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We’ll be the first to admit that soap opera time is elastic. Just take a look at the rapid aging, the holidays that drag on for a week or more and, well, Days of Our Lives’ leap year! We’re still trying to figure out what year it is in Salem. But Days of Our Lives just messed with the timeline in so obvious a way, we couldn’t help but take notice.
As Brady and Sarah dig into Destiny’s death and the tainted drugs likely linked to it, they learned that there was a wave of deaths back in 2024, all, apparently, tied to DiMera Pharmaceuticals’ Coriseal. And Steve and Brady even think EJ might have been directing the tainted drugs to be sold on the street since this all happened when he was CEO of DiMera. Except… he wasn’t.
We double checked — Gabi was sent off to prison in 2023 for Li’s murder. And she was sent off by the vengeful, vindictive DA, EJ. He held that position for most of 2024, and when he lost it around the time that Arnold Feniger showed up, he was a bit adrift. The point is: EJ was not CEO of DiMera two years ago. And elastic time or not, this rewrite is recent enough that it’s not just us, but quite a few fans who have noted the discrepancy.
And that has us worried that the show rewrote history to finish killing off any decency left in EJ. If he is tied to this, there’s no way he’s going to come out looking like anything but a monster.
If he was intentionally putting the deadly drugs out into the world, he could have been doing so for a very real, very twisted purpose: Creating Dr. Rolf’s miracle drug. Lexie’s been on ice since she died nearly 15 years ago. Dr. Rolf may have only just come up with the proper treatment thanks to the Versavix, but that doesn’t mean he and EJ weren’t working on reviving Lexie.
One reason for the Coriseal street drugs could have been EJ needing test subjects to try out different treatments. He and Dr. Rolf could kill subjects in a controlled way and nab their bodies to put on ice. Subjects, they figured, who might not be all that missed, like addicts willing to buy drugs off the street.
Maybe EJ even rationalized it by figuring that, once the treatment was perfected, they could bring them all back. No harm, no foul. We know that they’ve got other potential recipients waiting — EJ said as much to Gwen. And we’ve been figuring it’s more people we know like, perhaps, Peter. But what if they’ve got a stack of frozen bodies on hand who they killed? If that’s the case, EJ just went past the point of no return.
Even if people weren’t killed intentionally, Johnny finding that the Coriseal drug records from 2024 being erased is a pretty clear indication that EJ knew what was going on. And if he had any hand in selling dangerous drugs on the street — even if it was just to make some extra cash, perhaps to funnel into the resurrection experiments — he’s still entered into a whole new level of darkness.
Ever since he put on Stefano’s Phoenix ring, EJ’s been getting darker. But not hopelessly so. Yes, his experiments on Lexie were unethical, but not illegal. He brought his beloved sister back to life. Yes, he manipulated Theo out of DiMera (temporarily), but it was what Abe wanted.
Yes, he tried killing Vivian after learning she was behind the DiMera kidnappings, but, well, she’s Vivian. Yes, he’s probably about to do something horrible to Kristen, but she flat-out tried to murder his son. And yes, he wants to make absurd amounts of money selling the drug on the black market to the ridiculously wealthy, but — OK, that one’s not great.
But the point is, as dark and dangerous as EJ’s been getting, there’s still been give and take on his misdeeds. If he’s responsible for countless lives lost in the pursuit of his own aims, there’s no gray area. EJ’s a villain. He’s become his father. And that means history was just rewritten to kill the last of EJ’s humanity and the character who’s walked the razor-thin line between good and evil for decades. God help Salem if that’s true.
