WARNING!These are not spoilers, they are Matt's opinions. Furthermore, he is entitled to have an opinion and if you disagree with him that is fine, just don't send hate mail about it. If you feel like you're someone who is easily angered by others opinions, simply do not read this page! For the most part, this is all in fun!

May 9, 2008
Mob boss and all around ubergoon Martino Vitali came to town and very soon he will be gone. I'm unsure if this is a shame or not. With Stefano gone and Victor back, a good feud among rival crime families would be welcome, especially when you throw a loose cannon like John into the mix. But perhaps the writers quickly realized that they've been down similar avenues before and the mob is best left to "General Hospital", where there isn't much of anything else. In the process, everything's changed for Ava pretty quickly. It's an easy trick to blame drugs for everything and suddenly transform a character into someone else. So who is Ava going to be now and will we get a chance to see much of her? I find it terribly hard to dislike someone who would level a shot at Hope, so, hopefully, there will be something else worthwhile for her to do.

As for the other newer characters: We discovered Daniel's secret, which was that, apparently, his wife was a terminally ill patient and she died. Not a terribly impressive secret, so I hope there will be more to it. The fact that he took her down to die by the waves makes a rather tidy excuse for his surferisms and explains why he refuses to hook up with Chelsea... for now anyway. He'd be better with Kate, I think. He would even be better with Lexi, and considering how much trouble she thinks her marriage is in, she might be priming herself for a fling. Meanwhile, Chelsea is going back to her old self, brutally dumping Nick, who also seems to be getting screwed over by Max who is slowly acquiring a new and strange personality. The irony of this is that Chelsea seems to once again be chasing a phantom. Nick seduced Chelsea from afar by pretending to be a handsome doctor. She discovered this lie and found the "real" doctor who turned out to be a creep. Nick saved her from the doctor and she discovered that Nick was who she really wanted. This fantasy now seems to have returned in the person of Daniel, but it's far from clear who he will turn out to be.

In other news, EJ and Nicole are in cahoots after all. He's paid her to lie to Immigration and it's unclear exactly what else they will get up to together. It's very nice. Finally a little more of the evil EJ, even if it's evil of the boring variety. Using Nicole to make Sami jealous is cringe-worthy on many levels, but Nicole still makes the pair more amusing than they are on their own. To be honest, I could care less what he does to Sami, as long as he does it in an underhanded and evil way. Why can't he just get Rolf to reprogram her or stick Kate's brain in her body? Instead, Sami continues to move toward a Lucas level of blatant stupidity. If the flashbacks this week reminded us of anything other than John and Marlena's old hairstyles, they should have reminded us of what a devious and vindictive creature Sami is. What happened to the cruel and scheming Sami of old? When they magically aged Will did they accidentally start aging her backwards? Beneath her thin maternal veneer, she seems less mature now than she did when she was teenager.

The strange central scene of this week was when Sami, wearing a pair of large monkey slippers, sat down to psychoanalyse both herself and John. I'm not sure if she got her lessons from her mother or Dr. Nussbaum, I'm not even sure which would be worse, but Sami passes the test as a daytime shrink, handing out the regular advice and excuses; they even gave her glasses to do it with. But the whole conversation between them was an important one, not just for John but for "DOOL" itself. After all, if you keep bringing back the past in flashbacks, how do you move on? Isn't it better to forget and abandon the past, something the show always tries to do but never completely manages. Some soap operas don't require a suspension of disbelief, they require recurring amnesia. That's the thing that makes John's role so interesting now. Not only is he Mr. Amnesia, he also serves to center everything around him. In spite of the fact that, as a person, he's completely inconsistent, it's only his present which changes dramatically as he re-imagines himself, whereas everyone's past continues to change. Up until now, this has always made him easy to manipulate, whether by Stefano, Victor or Marlena. Now he's become far more creative. Maybe Sami, also a remarkably inconsistent character and frequent amnesiac, could learn a few things from this.

Lines of the Week:
Nicole: "I don't know what I'll do if Pookie leaves me."

EJ: "Then you will have me."

Victor: "Daniel told me he was going to marry her in the hospital. That night she took a turn for the worse."

John: "Look at this place. There is no sign of forced entry. Either a professional or a freeloading relative robbed me."

Nicole: (to Sami) "I can't just exchange Pookie like you do husbands."

Sami: (imitating Charlton Heston) "You can have it when you rip it from my cold, dead hands."

