Recap: Days of Our Lives: Is the Phoenix Set to Rise From the Ashes Again?

Yes! Finally! Somebody has decided to recap Days of Our Lives! Is it going to be me? Of course not. I already had to drop Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica, so this gig will not be full-time for me. However, with all of the new writers that we have been adding, I thought it would be a good idea to add some writers for our favorite Soap Operas. If you are interested, mail your submissions to B-Side and we’ll put it to a vote. Soap writers only need to go once a week, so if you like Passions, Days, General Hospital, or The Young and the Restless, why not give it a shot?

But enough with all of that shit. We are here to talk about the phenomenon that is Days of Our Lives. What other show features a love triangle with two girls who are in love with a guy who also happens to be an uncle to both of them (by adoption)? yes, there are some story lines that I don’t are about, but as I was in line to buy some pre-sliced apples at the grocery store (yes, I am that lazy), I noticed that the cover of Soap Opera Digest said that Stefano Dimera would be coming back from his latest death. Luckily, the woman ahead of me was busy arguing over a few of her coupons that were expired (as if she couldn’t make do with the FIFTY other ones she used) and it gave to time to think. I decided right then and there, that we need to have Days on TVgasm. So, if you are a fan of the show, I invite you to write, and if you haven’t been watching lately or are new to the series, I’ll try and fill you in as best as I can after the jump.Like most soap operas, Days is seemingly without rhyme or reason. Therefore, it is sort of impossible to really get a handle on everything in one recap, but as the “days” go by, you too will be talking about the Bradys and the Dimeras like you are an old pro. And although it is a cliché, getting back into soaps is like riding a bike. It’s easier than falling off a horse. It’s a complete waste of time and yet why would we want to tear our eyes away?

So, I said that Stefano DiMera was coming back. For those of you who don’t know, Stefano is the super villain of Days of Our Lives. He has done a lot of shit in Salem, including demonic possessions, brainwashings, and various kidnappings throughout the history of the show. Stefano himself has been killed numerous times, only to rise back from the ashes, hence the Phoenix moniker. Stefano comes back from the dead with such regularity; you can set your watch to it. Having him in the story lines has an added bonus: you know there will be plenty of people with bad Italian accents featured whenever he is around.

We all thought that Stefano was dead, but everyone’s favorite psychologist, Dr. Marlena Evans and her beau John Black decided to fly to Italy to investigate if this was the case, because somebody back in Salem has been stalking the Brady family. John decided to propose to Marlena while in Italy. They actually were married for a long time, but she was recently brainwashed into thinking that she was a serial killer. In reality, there was no serial killer. All of the people who “died” were transported to an Island and forced to live there by Stefano’s son, Tony. While in captivity, Marlena got back together with her old husband Roman, got pregnant, had a miscarriage, and then when hysterical, leading to her break up with John. All is good now though and John and Marlena are back together, no doubt aided by that impromptu serenade from Smokey Robinson.

John and Marlena’s wedding was interrupted by a generic Italian guy who came to say that Stefano was dead and Tony was in jail. Not believing him, John and Marlena went to check on Stefano’s grave and when they found no dead body, they realized that all of those problems in Salem may be the work of a familiar face.

We aren’t positive that Stefano is back, but we do know that bad shit is going on in Salem thanks to somebody we only knew as “The Gloved Hand”. The Gloved Hand sucks, and not just because he doesn’t even have enough taste to wear Isotoners like Dan Marino tells us. Days of Our Lives loves to have people commit crimes and only show their hands as they are doing it. What did this guy with the Gloved Hand do? Well, at first, he tormented Samantha “Sami” Brady. Sami is a maneater herself who will do anything to get ahead or get the man of her dreams, Austin, even going so far as blackmailing Austin and Carrie’s doctor, Lexie Carver (daughter to Stefano) into telling Austin and Carrie that any babies they had would have birth defects. This caused Austin to go back with Sami, and Austin’s brother, Lucas, to go back to Carrie.

Somebody found out about what Sami did and blackmailed her into doing something about it. On the day of Sami’s big wedding to Austin, after she had spent so much time convincing people that she was not a witch (not in the literal sense, they just don’t like to say bitch during the daytime), the Gloved Hand said that she must not marry Austin or something would happen to her son (with Lucas) Will. Sami stopped the wedding, almost lost Will in the process anyway (she thought he was kidnapped, but he actually ran away to Chicago because he didn’t want the kids at school to make fun of him and his crazy mom, and eventually, people found out about how she blackmailed Lexie anyway. Austin and Carrie got back together and decided to move to Switzerland.

