Happy Thursday, Days fans.

EJ told Lexie today that he enjoys her Dimera side — and from what we saw, he might have a point. Meanwhile, Abe is getting the house ready for her homecoming, Gabi's secret is holding (for now), and a new face arrives at the fire station. Let's get into it.

Forwarded to you? The Salem Dispatch is a weekday read for Days fans: full recap of yesterday's episode, tomorrow's spoilers, and what other fans are saying.

Johnny wakes up on the couch and finds Chanel having been up most of the night reading about pregnancy-associated breast cancer, and she tells Johnny she wasn't doomscrolling — she was preparing. She wants a plan of attack before they see the oncologist. She wants questions ready. She reminds him this is a high-risk pregnancy and that not many doctors have seen her particular situation, so she needs to be her own advocate.

Johnny promises to stop being in denial and be a realist with her. Chanel draws one line: he can never say her life is more important than the baby's. Johnny acknowledges they're in a different situation now — she's in her third trimester, and all they can do is listen to the doctor's recommendations. Chanel softens, and they share a moment of gratitude for what they have — Trey, the baby on the way, each other. Then the baby kicks for the first time, and both of them light up. Johnny calls it their little Lionel Messi. It's a beautiful, quiet scene — a pocket of joy in the middle of something terrifying.

Abe tells Theo that Lexie's doctors think she can be discharged today, and he wants the house ready. Theo notes that Paulina moved the rest of her things out last night. Theo asks the question that's been hanging in the air: is Abe getting a divorce, or is his marriage to Paulina invalid now? Abe sidesteps the legalities but admits Paulina walked away and made the decision for him. Theo pushes: do you still love her? Abe says of course he does. That didn't change when Lexie came back.

Theo opens up about his own struggles. A friend accused him of something he didn't do — he's clearly talking about Gabi — and when he denied it, she didn't believe him. He's not just upset, he's furious. Abe listens. Theo also admits he's questioning his own direction: unemployed, living with his parents, unsure what comes next. Abe reminds him of everything he's accomplished — South Africa, running a multinational — and tells him he's proud of him every single day.

Then comes the gut punch. The framed pictures of Paulina are still up. Theo asks if they should move them. Abe says it doesn't feel right taking them down. Theo says it doesn't feel right having them up, either. After Theo leaves, Abe replaces one of the Paulina photos with one of Lexie, and we see how conflicted he actually is.

This is the first real sibling scene between EJ and Lexie since her resurrection, and it crackles. Lexie greets him at the hospital with a wry "Well, well, well" and immediately starts asking questions. She wants to know how the cure works. EJ explains: a doctor at this hospital created a tissue-regenerating drug (Versavix), and when Rolf mixed it with a formula he'd already developed, it cured her tumor and reversed the damage. Lexie pushes back — she's a woman of science, she says, and she doesn't believe in resurrections. EJ asks what she thinks happened, then. She believes Stefano kept her in stasis and EJ brought her out of it.

EJ says Rolf needs a blood sample, and since Rolf can't appear in public, he's here to collect it. Lexie draws the blood herself. Then the conversation shifts. Lexie rails against Paulina — her tone, her arrogance, the way she announced she'd "let" Lexie have her husband. EJ observes that if he didn't know better, he'd think Lexie was talking about someone else. Who? "You." He tells her Abe has a type. He says he enjoys seeing "this side" of her — the Dimera side. For too long, she shunned it, but unlike other pretenders to the throne, it runs in her blood.

EJ collects the blood sample and heads out. It's a loaded exit — he's got what Rolf needs, and he's left Lexie with a question she didn't ask for: is this who she is now?

Ari confronts Gabi about Liam. He quit his job at the bookstore, left Salem without a word, and is ghosting her calls and messages. Ari blames Gabi — her mother was horrible to Liam, totally out of line, and now he's vanished. Gabi pushes back: did a grown man really leave town because someone's mom made him uncomfortable? Or is it possible, given his track record, that he had other reasons?

