Days of Our Lives Preview: Two Go Missing During a Freak Snowstorm — Plus, Rafe Has a Question for Jada! (2024)

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<p>Regretting its decision to make Emily Quartermaine a victim of the Text-Message Killer, the soap rehired Natalia Livingston in 2009 to play the heroine’s heretofore-unknown twin sister, Rebecca Shaw. But the second time wasn’t the charm for the Emmy winner. “When they first told me about Rebecca, she was gonna be this completely different character,” <a href="https://soaps.sheknows.com/general-hospital/news/578793/general-hospital-steve-burton-natalia-livingston-story-gone-wrong/" target="_blank">Livingston recalled in 2020</a>, “so I came in that first day with all these ideas about how she was going to be different, and one of the writers came down at the end of that day and said, ‘Keep this character just like Emily.’” Too bad the con artist didn’t turn out to be adored by viewers just like Emily.</p>

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<p>When the primetime juggernaut aired its Season 5 finale in 1985, the audience went wild. In the episode’s final moments, terrorists crashed the wedding of Amanda Carrington and Prince Michael and opened fire. “Who died?” viewers were left to ask all summer. It was so exciting, so suspenseful and ultimately so… lame. In Season 6’s premiere, we found out that none of the series’ major players had kicked the bucket, just Steven Carrington’s boyfriend and Jeff Colby’s girlfriend. So it was all much ado about nothing.</p>

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3/40

<p>Gotta admit that when the venerable soap took us to the Wild West of yore in the 1980s, we bought it hoof, line and sinker. But its 2008 visit to 1968 was destined to go down in daytime history as a dud. After Bo Buchanan and Rex Balsom were struck by lightning — yeah, like <em>that</em> was the most farfetched thing about this story! —we got weeks of Bo as dad Asa and Rex as Bo before finally Gigi Morasco rescued them from a bygone era and us from this plot.</p>

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4/40

<p>As if to prove that there was no “there” to which this whackadoo soap wouldn’t go, it followed up Julian Crane’s affair with the sexpot that he didn’t realize was his son, Vincent Clarkson, with a 2007 twist that found the womanizer’s penis being stabbed off. Mind you, none of that was the crazy part. What <em>was</em> was Vincent making sure that doctor mom Eve Russell was so drunk when she tried to reattach the appendage that she put it on upside freaking down!</p>

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5/40

<p>Over the course of its storied run, this much-missed ABC soap was praised on the regular for keeping its plots relatable and down-to-earth. And on the rare occasions when when things got unreal? Let’s just say that it didn’t go well, as in 1982, when Dr. Faith Coleridge was briefly believed to be the reincarnation of Egyptian queen Merit Kara. (Another much-derided arc that you might expect to find on this list — but never will, not on our watch! — even has a champion in the leading lady who played it out. <a href="https://soaps.sheknows.com/soaps/news/593910/ryans-hope-delia-gorilla-drop-tower-soap-opera-storyline/" target="_blank">Read all about it here.</a>)</p>

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<p>In 2023, Phyllis Summers was so very angry about Diane Jenkins faking her death and leaving behind son Kyle Abbott to grieve that she decided to stick it to her archenemy by…faking her <em>own</em> death and leaving behind <em>her</em> kids to mourn. She even took pains to frame Diane for her attempted “murder” as payback for stealing away Jack Abbott. Of course, Phyllis — or headwriter Josh Griffith —hadn’t thought through the scheme <em>at all.</em> Her nonexistent body wasn’t even cold before she was skulking around Genoa City in a wig and trying to figure out how to unmake the mess that she should’ve been smarter than to have made in the first place.</p>

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7/40

<p>In 1996, the NBC soap attempted to goose its Nielsen numbers by having the Bay City Stalker murder beloved heroine Frankie Frame. But the horrifying twist was all shock, no actual shock value. “It was a bit of a miscalculation on the part of the show to kill her off and in such a brutal way,” portrayer <a href="https://soaps.sheknows.com/soaps/news/605697/another-world-anniversary-frankie-frame-winthrop-murder-backstage-soap-opera-scandal/" target="_blank">Alice Barrett said later</a>. “I think that they forgot who their audience was — they’re mothers.” Three years later, the soap followed Frankie to the grave.</p>

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<p>In 1982, the Monticello-set soap asked its audience to suspend its disbelief to the point that it would buy bubble-headed teen Jody Travis both as a descendant of Marie Bonaventure, aka the Martyr of Eden, and as the one individual who could save the war-torn Mediterranean country from organized crime. The audience’s answer: No.</p>

