MBTI: Days of Our Lives rogues gallery

 

I.  The Days rogues gallery

 

A distinct genre unto themselves, soaps borrow from other genres: the spy genre, the action-adventure, the science fiction, and so on. In the main, soaps aim to provide conflict and excitement, and that does mean on occasion fisticuffs, gun battles, car chases, and explosions, and it also means a stark contrast between hero and villain, good and evil. This moral absolutism, as I call it, evokes the comic book and one genre of comic books, the superhero; the affinity between soaps and comic books is one of the main reasons why I like soaps, silly and ridiculous as they may be.

 

But I must separate the two. The chief difference between the superhero comic book and the daytime TV soap is that soaps are written for women of all ages, and comic books (at least up until the 2000s) for children, particularly boys. This is why most men who are normally fans of American popular culture shrink from embracing the daytime soap. I am here to tell them that soaps do not differ overly much from preferred genres such as the superhero comic book; soaps are meant for females but can be enjoyed by males.

 

Like any DC or Marvel series, Days has a rogues gallery. Like most soaps, it makes a clean divide between heroes and villains, and in doing this, it is as cartoonish, viewing the worlds in terms of black and white, as a DC or Marvel comic book.

 

On an intuitive level, we all understood the gulf between good and evil characters, but explaining it takes work. When I am settling down to write on this subject, I am confronted by a question which is this: in soapland, what makes a hero, and makes a villain?

 

II.  Defining villainy and evil

 

In Days, a rough working definition of a villain is: a Days villain breaks the law consistently and he does so for selfish purposes, whereas while a Days hero does break the law now and then, but he does so always in the interests of a justice higher than the law. Most of the Days lawbreakers belong in the former group, and Salem is filled with career criminals, many of them thieves, blackmailers, drug dealers, pimps, rapists, murderers, and all of them qualifying as villains.

 

On occasion, a morally grey or neutral character will engage in criminal conduct, and in Days this is nearly always because the character has come under the influence of a more dominant personality who is a villain. Gray characters include Lucas Horton (influenced by Kate Roberts); Mimi Lockhart (influenced by Jan Spears); Lexi Carver (influenced by Stefano DiMera); and Nick Fallon (influenced by Willow Stark). They may be either swayed, coerced, bullied, blackmailed, into going along with the villain's plan. They usually think that by co-operating they are taking the easy way out, but they soon regret their decision, and they usually end up in court and then jail.

 

In Days, the worst crime a villain can commit is murder or rape, and either of these crimes distinguish the evil villain from the merely bad; in Days, a murderer or rapist is always a monster. This is not to say that a good character never kills. Heroes do take lives on Days, but extenuating circumstances always exist. For example, a heroine may commit manslaughter (see Isabella Toscano) or justifiable homicide (see Adrienne Johnson), and the good people of Salem forgive them for it, recognising that the character's actions were out of character. And sometimes heroes, especially action heroes, are given a licence to kill. In one episode in the late eighties, Shane Donovan and Steve Johnson gun down, quite casually, an armed hostage taker at Salem University hospital; in other episode from the same era, Roman Brady orders a police sniper to kill a gang member who is holding Steve at gunpoint. In both instances, a villain was killed, and the audience's sense of justice is not offended, and indeed, in the audience's view, the villain got what he deserved. This is especially true in the former case: a two-bit hood had been stalking heroine Eve Donovan (Shane's daughter) for six months and trying to extract the location of buried treasure from her; at the time of his death, the audience had grown heartily sick of the man and was glad to see him go.

 

An act of evil makes a character a monster, and the monster who the audience finds particularly repulsive is the one who takes life with his own two hands; Victor Kiriakis and Stefano DiMera, both master villains, rarely if ever get their hands dirty and neither man usually carry out an act of murder themselves - they let their minions do the killing for them. (One exception I can think of is when Stefano, in a fit of anger, kills Curtis Reed, a thug who had held Stefano hostage and humiliated him, taking advantage of an illness that had made Stefano confined to a wheelchair).

 

The villain who kills with his own hands is seen by the residents of Salem as particularly dangerous, and this leads to another standard Days theme: the villain as menace terrorising the good folk of Salem. The Menace is regarded with fear and contempt, and in the eyes of others possesses a power that is almost supernatural, and the heroes spend a great deal of time trying to divine his intentions, anticipating his next move. At the beginning of the 1986 season, three villains - Victor Kiriakis, his employee Steve 'Patch' Johnson (working most of the time independently of Victor), and the Salem Hospital rapist serve as the Menace. By the middle of the year, the lineup of Menaces has changed slightly: Kiriakis and his employee Orpheus (who like Steve Johnson is a wayward henchman of Kiriakis’) are terrorising Salem, and Steve, now a more neutral character, is their victim.

 

Every season after the eighties relies heavily on the plot device of the Menace; to take one season at random - the 2003 season (a mostly forgettable one) - two master villains Tony DiMera and Larry Welch, and one minor villain, drug dealer and murderer Vin Ramsell, do duty as the Menace in the first half of year, and the Salem Slasher in the second.

 

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the most frequently used Menace is of course Stefano DiMera, and because the DiMeras are such powerful pieces on the chessboard, they must be used judiciously. A writer deploying a DiMera follow certain rules, and the first of these is: only one DiMera master villain at a time. In the 2006 and 2007 seasons, EJ Wells (who is revealed to be EJ DiMera, Stefano's son) is the Menace causing havoc. By mid-2007, we learn that EJ was only holding the fort and was awaiting Stefano's return, and after Stefano does return, Stefano takes up the mantle of Menace once again; EJ is downgraded to flunky and then Stefano's conscience. For the rest of the decade, EJ fulfils the same function as Tony DiMera did in the 1980s: he is the good DiMera, forever remonstrating with his father Stefano and trying to persuade Stefano to refrain from carrying out evil acts.

 

III. Can a villain become a hero?

 

Villains can turn into heroes and romantic leads; this happens all the time in soaps. But converting a villain into a hero proceeds according to a set of rules. The first rule is that change must happen naturally and organically, that it cannot be forced, and the same applies to forgiveness and acceptance. Further, the reformed villain must do good deeds and do them selflessly, without thought of reward, i.e., without one eye on the approbation of the other characters; it helps if the good deeds receive no recognition from the other characters and that it is only we in the audience who see them. And lastly, the villain must undergo some form of punishment.

