Days of Our Lives: Count Dimera Gets Staked!

So, this week Days of Our Lives gave us the lead-up to Thaao Penglis leaving the show by having his character, Count Tony Dimera staked on the docks. I think the phrase that would best sum my reaction to this storyline would be “WTF?!” I mean, in theory, this should be an amazing story – the eldest Dimera son killed in fight with the Kiriakis heir leading to an eruption between the show’s two powerful, villainous families, and yet it isn’t. This should be fun, thrilling, and captivating, but instead, in the hands of the show’s current writing team this story comes across as a lame and pathetic waste of everyone’s time.

First of all, I think that if you’re gonna kill off Tony maybe you should have been building up to it over the period of a few months, not a couple of weeks. The writers should be playing all the beats of the story. They should have shown Tony slipping into bitterness about EJ being treated as the golden boy, while Stefano was treating him like mud. Then, there should have been a slow build up to Tony finding out the truth about Nicole and then him holding it over her head for at least a month – or better yet two. This way Tony’s behaviour in this whole stupid scenario would make sense and we would have seen Nicole unraveling some more before we see her trying to decide whether to bother calling 9-1-1. Instead, we get hardly any Tony for months. Instead, on the flip of a dime, we get a Tony who goes from wanting nothing to do with Stefano and the business, to a Tony that’s jealous of EJ and feels he’s being taken for granted. Instead, we get Tony acting more like Andre. Thus, leaving all of us viewers scratching our heads and collectively asking, “WTF?” And apparently, viewers aren’t the only ones wondering “WTF?” because in some of the scenes this week – like Stefano and EJ discussing what the heck Tony’s problem is – we can see the actors struggling with the material. When I see actors the caliber of James Scott and Joe Mascolo struggling with crappy dialogue and nonsensical motivation and storytelling, you know it’s not just you, it’s just that bad!

Second of all, the dialogue in the arguments building up to Friday’s showdown between Philip and Tony are absolutely cringe worthy. You have Philip running around town yelling, “Tony!!!” Then, you have Philip acting like an 8 year old in the school yard, stomping his feet saying, “I want my Alternative Fuel Project, now!” I’m surprised he isn’t threatening to tell his mommy for crying out loud. Then, you have what should be an interesting conversation between the two of them on the docks, where Tony tries to tell him he’ll never please Victor, but the writers ruin it with things like Tony saying, “Well, what are you gonna do, huh, challenge me with your lightsaber, young Padawan?” I mean, seriously? I love a sci-fi/pop culture reference as much as the next person, heck probably even more, but I’m supposed to believe Tony Dimera is quoting Star Wars? And not just any Star Wars, but the crappy prequels that all came out when he was stranded on an island for 20 years!!!! So according to these awesome writers, in the year and half that Tony’s been back, he made sure he caught up on all the movies he missed? I guess that explains where he was all those months he was offscreen! Sigh.

Thirdly, let’s get to the showdown, which consisted of Philip shoving Tony around and continuing his wonderful dialogue of yelling things like, “Are you gonna give me my project back? Huh? Huh? Answer me, damn it.” and then shoving Tony who gives him a ‘WTF” face as we see this wooden spike sticking up in the background the whole time. Subtle, really subtle. Then, after all this lameness is done and Tony pretty much laughs Philip’s ridiculousness off, he starts to walk away and falls when the railing on the stairs becomes loose and falls off, taking Tony with it and naturally he falls on the stake. Now, science wasn’t my best subject, but what did he do, back flip into the air and land on his back? Maybe, he did a summersault in the air? Should we judge his dismount too, while we’re at it? Talk about contrived crap! This stuff isn’t even worthy of a “B” movie.

After watching this week, I am appalled that someone out there thought what they were writing was clever. Thaao deserves more, the show deserves more and the fans deserve more. How am I supposed to look forward to the fall out from this, when the writers couldn’t even be bothered to give me a good exit story for Tony. Sometimes I think Steve and Kayla got off easy – not being written an exit storyline at all seems to be best for everyone with these writers.

End of Rant.