JJ is back!
I was as thrilled as Abigail when he showed up to surprise her on Days of Our Lives during the week of 11-03-20.
Abigail's gullibility has driven me nuts for a long while.
As a general rule, if someone wants to screw her over, she's going to assume they're her best friend.
It happened with Sami, with Gabi, and now with Gwen.
It's insulting to viewers' intelligence to claim this woman is an investigative reporter!
Abigail has ZERO instincts. She believes everything she's told, no matter how obvious the lie, and Gwen's latest scheme is a prime example.
Gwen hid Abigail's shoes under the couch and when Abigail couldn't find them, suggested they just borrow a pair from Kate.
Abigail, who has the sense not to go through people's things without permission, quickly lost her resistance to doing so because Gwen said it was okay, and it just so happened a box of letters fell in front of her... and that one letter was between Kate and Jack.
After this shocking discovery, Gwen was able to convince Abigail to drink two glasses of champagne even though Abby is on medication that interacts with alcohol and to wait until the worst possible time to accuse Jack of having an affair with Kate.
All of Gwen's manipulations were extremely obvious, and Abby fell for them all.
To make matters worse, JJ's only question about Gwen was whether she was single!
JJ usually has much better instincts than Abigail -- in fact, he's the one who should be an investigative reporter, because he's skeptical of idiotic claims and willing to risk his life to find out the truth, while Abigail accepts everything she's told at face value.
So while it was great to see him again, rewriting his character to be nothing but a horny guy who thinks bossy Gwen is pretty and doesn't question her motives is ridiculous.
I'd much rather he pick up on Gwen's weird vibes and be the one to investigate her.
Oh, and give him his sister's job. There's no way she can ask the tough questions needed to be an investigative reporter if she can't even see through Gwen's schemes.
JJ wasn't the only one to return home -- so did Theo!
Hopefully, the writers get Theo's autism right this time. Too often, they forget he's autistic at all until it's convenient for the story.
There were some small signs that Theo's autism hadn't been totally forgotten.
Abe: So, how are you?
Theo: I am the same as I was two days ago when we spoke on Skype.
His answer to Abe's question about how he was, along with his calling Stefan "the other one" when he saw Jake suggested that Days of Our Lives will at least give Theo some language-related autistic traits.
Knowing the Days of Our Lives writers, it's not going to be anywhere nearly as realistic as The Good Doctor. In fact, most likely Theo will have a few stereotypical autistic traits that come and go depending on what the writers need him to do in a particular scenario.
But since he's been on all of one day, I'm willing to give it more of a chance before coming to that conclusion.
Speaking of symptoms that come and go, what's up with John's aneurysm?
Now that John's punched Tripp, he seems to have gotten the mood swings out of his system and is back to being his old self. Sure, he decided to avoid seeing Steve by staying home from the party, but that can be excused by the fact that he wanted to spend his wedding anniversary reminiscing with Marlena.
He doesn't seem to have any more mood swings, and that's a shame, because a story about him coming to terms with his disability post-aneurysm would have been compelling.
Meanwhile, the Allie story would be a lot more riveting if only Tripp were the actual rapist.
This weird thing they're doing where all signs point to Tripp but we know it's not him ruins the drama.
Days of Our Lives had the opportunity to present a realistic, responsible storyline about a young woman dealing with having a child born out of rape, but instead they chose to make it about a good guy falsely accused of being the rapist.
Imagine how much more powerful Kayla's statements to Steve about needing to accept what Tripp had done would be if Tripp had actually done it!
Kayla confronted Steve about his insistence that Tripp was innocent, even pointing out that as a fellow rape survivor, she was offended by his denial of the obvious truth.
Tripp raped Allie and you don't want to accept it. And your denying it is an insult to all survivors, including me.
Kayla
It was another strong performance from Mary Beth Evans, but since we all know that Tripp will eventually be found innocent, it was hard to fully root for Kayla here.
I do have a bone to pick with Steve, too, and it's not the same one Kayla did. While talking to Jack, Steve told him that Tripp would not be charged because he was innocent.
What? Kayla gave birth to their daughter Stephanie in jail after being falsely accused of murdering Marina Toscano. So why on Earth would Steve think innocence guarantees that Tripp will not be arrested or charged with anything?
Other than that, there was some great drama here that is undermined by the Tripp-is-innocent motif.
Steve vs Kayla was almost topped by Jack's connecting this incident to his own past as a rapist and suggesting Tripp needed to take responsibility for it to have any chance of not repeating the behavior.
Jack helping Steve come to terms with his son being a rapist would have been an excellent, topical story that didn't exonerate a young man from sexually assaulting a woman or turn that woman into the bad guy for making the accusation.
But no, instead we have to have a run-of-the-mill DNA test that doesn't make sense while we wait for the reveal of who really raped Allie.
Also, can anyone give Allie the space to tell people in her own time? The news of her rape shouldn't be traveling down the grapevine from Allie to Nicole to Lucas to Kate to Roman.
Don't get me wrong. Roman's been absent for far too long and I was overjoyed for some scenes between him and Kate. And his response to the news was top notch.
But it wasn't Kate's news to tell. It was Allie's. And nobody seems to understand that.
Across town, the other huge story was Ben's attack on Vincent.
This was another story that didn't need to happen, but since we're stuck with it: there is no reason, gun or no gun, to believe a word Vincent says about Ciara's death.
The forensic evidence doesn't support his version of events. If he shot her at point blank range in the car, why was no body recovered from the ashes after the explosion? And if he did it outside the car, her body should be somewhere nearby.
Plus none of her blood was found anywhere near the scene.
Nobody has even brought any of that up. While my experience with this is limited to watching police crime dramas, it seems to me that police should have interrogated him mercilessly about where Ciara's body was since he allegedly killed her.
Instead, in yet another insult to our intelligence, the Salem PD assumes Ciara is dead because her rings were found in the car (and supposedly didn't melt in the fire) and her not-known-for-honesty kidnapper says so.
Could this get any stupider?
Hope left town to search for Ciara. So will Ciara show up in Salem one day while Days of Our Lives continues to insist Hope is in Europe or somewhere looking for her?
As for Ben, there is no reason for Shawn and Eli to be treating him with kid gloves just because he lost Ciara. Sure, they arrested him, but ten to one they don't file the paperwork because "he was grieving."
That's not an excuse for knocking a cop out and taking a prisoner at gunpoint to a secluded airfield.
I'm especially disappointed in Eli. Shawn, like most Salem cops, looks the other way whenever it's convenient.
But Eli just raked Lani over the coals for her part in helping Kristen escape. So what business does he have being anything close to excusing Ben for his behavior?
Speaking of which, risking his health to ensure Brady doesn't tell Lani that Eli got Kristen to confess is ridiculous.
This secret is nonsensical and the whole thing could have been solved by Eli and Lani actually talking to each other about what was going on.
Eli continually does his job behind Lani's back then worries that she'll find out about it. Can't the writers find a better story for these two than this silliness?
Speaking of forgiveness, can we not go to romantic territory between Justin and Bonnie?
Justin seems like he gloms onto any woman who makes him feel less alone since Adrienne's death, and the fact that this one looks like Adrienne doesn't help matters.
A friendship is one thing, but this relationship is destined to go nowhere good. Unless, of course, Bonnie turns out to really be Adrienne.
Your turn, Days of Our Lives fanatics!
Are you excited by Theo and JJ's returns? What did you think about Kayla's argument with Steve? And am I the only one who wants to shake some sense into Abigail?
Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and share your thoughts!
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Days of Our Lives continues to air on NBC on weekday afternoons. Check your local listings for airtimes.
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