 

Accompanying the change from villain to hero is a change in the villain's view of himself. One defining characteristic of a villain is a lack of self-awareness. A wealthy and powerful man, and a man of culture and refinement, Stefano ought to see himself as belonging to the upper class, the elite, the aristocracy of Salem, but throughout his time in Salem he sees himself, as most criminals in real life do, as a poor picked-upon fellow who has been wronged. Stefano claims that he has been targeted by what he calls the 'Brady justice system' and that he has been unfairly persecuted by those in authority in Salem. This is rich, given that all the misery he has visited on Salem and the Brady family. If he is to reform, then, the villain must right his warped world view; the first step on the road to redeeming the villain is the villain's reassessing himself; he must begin to hold a low opinion of himself as opposed to a high.

 

To see how soap writers manage to bring a bad, even evil, character over to the side of good, we can think of two classic cases: the brothers Johnson - Steve 'Patch' Johnson and Jack Deveraux. The writers faced a great challenge in the task of redeeming Jack Deveraux; for whereas Steve is bad, Jack is evil. A snide, well-heeled yuppie, the mincing, effeminate Jack appears to be somewhat unusual and disturbing; perhaps this effect is enhanced by his habit of wearing mascara (never trust a man who wearing mascara). He commits rape, which is worse than murder on soaps, and after it, the industry journal Soap Opera Digest put him on the cover with the caption 'The Most Hated Man on TV!'. He is shunned by Salem, but nevertheless he becomes engaged to a member of the Horton family, heroine Melissa Horton, who is blind to his faults. Her family reluctantly attends the wedding. It is here that she comes to her senses, finally recognising Jack for what he is, and jilts him at the altar; her father Mickey chortles in delight. After this social humiliation, he continues to be a villain, but his acts of villainy are to be characterised more as acts of mischief more than anything else (Jack is an ENTJ like Loki, the god of mischief). And then, to our surprise, he does something an evil character rarely does: he develops self-awareness. He begins to view himself with contempt. Around this time, he meets the ingenue Jennifer Horton (Melissa's cousin) who takes a job as a reporter at the newspaper Jack owns. The pair's relationship is a strange one, close but adversarial. Jennifer hectors and berates him, and by this method, encourages him to better himself. Slowly, he is gradually transformed into a comic buffoon, and then a romantic lead, and then a hero. And then, much like Steve, he is punished. Lawrence Alamain, an INTJ, visits the same misery on Jack and Jennifer that Jack, an ENTJ, visited on Steve and Kayla. Thus, we are given another example of symmetry in soaps. Clearly, the writers wanted to punish Jack and not let him get off easily. Overall, their treatment of Jack and his redemption worked, and worked spectacularly; Jack went from being the most hated man on TV to being one of the most loved. He moved from being a villain into a hero, one half of a supercouple, and a fan favourite, and all this was done easily and seamlessly. For this we have to than the writers and the actor portraying Jack, Matthew Ashford.

 

The rule then is do not tell us that an evil character now regrets being evil, show it; do not tell us that he is now a character who does good deeds, show it. 

 

The below selection ranges from 1985 to 2008, a twenty-five-year period that encapsulates the best of Days. To help ground the reader in the history of Days, I have presented the villains in order of their appearance.

 

IV.   The Eighties

André DiMera - INTJ (first appears 1983)

 

A loyal 'soldier' or minion of the master villain Stefano, the character of André functions in two modes. When Stefano is around, André serves as a 'soldier' and does Stefano's bidding. He kills for Stefano but sometimes ends up going out of control, and he either kills too many people or kills the wrong sort of people (one of his victims is Stefano's daughter Renee DuMonde). After one of André's excesses, Stefano typically tries to reel André in. He will contemplate punishing André and then decide against it: André has a monopoly on Stefano's affections, and Stefano regards him as his finest and most loyal soldier.

 

When Stefano is not around, and Stefano is missing from the canvas for substantial amounts of time, André will substitute for him. He plays the master villain, taking up the mantle of Days' Palpatine (another INTJ villain) throughout the years 2002 to 2005, a period in which Stefano was absent.

 

What is confusing is that André is the evil twin of Stefano's son Tony, the good Dimera who is forever hectoring Stefano and demanding that Stefano renounce his evil ways. André, who is the exact duplicate of Tony, steals the identify of Tony in 1983. As the years roll by, André seems to be convinced that he is Tony, but André's true personality breaks through, and we see the subtle transforming of connoisseur and bon vivant and playboy Tony into the dark and brooding schemer André. Longtime fans of Days know the subtle visual tics that distinguish Tony from André, and we these in what is one of the great Days storylines, Aremid. In Aremid, André / Tony, who is terminally ill, commits suicide and frames John Black for murder. It is the perfect scheme, and in this instance, André lives up to the INTJ's reputation as a master planner.

 

Some of the most representative André scenes can be found in the 1984 season. After his latest scheme - which involves impersonating Tony and living Tony's life - goes awry and his imposture is revealed, he flees to London and becomes a Shakespearean actor in a run-down theatre. Wearing a series of costumes and masks backstage, he deteriorates mentally; he descends into the brooding, paranoia, and obsessiveness that the INTJ villain is famous for. In these scenes, he reminds me, oddly enough, of Bruce Wayne, another INTJ.

 

Victor Kiriakis - ENTJ (first appears 1985)

 

A ruthless Greek shipping magnate modelled after Aristotle Onassis, the character of Victor first appears in 1985 months after the exit of Stefano from the series; the writers felt Stefano's absence keenly and evidently thought that another ENTJ mastermind was needed. Although not as flamboyant as Stefano, the smartly dressed and high-living Victor shares his sense of style, and like Stefano, he embarks on a series of far-fetched escapades that are marked by international mystery and intrigue. The DaysWiki entry summarises the first phase of Victor's career thus: 'Victor's organization engaged in many schemes and plots all over the world during the late 80s and early 90s, including selling military secrets to the Soviets, hiding stolen Treasury bonds in Stockholm, Sweden, and stealing a computer disk from the U.S. government that turned out to be made of an indestructible material with various potential military applications'.