Ari admits she didn't know Liam all that well. She knew what he wanted her to know. She's hurting — she watched all her friends pair off this year and thought it was finally her turn. Gabi comforts her with bolilla bread, their abuelita's heartbreak cure, baked in the middle of the night. They plan a spa day. Then Ari delivers the line that should keep Gabi up at night: "No matter what happens, I can always trust you." Oh boy.

Leo runs into Javi outside the pub and asks why he wasn't at Sophia's memorial. Javi explains he's on desk duty after the PPE incident at the fire. They reminisce about baby Trey — Javi says those months raising him were the happiest of his life. Leo gets openly emotional, telling Javi he's a hero. Then Javi drops the bomb: he has to go meet Gus. His boyfriend.

Leo's face is a masterwork of barely concealed devastation. "Gus? Your boyfriend's name is Gus." He recovers with a string of deflections — "a telenovela supervillain," "a romance with a built-in exit strategy" — but the pain is right there. When Gus arrives, Javi lights up. They're sweet together. Gus reveals he's been thinking about it, and he wants to stay in Salem — there's an opening at Javi's fire station, and Javi offered to put in a good word. Leo watches them walk away together from a distance. It's brutal.

EJ told his sister today that he enjoys seeing her "Dimera side," and for a moment it looked like he might be right about her. Lexie was sharp, possessive, dismissive of Paulina in a way that felt more Stefano's daughter than Abe's wife. EJ recognized his sister in that moment — the version who fights dirty and doesn't apologize.

But is that really who Lexie is? The answer has never been simple, and it's the key to understanding a character who has spent nearly forty years caught between two identities.

Lexie Carver first appeared on Days of Our Lives in the summer of 1987. She was a young nurse, Abe Carver's love interest, and eventually his wife — they married in 1991. For years, she was defined by that relationship. Lexie Carver was a good woman married to a good man, and that was the whole story.

Then the show revealed that Stefano Dimera was her biological father, and everything got complicated.

The Stefano revelation landed in the early 1990s, and Lexie initially rejected it. She didn't want the name. She didn't want the legacy. She watched Stefano terrorize Salem for years and wanted no part of it. But blood has a way of asserting itself on this show, and over the next decade, Lexie made choices that the nurse who married Abe Carver never would have made.

The baby switch was the first major fall. In 2000, Stefano orchestrated a swap — Hope and Bo's son was given to Abe and Lexie as their own, a baby they named Isaac. When the truth started surfacing, Lexie didn't step back. She dug in. She let Brandon switch DNA samples to hide Isaac's real parentage. She fought to keep a child she knew wasn't hers. It was Stefano's playbook — protect the family at any cost — and Lexie ran it without blinking.

Three years later, she went further. In 2003, Lexie planted fake paternity results in the hospital's computer system. A doctor, a healer, manipulating medical records. Abe was devastated when the truth came out. Their marriage buckled.

Then came Tek. When Abe's health problems left their marriage in crisis around 2005, Lexie turned to Detective Tek Kramer. The affair was another crack in the Carver foundation, another moment where the woman Lexie wanted to be lost ground to the woman circumstances kept making her.

Through all of it, Lexie kept trying to come back. She'd fall into a Dimera pattern — the manipulation, the moral compromise, the willingness to bend rules for people she loved — and then she'd fight her way out of it. She'd recommit to Abe, to medicine, to being the person she believed she was underneath all the noise. That tug-of-war was what made her one of the most interesting characters on the show.

She died in 2012 from a brain tumor. And in death, she became something simpler: a saint. Her ghost appeared to Abe in 2021 when he flatlined, sending him back to the living. She appeared again in 2024, helping Abe channel his love to save Paulina. The complicated woman who switched babies and faked paternity tests was smoothed into a guardian angel.

Now she's back in the flesh, and she's not smooth at all. She's prickly. She's territorial. She talks about Paulina with barely concealed contempt. EJ saw all of this today and told her the Dimera blood runs in her veins — unlike the pretenders, she's the real thing.