Anyway, the this gloved jerk didn’t stop there. Sami’s mom is Marlena, and Marlena was actually kidnapped for like half a day after she had left for New Jersey to start a Women’s Self-Defense program (I think). While she was gone, Marlena’s other daughter, Belle, had a miscarriage. Any miscarriage is difficult, but this one was especially horrible because she discovered that her baby, who was conceived using in-vitro semination for some reason I missed, was not conceived using her husband’s sperm. Her eggs were fertilized by Shawn Douglas Brady (Sami’s cousin) who was married to Mimi Lockhart at the time. Belle’s husband, Philip, wanted Belle to have an abortion, but Belle refused, even when we learned that Belle might die in the process.

Shawn and Belle have a long history and he is also super-Catholic, so he didn’t want to abort the baby. He happened to be married to Mimi at the time, and because she earlier had a miscarriage, they were paying for a surrogate to carry the baby to term. Mimi also started to get a little worried about this because she had found out that Belle and Philip’s baby, Claire was actually Belle and Shawn’s baby. Philip was fighting in Iraq and Belle and Shawn had a one-night stand (again, a little sketchy on that one) that they didn’t even know about. They had become lost on some island or something and had to huddle together for warmth and apparently that was all it took. Sounds like something they would teach you in health class in 1957, right after they gave you the “how to avoid hairy palms by not masturbating” pamphlet.

The gloved hand exposed the mistake in Claire’s paternity by revealing these facts to Chelsea Brady. Chelsea is bad girl who accidentally killed her half-brother while she was driving and talking on her cell phone. Her father, Beau Brady, helped cover up the crime for her, which made his wife, Hope Brady and their son, Shawn, pissed at the two of them. Chelsea hates hope and is trying to get her father back together with her mother, Billie. Chelsea also has a taste for older men and her relatives. OK, that last one is not entirely true. She was in love with Max Brady, but he was only adopted into the family, which apparently doesn’t count. Chelsea wanted to do a good deed for her half-brother Shawn, and she knew how much he liked children, so she left Claire’s paternity papers where he could find them. At the time, she was volunteering at the hospital in order to fulfill the community service requirement she received after her vehicular manslaughter. Shawn was at the hospital because he and Philip were fighting over custody of Claire and he nearly drank himself to death.

Nobody believed Chelsea because she is such a witch, but she was later proved right, not that it helped her standing with any of the other Bradys. However, the Gloved Hand did not stop there. Two other Brady clan members, the aforementioned Max and his niece / sometimes girlfriend Stephanie Johnson, are both racecar drivers. While racing in the Salem Grand Prix, the gloved hand sabotaged Max’s car, which was using an experimental turbo system developed by Shawn. Max and Stephanie crashed, sending both to the hospital and nearly killing Stephanie.

What else did Mr. Glove do? Messing up the paternity of one of the Brady family is not enough. He also messed with the paternity of Beau and Hope’s baby. During the whole serial killer phase, Hope started a little bit of a relationship with Patrick Lockhart. Patrick is a bad guy who used to work for the DiMeras, but you can’t blame hope. They were on this island and didn’t know if they were going to be able to get off of it. Lots of people back in Salem thought everybody on the Island was dead as well, so there were some interesting pairings, like John Black with Kate Roberts (Austin, Lucas, and Philip’s mother) and some familiar ones, like Beau and Billie Reed, who spent that time looking for their missing daughter, only to find out she was living in Salem all along. That would be Chelsea, of course.

Patrick and Hope slept together once, and when they got back to Salem and discovered she was pregnant, we learned Patrick was the father, but not really, he was only paying off the doctor to fix the paternity tests so he could get close to hope. Patrick has no prospects, so we all started wondering how he got this money to pay off the doctor. Then everybody on the show started wondering how he had so much money to fly Hope on a private jet, among other things. It turns out that Patrick was working with the Gloved Hand not only for his own good, but also to torment Beau. It infuriated Beau to lean that Patrick was the father (nobody knows about the fake results), and he did everything he could to get Patrick. At one point, there was even an investigation that Patrick might be the gloved hand that was going after the Bradys and he was put in jail for the murder of a policewoman who supposedly had evidence.

At the time, Patrick was trying to enter the Police Academy to legitimize himself a little bit more, hoping to go where only Steve Gutenberg and Bobcat Goldwaith dared to tread, but obviously that went out the tubes. He said that he was being framed, but in reality, Beau was the one being framed. The evidence was planted, and when Patrick was in jail, the gloved hand struck again at the racetrack, meaning Patrick must be innocent and Beau must have fabricated evidence, even though it was really the gloved hand who put the evidence there to help Patrick frame Beau. The horror!

So, who is this gloved man? I reveal the details in part 2 of the days recap later this week and make sure to catch all of the discussion in the forums!