 

Women, children, and family play an outsized role in Victor's life. In 1986, it is revealed (and this was something suspected by us all along) that Victor is the real father of Days' leading man Bo Brady; it is explained that in his youth, Victor had an affair with Caroline Brady, the wife of Shawn Brady, who is an Irish American fisherman and the patriarch of the Brady family. Victor is also, for a time, considered to be the father of Andrew Donovan, the son of Caroline's daughter Kimberly, who was married to secret agent Shane Donovan; Kimberly consented to sex with Victor to distract him from Shane's burglary of Victor's mansion. As the series proceeds, we encounter more of Victor's progeny. In the late eighties, Victor is revealed to be the father of Isabella Toscano; Victor had a youthful affair with Isabella's mother, who was married to an ENTJ billionaire, the madman Ernesto Toscano. (We see a pattern here: Victor tends to cuckold other men). In the early nineties, Victor marries Kate Roberts and fathers a son, Philip. They get divorced, Kate tries to kill him, and he marries model and former pornographic actress Nicole Walker, and Nicole tries to kill him as well. It is in this period that Victor earns a reputation as a misogynist. He sours on women, and sadly reflects that the only woman he ever truly loved and respected was Caroline. But we cannot blame his wives for the breakdown of his marriages, because we quickly recognise that marriage to Victor is a miserable affair. Like the 'rich old man' in the Eagles song Lying Eyes (1975), Victor is 'a man with hands as cold as ice'.

 

Victor takes after Stefano in his frequent displays of coldness, vindictiveness, and cruelty. I attribute this trait to Stefano and Victor's sharing the same personality type; the inferior function of the ENTJ is Introverted Feeling Fi, which can manifest itself, as Jung observed, in great explosions, or rather in this case implosions, of vengefulness and malice. This is commensurate with the ENTJ villain's desire for control. Like any Extraverted Judging type, Victor habitually lectures people and instruct them in how to live their lives.

 

Something that I do enjoy in Victor, at least in his first twenty years on the show, is his courtesy. Even when he is expressing anger or disappointment or annoyance, this well-spoken man struggles against his inclinations to vent - we can see these bubble below the surface as his brow furrows - and he strives to express his feelings in the most polite and courteous way.

 

By the late eighties, Victor retires from the job of Menace and master-villain. He does remain a villain but refrains from terrorising the Salemites and embroiling himself in international intrigue. By the 2000s, he achieves a sort of self-awareness and comes to the realisation that life as a villain has made him lonely, isolated, and miserable. Such insight never comes to Stefano, who is the same boat as Victor; in the case of Stefano, there is no growth, no self-awareness.

 

The secondary function of the ENTJ, Introverted Intuition Ni, can mean two things: firstly, a desire for continuity, for what lasts over the course of time, and secondly a desire for progress. We see Ni manifesting itself in two typically Victor character traits.

 

For most of Victor's time on the screen, Victor is obsessed by the need to find an heir to his empire. In his search, his attention is drawn to sons or substitutes for a son, and Victor attempts to mold them into copies of himself. In this pursuit, the young men he latches onto are his son Bo, his stepson Lucas, his son Philip, his grandson Brady, and his nephew Xander.

 

The other typically ENTJ Ni quality is this. Victor, in the first year of his arrival in Salem, champions progress. His company buys up all the businesses on the Salem riverfront, except for that of his old friend Shawn's; Shawn holds out. In a stormy meeting down at the docks, Victor implores Shawn to give in. Victor doesn't understand why it is that Shawn is resisting progress, growth, jobs, and all the good things that can come to Salem under Victor's wise leadership. Being a stubborn old Irish American mule, Shawn argues with Victor, digs in, and puts up a front; perhaps in his subconscious he suspects that Victor is the true father of Bo. The episode illustrates what Socionics calls the Conflict relation between two types: Victor is an ENTJ, and the Conflicting is Shawn's - Shawn is an ISFJ.

 

Orpheus - ISTP (first appears 1986)

 

Victor learns that a fortune in US government bonds is buried somewhere in 'Old Town', a district of Stockholm. The location of the bonds will be revealed if three tattoo designs are superimposed on a map of the Old Town district of Stockholm; the tattoos are of daggers whose blades point to the location of the bonds. The wearers of the tattoos are hero Bo Brady, his former friend Steve Johnson, and Britta Englund, a Soviet spy who has had affairs with both men. Why the three wear these tattoos is never fully explained, and neither is the part that Soviet spy agencies and the ISA (International Security Alliance), a shadowy secret service that possesses vast power, plays in the affair.

 

We learn that Salem superhero Roman Brady is involved. In 1979, Roman and an ISA agent who later becomes known as Orpheus are engaged in a gun battle with Russian spies in Stockholm's Old Town; Orpheus' wife is killed in the crossfire, making Orpheus a widower with two children. Driven mad by grief, he convinces himself that Roman is to blame and he vows vengeance. Seven years later, he comes into the employ of Victor, who is seeking out the bonds. The body count racks up as Britta and anyone else who knows of what happened that night seven years ago in Old Town are systematically murdered. Desperate to find the bonds, the ISA begs Roman to return to Stockholm and uncover the bonds before Kiriakis gets his hands on them, but Roman refuses; in a Machiavellian move, the ISA then kidnaps Roman's wife Marlena to Stockholm and holds her hostage there as an inducement; Roman is tricked into thinking that Orpheus and Victor are responsible for the kidnapping. Once Roman arrives in Stockholm to find Marlena and rescue her, Orpheus begins his long-drawn-out scheme of revenge.

 

Orpheus is not interested in Victor's schemes in the slightest, and after he finds the bonds, he steals them for himself and lies to Victor about their whereabouts. His motivation is that he wants the cat and mouse game with Roman to continue. Eventually Roman tracks Orpheus down to his tropical island lair, a fight ensues, and Orpheus dies in a gun battle (or so we think) and Marlena dies in plane crash (or so we think).

 

Orpheus returns to the show thirty years later, and it is never explained as to how he survived being shot: this has become something of a recurring theme with Days - a character will die and then be brought back to life without explanation. Other continuity problems cropped in the wake of Orpheus' return. Days fans know that Roman was played by actor Wayne Northrop, whose portrayal of the character ended when Roman died in 1984; he returned in the following year, this time being played by Drake Hogestyn, and plastic surgery was given as the reason for the difference in appearances between Hogestyn and Northrop. But, in 1991, the Northrop Roman returned, and the Hogestyn Roman was revealed to be an imposter called John Black. And then in 2016, Orpheus returns, and all his animus towards Roman Brady - so important to the Orpheus's motivation - is redirected towards John Black; he pays little attention to the real Roman Brady.

