It had to happen sooner or later.
As soon as Paulina mentioned an ex she never wanted to see again, it was almost inevitable that he would show back up in Salem.
And on Days of Our Lives during the week of 1-24-22, he did, freaking Paulina out and throwing her off her game.
It’s not clear why TR is so desperate to get his hands on Johnny’s movie. You’d think he’d have better things to do than chase after a flaky no-name who didn’t get any further than casting the movie before abandoning the project.
With TR already offering hints of a darker, more violent personality underneath his charm, plus his history with Paulina, I have to wonder if he’s had his own dealings with the Devil.
And since Abe made it clear to Chanel that he still isn’t ready to give Paulina another chance, there’s only one place this story could be heading.
TR will threaten Paulina’s life somehow, maybe with the help of the Devil, so that Abe wakes up and realizes how close he came to losing her. Days of Our Lives loves the trope of kidnappings leading to renewed love, so if Abe and Paulina are end game, I can’t imagine it going any other way.
But in the meantime, why the heck did Paulina have to tell some convoluted non-story to Lani to warn her away from TR?
First of all, Paulina’s weird behavior isn’t going to accomplish anything except make Lani curious about this TR guy and why Paulina is so scared of him.
Her excuses made no sense whatsoever, and Lani knew it. She even asked if Paulina was holding something back again.
Why was that necessary? Lani has no interest in her biological father right now and already knows that Paulina was so scared of him that she gave Lani away to protect her.
So what would be the harm in informing Lani that her dangerous, abusive father was in town?
Even if Paulina wasn’t ready to tell the whole truth, she could have admitted that she knew TR from years ago and that he used to be violent.
Lani SHOULD be able to figure out who the guy is from that, but this being Salem, she probably wouldn’t. So if Paulina wanted to keep Lani in the dark, this would have been the way to do it.
But no, she has to ramble on for the better part of an hour, making no sense whatsoever and making Lani determined to find out what Paulina is hiding this time.
Eventually, Lani’ll find out some other way. It’ll be ugly and maybe violent. And then Lani will again be angry that Paulina lied to her and need Eli to talk her into giving her another chance.
Can we break this vicious cycle, please? Don’t make Paulina the type of annoying character that repeats the same mistakes over and over. She’s far too clever a character for that.
Across town, Gwen also repeated past mistakes, only she’s become worse than ever.
She stopped short of killing Abigail but was happy to hit her half-sister over the head with a rock. Gwen only cares about holding onto Xander, and she doesn’t care who she has to hurt to do it.
Abigail and Sarah are collateral damage as far as Gwen is concerned. There’s nothing sympathetic about her. It’s not like she has a backstory viewers connected to or a balance of good and evil traits.
She’s just nasty and self-centered. Ugh.
For some reason, Xander has fallen entirely into her trap, too. Despite Chad explaining Abby’s theory about Sarah, Xander still assumes Gwen is a good woman who loves him and that Sarah did a random 180 and truly hates him.
It doesn’t make sense. Xander didn’t as much as try to test Gwen. He jumped quickly to proposing to her so that he could move on from Sarah.
Since Sarah and Abigail are both being held captive and Chad’s already onto the fact that Abigail is missing, it’s obvious where this is going.
Sarah and Abigail will likely work together to defeat Kristen and arrive in Salem just in time to disrupt Xander and Gwen’s wedding.
Hopefully, the entire truth will come out then, including that Gwen not only masqueraded as Sarah but also bashed Abigail over the head with a rock.
I’d love for Jack to come back to Salem for Xander’s wedding, only to learn what an amoral narcissist Gwen is and kick her out of his life for once and for all.
He’s given Gwen far too many chances as it is, and helping imprison Abigail on a desert island SHOULD be the last straw.
But of course, Gwen is Jack’s daughter, and he feels obligated to have a relationship with her no matter how toxic she is, so that’s not likely to happen.
Either way, though, some bad karma needs to head Gwen’s way and her new best friend Ava’s, too. Enough already!
Ava’s conversation with Nicole was creepy, especially juxtaposed with her chopping carrots and celery so hard.