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<p>Get used to seeing Reva Shayne. She pops up a lot on this unfortunate countdown (and it’s a testament to how well Kim Zimmer’s character was sometimes written and always played that, despite her numerous godawful storylines, she’s still revered as one of daytime’s greatest). First up on the list of plots that never should’ve been hatched for her: that stretch during which she was briefly psychic and started traveling through time via a magic painting to Edwardian England, the Civil War era and WWII Germany. A brush stroke of genius, it was not.</p>

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10/40

<p>Never having been one to count herself lucky that she wasn’t serving a life sentence for her years of tormenting Lauren Fenmore, looney-tunes Sheila Carter took another pass at her archenemy in 2006 by getting so much plastic surgery that no one could tell her from her victim’s bestie, Phyllis Summers. It made no sense and was of even less consequence (and yes, that <em>is</em> possible) since a decade later, despite being killed by Lauren, Sheila turned up on <em>The Bold and the Beautiful</em> alive and well, and looking like her old self.</p>

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11/40

<p>Unaware that Sheila wasn’t dead (and <a href="https://soaps.sheknows.com/the-bold-and-the-beautiful/news/719771/who-was-sugar/" target="_blank">apparently never will be</a>!), her twisted sister Sarah Smythe signed up for plastic surgery to make herself Lauren’s twin. Side note: Who the hell <em>is</em> this doctor who can chisel such exact replicas of people, right down to their heights and voices? But we digress. Sarah campily conspired with Sheila’s never-before-mentioned kids Ryder and Daisy to ruin Lauren’s life for a couple of months before finally then-headwriter Maria Arena Bell let Lauren put herself as well as us out of our misery by slaying the Dragon Lady.</p>

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<p>When the soap killed off Franco Baldwin in 2021 and assigned Roger Howarth his third Port Charles character, we assumed that something great must be in store for the Emmy winner. We — and perhaps he, too — assumed wrong. In short order, Austin was tied to the hospital and the Quartermaines, to Maxie Jones and a mystery that… Honestly, to this day, we couldn’t tell ya whether it was ever solved or even resolved. In fact, so murky and tiresome was Austin’s storyline that months passed after his murder without anybody bothering to ask whodunit.</p>

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13/40

<p>As the <em>Another World</em> spinoff’s Thelma and Louise, Tina Johnson and Alexandra Neil sold the hell out of this hella-silly 1981 storyline in which gal pals Lurleen Harper and Ruby Wright discovered that a Native American artifact called the Fire Compass would turn anyone who opened it into a mummy — and not the high-quality kind that once took ahold of Abbott and Costello, either! But we still weren’t sorry when the goofy plot was, ahem, “wrapped.”</p>

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14/40

<p>We thought that the “ick” factor was as high as it could get in 2012 when the show had Sharon Newman marry Victor, not only her ex-husbands’ father but her own longtime father figure. But the nuptials were topped by the fact that the on-again/off-again in-laws also had sex that so inspired The Mustache, he slipped a diamond necklace under Sharon’s pillow. TMI! TMI!</p>

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<p>Imagine you’re Taylor Hayes. You think you’ve finally gotten off the marry-go-round that for so many years had found you battling Brooke Logan for the affections of fickle Ridge Forrester. Sure, you’ve settled down with his half brother, Nick Marone. And sure, he was also one of Brooke’s exes. But still, if you’re Taylor, you’d consider that progress. So imagine her chagrin in 2007 to discover that, through the kinda mixup that could only happen on a soap, she didn’t give birth to her and Nick’s baby, she gave birth to <em>Brooke</em> and Nick’s!</p>

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16/40

<p>The 2013 plot in which a back-from-the-dead A.J. Quartermaine used his late grandmother’s relish recipe to bail ELQ out of financial trouble could’ve been a charming throwback to the original 1984 storyline. Do we need to tell you that it wasn’t? No, what we got instead was a mind-numbing arc in which A.J.’s crankypants Aunt Tracy founded a competing relish company, and the whole family discussed condiments to the point that we never wanted to so much as <em>see</em> another pickle. And the worst part? To decide who had made the better relish, A.J. and Tracy went on <em>The Chew</em>, the talk show that had replaced our beloved <em>All My Children.</em></p>