 

To conclude, two traits make Orpheus a typical ISTP. The first of these is his svelte appearance, in the 1980s at least, when he wears hauteur-couture eighties gear (including a marvellous Michael Jackson style jacket with shoulder pads and zip up pockets (in which he hides the Stockholm bonds)). The consensus among female viewers is that the character is extremely attractive, and it is this quality that explains why it is that Calliope Jones, who is working at a waitress, leers at him and behaves in a licentious and flirtatious manner after he approaches her to ask for a table at her restaurant. Amusingly enough, the normally unflappable Orpheus is deeply discomforted by Calliope, and this touches upon another distinctive ISTP trait: Extraverted Intuition (Ne) makes up the vulnerable function of the ISTP and it is main function of Calliope's type, the ENFP. Ne rattles the ISTP, as does the ENFP; the relation between the two types is one of Conflict.

 

Andrew 'Drew' Donovan III - ENTP (first appears 1988)

 

Like André, Drew is an evil twin and like André, Drew is fond of elaborate disguises that change his appearance completely. In this he is a typical ENTP villain: NT villains are often shape-shifters.

 

When we first meet him, Drew, like André, impersonates his twin brother. Drew attempts to take over his brother Shane's life in all aspects, which includes of course an attempt to enjoy intimate relations with his brother's wife Kimberley Brady. Like André, Drew resents and envies his good twin. His career follows the trajectory of André's: at some point Drew falls into evil ways, becomes an employee of Stefano DiMera, and carries out several murders and kidnappings on Stefano's orders. But whereas André is an introvert, Drew is an extravert. He performs his deeds with a theatrical flair. In one story, he impersonates a stage magician, dons makeup and a costume, and has a captive Steve lowered headfirst into a water tank on a stage; the theatre audience thinks Steve's immersion and drowning is part of the act. The ENTP's dominant function Ne gives Drew great powers of invention.

 

The secondary function of the ENTP, Introverted Thinking (Ti), comes into play when Drew returns to the show in 2017. He had left in 1989 after giving up being a villain; in his last appearance, he had let his brother and Kimberley escape Stefano's secret island (where Shane and Kimberley have been held captive) and he achieves a reconciliation of sorts with Shane; as often happens when a villain changes his ways, Drew is punished - he is shot, and for a while we think that he is dead. He survives, however, and decides to leave Salem. In 2017, he turns up in Salem - in a wooden crate. Usually as dapper as his brother, he now looks dishevelled - and maniacal. We learn he is now a brilliant computer programmer and hacker, a variant on the ENTP as mad scientist stock type. Ti + Ne gives a character a knack for creativity and scientific discovery. By the time of his next appearance (in the 2021 mini-series Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem), he has been transformed into fully-fledged mad scientist:

 

He poses as his twin brother, Shane, conspires with Dimitri von Leuschner to steal Alamainian gemstones which Drew uses to connect with satellite lasers in space. He intended to use them to destroy various locations worldwide, including Salem. However, he was found out and stopped by John, Marlena, Shane, and Billie Reed before being sent to prison.

 

Saul Taylor - ESFJ (first appearance 1989)

 

Certain stories and seasons of a soap build up a reputation among fans. The decade of the eighties is held to be one of the best, if not the best, for Days, but the consensus is that the quality tailed off after the two excellent seasons of 1986 and 1987; the seasons of 1988 and 1989 are not highly regarded. In response to this, all I can say is ignore the critics: widely disparaged storylines such as the Marlena demonic possession story of 1995, the Salem Stalker / Melaswen arc of the early 2000s, and the Santo and Colleen romance of the late 2000s, are great fun. In the seasons of those years, the producers, writers, directors, and actors did their jobs with the usual professionalism and skill that we have come to expect. And that is true of the all the stories of the late eighties period.

 

Having said this, I found the certain of the storylines of the 1989 season more bizarre and confusing than usual; one of these is the Saul Taylor storyline, which made little to no sense.

 

The overweight and middle-aged evangelist Saul Taylor comes to Salem and holds a revival meeting near the docks. After an accident, his sheltered and virginal daughter Faith is taken to hospital; there she meets Dr Marcus Hunter. Saul takes a dislike to Marcus and warns his daughter to stay away from him. Whether this antipathy stems from a father's natural protectiveness or from a racial animosity (Marcus is African American) is not known; the answer, we begin to suspect, is both.

 

At this point in the season, Marcus is undergoing a trauma; he keeps having flashbacks to his childhood, when his two parents (both civil rights activists) died in an explosion in a church; gradually we learn that Saul Taylor and his associate Alfred Jericho planted a bomb. DaysWiki describes it thus:

 

Years ago, Saul was responsible for numerous black church burnings in the south with a man named Jericho. One of those churches was blown up, and though Saul thought it was empty it really was full which Jericho knew. Among those inside the church were the parents of Marcus Hunter, whose father was a civil rights activist who was Jericho's target. Jericho tried to kill the young Marcus Hunter, who fled from the church.

 

Here is more background on Alfred Jericho:

 

Jericho was a crooked ISA agent who was involved with the Reverend Saul Taylor. The two of them had burned many black churches in the south and fenced stolen goods through Saul's traveling revival camp.

 

It is here that the story goes off the rails. Why would an ISA agent blow up churches and fence stolen goods? The incongruity is compounded after Jericho establishes himself in Salem; we see that he is a criminal mastermind, a master villain, and an ENTJ villain in the tradition of Stefano DiMera, Victor Kiriakis, and Ernesto Toscano. He is important enough to attract the attention of the ISA, which sends one of its best men (Shane Donovan) after him. He lives in a Stefano-like secret base inside a mountain; the walls of it are lined with giant computers. But even though he is a supervillain, he stills retains his alliance with the preacher Saul. They are engaged in some secret scheme that I never understood the particulars of, but it did involve more than fencing stolen goods.

 

After Jericho takes Shane prisoner, Steve is sent by the ISA to infiltrate Jericho's operation and become a member of Saul's church. Given plastic surgery and a glass eye to make him 'look pretty again', he poses as a drunk homeless man and makes his way into one of Saul's revival meetings. There he pretends to have a religious conversion; he gives testimony and confesses his sins to the assembly: 'I drank! I lay with whores!'. (This is probably Steve's funniest scene). Saul trusts and approves of Steve, who is sent to a religious camp on the outskirts of Salem; there in a secret room Shane has been tortured and imprisoned.

