Happy Friday, Salem. Cat Greene spent most of today's episode putting out fires — Leo asking if she's ISA, EJ booking a hypnosis session to recover his Italy memories, and Chad starting to ask the wrong questions. Meanwhile, Kristen decided the quiet approach isn't working and went straight to Xander with a very direct request. Javi is thinking about leaving town, Gwen told Xander she wants more than he can give, and the week ended with a cliffhanger that sets up what should be a wild ride into Monday. Here's how it all played out.

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Javi and Rafe

The episode opens with Javi and Rafe arguing about thick crust versus thin. Rafe is relieved to have Javi back home and on his feet after the gas emergency, but the mood shifts when Javi admits the captain is suspending him without pay and giving him his first write-up for rushing into the Code One without gear. Javi knows he broke protocol — "When you panic in an emergency, people die" — but he saved Johnny's life. Rafe floats the idea of asking EJ to put in a word, and Javi shuts it down cold: "He can send me a fruit basket because I am never going to ask that bastard for a damn thing." Then Javi drops a bigger bomb — he's thinking about going back to Texas. It feels sudden, but something else is clearly going on. Rafe picks up on it: "Suddenly, it feels like we're not talking about work problems anymore." Javi leaves without elaborating.

Cat and EJ: The Cover Is Starting to Crack

At the hospital, Cat sits with EJ in his office as he defends the Lexie project. He calls it "cutting-edge science" with "contingencies in place" and says there are two paths forward: abandon the project entirely or take it through proper channels. Cat plays the supportive assistant, asking how he managed carrying it all alone. Then EJ shifts the conversation somewhere Cat wasn't expecting. He wants to recover his lost memories from their time together in Italy. He's already booked a hypnosis session with Marlena. "I want to know what really happened," he tells her. "Why you and I connected. Was it coincidence, or orchestrated by someone, or was it simply fate?" Cat keeps her composure and excuses herself for lunch.

She goes straight to Rafe's apartment. The debrief is urgent. First problem: Leo Stark asked Cat point-blank if she's ISA. Dimitri recognized her voice from years ago, and Leo confronted her about it at the hospital. Cat thinks she talked her way out of it, but Rafe isn't reassured: "Once he gets an idea in that slippery little brain of his, he doesn't let it go." Second problem: the hypnosis. If Marlena puts EJ under and he recovers details from Italy that don't match Cat's version, her cover is done. Rafe says they need to shut it down fast. Third problem: the dark web already knows the life-restoring drug exists, and EJ conveniently left out the black market when he listed his two options for Cat. Rafe is blunt about the bigger picture: "We embedded you way too deep in his organization."

Then a knock at the door. It's Leo, carrying a takeout bag of Javi's favorite pub special. Cat ducks out of sight. Rafe tells Leo that Javi is out picking up his boyfriend at the airport. Leo absorbs the hit, leaves the food, and goes. Cat emerges. She got lucky — Leo didn't see her. Rafe tells her no more close calls.

Chad Suspects Something, Then Confronts EJ

Chad and Kristen have a charged conversation at the mansion. Chad asks about EJ's ability to bring people back. He'd do anything to get Abigail back, but EJ told him the process has to be initiated shortly after death, so Abby is out of reach. Kristen steers the conversation toward EJ's arrogance and what it's doing to the family. She brings up Rachel shooting EJ and gets emotional: "What really scares me is what the future holds for our family, for our children, if EJ continues to play king." When Chad asks, "If not EJ, then who?" Kristen doesn't answer directly, but the implication hangs in the air.

Later at the Brady Pub, Chad and Leo grab lunch. Leo pitches running the Lexie story in the Spectator — "the biggest story since Free Britney" — and Chad agrees but insists on respecting Lexie's privacy. Then Leo mentions he almost ran into Lexie in the tunnels and that Cat was down there too. Chad's ears perk up. Leo covers for Cat, saying she was grabbing wine, but after Leo leaves, Chad calls Rafe. He wants to talk about Cat.

Then Chad goes to EJ directly. He tells EJ he overheard him and Cat at the will reading — dinner plans, dessert, "next time." EJ reminds Chad that he won the bachelorette auction and that Chad was the one who walked away from Cat, not the other way around. Chad doesn't care: "Stay the hell away from her." EJ points out that Cat is his employee and he's not the one with a restraining order. Neither of them budges.

Gwen and Xander: Post-Coital and Pre-Alliance

Gwen and Xander are in bed at the Salem Inn. Their arrangement has been pure physical since EJ kicked Gwen out of the mansion, but Gwen is done with "no strings." She pushes Xander on what they are, and he can't give her what she wants because he's still in love with Sarah. Gwen reads his silence and lets it land. Xander gets a text from Kristen and leaves.

Later, Leo finds Gwen brooding in the hallway. She's upset about Javi and the EJ exposé being dead in the water. Leo suggests a walk and caffeine, and she takes him up on it.

Kristen Makes Her Move

Kristen summons Xander to her hotel room. He shows up expecting something romantic — "I've seen that look in your eye more than once" — and Kristen shoots him down: "That is me resigning myself to the tedium of a giant ego." She gets to the point. Their shared enemy is EJ. The original plan was to use whatever he was hiding, but that turned out to be Lexie, and bringing your sister back from the dead isn't exactly prosecutable. So Kristen moves to Plan B. "The only way to punish EJ for everything he's done to the people we care about is to eliminate him completely." Xander asks what she means. "What I want now is for you to kill him." End of episode.