April 25, 2008
The highlight of the week was Sami punching Nicole. Not that Nicole isn't swell, but it's so nice to see Sami get aggressive. It was also good to see the possibility of a Morgan/Philip pairing continue to blossom. Philly needs some love, or, at the very least, some non-Chloe-related lust, and it should be fascinating to watch him get involved with a woman who isn't a flake or a bimbo for once. Two other romances continued to percolate at different speeds. Stephanie is doing her best to get over her problems and move on with Max. Nothing new was revealed about Max's recent odd behavior, but Stephanie certainly seems sexually frustrated. What else could explain her wearing those white socks with that all black outfit the other day? The Chelsea/Dr. Jonas thing also moved on. I'm afraid it will develop into a story instead of staying in Chelsea's drug induced haze where it belongs. The most ominous sign of the week was seeing Rolf holding John's ID disc in his hands. Why isn't he destroying that thing? Please Rolf, before it's too late!

Things started to get way out of hand with the "old" and the "new" this week. Perhaps a third of the conversations in the past week revolved around whether the old you was the real you and the new you was not, or whether the new you was the real you and the old one was not... or something similar. It would have been more amusing if the conversations had employed flashbacks to different actors who have played the parts (for those to which that applies). They didn't really play it that way, sadly. It will be interesting to see how far they can push this angle without resorting to the use of doppelgangers and mysteriously appearing twin--not that either of those things are objectionable. It seems to be a dwindling possibility, however, as the Ava plot loses the steam it had left and Marlena tries to embrace the new John.

The issue in all of this is really a question of how to deal with redundancy and ambiguity and go beyond them. John Black's mysterious identity was finally solved when he discovered that he was a DiMera. Ironically, when he discovered this, he was no longer who he had been for years. This same theme finds a variation in Steve, who is also the product of other character's imaginations and machinations, though largely a cypher himself. It's a plot device they've been pulling out for years. Usually it keeps things fresh. If you can't integrate new characters, which is notoriously difficult, the least you can do is reinvent the old ones, even in a ludicrous manner because--as DOOL writers have always known--history is contingent. What's worrying is that at the moment, the show seems more intent on creating a semblance of coherency than it's ever really bothered with before. There was a time when the holes in logic could easily swallow entire storylines; now the sailing is a little too smooth. For instance, the incredibly bland problem of Ava. Patch left her, she got depressed and wanted him back... more or less. Apparently, she suffers from "brief psychotic disorder", which is something the show could use more of.

Lines of the week:
Marlena (to John): "Married people don't date."

John (to Nicole): "I lost my memory not my senses. You didn't think this tasteless dress and the painfully embarrassing come-ons would be enough to make me reveal my affairs, did you? Who are you working for, Victor or little Philip?"

Stephanie (to Max): "It's about you and me. And me and you – and how I feel about you."

Sami: "Nicole hydrates. She drinks two quarts of something a day."

Nicole: "Juice without vodka is like a day without sunshine."

Nicole: "I don't even know which brat I was holding. EJ's baby or Lucas' baby... Good thing you didn't have triplets. Can't tell the fathers without a program."

April 11, 2008
Marlena is hell bent on getting the old John back. We even got a glimmer that there might be something of the old John in the new John. When he, rather gruffly and over-adamantly, asserted that he wasn't remembering anything, something seemed to be returning... but maybe he was just uncomfortable, which I guess anybody would be if they were under Marlena's hypnotic control. I suspect the old John she seeks will return eventually, under the hypnotic spell that Marlena's hair seems to cast on him, but it will be a tragedy when that happens. What's really baffling about it all is that Marlena, of all people, seems so convinced that there was some specific old John she could call back up. John, if he's had any consistency over the decades, has always been a cipher with no really stable identity, continually flirting with new personalities. Maybe the new and wonderfully laconic John is just who John has always been underneath it all and Marlena has become excessively superficial and nostalgic for a past that was about as real as the erotic fantasises she used to have about him when he was in a coma. It was rather striking that all of the moments that she used to try to make him remember their past, were moments when the old John was pretending to be someone he knew that he wasn't, simply in order to please her. It was good to see that they didn't shy away from the irony that Marlena is now taking on the role of Stefano, albeit Stefano light, and, once again, John gets be someone's pet project.