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17/40

<p>Don’t you look at us like that! We can most definitely include storylines on this list that we both laughed at <em>and</em> loved! And the one about the city underneath Llanview that had once housed an experimental community definitely falls into that category! Just look at those rad, <em>Star Trek</em>-y uniforms —come <em>on</em>! And on the plus side, the trippy plot furthered longterm story, by revealing to Viki Buchanan — and all of us — that her alternate personality had given birth to her nemesis, Megan Gordon. #themoreyouknow</p>

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<p>Speaking of storylines that we both laughed at <em>and</em> loved… Honestly, there weren’t many plots on NBC’s too-zany-for-its-own-good 1999-2007 soap that didn’t fit that bill. But our favorite and by far the most ludicrous was the one in which scheming Kay Bennett imprisoned romantic rival Charity Standish in a block of ice and replaced her with a zombified version of herself. Only later — and need we say too late? — did Kay discover that the creature she’d unleashed was actually a succubus intent on bedding her crush, Miguel Lopez-Fitzgerald, thereby killing him! Hey, at least he’d have died happy?</p>

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19/40

<p>By the time future <em>Matlock</em> star Nancy Stafford joined the cast in 1982, the soap was as good as cancelled. So its final headwriters decided to out-<em>General Hospital General Hospital</em> by going even further into sci-fi territory than the Ice Princess storyline. The result? Stafford’s character, Adrienne Hunt, was a sixtysomething who, as you can see above, had discovered the secret of eternal youth. No fountain required, even!</p>

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<p>Make a list of all the things on which you might reasonably expect a rich, handsome, successful playboy about town to spend his time. Done? So how high did you rank “Start a podcast that’s so self-obsessed and boring, it causes a dip in the sale of sleep aids”? What? That wasn’t on your list at all? Funny. That wasn’t on viewers’ list of things that they ever wanted to see Billy Abbott do, either. And yet, for months in 2022, there they were, stuck listening to him prattle on in hopes of helping others. In fairness, we suppose he might have been of assistance to a listener or two — if they were suffering from insomnia!</p>

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<p>“Bope” fans had waited years and also years to see Peter Reckell and Kristian Alfonso back in action together as ill-fated Bo Brady and his Fancy Face, Hope Williams. (On <em>this</em> earthly plane, that is; they’d already taken a turn around the dance floor in the afterlife of <em>Beyond Salem</em>.) But when the audience’s dream came true in 2023, it turned out to be a nightmare. Bo didn’t even regain his love for Hope until a moment before son Shawn opened fire and put him in a coma. Talk about not sticking the landing! Or the takeoff… or…</p>

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22/40

<p>Overall, this classic soap, which changed channels from CBS to NBC over the course of its 1951-86 run, was pretty solid. But as the axe began <a href="https://soaps.sheknows.com/soaps/news/610899/why-was-soap-cancelled-search-for-tomorrow-anniversary-brian-frons/" target="_blank">swinging toward it for a second time</a>, the powers that be understandably panicked and gave T.R. Sentell what future primetime star Jane Krakowski told <em>Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen</em> was her lousiest storyline. “Once, I joined the circus. That was like a desperate grab at ratings.” Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it didn’t succeed.</p>

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<p>Perhaps it was inevitable that at some point in her long run as Rachel Cory, Victoria Wyndham would be tasked with playing a doppelganger. (It <em>is</em>, after all, a daytime rite of passage.) It’s just a shame that the lookalike she was assigned was as over the top as Carl Hutchins’ demented former lover. Throughout 1995, the cuckoo countess had Wyndham chewing scenery like a beaver at an all-you-can-eat buffet. By the time Carl fatally stabbed Justine with a letter opener, the actress reportedly wished the storyline had been marked “return to sender.”</p>

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<p>Who could blame Rex and Cassie for believing that they were really extraterrestrials? When the soap introduced Roman Brady and Kate Roberts’ surprise kids in 2002, it did so by having them crash-land in Salem during a meteor shower. And their attire? Well, that was truly out of this world. See above. Has tinfoil ever been so haute couture? Eat your heart out, <em>Bold & Beautiful.</em></p>

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<p>We thought that we couldn’t groan any more loudly than we did at the start of this 2023 storyline, in which Luna Nozawa got so high off of mom Poppy’s “breath fresheners” that she mistook slim, Black Zende Forrester for beefy, white R.J. Forrester that she hit the sheets with the wrong cousin. But then the show took a plot that was already bad beyond comprehension and made it worse. “How is that even possible?” you ask. It had Zende, despite knowing that Luna wasn’t into him and never had been, fantasize about their night together and imagine a future with the young woman who’d been too out of it to see straight, never mind consent to intercourse. Ugh to the nth.</p>