My Take

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Cat Greene's cover is cracking, and it's cracking from three directions at once. On Friday, she told Rafe that Leo Stark asked point-blank if she's ISA, that EJ has booked a hypnosis session with Marlena to recover his memories from Italy, and that Chad is now asking questions about why she was in the DiMera tunnels. Any one of those would be a problem. All three in the same episode is an alarm bell.

The ISA has been sending agents into Salem for forty years, and the pattern is always the same: the mission starts clean, the agent gets personally entangled, and the extraction comes too late. Shane Donovan arrived in 1984 as a straight-backed British intelligence officer and fell for Kimberly Brady within months. Steve Johnson got pulled into ISA work that put Kayla and his children in the crosshairs across decades. John Black's identity was built on layers of cover stories stacked so deep even he couldn't tell which version of himself was real. Billie Reed went undercover and fell for the target's world. Hope was literally programmed into a different person and sent on missions she didn't know she was running. The common thread isn't incompetence — it's proximity. Salem is where the threats are, but it's also a place where people form bonds fast and deep, and no amount of training prepares an agent for what happens when the target starts to feel like family.

Cat's situation is a textbook case. Rafe recruited her in the summer of 2025 for a financial crimes task force targeting EJ. She already had history with the DiMeras from the Clyde Weston operation, she knew the family dynamics from her time posing as Abigail, and she had legitimate reason to be in EJ's orbit. She got hired as his administrative assistant and started feeding intelligence to Rafe. But the mission went sideways almost immediately. Cat and Chad had real feelings, and working in EJ's house meant being around Chad constantly. Then EJ recognized her voice from Italy — he remembered her reading Wuthering Heights to him during his recovery — and that created a connection Cat never planned for. By December 2025, EJ was inviting her to dinner, bidding on her at a bachelorette auction, and Cat was reporting back to Rafe that the situation was getting complicated.

Now the bill is coming due. Leo's suspicion comes from Dimitri, who recognized Cat's voice as belonging to an ISA analyst he'd encountered years ago. The Marlena hypnosis could be worse — if EJ recovers memories from the Italian hospital, he might remember details that don't match Cat's story. And Chad calling Rafe means the person closest to both Cat and EJ is now connecting dots.

What makes Cat different from Shane or Steve or John is that she wasn't a career spy who fell in love on assignment. She was a civilian recruited because of a messy past, and the personal stakes were already there before the first briefing. The ISA didn't create the entanglement — they weaponized one that already existed. That's what makes this so dangerous, and it's why Rafe's own words on Friday landed so hard: "We embedded you way too deep in his organization."

The ISA's track record in Salem suggests this ends one of two ways: the agent gets pulled out and the mission collapses, or the agent stays too long and someone gets hurt. Cat is running out of room for a third option.

In today's episode, Gwen ends things with Xander and admits she still loves Sarah. But the first time Gwen and Xander were engaged, their wedding was stopped at the altar when a devastating secret came out. What had Gwen done to Sarah that destroyed her relationship with Xander?

Monday picks up right where Kristen's cliffhanger left off, and the week of May 18–22 is shaping up to be one of the biggest of May sweeps. Here's what CDL's weekly preview and Primetimer's two-week look-ahead are reporting.

Lexie Meets Paulina

Lexie has been awake for less than a week, and now she has to process the fact that Abe remarried while she was in the pod. Monday brings the confrontation that's been building since the will reading — Lexie and Paulina in the same room for the first time. Lexie reportedly plans to fight for a future with Abe. Whether Paulina can hold the line she drew on Wednesday, when she told Abe to go back to Lexie, is another question entirely.

EJ Goes Under Hypnosis

EJ finally gets Marlena to put him under to recover his memories from the Italian hospital. Today's episode made clear why this is so dangerous: Cat's entire ISA cover depends on EJ not remembering the details of their time together. Rafe told Cat to shut this down fast, but it may already be too late.

Xander Weighs Kristen's Proposal

After Friday's cliffhanger, Xander has a decision to make. Kristen asked him to kill EJ. He's weighing it against everything he's rebuilt with Victoria and the life he's trying to build outside of DiMera chaos. CDL notes that Kristen's real target may shift before the week is over.

Amy Keeps the Pressure on Holly

The cyberbullying legal exposure narrows around Holly as Amy pushes for formal charges. With Holly's recent defiance still fresh, Amy reportedly has more ammunition than she started with.

Tony Pitches Gabi as DiMera CEO

Tony tries to lock Gabi in as DiMera Enterprises' next CEO. This is Phase Two of the Stefan inheritance revelation Philip brought back from Alemania — Gabi isn't just Stefan's widow now, she may be the family's most logical choice to run the company.

A few things I'm chewing on after today.

Hit reply and tell me what you think. I read all of your responses!

She switched Sarah's antidote with a mind-altering serum, deliberately keeping Sarah in a confused mental state so Xander wouldn't leave Gwen for her. Abigail exposed the truth at the wedding ceremony in April 2022, and Rafe arrested Gwen on the spot. It was a double wedding — Leo and Craig's ceremony had just blown up moments earlier — making it one of the most chaotic altar scenes in recent DOOL history.