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We were treated to an overall okay week on Days of our Lives last week. While there were still no huge developments with the exciting story surrounding Bo Brady’s captivity or a real explanation as to why Andre Dimera is alive and well, there was some great gut wrenching drama to wash that confusion away. We’ve had our romance, we’ve had our mystery and now we’re finally getting our promised dosage of heart break in the way that only a soap opera can do. Not every week can be a week full of exciting moves and plays.
Now onto the highlights from Salem, USA this last week!
Week in Review for Days of Our Lives episodes airing September 28th-October 2nd, 2015.
Six Feet Under
There’s something to be said when after months of making you loathe a character’s every appearance, a show can turn around and make you feel sadness for said character’s loss of life. As viewers, we saw firsthand how Paige Larson’s death affected her mother Eve. As mentioned in past weekly reviews, Kassie DePaiva has been a standout with her grief-stricken performances and this week rounded that out on an extremely high note. Though Paige was killed around two weeks ago, her funeral services began just this last Friday with an extremely touching episode.
For far too long, Days of our Lives has been relying on adultery, scheming and drive-thru villains for shock value but when was the last time you felt for the characters on the show? Viewers may have cheered when Paige’s flame was snuffed out but no one wanted to see her mother suffer the way she did this last week. Earlier in the week, Theresa Donovan finally stepped up to the plate, playing both the sister and grieving aunt as she helped to prepare things for Paige’s funeral. The new fashion maven was the one to choose what Paige was to be buried in all while trying to remain strong for her big sister. It proved difficult for the both of them so Eve opted to stay alone for a while. They’ve shared a town for over a year now but we’ve barely had chances to see the Donovan sisters bond, to stand on each other’s sides for longer than a nanosecond so to see them bond in grief is both sad and amazing. Theresa really does seem to be invested in maturing a little bit – though it may still be for the wrong reasons, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
The highlight of the week had to be Friday’s episode. Since new writers and executive producers took the helm, the show has been showing how much it valued meaningful, longer conversations as well as more poignant music cues and natural lighting. All of these factors played beautifully into the episode centered on Paige’s burial (in Murder Park!), most noticeably when Eve began to hallucinate the key moments in Paige’s life that she’d now never get to experience. With faraway audio and hazy lighting, the scenes shown were very clearly a figment of Eve’s imagination to the viewers but to her they were very real. Whenever one ended and the lights returned to normal, the scene would fade to black with nothing but silence behind leading it out. There was such a feeling of emptiness whenever one of those scenes came to a close especially the one at the funeral where the apparition of Paige forgave her mother with a hug. A hug that Eve would never get to feel again.
These were some of DAYS’ most powerful moments in a very long time which is both upsetting and triumphant. Call some of the new plots contrived, boring or slow but the fact that our characters are again showing emotion that in turn makes us feel emotion is what a soap should always do. The genre has always a bit like an escape for its millions of viewers, taking them out of their everyday life and plopping them into someone else’s emotionally charged existence. I didn’t get into soap operas to feel apathetic week after week. I didn’t get into soap operas to wish awful deaths on a majority of characters. Like countless others, I watch soap operas to connect with the characters’ lives whether it be through their histories or their futures. Days of our Lives is well on its way to rebuilding that connection with its viewers’s hearts. So be sure to thank the showrunners for finally offing Paige and giving Eve her time to (age appropriately) shine. So I don’t run the risk of rambling, I’ll just end this by expressing nothing but admiration for everyone involved in last Friday’s episode. That’s how it should be done.
9 to 5
I have been a Jeannie Theresa Donovan supporter since she blew back into Salem two years ago. Yes, she’s been unnecessarily vile and outlandish since her arrival but – aren’t we all sometimes? She’s a very polarizing character for a lot of the fans even this day. After rooting for her through every mishap, I’m finding myself beginning to withdraw from her. She’s turned over a new leaf lately but her pursuit of Brady Black still seems to be top priority. Motherhood and actually finding a real job to create a stable foundation for her baby seem to follow in distant second and third places though.
Theresa pleaded to everyone in town just a few weeks ago about wanting to be taken seriously. She’s well-armed with the talent but without experience and business sense, Theresa really had to work hard to get investors on her side. Now that she’s at the helm of Basic Black with Nicole Walker and Kate Roberts – she’s just kind of sitting out. This last week, unsure of if it was a conscious or unconscious effort, both Kate and Nicole edged Theresa out of their first meeting regarding the company. Though standing on equal ground with the two older women in the company, Theresa was ushered out on coffee duty like some intern fresh out of college. Brady is at home watching this all unfold, he even gives a pep talk to Theresa after Kate basically tells her that she will be interning, studying under top designers instead of producing her own work. All it takes is a few compliments from Brady and Theresa is all over him again, vowing to win him back. But for what? And why?
Brady is no Daniel Jonas when it comes to being downright verbally abusive to the women in his life, unlike Daniel who dispenses it to everyone with an excess of X chromosomes, Brady saves it all for Theresa. Especially since Tate came into their lives, Brady has been utterly nasty to the mother of his child even when it was unwarranted. Theresa only made him believe he’d put his father into a coma! That event got him to go sober again; he should really be thanking her instead of belittling her when there’s even the slightest of chance. Theresa may have been through a lot in her life but she needs to have some self-respect and give up tripping over herself to get to this unattainable man.
Probably against his better judgment, Brady began to warm up to Theresa again this week. Maybe because of something akin to a hero complex, he agrees to escort her to Paige’s funeral, to be her shoulder to cry on – platonically of course. They’re just co-parenting, nothing more. By the time of the funeral, she’d dumped Anne as her best friend and was even hired by Abigail Devereaux to design her wedding dress. She was actually making positive moves in life but for negative reasons. Theresa had even gone so far as to design her own wedding dress for when she marries Brady for the second time. Just gag me.
Thrady was a fun couple the first time around but I’m going to need them to take a very long route to their happy ending. The character of Brady needs some retooling and Theresa needs to discover herself, the self that exists outside of a man in any capacity. I’m sure Theresa could thrive if she wasn’t chasing down, scheming against, pining over and/or deluding herself over men. This Basic Black storyline should not just be Theresa’s redemption story, but her reinvention story as well. I want her to continue on a rise in her life that makes her reevaluate everything, not just her friendships and past life choices. I want her to figure out through her passion that she doesn’t need someone like Brady and that she deserves better. Brady needs to suffer through that pain, he needs a chance to pine away and try to win over Theresa’s heart that he’s demolished numerous times. She needs to want to change for herself and her son, not for a man who barely values her. I’ll be on the fence about the development in this storyline for a while now. I’ll be watching how it plays out. Do you think Theresa and Brady should be back together? Or should Theresa start prowling elsewhere?
This coming week on Days of our Lives, Stefano and Andre work together to help Chad, JJ and Gabi form a connection, Will uncovers evidence on the Necktie Killer, Bo withholds something from his captors and the Necktie Killer strikes again!
As usual, if I missed something you really wanted to talk about or if I missed something important in my recap, let’s start a discussion! Comment below, tweet me and let’s chat!
Photos courtesy of NBC.
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