 

As could be expected, the story ends with a bang. Saul is shot and wounded, Jericho's mountain base blows up, and Jericho and Shane fight on top of a cliff. Both men fall to their apparent deaths. Steve's glass eye is put out and his eye socket crushed, and he goes back to wearing a patch. Saul gives a deathbed confession to his daughter. And so, the strange and confusing Saul Taylor and Alfred Jericho arc ends. In retrospect, it seems that the writers and writers wanted a certain aesthetic effect: they wanted to portray the Deep South in the 1960s, the Civil Rights struggle, and so on, and accompanying the footage of life in the South they had made, they wanted gospel songs. The need for effect took priority over writing a story that made sense.

 

When Saul first appears, I typed him as an Extravert and a Feeler - most likely an Extraverted Feeling (Fe) dominant. Seeing as he was a preacher, this raised the possibility that he was an ENFJ villain like Glorious Godfrey in Jack Kirby's Fourth World. But down to earth and small-minded Saul gets his information through his senses, not his intuition; he is not a mystic or a seer. And his family matters most of all to him - another trait of the ESFJ (Extraverted Feeling / Introverted Sensing) type.

 

IV.  The Nineties

 

Vivian Alamain - ESFP (first appears 1992)

The fan favourite Vivian arrives in Salem in 1992, showing up at the mansion of her villainous nephew Lawrence 'Larry' Alamain. The pair come from a Ruritania country, and both are fabulously wealthy and of royal heritage. The two should be considered as a pair: they are what Socionics calls Duals.

 

Because of this relationship, we need to look at Lawrence in some detail. Lawrence is well-dressed, well-mannered, well-groomed; he is a man who speaks with an American accent that is aristocratic as can be, and a man who is cultured and genteel; he is also snide, prissy, effeminate, self-centred, and a villainous schemer. He is, in short, a typical INTJ villain, and this time a typical INTJ villain as prince or playboy. Lawrence is a Bruce Wayne but a Bruce Wayne who has turned to the dark side; I am cynical enough to say that if Bruce Wayne did exist in real life, he would probably be Lawrence Alamain.

 

Lawrence is not irredeemable: as his time on the show progresses, he is drawn in shades of grey. In the 1992 season, when his ex-wife Carly Manning becomes ill and she and her stepson Shawn Douglas Brady come into his care, he treats the boy Shawn with great kindness; Lawrence is a gentle, albeit preoccupied, father figure. In these sequences we see one of the typical tricks that writers use to humanise a villain: they show him going out of his way to be nice to small children.

 

Vivian plays the part of Harley Quinn (another ESFP) to Lawrence's Bruce Wayne. A forceful woman and a woman who calls attention to herself wherever she goes, she is a bon vivant who loves life, and she lives up to the ESFP's nickname - the Performer. Unlike her nephew Lawrence, she is improvident and has no business sense. Early on, she confesses that she squandered her fortune by giving most of it away to a gigolo in Europe. Nonetheless, she keeps up appearances by living off credit and by doing so she maintains a luxurious lifestyle; and part of that lifestyle is keeping her dour Eastern European butler, Ivan Marais, in tow; the loyal and laconic manservant is inseparable from her and accompanies her throughout all her subsequent appearances.

 

To ameliorate her financial woes, Vivian sets her sights on Victor Kiriakis and becomes a rival to Kate Roberts (see below) for his affections. Vivian goes on to commit terrible crimes to achieve her objectives, but excuses are made for her - she was under the influence of drugs at the time. Improbably enough, she goes on to have more than one child (using stolen embryos): the middle-aged Vivian is as fertile as an ewe.

 

To sum up, she is your typical larger than life soap villainess, and like most extraverted villain types (see Stefano DiMera) she possesses a great charm and warmth; we like her, and we like seeing her on our screens, even though we feel we shouldn't. She becomes a fan favourite, which is why the writers kept bringing the character back.

 

Kate Roberts - ESTJ (first appears 1996)

 

The character of Kate, as played by Lauren Koslow (who previously had been an actress on a rival soap, Bold and the Beautiful), has seen a long run; she has appeared over the course of nearly three decades.

 

Interestingly, Kate Roberts as villain was created out of two characters. The first of these is a nurse called Kate Roberts who debuted on Days in the late seventies; the second, a nurse who debuted in the mid-eighties. The latter, a character called Kate Honeycutt, worked for Stefano DiMera and then Victor Kiriakis; Victor employed her to minister to a captive John Black (who in the first few months of his time on the show was a bed-ridden amnesiac swathed in bandages and who went by the name of The Pawn). In the early nineties, the writers of Days dusted off the 1970s good-girl Kate and made her into a love interest for Victor. She made herself useful to the show by expanding the cast; after her debut her children Lucas, Austin, and Billie were introduced (a soap can always benefit by introducing young blood). After the departure of Deborah Adair who had played her, Kate was recast; she was henceforth played by Koslow. And as often happens with a recast, the character's personality type changed. Elements of Nurse Honeycutt were introduced, and Kate became scheming, manipulative, ruthless, and evil.

 

Kate Roberts' medical background was excised, and Kate was made a businesswoman who pulled herself up by the bootstraps, a social climber who went from being a struggling single mother (and prostitute) to head of a corporation. A stylishly dressed woman who has the best fashion sense of all the women characters on the show, her life revolves around the men she manages to attract, and her children. Like many a soap parent, she is constantly interfering in her children's lives, especially their romantic lives, and in this capacity, she makes an enemy of Sami Brady, who is romantically entangled with two of her sons and who is the mother of her grandchild Will. A villain in her own right, Sami drugs Austin so she can have sex with him and claims to have been pregnant so she can trap him into marriage; she is pregnant, but by Austin's brother Lucas. Their son, Will, makes Sami a permanent fixture in Lucas' and Kate's lives, and such is her irritation, Kate cannot stoop low enough to get rid of Sami. In 1998, Kate and Lucas - whose relationship with Sami has soured by this point - frame Sami for murder, and Sami gets sent to death row.