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<p>If you asked any viewer in 2022 which character they most wanted to see come back, the one answer that you definitely <em>wouldn’t</em> have received was, “Could it be… <em>Satan</em>?” Yet, decades after Marlena Evans’ mid-1990s possession, return, the hell-raiser did, only this time with little to no point. Beelzebub bounced from one host to another as if auditioning for the lead in <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</em>, turned Susan Banks into a cat, re-cast Eileen Davidson as Kristen DiMera and played spoiler to a bunch of couples we really didn’t mind seeing broken up.</p>

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<p>Luke Spencer was never exactly an altar boy, but when he started to make the Cassadines look like the Cleavers, it raised eyebrows. For months, the audience assumed that he’d been replaced by a doppelganger or a bona-fide villain in a mask — hey, it happens, and in Port Charles, a freakin’ <em>lot</em>! But it turned out that a trauma suffered decades earlier had left Luke with a case of dissociative-identity disorder that didn’t require him to don a red wig like <em>One Life to Live</em>’s Niki Smith or be any fun whatsoever.</p>

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<p>In 2002, the CBS soap put the “mother” in “Necessity is the mother of invention” by accommodating three actresses’ pregnancies at once with a cuckoo plotline in which Barbara Ryan shipped off to a spa a trio of her enemies, Emily Stewart, Carly Tenney and Rose D’Angelo. “That doesn’t sound so silly,” you might say. “It doesn’t even sound very vindictive.” Ah, but it was both — because at this <em>particular</em> spa, Barbara’s foes were given treatments that amounted to Soap Opera Rapid-Aging Syndrome for adults!</p>

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<p>Good Lord, no <em>wonder</em> Kevin Fisher drank even wine that looked like a headache in a bottle! Emotionally tortured by memories of the abuse he’d suffered at the hand of his appropriately named father, Terrible Tom, Amber Moore’s pal was forced by bad guy Clint Radison to rob banks. Sorry, did we say that he was forced to rob banks? We meant that he was forced to do so while wearing a <em>ginormous</em> chipmunk head. Thankfully, Kevin’s big brother, Michael Baldwin, eventually arranged for him to get psychological help. And, presumably, all the acorns he could eat.</p>

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<p>Five years after Josh Lewis’ wife drove off an unfinished bridge in the Florida Keys, “the deceased” resurfaced in old-timey Goshen with a bad case of amnesia and a keen interest in butter churning. There, she might have stayed, too, were it not for the horse-drawn carriage accident that reunited her with old flame Alan Spaulding and started her down the path to remembering that she wasn’t a prim and proper Amish lady but the notorious “slu*t of Springfield.”</p>

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31/40

<p>Talk about a rude awakening! When the primetime soap decided to un-kill off Patrick Duffy’s Bobby Ewing in 1986, it simply had him reappear in sometime wife Pamela’s shower at the end of Season 9 and wash away everything that had happened in the last 31 episodes by telling her that it had all been a bad dream. Though fans jumped for joy to have Duffy back, they couldn’t say that the show hadn’t jumped the shark. Plus, “various cast members were pissed because their storylines were lost as a result of that,” Steve Kanaly, who played Ray Krebbs, told <a href="https://people.com/patrick-duffy-dallas-costars-were-pissed-over-bobby-ewing-return-from-dead-7547227" target="_blank"><em>People</em></a> in 2023.</p>

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<p>The NBC soap milked this blood-soaked storyline for all the shock value that it could —and there was a <em>lot</em>, considering that it rubbed out half of Salem, even Alice freakin’ Horton! (You might as well smash the hourglass at that point!) But after we found out that the mass murderer who’d decimated her town’s population was Marlena Evans, the show pulled its punch, revealing that all of the dear departed were alive and well and being held prisoner in Melaswen (New Salem spelled backwards) by Andre DiMera.</p>

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<p>When faking one’s death, rule No. 1 is “Don’t get spotted by people who know you.” That’s Soap Vixen 101, and we’d have thought that Skye Lockhart, Adam Newman’s mercenary wife of convenience, would have known it, even back in 2010. (It’s <em>not</em> a new rule.) And rule No. 2? There really isn’t one, but apparently, for Skye’s sake, it should have been “Don’t hang out on volcanoes, you twit!” That’s where she got busted by Sharon before taking a tumble into the lava and doing a way better impression of a deep-fried corpse than she had been.</p>

