Strange / Awkward / Random Story Plots

[Titus Andronicus]

On a similar note, John spent months having sex with Susan who was pretending to be Kristen. He also couldn't tell the difference between a pillow and a baby while Kristen was faking her pregnancy.

[carolineg]

 

John was a special kind of dumb during Reilly.  Kristen had a pillow baby, he couldn't tell the difference between Kristen and Susan in the bedroom, and Marlena would practically swoon when he walked in the room, but he didn't realize she was in love with him.  Okay, John.  I don't think John spent months with Susan...I think it was month or so in real time, but like a 3 or 4 days in Days time.  They only had sex a couple times, IIRC.  Honestly I can only remember the one time when Kristen and Marlena watched in the Secret Room, but it's been awhile.

[amybrickwallace]

When Kristen wore the pillow, she wouldn't let John touch her belly for months on end (and, of course, he suspected nothing). For months, the only people who knew Kristen's secret were Vivian and Ivan (I forget how they found out).

[carolineg]

 

They saw Susan at a bar, I think while she was changing out of her Kristen disguise into herself or vice versa.  They snooped and found Susan's Kristen wig and then confronted Kristen with the truth and blackmailed her into changing her Titan vote to Vivian as CEO instead of Kate.

[Khan]

JER ripped the heart out of DAYS and [!@#$%^&*] stomped on it.

[amybrickwallace]

 

The People of the Night!!! 

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Thanks for refreshing my memory there. How fitting it was later on when "Kristen" was revealed as Susan by having her false teeth fly into Vivian's champagne glass. 

[carolineg]

One of my fave things about the story is the guillotine was stopped by a piece of wood when Marlena put her head in front of it-which I think would make that guillotine an epic fail because=wood isn't a guillotine stopper unless it's a super dull blade, but honestly that gilded cage was way nice.  Almost as nice as my condo

That entire reveal was so long in coming and so good and campy but, yes, every character was dumbed down to make it work.

[amybrickwallace]

I too remember when Susan locked Marlena and Kristen in the secret room. I was amused, months later, when the room was used again for Stefano to hide Peter (who had escaped from jail).

[titan1978]

When you watch the earlier Reilly stuff, everyone wasn’t as stupid to justify the stories never moving towards conclusions.  

 

Austin was always kind of stupid.  But then everyone became as stupid and oblivious as he was.  Not to mention the storylines got more incredible and required the characters being complete idiots to pull the endless plots off.  

 

I noticed the change about midway though the possession.  Everyone just got really stupid at that point, and then the IQ points just kept dropping.

[Franko]

I'm surprised Reilly never tried covering his tail and having it turn out everyone in Salem -- except Stefano, of course -- was exposed to a mind-altering chemical.

[amybrickwallace]

 

I never saw Patrick Muldoon when he originated the role, but Austin Peck's take on the character was that he was always dumb as a post. How many times over the years did Sami pull the wool over his eyes?

[Gray Bunny]

You really had to suspend disbelief during the Reilly years, both the good ('93-'97) and bad ('03-'06).  Even something as simple as a character thinking about something and having a flashback, and the person would literally stop and turn to the side as they had their thought.  Granted, other soaps have done this but not to the obvious degree DAYS would.

 

.... athough didn't soaps back in the day (like 1970's) sometimes have scenes (particularly on Y&R) where a character was thinking back on something, and the scene would have the person standing/sitting there in a trance while the flashback played over in a half fade so you could see the flashback and the person thinking at the same time? 

[carolineg]

 

Agreed.  Days characters had some long flashbacks/fantasies where I wondered what the other person in the room was doing while Sami had an elaborate fantasy about Austin or Marlena flashbacked to a love scene her and John had.

Anyway, characters would talk to themselves all the time.  That bugged me because who does that in real life?  And they used to say inane things over and over that added nothing to the story like "so and so can never find out what I did" or "after I tell so and so the truth we will be together".  You could tell it was literally filler to drag out the stories, but I still think Reilly did a good job with the idea of his stories-the pacing was the problem.  And the glacial pacing made the characters dumber than they should have been, but he certainly added excitement to the show.  I was recently watching 1991's Tale of 2 Romans and that story was not only stupid and convoluted, but it was really boring and drawn out too when it should have been epic.  Reilly was a huge improvement over 1991-1992 stuff.

[amybrickwallace]

 

Not to mention always talking to themselves. 

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[Khan]

 

That's how I would do it!  Even today!

 

Just say something was in the water (shades of Flint!) that maybe ties back to when Abigail was sick an infant; and while you couldn't turn back the clock, so to speak, and pretend the past 25+ years never happened or was somebody's dream, you COULD explain away a lot of it as hallucination on the part of the characters.

 

 

In retrospect, I wonder whether DAYS sabotaged that storyline deliberately.  I don't feel like they were committed to it 100%, and only went through with it, because Deidre Hall insisted that they bring back Wayne Northrop.