 

Putting it mildly, Sami and Kate do mean things to one another. One of the most amusing of Kate's schemes has Lucas impersonating a blonde, long-haired surfer who looks Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar; Lucas sneaks into a restaurant in Italy and drugs Sami's meal; Sami hallucinates, and she nearly becomes mad after Lucas visits her in her bedroom and torments her with a life-sized Will mannequin that talks in Will's voice. 'Don't go mommy, don't go; why are you hurting me?'. But after she after she wanders to the seashore and nearly falls off a cliff, Lucas becomes remorseful. He is not evil like his mother and not a villain; he is merely a neutral character and a weak-minded one, so he is easily influenced.

 

Shortly after this story, Kate, who is married to Victor again, tries to kill Victor - twice - and he retaliates by throwing her out on the street. Homeless and sleeping in her car, she lands a job as a waitress at a café. There Sami finds her serving meals, and Sami of course gloats over Kate's predicament and rubs it in her face. The argument between the two continues into the restroom, and there Kate, who has made ill by her ordeal, collapses, and starts bleeding between her legs. Revealing herself once more to be a total sociopath, Sami snickers, and she gingerly steps over the growing pool of blood on the bathroom floor. This is strong stuff, and I don't think anything quite like it had been seen on a daytime soap before.

 

As could be expected, Kate hauls herself up by the bootstraps again after this low, and she achieves escape velocity from poverty. This is in keeping with her personality type, which is the ESTJ. That type belongs to a group of four that Socionics calls the 'Delta Quadra'. One of the distinguishing marks of a type that belongs to that Quadra is a desire for self-betterment, self-actualisation, moral uplift, the bringing-forth of one's inmost possibilities to completion. Whenever her children are caught up in a romantic entanglement that she feels is unworthy of them, she exhorts them, and the theme that lurks underneath all her lecturing is, 'You can do better'. In a twisted way, Kate embodies the qualities of the Delta Quadra. A character can preach moral uplift and at the same time be evil.

 

Like any ESTJ, Kate can be summed up by three functions, and these are Extraverted Thinking (Te), Introverted Sensing (Si), and Extraverted Sensing (Se). The dominant function of the ESTJ, Te, is logic, business logic; it guides all of Kate's most important decisions; the type’s secondary function, Si, drives her to create a safe, comfortable, familiar, reassuring domestic environment for herself and her family. Extraverted Sensing, which is what Socionics calls the ESTJ's Demonstrative Function, means that she is prepared to defend that safe and cosy environment with force - brutal force if need be.

 

Bart Biederbecke - ISFJ (first appears 1997)

 

Some characters must perform the function of background characters, drudges, servitors, henchman; not every character can be a bright and shining star. Keirsey calls these workmanlike, yeoman characters 'Guardians', and Bart Biederbecke is one such Guardian. Normally, Guardian characters stand on the side of good; Bart breaks the mold insofar as he stands on the side of evil.

 

Bart begins his life as a henchman and hitman of Stefano and he wears, like many a gun-wielding character of the nineties, a navy suit and a navy trench coat; he dresses like a spy or secret agent from the X-Files. As time goes on, we see more and more of the inner Bart, and he is revealed to be a sentimental character, and a character with barely suppressed creative longings; at one point, he records, in one of the DiMera hideaways, an imitation Frank Sinatra tune, and for the recording session, he wears his tie loose, Sinatra-style.

 

We can trace all these elements back to functions of the ISFJ that are strong. The first of these is Fe, Extraverted Feeling, a function that manifests itself in Bart's gross sentimentality. On finding that André, the son of his employer Stefano, is alive, Bart weeps tears of gratitude and hugs him; André, horrified, responds by yelling 'Don't touch me!'. This is a piece of cleverness on the part of the Days writers: like many a soap villain, André is an INTJ, and that type finds itself vulnerable to overt displays of Fe; Fe forms what Socionics calls the Vulnerable Function in the INTJ; simply put, Fe makes the INTJ uncomfortable, overwhelmed, oppressed.

 

At the conclusion of the notorious Melaswen story arc, one which saw around a dozen regular characters killed off and then brought back to life on a secret island (in a village that is a perfect imitation of Salem, right down to the last detail), Bart is holding the good guys hostage at gunpoint; the heroes attempt to reason with Bart and get him to join their side; after all, they argue, André's mental state is deteriorating rapidly, he is becoming more and more crazy; and furthermore, the entire island is about to be engulfed by an erupting volcano. So why not switch sides? Bart refuses, and in a strangled voice cries out: 'The DiMeras took me in!'. That is typical Bart and typical ISFJ. ISFJ loyalty supersedes self-preservation.

 

Dr Wilhelm Rolf - ISTJ (first appears 1997)

 

Like Bart, Rolf is an Introverted Sensing (Si) dominant, and it is the lot of the Si-dominant character to be nondescript background figure, which is what Rolf is; and like Bart, Rolf is a loyal, long-standing and long-suffering henchman of Stefano DiMera who is bullied and abused. Rolf does not deserve our sympathy, however; he is perhaps the most cold-hearted villain on the show, one who kills without thinking and without remorse.

 

Rolf spends most of his time in Stefano's employ inventing; he constantly comes up with miracle potions and cures, the most famous of which is his 'reviving serum', which can bring a man back from the dead. The inventive streak has led others to call Rolf a mad scientist, and from the perspective of MBTI, the most interesting thing about this appellation is: should it lend weight to the categorising of Rolf as an INTP?

 

We find a lot of Introverted Intuition (Ne) in Rolf. This is the function of creativity, and the exploration of possibilities and potentialities. Mad scientist types, such as the INTP and ENTP, possess Ne in spades. But Ne can be detected in a few Si-dominant characters, like Bart for instance. An Si-dominant will have Ne bubbling underneath the surface, liable to erupt at any time; Ne is the type's inferior function, or what Socionics calls the Suggestive Function. If a type is put under stress or placed in an extreme state of loosening of inhibitions, the inferior function will burst forth. And that is what we see in Bart, who has barely suppressed desires to be a creative type, an artist, a performer. We also see it in other Si-dominant types - Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager.

 

In Rolf, Introverted Thinking (Ti) recurs again and again. That function is the dominant one of the INTP, and perhaps the prevalence of Ti in Rolf could support the argument that Rolf is an INTP. But Ti does form an important part of the makeup of the ISTJ as well, Ti being what Socionics calls the ISTJ’s Demonstrative Function.