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<p>Upon finding out her true identity in the late 1990s, the young woman who seemed to be perpetually rocking an all-over mud mask declared, “That’s <em>Princess</em> Swamp Girl to you!” But as Gina’s heir, Greta Von Amberg wasn’t just handed a loofa and a scepter. On the contrary, she was obliged to venture into a Virtual Garden of Eden, where she and a fig-leaf-clad Austin Reed were tasked with battling all manner of demons (who just happened to resemble characters back in Salem). In the end, about the best that could be said of this storyline was that the Wardrobe Department issued Austin a fig leaf.</p>

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<p>Joshua Lewis learned the hard way what we all could’ve told him: Some people are — and should remain! —one of a kind. After wife Reva’s late-1990s “death” — she was very prone to dying in quotation marks, you’ll recall — he had her replicated and rapidly-aged into Dolly, a doppelganger for his lost love. (How the clone managed to completely and totally avoid this spectacular hair-metal ’do as she grew up, we’ll never understand!) In the end, Reva, as she was wont to do, rose from the grave, and Dolly, realizing that she was a redundancy at that point, overdosed on aging serum and died in…well, her own arms.</p>

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<p>Ew! Sorry, we mean… ew, ew, ew, ew and also, to be sure we haven’t been unclear, <em>ew</em>! That was in a nutshell the audience’s reaction when the CBS soap flirted with the idea of pairing up these two. Technically, there was no reason that they <em>couldn’t</em> hook up — he was the son of Stephanie Forrester and Massimo Marone; she, the daughter of Eric Forrester and Brooke Logan. But because Ridge (then Ronn Moss) had originally thought that he was Bridget’s father, then her uncle, the “ick” factor was just way too high. Thankfully, the plot never went any further than a coupla kisses that left fans retching.</p>

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<p>We didn’t blame the ABC soap for wanting to capitalize on Kelly Monaco’s sky-high profile following her victory in Season 1 of <em>Dancing With the Stars</em>. But we <em>definitely</em> have held against the show the facepalm-inspiring storyline with which it tried to do that. Follow along — if you can. A rich woman named Allegra Montenegro, in order to keep living in the lavish style to which she’d become accustomed, kidnapped Monaco’s Sam McCall — a dead ringer for her daughter, Alicia — in order to have her convince one Andrew Olsen that she was the real McCoy. Via ballroom dancing. We know — it was atrocious. When all was said and done, Andrew was dead, Sam was arrested, Allegra was revealed to be the actual killer, and everyone did their best to forget that this mess had ever happened.</p>

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<p>“Go big or goto outer space!” seemed to be the <em>Dynasty</em> spinoff’s motto as it ended its two-season run in 1987. In the series’ final moments, it had Fallon Carrington’s car break down in the desert. There was no such thing as Lyft back then, but that was OK. She was soon picked up by — sure, why not? — a flying saucer. When she was done putting the “gal” in “intergalactic,” she simply turned up again on the mothership to start frequenting support groups for those who had been, ahem, alienated.</p>

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<p>Never mind that the soap had been lauded for decades for the groundbreaking 1973 storyline in which ambitious Erica Kane had had an abortion. In 2005, headwriter Megan McTavish threw that pivotal twist out the window and revealed that all those years earlier a mad doctor had implanted the future supermodel’s fetus in his wife. Why? Apparently, McTavish felt that the show was past due to replay the bad-seed plot that had introduced the character of Kendall Hart, only this time with a hunky surprise kid who was so uninteresting that nobody much cared when he lost his marbles and then his life.</p>

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<p>Chances are, when you read the words above, you instinctively groaned. The cast, on the other hand, just laughed their asses off while they were playing out this whackadoo 2006 storyline, which involved hidden treasure, Nazis and Brad Carlton breaking a villain’s neck with his thighs. With! His! <em>Thighs</em>! As hard as it is to believe, things apparently got even sillier backstage than they did on the air. “One day, Josh [Morrow, Nick] decided we should make our own reliquary,” Amelia Heinle (Victoria) told <a href="https://www.soapoperadigest.com/content/amelia-heinles-five-greatest-yr-moments-0/" target="_blank"><em>Soap Opera Digest</em></a> in 2010, so he “ended up making one out of tinfoil and Jolly Ranchers… You had to be there.”</p>