Friday's episode even though it had some real logic holes. They were obviously writing around Drake's illness, so it's understandable, but why did Andrew have to fly to Salem to tell Marlena about John if John was able to call her 15 minutes later? And why didn't Johnny react at all to seeing Andrew at the townhouse given that he was with Paul, who'd just told all of them that Andrew wasn't in town? I love when they let Marlena be dismissive and bitchy to Kristen, though.

I like the general shape of this, but if there's one thing I need Days (and all soaps) to stop doing, it's putting people into romances with their rapists. So a big no to Chad/Gwen as an actual pairing.