te.

They really should've gone with the decapitation route for Abigail - but maybe they can do that for when they finally kill off Will? Of course, in a nefarious DiMera plotline, his head would be kept alive and kept by Leo, which would allow for them to work around Smirky McSmirkface's schedule (when he's not available, they can just draw a smirk on ball), while also freeing up Sonny for hot sex with Chad! Why haven't I been scouted by them as a writer? Obviously, I'm writing GOLD.

Going by Julianne Morris's real age there would work to be fair - she was born in 1968, so she'd been 22 in 1990. But either way, not only are we to assume no one would call out the fact that Ciara is 20/25 years younger than Greta is, but also ignore the fact that as a royalty, she'd likely be known in social circles + regularly papped.

Yeah, I mean even with not going by Julianne Morris's real age Greta would be in her mid-40s at the very least. I'm not sure why they didn't go with Ciara pretending to be her daughter - they could've always used it as a way to established that Greta had gotten married and had children, giving her a bit of a happy off-screen send-off.

That's been pretty much confirmed to happen. I don't get what the purpose of killing off Jake was.

I haven't even seen the episode yet, but the mugger already reminds me of that dorky mob guy last year. I get that these day player characters are meant to have exaggerated features since they're appearing briefly and they're not going to waste time diving into their psyche, but they could do with pulling it back a bit at least.

This one gets the Andrea Zuckerman award for awkward adult trying to pass as a teenager.

Plus, Ron would be way too tempted to bring in young Tom and Alice onto the main show as a part of DiMera time travel or something. Do we really want Tom and Alice screwed up by him?

I don't think there's a perfect solution to the age problems that excessive SORAS has caused on Days, but I'd just put Claire on ice for a few years and Mike Horton her - if she does return a five or so years from now she's still vaguely early 20s.

I've said it before, but I'd cast someone born in the mid-80s just to try and have at least some age difference between Ali and whoever plays Belle, especially if they're going to keep bringing up how Belle was conceived and Sami's past kidnapping. If they're going to keep Martha in the role, just lean into her more icy demeanour when writing Belle.

It wouldn't surprise me if they had one done that was more ambigious done to hang in the background while working out who would play re-cast Fallon. Since they wouldn't focus the scene on it, it didn't need to be perfect, just not obviously be Pamela Sue Martin.

No, it didn't go anywhere. I think they eventually used it on The Colby's though as an excuse for Fallon's breakdown (it was in part because she was attracted to her brother!). And the "Adam's not a real Carrington" story was more of a family fodder story more than anything. They wanted more stories that focused on the love and family conquers all or some bs due to the popularity of family sitcoms and they thought the whole "you're not our son but we accept you anyway" was a heart-warming angle despite being utterly stupid. Also, Fallon was still on The Colby's at that point, so no that wasn't ever the plan. They retconned it back to Adam being a Carrington in season 8 when Fallon was on the show again.

These shows were always wonky about distances - O/T but I've been starting to watch through Dawson's Creek and in one episode Joey's sister gives birth and the ambulance can't come there and it's portrayed as Joey/Dawson/Jen lives in the middle of nowhere. Two episodes later they go to a beach party, the area is clearly heavily populated (it looks like it was the same house that they would eventually use as Emily Thorne's beach house on Revenge) and Joey gets drunk, so Dawson and Pacey get her home without an issue supposedly by walking home. TL;DR these distances are just plot dictated. I wouldn't put too much stock in how it actually is in real life. In real life, Michael would've eventually just fallen out of touch with the people at the apartment complex, Sydney wouldn't have taken his laundry to the apartment complex to wash them (in one episode it's implied she skated there) and so on. We roll with it because it makes for a delicious soap, plus we got a new pretty location out of it.

To be fair, the show itself never brought up that there was some major distance between the apartment complex and Michael's beach house, so I think it's a case of Convenient Soap Distances where it's sort of fuzzy where everything's located. Most watchers won't have ever been in Los Angeles, much less know how long it takes in real life to travel from one distance to another. Beverly Hills 90210 also did this sort of thing where things would either be located just around the corner/walking distance or miles away depending on what the plot was that week.

Well, I think a huge charm of Melrose Place (especially before they started islanding characters) was that they lived so close together and got embroiled with each others lives (one of my favourite examples of this is an episode in season 2 when Sydney has started hooking and Jo starts noticing that's something is "off" with Sydney's "modelling" career - two unexpected characters that never really interacted starts unexpectedly interacting because they live next to each other). I think the idea could work with a new cast - LA Complex was proof of that and more Melrose than the reboot. It just needed better writing and drop the entire premise of a murder mystery. The new creators clearly wanted to do their own show rather than reboot Melrose Place - they weren't even fans of the old one!

I agree - I don't see why they need so many characters + locations. BSII would've been better if they had just focused on the Bo/Hope and Megan story. This was way too bloated for five episodes.

No. I think they might've referenced Amanda's step-mom in the season 7 plot, but from memory they did focus a lot more Mrs Damarr (Julia Adams, famous from Creature from the Black Lagoon). It has always been my guess that if the show hadn't been cancelled that she would've been involved with the murder of her son (like him surviving the fall from the bleachers and she coming in later, clearing Amanda and Eve) since they cast a a somewhat noteable horror movie star in a role that turned out to be so small.

It's probably more of a hassle to find an actor whose schedule would have to match Ali Sweeney's than for Sami to stay single - or he'll just exist off-screen like EJ did for years and that wasn't really a good solution either. Add that there wouldn't be time to build that romance either way because AS only does two week "arcs". Nah, just have Sami stay single and have her turn up a few times every now and then to wreck havoc.

Since Allison Sweeney will only commit to doing drop-ins it's probably better for Sami to stay single.

This death seems to happen on July 27th.

I said it before, but I think they truly bring out the worst in each other. Both need a co-writer to balance them. From what I've seen, BSII seems to be the worst sort of amalgamation of both their worst habits.

Even if the last one worked as a stand-alone from what was happening on DOOL, they still used characters that were mostly on the canvas - this one they use a lot of characters that haven't been on for ages, some that have also been dead. It probably would've been enough to have the Bo / Hope and Meghan Hathaway returns story on it if they wanted to keep it to five episodes. Either that or expand it to two weeks, if not three. It's a busy canvas on BSII.

So how did they explain Megan coming back to life then?

I mentioned the 2009 reboot in my post... But yes, we kind of are.

Honestly though, does it need a reboot? I love the characters, but it wouldn't make sense for them to live in Melrose Place all these years later and in all honesty, you can make the core of the show into a new one - I actually thought the short-lived Canadian L. A. Complex was a better Melrose Place than the Melrose Place reboot! I kind of feel the same way about Knots Landing - it's a show about a bunch of people living in close proximity to each other so they get into each others business. Just do a show from scratch instead and don't have the baggage of the old shows.