 

The ISTJ's Ti helps the ISTJ's first two functions, Si and Extraverted Thinking (Te) do their work. One MBTI nickname for the ISTJ is the Duty-Fulfiller; the fundamentally passive ISTJ, an Si-dominant, uses his secondary function Te, which is business logic, in his capacity as a cog in a wheel, in either a business, an army, or in Rolf's case, an organised crime syndicate. But his approach to business uses a lot of Ti; the Ti function is analysing, and it closely attends to underlying first principles, mechanics.

 

This explains why it is that cold and cerebral character who is a scientist can often appear to be an INTP, the consummate scientist and rationalist; after all, there are two functions that the ISTJ returns to again and again, and these are Ne and Ti, form the first two functions of the INTP.

 

V. The 2000s

 

Hattie Adams - ENFP (first appears 2000)

 

Hattie, one of several evil twins in Days, and Dr Marlena Evans' doppelganger, is played by Andrea Hall, the real-life twin sister of Deirdre Hall, who plays Dr Marlena.

 

A waitress who works at a greasy truck stop café, the malcontent Hattie develops a dislike for Dr Marlena after she replaces Hattie's favourite celebrity psychiatrist on a radio show. An extravert - unlike Marlena - she attracts the attention of a few prominent Salemites, including Marlena's ex-husband Roman Brady, who she falls in love with, and the supervillain Stefano DiMera, who frequents the café and calls it his 'Own little piece of Americana'. Stefano conceives a scheme to turn Hattie into Marlena's perfect double, and being Stefano, he intends no good. He sends Dr Rolf to persuade her to take plastic surgery and tutor her in how to reproduce Marlena's mannerisms. Rolf, a secret romantic, falls for Hattie, and we see a re-run of the plot of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1912), the Audrey Hepburn movie My Fair Lady (1964), and the Richard Gere and Julia Roberts movie Pretty Woman (1990).

 

Stefano plans on abducting Marlena and making her disappear, in order to punish for refusing his advances; Hattie will take Marlena's place, the perfect resemblance ensuring that no-one will notice that Marlena is gone. Before Stefano can carry out this intriguing scheme, he is forced to leave Salem abruptly. He would not return for five years. Hattie would put in a brief appearance for the notorious Salem Slasher / Melaswen storyline of 2003 to 2004.

 

A Feeler like Marlena, Hattie displays a great deal of Marlena's Introverted Feeling Fi; at the same time, she is an Extravert whereas Marlena is an Introvert. This led me at first to type Hattie as being an ESFP, but I think Hattie dwells much in a dream world to be a Sensor, which is what an ESFP is. Besides which, Hattie's rather weird turns of phrases show a lot of Extraverted Intuition (Ne). This makes her sound like the John Candy character in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). Here's what Taylor has to say on the Candy character, whose name is Del Griffith (I cannot link to Taylor’s site Zombies Ruin Everything site here, because the site is down).

 

Del’s Ne seems to come in the form of not only being able to find a solution in the dimmest of situations (and ones that get the better of Neil throughout the film), but in his constant analogous sayings and anecdotes.

 

"St. Louis and Chi-town are booked tighter than Tom Thumb’s ass"

 

"We’d have more luck playing pick-up sticks with our butt cheeks than we will getting out of here before daybreak."

 

"If they told you wolverines make good house-pets, would you believe them?"

 

Hattie, like Del, gets the best lines, and I believe that Hattie's creators took inspiration from Del, among other sources.

 

EJ DiMera (INFJ) - (first appears 2006)

 

I think of all my typings, this would be most controversial. Intuitive-Feeling (NF) types rarely turn up as the villain, especially INFJ types; as a rule, NFs are soon as too sensitive, too nice, and too ethical.

 

In 1996, Stefano fathers by artificial insemination a son on hillbilly moron Susan Banks; Stefano, preying on Susan's gullibility, convinces her that he is Elvis Presley and even wears an Elvis costume when he is with her. The baby, Elvis John DiMera, is born in 1997, and Susan escapes with him to England, fleeing Stefano's clutches. Sometime later, Stefano does catch up with the boy and raises him to be his evil protégé. EJ returns to Salem in 2006, not as a ten-year-old, but as a man in his thirties: the writers have taken the liberty of artificially aging him, that is, subjecting him to the 'SORAS' (Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome) treatment.

 

EJ takes the name 'EJ Wells' and moves into the apartment next door to Sami Brady's. He keeps his lineage secret; the world knows him only as a race car driver and businessman. A handsome snake, his British accent, his charm, his fine clothes, his culture, his good looks, and his habit of walking around half-nude in a towel and flaunting his waxed, oiled-up torso - all serve to attract Sami's attention. His sympathising with her, his listening to her, and his lack of moralising and condescending to her, makes him different from all her other suitors; unlike these men, he accepts her unconditionally. The truth is that EJ, an INFJ, is the Dual of Sami's type, an ESTP. Sami has found the love of her life but does not get to enjoy EJ's good side for long; the writers of the show have decreed, as usual, that Sami must be punished for her long list of crimes, Sami being as much a villain as EJ.

 

At the first, I typed the slippery, insubstantial, vague, and otherworldly EJ as an Intuitive, and Intuitive dominant; his leading function was Intuition, N. In some ways, he reminded me of Lord Baelish from Game of Thrones, who Taylor types as an ENTP. Was EJ an ENTP? To be one, he would need to be a Thinker, and he lacks the ruthlessness that comes with a villain who is a Thinker. EJ expresses himself more in terms of emotions, feelings, ethics, values, than cold rationality; this is made clear when we see him on the screen with his brother André, an INTJ. Both are Intuitive dominants, but one is a Feeler, the other a Thinker. This is not to say that EJ does not do villainous deeds, but at this point, we are willing to accept - or half-accept - his contention that these are not in keeping with his true character. He is a 'good' DiMera, or so he argues.

 

One MBTI nickname for the INFJ is 'The Counselor', and that is precisely what EJ does with Samantha: he counsels. And he does not criticise Sami's lack of morals and her inability to empathise with others, which is for the good, for as Gulenko writes of the ESTP, 'Lecturing and annoying hectoring over this element can lead to a sharp deterioration of [the ESTP's] mood'. Gulenko writes:

 

The [INFJ] unconsciously produces large psychological distances on this element, he as if slips away from his conversation partner, closes himself off behind a meaningless smile. Events that are relayed by his conversation partner do not affect him deeply. It is exactly these kind of elusively polite relations that seem inviting to the [ESTP], creating for him [the ESTP] the stability of the external psychological situation.