Sami and EJ's "marriage" got a little more real thanks to Nicole waving cash in his face to help him support his martini habit. It's hard to say if Sami is jealous or just annoyed that Nicole seems so intent of getting into EJ's life. I just hope she can get rid of reformed EJ and push him back into the realm of darkness. If Chloe, Nicole and John are the most sinister people on the show right now, something is seriously wrong...beyond the bizarre pacing. The show seems to have returned to the John E. Reilly version of time. More time passed in the first few minutes of Monday's show than the entire rest of the week. Not that I'm complaining about that. I'm probably the only person in the world who would prefer it if he was still writing the show. At least it was relatively consistent, even when it was consistently bad, and it always seemed like something could happen. Now it persistently seems like, whatever is going to happen, is going to happen in some distant future and nothing much is pushing it along. Couldn't we have gotten a few more details from Ava and her shrink this week, or at least some ludicrously phoney TV psychiatrist talk. Ava should send her doctor after Hope/Kayla and have her brainwashed using all the information on her that she's culled from the internet. Then Hope could run around thinking she was some strange version of Kayla, resulting in many uncomfortable moments for both Bo and Steve. Or at least they could have Steve brainwashed again. Isn't that what soap opera psychiatrists are there for? Kayla and Bo worrying in bed is not interesting, or necessary, and the only thing exciting about Stephanie and Max's scenes this week was that pie and cake were involved.

Lines of the Week:

Nicole (to Sami): "I'd cry too, if you were my mother. You know... the twins having different fathers is freakish. How does that work, anyway? You really must have been slutting around."

Sami (on Nicole): "I dislike tomatoes. I despise her."

John (on the difference between being used by Marlena and Stefano): "He didn't look half as good in a dress."

Philip (on Nicole arriving at Chez Rouge): "Maybe I should tell Maggie to hide the Crystal."

Nicole (to Sami): "You look... like you've just had twins."

Roman: "I'll lock you up."
Bo: "On what charge?"
Roman: "Reckless stupidity."

April 4, 2008 -
It's been bickering week on "Days". Well, that's not entirely accurate. Bickering and inappropriate flirting seem to have been the rule. Not that I'm complaining. While every woman in Chelsea's orbit noticed her obvious crush on Dr. Daniel, none of them managed to stop themselves from throwing a few double entendres his way. Kate probably has a shot with him... Chelsea has yet to share a man with her grandmother. I still don't trust him at all, by the way. I think it's the surfer talk. I also found it a little odd that, considering he's known Victor for most of his life and their families are supposedly close, he suddenly needs Chelsea to explain everything to him. Some people have suggested he may have something to do with Ava, citing the mention that he was hired to help the troubled daughter of a powerful Italian family. Maybe...but he also seems to be trying a little too hard to be ignorant about fellow world-traveler Nicole.

Having finally gotten out of the hospital, for the most part, we have instead been confined to a series of dining rooms. It's been wonderfully theatrical: just when soaps seem to be moving away from their campy phoniness, "Days" maintains the tradition. To accompany that, the chatter on the show has really been upped. My hands hurt from typing, but little has actually happened this week. Whoever is writing the dialog is really outdoing themselves. EJ somehow turned from being Hugh Grant to Cary Grant while he and Sami tried to re-enact the first half of "His Girl Friday" for the Immigration agent. The more successful humor came from John and Rolf. I never thought Marlena, Salem's own Lady Satan, would be put in the position of straight man to John, king of the monosyllabic response. But, to me at least, this is the most fun they've ever been and listening to anyone make sardonic remarks about Sami and EJ makes me smile.

Max continues to become more mysterious, which is a relief since I often wonder what they'll do with poor Uncle Max. His efforts to keep Stephanie away from the docks and his increasingly perplexing behavior towards Nick are giving him a darker dimension. Though I doubt Max, however troubled, can make the leap into villainy, this weird side of him is, at least, more interesting that he and Steph making Little Orphan Annie eyes at each other. I suspect his working down at the docks may be more than random considering the fact that John and the Kiriakis' are currently dancing around going to war over them.

I never realized Aunt Maggie was such a cutie until Tuesday. New, surprisingly youthful, Mickey pops up and Maggie's hair truncates in size and she suddenly becomes mischievous. Perhaps this means they'll finally get something to do, though the cynic in me assumes they'll become props in the ongoing EJami Punch N' Judy routine. This prospect is almost as exciting as Ava noticing how unbelievable it was that Hope is pregnant. Of course, that didn't last. They really have to hurry things along with this. I actually find Ava amusing, but they have repeated the exact same flashback sequences with her repeatedly and it's starting to seem like she's just a time filler to put between John's laconic remarks.

The other big excitement of the week was the return of Nicole. So far it's been fun… though I worry it will turn into another pointless parade of cleavage a la Chloe.

All photographs are courtesy of Soapoperafan.com.