You’ve got to say this for DAYS OF OUR LIVES new headwriters, who rebooted the show in September by bringing back beloved characters and refocusing the soap’s storylines: They’re big on giving fans what they want. But when viewers who’ve been clamoring for one of Salem’s most notorious pairings to reunite, the scribes had their work cut out for them.
Why? Well, under previous regimes, Sami Brady and EJ DiMera did some pretty awful things to one another… culminating with her shooting him in the head while he laid on a bed, drunk as the proverbial skunk.
Kinda hard to bring back the romance after that, huh?
But this being a soap, there are ways. Oh, yes, there are ways. And in the case of EJ and Sami, it meant creating a scenario in which the pair believed their child dead, driving them to react as only soap opera characters would: With a heated bout of grief sex.
Which, of course, led to immediate regrets when, literally minutes later, they learned that rumors of their son’s death were most definitely exaggerated. (Whoopsie!)
The question now, however, is where does the pair go from here? Soap aficionados are already speculating that Sami — for whom the term “fertile Myrtle” may have been invented, what with her already having four tots running around town — will wind up pregnant. Many, however, hope this is not the case, thinking that the last thing the show needs is to put Sami — who is currently married to hunky Rafe Hernandez — through another “Who’s The Daddy?” story. But if not via a baby, the question looms: How do the writers turn Sami and EJ’s ill-advised, grief-driven romp into something more lasting? And is that even in the cards, what with EJ’s latest ex-wife, Nicole, slowly falling back under the charmer’s spell?
Something tells us this story will be complicated and messy. Already, Sami’s oldest son, Will, knows about his mom’s tryst, having accidentally walked in on the couples coupling and then beat a hasty and unobserved retreat. (His reaction? To vomit in the bushes!) And the less-vocal but equally passionate fans of Sami and Rafe have made it clear that they want to see her marriage survive this crisis.
In other words, the writers have their work cut out for them, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years of watching soaps, triangles are like a warped version of Thunderdome: Three people enter, two people leave. But which two? Only time will tell!