 

EJ's thin-lipped smirk is the default facial expression for the character, and Gulenko is right to describe it as a 'meaningless smile'.

 

Ava Vitali (ESTP) - (first appears 2008)

 

Iconic Days hero Steve 'Patch' Johnson returns to the show after a 16-year absence in 2006; he was presumed dead, murdered, in 1990, but in a typically soapy retcon, it transpires that his death was faked and his memories erased. Steve takes up the identity of 'Nick Stockton', male nurse and delivery driver for the mafia. Sometime during his missing years, which are somewhat like Ben Reilly's missing years in the notorious Spiderman Clone Saga of the 1990s, Steve had an affair with the daughter of his employer, mob boss Martino Vitali. The pair are engaged, but on their wedding day, Steve is abducted by Vitali's goons and sent away. Thereafter Ava falls into a depression. She is prescribed drugs by a quack doctor and locked away by her father in a luxurious bedroom in the Vitali compound, which we assume is somewhere in New York State. The influence of The Sopranos can be detected in the 2008 season, and this is natural enough, because The Sopranos, which had come an end the year before, had been a highly popular show. It concerned the decline of an Italian American organised crime family, and the mafiosos in The Sopranos, like those in 2008 Days, live with the ghosts of the past; by the time we see them, both crime families, the Sopranos and the Vitalis, are clearly on the way out.

 

Isolated in her New York compound and drugged up to the eyeballs, Ava becomes increasingly unhinged. Obsessed by the past and her affair with Steve Johnson, she plans to win him back with the aid of her father's goons; even though she is progressively losing touch with reality and is neglected by the father whom she hardly sees, she still has a hold on the gun-wielding mafiosos in her circle; these men will obey her orders without question. 

 

She and her retinue follow Steve, who is in the company of the Brady family, to Ireland. After Steve's party board a passenger plane back to Salem, the plane is sabotaged by Ava's goons and its pilots are drugged. Ava wanted to ground the plane and leave the Salemites stuck in Ireland, but her scheme backfires. The jet does succeed in taking off but develops engine trouble over the Atlantic, and it goes down in a sequence so thrilling that we in the audience hardly notice that the same plot device was used before, in 2000. Days possessed so much realism in this period that one could be forgiven, when looking at the wreckage of the jet when it crashes, that a real jet was destroyed.

 

These exciting events only form the beginning of the Ava arc. The denouement, or climax, occurs when Salem's heroes Steve, Kayla, Bo, and Hope, are held hostage by Ava in her family compound. Inevitably - and we see this coming from a mile off - Ava blackmails Steve into sex; her ultimatum is that if he lets her have her way with him, the lives of his wife Kayla and his friends Bo and Hope will be spared. Fortunately, Bo, who is tied up, escapes his captors in what is an implausible escape ('And with one bound, Jack was free'), and he rescues Steve, who is mercifully spared the choice between sex with Ava or Kayla's life.

 

After the rescue, the Salem police descend on the compound and arrests are made; Ava is taken to a hospital, and she detoxes. After the drugs have been flushed out of her system, becomes halfway normal. She leaves the show and comes back in 2015.

 

For the Ava arc, the writers of Days were inspired by a Steve story from 1989; in it, Steve and Kayla, happily married, saw their lives upside down after a woman from Steve's mysterious reappeared; her name was Marina Toscano, and she was played by Hunter Tylo, who would in a few years become famous on rival soap Bold and the Beautiful. Marina claimed to be Steve's former wife, and in this she was correct, and the unfortunate consequence was that supercouple Steve and Kayla's marriage was null and void, and Steve was revealed to be a bigamist. But Marina assures him, this can be undone; in return for a divorce, Marina demands that Steve help her locate a map that will lead to buried treasure...

 

The two women, Marina and Ava, are con women and grifters, and share the same personality type, which is ESTP. The dominant function of the type, Extraverted Sensing, can be defined as pure force, volition, concentration of energies into a focal point like a laser; the secondary function, Introverted Thinking Ti, is understanding of the structures of things - and personalities - and for the predatory and crooked ESTP character, that means an understanding of others' weaknesses and how to take advantage of these. It should be noted that in such ESTP characters, the moral sense is atrophied, and this is largely due to the function of Introverted Feeling Fi. This function, a moral function, makes up the Vulnerable Function of the ESTP type; the ESTP lacks a strong Fi, feels embarrassed by it, and prefers not to think about it.

 

Considering the three functions the strong Se and Ti and the weak Fi, we arrive at a sketch, an outline, of the ESTP type, and we recognise the sketch in its essentials in plenty of Days villains over the decades; there have been many hoodlums, con-men, pimp, bullies, extortionists, blackmailer ESTP characters - too many to count.

 

Another strong function in the ESTP is what Socionics calls the type's Demonstrative Function: this is Extraverted Thinking Te. Simply explained, Te, which is business logic, help the ESTP's two main functions, Se and Ti, do their work. Se equals force, volition, will; Ti equals an understanding of systems, and a certain obstinacy. The ESTP wants to understand existing social hierarchies and carve out a place for himself in them; and he uses force, bullying, effrontery, to get his way. In this struggle, he draws upon the organisational power of Te; furthermore, he 'hustles', like a good Te-dominant businessman.

 

When we translate the above into popular culture and apply it to a female character such as Ava, we arrive at the stock character of the 'Girl Boss' who, when a villain, manages a criminal gang by dint of her charisma and organisational acumen. Think of Catwoman, and transpose her to Days, and we get Ava.

 

VI. The End

 

After looking at all the major villains from a twenty-five period, I have found twelve characters who are representative of twelve out of the sixteen personality types. The reader will notice the types missing from the above list: INTP, ENFJ, ISFP, and INFP. Coincidentally, each of the four missing types belongs to a different Socionics Quadra.

 

If you read my two articles on Days together, you will not need to watch twenty-five seasons worth; I have done all the work for you. Having said that, I hope that now my readers will want to explore further, because the series was a classic for a reason. It provided hundreds of hours of entertainment, and writing on Days’ past has made nostalgic and want to watch some of it again.