We’re up to four victims with at least one more to appear very shortly. Despite her sons’ reassurances that they would protect her from the Salem Stalker, Caroline found herself dead in a church at the triple funeral for Abe, Maggie and Jack.
As he mourned the dead threesome, Bo was taunted on his PDA by badly animated text messages telling him his mother was going to snuff it within the hour. The little timer clicked ominously downwards to naught as Bo and Roman struggled desperately to protect their mother. It was like an episode of 24 only incredibly stupid.
Danger lurked all around the funeral. The suspects were all hanging around the church at some point during the service. Bo and Shawn’s paranoia reached epic proportions as they saw everyone as the enemy.
When Bo found Victor lighting a candle at the church, he immediately started screaming at him and accusing him of being a murderer. Who knows what sinister fumes that candle might release into the air? Perhaps Victor was trying to kill Caroline through the power of smoke inhalation.
Bo’s mad ranting at Victor was nothing compared to Shawn’s accusations towards his favourite punching bags, the DiMeras. When Cassie and Tony made an appearance at the funeral, Shawn immediately tried to beat the crap out of Tony for daring to show his foul face.
It was worth it just to see Tony use his newly acquired ninja moves to drop the errant Shawn like a sack of potatoes but the little pissant does get scarier and more in need of anger management every time I see him. When he makes comments like “I promise to wipe every last DiMera off the face of the earth”, he sounds like he’s a hair’s breadth away from gunning them all down from a clocktower.
Even standing outside the church is apparently proof of guilt for Shawn. When Shawn found Cassie standing outside doing absolutely nothing remotely suspicious, he immediately took this as proof that she had been recruited by Rex to kill someone while he was in jail to prove his innocence.
In Salem, even loitering is considered eeevil if you’re a DiMera. You don’t even want to know what the Bradys think of DiMera littering.
Shawn’s worst moment by far came when he began shouting accusations in Cassie’s face and shaking her as the poor girl cried and cowered against the wall. This guy is supposed to be a hero? We’re supposed to be rooting for this idiot who screams and manhandles women without provocation or reason?
The Bradys’ paranoia turned out not to do a damn thing as Caroline dropped down dead anyway at the very moment the killer predicted. One moment she was praying in the corner and talking about how the one thing that had never failed her was her faith (unlike her facial muscles) and the next she collapsed to the floor, the oddest death grimace on her face.
The coroner’s verdict was that Caroline had died from poisoning. Of course she had – you can’t inject that amount of Botox into your face and expect to come out fine. But apparently this was the work of the killer who had somehow managed to find a poison that worked accurately enough for him to predict the exact second of her death.
Poor Caroline. There wasn’t even a proper reason for her to die unlike the other victims. The only reason she got killed was because she visited Maggie on the night of her death and Maggie told her she saw an episode of Law And Order where a character had similar evil eyebrows to the Stalker.
Now that’s just unnecessary, evil killer. The cops couldn’t find their own asses with a map, compass and GPS. They certainly wouldn’t be able to catch you with an obscure clue that Caroline may or may not have remembered properly.
The bright side about Caroline dying is that her name won’t be mentioned so much and I can finally get the Outkast song Roses out of my head that’s been playing on constant loop (the same thing happened when Maggie got killed and Mickey had a plotline – I could not get Hey Mickey out of my head for weeks). Unfortunately, before I can purge myself fully of the song, I have to do this:
Caroline, Caroline
Bo said he’d protect her and she’d be just fine
But Bo is totally useless half the time
And the other half either got him pissed off or coming up short
Even though (even though)
You need a golden calculator to divide (to divide)
The time it took for your insides to liquefy
And di-i-i-e-e-e,
The killer really got his timing down, yeah
I know you like to thank this show don’t stank
But look a little bit closer, see
Days is really smelling like poo poo poo
Yeah, Days is really smelling like poo poo poo
Caroline
See she’s the reason for the Brady clan (clan)
I hope she’s speeding on the way to the pub
Trying to hurry up to get to some
Bread or Irish food or something like that
And try to make a facial expression in the mirror
And crash, crash, crash into a Jan! (Just playing)
She needs a golden calculator to divide (to divide)
The time it took for her insides to liquefy
And di-i-i-e-e-e,
The killer really got his timing down, yeah
I know you like to thank this show don’t stank
But look a little bit closer, see
Days is really smelling like poo poo poo
Yeah, Days is really smelling like poo poo poo
And so on. I’m not even going to try reword the rap part because I’m so not a rapper. Much like Bo and Hope are so not cops no matter how much they like to pretend they know what they’re doing.
As hard as it may be to believe, Shawn and Bo were not the only perpetrators of unbelievably dickish behaviour. John went to question suspect Sami and treated her with all the sensitivity of a drunken rhinocerous:
John: Samantha, the latest victim just died and I need to question you since you’re a prime suspect.
Sami: I hate you and hope my mother divorces you. Go right ahead.
John: Did you kill your beloved grandmother?
Sami: OMIGOD, GRANDMA CAROLINE JUST DIED??! WAAAAAA!!
