Michael

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. 

2 minutes ago, j swift said:

Given that we've now spent more time thinking about this than the writers (lol), I would contend that Kristen was still guilty of extortion. 

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!

39 minutes ago, j swift said:

I've read this critique in a few different spots, but I disagree.  The fact that Kristen's victims lived doesn't negate her crime, which was withholding the cure in order to extort their family.  While it is true that we never saw her charged with a crime, so we don't really know why she was in jail, the failure of crime does not absolve a person from liability.

For example, if I attempt to rob a person on the street, and they have no money, it doesn't mean that I couldn't be charged for the attempt.

That being said, I agree that her deranged energy is not intriguing enough for me to want to see much more of the character.  Added with the fact that her presence makes EJ's SORASing even more obvious.  I don't think both characters shouldn't exist in Salem at the same time.

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.

11 hours ago, dc11786 said:

For the show to address this issue, a character choosing to join the police force due to police brutality, would require the show to address their recent past of having a white police officer shooting an unarmed black youth who is on the Autism spectrum. Given the reaction to that story, I imagine that's not something the show really wants to draw any light to.

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.

35 minutes ago, Vee said:

Yeah, the whole Frankie thing was odd. He was introduced as a dude living in the woods under an alias, IIRC. But it wasn't that long before Debbi and Darnell returned, AFAIK - maybe a few weeks - so I can't imagine they didn't already have the Angie/Jesse plans in the offing when he was first hired. So I don't think it was a rewrite so much as a very weird introduction.

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.

On 5/18/2023 at 6:49 PM, John said:

If SAG AFTRA Strikes no actor in that Union can work. And the soaps are all signatories to SAG-AFTRA which means they cannot replace them with non union actors. IF SAG AFTRA  strikes all productions outside of  non union productions will shut down

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. 

23 minutes ago, dragonflies said:

I don't think alcoholism is a disease, to me that's offensive to people with actual diseases they didn't ask for. People CHOOSE to drink, they don't CHOOSE to get a disease 

That being said I hope she does get help, not the cushy rehab that she's supposedly at

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

Daniel and Summer are both dead, so I'm fine with them being mentioned as long as we reinforce that they are DEAD DEAD.

I'm in the WGA. I don't want to be out of work, but we need this strike. It's become almost impossible, with all the loopholes and trickery the studios have been using, to string together enough work to live even a very regular middle-class life in Los Angeles.

Would actually be cool if they had him playing Tommy Horton, returning to the family home (to explain where the hell he's been for 40+ years) at the end of his life.

I'm finding RHONJ exhausting. Every episode, it's Teresa vs Melissa/Joe, plus Jennifer and Marge going at it over the same [!@#$%^&*]. I like Danielle, but I'm already so sick of the word "arsenal." Nothing changes, no one learns or moves on, we just keep repeating the same sh*t every single week.

1 hour ago, j swift said:

The issue with Nicole's lie is similar to my criticism of Harris's lie, there is no other logic than they did it to advance the plot.

I mean why is Nicole living with EJ in the first place?  Her divorce from Rafe seems to have been settled in record time, but didn't she get a settlement?  I know there's a housing crisis in Salem, but why didn't she get their house?

Also, she's expressed hesitation about being with EJ, then they boffed once (while under the influence, so he would get the context of what happened with Eric), and suddenly they are committed.

I mean, it was Rafe's house and she cheated on him, so I can't imagine there was much hope of some settlement or her getting the house. But she's a damn executive at Basic Black! Invest in a condo instead of schlepping poor Holly from place to place.

Those are some big-ass walk-in showers they've got attached to the bedrooms above the Pub. I would've expected a tub with a curtain.

Sarah Buxton also had that brief stint as Nicole's ex-porn associate, "Crystal Galore," in 2004. I think she was part of that kung fu fight Marlena got into when she was in prison for being the Salem Stalker (good grief).

God bless whoever keeps putting Chad in those tucked-in polo shirts. At least he gives me a reason to keep my eyes open while I try to slog through this show.

Yeah, I don't think it's supposed to literally be that someone is standing there for a minute or more completely silent while they recall a previous moment in perfect linear fashion. I can think, "Oh, I got in a fight with my friend yesterday" and sort of... remember the whole thing without having to go step-by-step through it mentally.