That scene gave off a Fatal Attraction vibe as if Ava’s next move was going to be to suddenly stab Nicole.
But as uncomfortable as that scene was, I’d still rather have the good version of Ava, who put her angry energy into cooking and was trying to build a better life for herself.
Nobody is acting like an adult in this storyline, but Ava is the worst. She knows Rafe wants to be with Nicole, and she overheard part of a conversation about him cheating on her. So all she had to do was have enough self-respect to end things with him and to accuse Nicole to her face of betraying her.
Instead, Ava has gone over the top in her attempt to seek revenge, regressing to the crazy Ava of old that no one ever wanted to see again. Blah.
In addition, her revenge plan for Rafe is stupid.
This is far from the first time Days of Our Lives has treated weak evidence as a smoking gun and expected viewers to go along with it. But this is one of the most ridiculous.
I doubt that three perps getting it in their heads to accuse the Commissioner of planting evidence would even trigger a call to IAB in real life. That’s not evidence of anything except that three idiots got the bright idea to get themselves out of trouble by throwing mud at Salem’s top cop.
And as Rafe himself pointed out, he’s not out in the field most of the time. He’s behind a desk. So that makes these accusations even less credible.
Shawn didn’t believe the accusations, and it was laughable that the existence of a third perp making baseless claims meant that he had no choice but to arrest Rafe.
It’s not like there’s video evidence or discrepancies in the evidence log. Come on!
Of course, this nonsense will give Nicole an opening to prove her ex-friend Ava was behind framing Rafe, leading to Nicole and Rafe being together in the end. But still, couldn’t Days of Our Lives have found a more realistic way to get there for once?
I’m curious whether Rafe will run into EJ in Statesville, though. They’re both innocent, so it might be a nice change of pace for these two old enemies to join forces to clear each other’s names.
Speaking of EJ, he and Belle are getting pretty close.
Belle claims to just be doing a job, but she’s straightening EJ’s tie for him and encouraging him to do the right thing, while EJ keeps thanking Belle profusely for believing in him when no one else would.
EJ shouldn’t be Belle’s type, but imagine the drama if Belle stole Sami’s man! The writers might not have been able to resist.
Plus, all of this talk about how Belle is the only one to believe in EJ seems to go beyond a professional relationship.
Elsewhere, it seems we have two LGBT relationship stories heating up.
LGBT representation is important. For years, soaps had none, and even after Days of Our Lives introduced Will and Sonny as a supercouple, they were the only non-straight relationship in Salem.
So it’s about time that we have some bisexual women like Chanel and Allie, in addition to Craig’s story about being blindsided by his feelings for a man.
The problem is, though, these stories aren’t especially well-written. Chanel and Allie’s love story often feels more like a male fantasy than anything organic, and Craig met his lover off-screen.
In Craig’s case, we came into the middle of a story because Craig and Nancy have been off-screen for a long time.
Hopefully, this story will be played seriously and not for shock value. Craig should be more conflicted than he is. After all, he does believe Nancy is the only woman for him — so it shouldn’t be so easy for him, after 30 years of marriage, to jump into bed with a man.
There are plenty of cases in real life where someone realizes after decades of marriage that they’ve been suppressing feelings of same-sex attraction. This is an important story to tell because sometimes when people have those types of emotions, it causes them confusion and stress.
But although Craig seems to have some guilt over lying to Nancy, he doesn’t seem overly conflicted. He did admit to Chloe that he wasn’t sure what it all meant, but that was about it.
As for Allie and Chanel, I wish there was more nuance to this story. The story doesn’t seem to be about Allie struggling with her feelings at all. Instead, Allie went from no interest to jumping in bed with Chanel at the drop of a hat, and now the story is about her guilt over betraying Tripp.
It’s the Ava/Rafe/Nicole story all over again with different people.
And Ava being Tripp’s mother doesn’t bode well, either, because she’ll seek revenge against Allie too in a heartbeat, whether or not Tripp wants her to.
Your turn, Days of Our Lives fanatics.
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Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
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