The question is whether EJ is right. The easy read is yes — look at her, she's already scheming. But Lexie has always been more complicated than the easy read. She's the woman who switched babies and then spent years trying to make it right. The woman who faked paternity tests and then recommitted to medicine. The woman who had an affair and then fought to save a marriage she'd nearly destroyed. Every time the Dimera side won a round, the Carver side came back swinging.

What makes this return so interesting is that we don't know yet which version we're getting. Maybe EJ is seeing what he wants to see. Maybe Lexie is angrier than she used to be, fourteen years in stasis giving her plenty of time to sharpen. Or maybe the prickliness is just what it looks like when a woman comes back from the dead and finds out her husband moved on. That's not the Dimera side — that's just human.

The show has time to answer this. The question is whether Salem will let her be both.

In today's episode, EJ told Lexie he enjoys her "Dimera side." Back in 2003, Lexie showed exactly that side when she hacked the hospital's computer to plant fake paternity results. Whose paternity was she trying to cover up?

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Friday's episode is built around one devastating milestone: the first anniversary of John Black's death. Marlena heads to the cemetery with flowers and sits with him — just the two of them, the way it always was at the end. Belle and Brady join her, but their visit takes an unexpected turn when they go through the chess set Stefano left Marlena & John. Belle notices a pawn is missing from the queen-side line of Stefano's chess set, and Brady reads it as a deliberate message tied to John's old "queen of the night" line. Whether this is a breadcrumb Stefano planted years ago or something more recent, the Black family isn't letting it go.

Meanwhile, Eli returns for his first on-screen moment with Lani since Lamon Archey's last DAYS run, with Julie part of the scene — framing it as a Horton family reunion, not just a couple reconnecting. And speaking of Julie, Foster makes his move, asking her to dinner in what looks like DAYS finally pulling her out of her post-Doug holding pattern.

Rounding out the hour, Holly opens up to Sarah about where she stands emotionally in the wake of Sophia's memorial and Amy's escalating push to prosecute.

Amy's revenge is about to get physical. Next week (June 1–5), with the manslaughter case against Holly stalling, Amy looks ready to take matters into her own hands. Spoilers describe the situation as intensifying beyond words — will Amy cross a line that can't be uncrossed?

Anna clears Theo's name. Gabi has been blaming Theo for leaking information to Philip, but it turns out Anna is the one who tipped him off. Once Gabi learns the truth, she'll owe Theo an apology — and given today's episode, where Abe is already worried about his son's struggles, the timing couldn't be more loaded.

Stephanie walks into an awkward picture. Back from Tripp and Wendy's wedding, Stephanie finds Alex, Joy, and baby Kelsey looking very much like a little family — and it leaves her questioning where she fits in Alex's life.

Xander and Kristen keep playing with fire. Multiple outlets read the affair as heading toward inevitable exposure, with Gwen the most likely person to catch them. The question at this point isn't whether it blows up — it's when and who gets hurt worst.

Lexie tries to reconnect with Abe — and it isn't simple. Today's episode showed how far apart they still are, and next week's scenes are framed as complicated rather than romantic. Fourteen years is a long time, even in Salem.

New Javi alert. Jacob Martinez will take over the role of Javi starting June 30, replacing Al Calderon, who is a real-life EMT and was always intended as a short-term recast. Today's episode — which introduces Javi's boyfriend Gus (Michael Ocampo) and plants the firehouse opening — appears to be laying track for the new Javi's stories.

Ryan Quan is coming back. Daytime Confidential reported Monday that General Hospital's Ryan Quan will return to DOOL as co-head writer alongside Jeanne Marie Ford, as Paula Cwikly retires. Michael Fairman TV confirmed the report. Quan is widely respected for his deep knowledge of DAYS history, and fans have been vocal about wanting him back since Ron Carlivati's departure. Given that the show shoots roughly ten months ahead, any Quan influence on the scripts won't land on screen until early 2027 — but hope travels fast.