John: You’re not answering my questions, Samantha. Come on. Did you poison your grandmother? You did, didn’t you? I can see it in your eyes.
Sami: WAAAAAAA!!
John: Stop stonewalling me and answer the question, dammit! You’re being a difficult witness. This is so like you, Samantha. Always lying and never being honest.
Sami: WAAAAAA!!
John: Typical. That crying is so fake and over-the-top. You’d think you’d just heard a cherished loved one had just died or something. Do you have no shame, Samantha?
Everyone reacted badly to the Brady matriarch’s death. Roman had a Shawn-esque miniature crisis of faith as he asked God why he was doing this to his family. He glared at the cross (as if Roman can make a non-glaring facial expression) and asked the Big Dude Upstairs “Where were you?”
Sadly a bellowing voice did not answer from the heavens “Don’t blame Me if you Salem PD cannot protect anyone even if they’re right under your own noses. Bloody Bradys are always on my case.”
After his grandmother died, someone one the production staff mercifully decided they’d write a new script for Shawn instead of photocopying the same three pages over and over and Shawn finally had a few days in which he stopped obsessing over Rex.
Unfortunately, the brief respite brought with it a new terror. Shawn had a convo with Brady in which two long-forgotten names made gratuitous appearances – Jan Spears and Chloe Lane.
At the same time as they had this conversation, a Mysterious Figure lurked outside the Java Café watching them. From the overwhelming urge I felt to tell this Mysterious Figure to shut up, I knew an unwelcome character return was imminent. Shut up, Mysterious Figure’s unnervingly familiar black ponytail!
The Mysterious Figure was quickly unmasked to be Jan, hateful and ineffectual ‘villain’ of times past. God, not Jan. Anyone but Jan. I hate Jan and not in the good love-to-hate villain way. She’s a wretched, wretched actress who delivers every singe line in that hateful snotty voice of hers.
Wretched Jan went to see Marlena where her wretched backstory was revealed. Her wretched parents were killed in a tragic ski accident (clearly a lie because her wretched parents obviously killed themselves from having to spend time with her) and the wretched Jan decided to return to Salem.
(She also mentioned how she’d just happened to run into Belle in Europe which has convinced me that Belle’s in neither Milan nor Paris. She’s in Europeland, a theme park located in Wisconsin. That’s the only explanation for why the Eiffel tower’s in Milan and she can run into people she knows so easily.)
As if wretched Jan’s wretched return wasn’t enough, there are mumblings that Chloe might return as well. In between occasionally strangling Nicole (perhaps she should start wearing polonecks as a preventative measure), Victor is plotting on separating Brady and Nicole by bringing Chloe back from whichever music hall she’s terrorising with her singing.
Dark times lie in wait for Days, clearly. And I’m not just talking about the next victim.
The next victim almost turned out to be Marlena when she collapsed at Caroline’s wake. Luckily for her, Celeste was there to find out what was going on. Decked in a platinum blonde wig of inappropriately cheery flippiness and mourning cleavage, Celeste’s powers allowed her to talk to Caroline’s dead body. I think it was her powers at least; it could have been that her push-up bra was way too tight and causing her to hallucinate.
Caroline’s corpse sang along to the Irish ditties being sung at the wake and then informed Celeste that another person was going to die. When Marlena collapsed, Caroline’s corpse actually gave some useful information and told Celeste that Marlena had been poisoned as well. This allowed Lexie, aka the most useless doctor ever, to do something to save her rather than staring at Marlena dumbly and hoping she’d get better on her own like she’d been doing.
Everyone was horrified at the thought of their beloved Doc dying. As her mother lay near death, Sami did take time out to gloat to Kate that Roman clearly still loved Marlena from the way he was cradling and comforting her. It’s nice to look on the bright side of things, Sami, but your mother almost dying isn’t really one of those things you can put a positive spin on. Carry on being nasty to Kate, though.
Flashbacks revealed what had happened. The show flashbacked to the Marlena eating some dip. Yes, a Dip eating a dip – how poetic. From the ominous shots of the snack dip, it became clear that the culprit for Marlena’s near death experience was a diabolical dip of death.
The show tried to instill suspense by having Hope pick up some finger food and dipping it into this diabolical dip but I knew she was safe. You can’t fool me, show. Like Hope would let a morsel of food into that spiderweb-encased digestive system of hers.
So someone is still due to die very shortly at the Salem Thanksgiving celebrations. Who will join the turkey as the sacrificial bird?
Rex claims he knows who’s going to die next because he’s studied the killer’s mindset. He says that the next person to come close to the identity of the killer will be the fifth victim so one of the Salem cops is next on the killer’s hitlist.
For a supposed genius, that’s just a silly thing to say. That assumes that the next person to learn the truth of the killer is going to be a Salem police officer and I can think of approximately six billion people who can figure it out before them.
Maybe if the Salem PD actually got off their asses and did some investigating instead of wasting all their time shouting down the DiMeras and how they were going to lock them away, they might get somewhere. But otherwise, the only safe people from the killer’s wrath are the Salem cops because they’re so stupid.