Here's what fans are saying across the web.

Tuesday's scene — Jennifer apologizing to Cat, then to Chad — drew the biggest single-day Reddit reaction of the week. The community is deeply divided. A minority praised it as a return to form for a legacy character, but the dominant take is that the apology was immediately undercut when Jennifer told Chad and Cat they still can't be together. One highly upvoted comment called it a half-hearted apology made to ease Jennifer's mind, not her heart. SoapHub's Rachelle Lewis published a piece calling the forgiveness "conditional" and noting Jennifer is still trying to call the shots about Chad and Cat's lives. I think the writers know exactly what they're doing here — the apology keeps Jennifer sympathetic enough to stay on screen while the audience roots against her position.

A standalone Reddit post titled "I prefer Abe stay with Paulina over Lexie" hit 60 upvotes overnight, and the comments fell into two camps: fans citing Lexie's history of cheating, and fans praising Jackée Harry's screen presence. Multiple commenters said Paulina has shown more integrity through this crisis than Lexie ever did during their marriage. One recurring theory — that this Lexie might be a Rolf creation rather than the real woman — shows how badly some fans want to keep Abe and Paulina together without making either woman the villain.

The co-head writer news generated the most consensus-driven conversation of the week. Reddit is virtually unanimous that Paula Cwikly's tenure produced the pacing problems fans have been complaining about, and Quan's return is read as a course correction. The practical question everyone keeps asking: how far ahead are scripts written? Fans know the show shoots about ten months out, which means any Quan influence won't hit screens for a while — but the optimism is real.

Shi Ne Nielson won Soap Opera News Performer of the Week for her grief work as Amy — but on Reddit this week, the character has flipped from sympathetic to actively reviled. Fans are calling her out for ignoring everything Sophia did to Holly while pushing for prosecution. Holly isn't generating much sympathy either, though — one commenter noted she's making Sophia's death entirely about herself. The bigger fan theory brewing: several Redditors think Sophia may have staged her own death, and one popular extension imagines Amy found Sophia alive and is hiding her to plot revenge.

Not one fan on Reddit is rooting for this pairing, and Brady-Sarah isn't doing much better. SoapHub's Alina Adams walked through Xander's Marlena confession where he admitted Sarah is the only woman for him while sleeping with Kristen for the added benefit of her being Brady's ex. The most withering take on the whole quadrangle came from a former Xarah fan who wrote that Sarah is mean, has an inflated opinion of herself, and treats Xander like he's beneath her. When even the shippers abandon you, something's broken.

Two separate Reddit threads this week diagnosed the show's pacing problem the same way: there are no active villains stirring things up. Fans miss the days when a Stefano or a Sami-style schemer kept every storyline on edge. Some pushed back that they're tired of omnipotent supervillains like Clyde and Orpheus, and would settle for smaller-scale chaos instead. Pair this with the Ryan Quan optimism above — Reddit is reading the head-writer change as the best chance to fix exactly this.

Yesterday I asked whether Cat should go under hypnosis herself to help EJ recover his Italy memories. Seventy-five percent of you said no — Cat should protect herself and whatever the ISA is hiding. Twenty-five percent took the middle road, saying she should do it but control what EJ actually learns. Not a single vote for full transparency. You don't trust what's buried in Italy, and honestly, neither do I.

Please click below to participate in today's poll. The results will be shared in the next edition of The Salem Dispatch.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Hit reply and tell me what you think — I read every response.

Theo's. Lexie had an affair with Brandon Walker and planted fake results in the hospital's computer system to make sure the paternity tests showed Abe as the father. When Sami Brady discovered what Lexie had done, it nearly came to blows — literally. The truth came out on June 3, 2003 (Episode #9571), and it was one of the moments that nearly ended Abe and Lexie's marriage for good.

That's all for today, Salem. See you tomorrow.