
Theo’s return to Days of Our Lives has surprised us in many ways, from his breakup with Claire for her cheating, to his willingness to embrace his DiMera side. But maybe the most shocking thing about his return is that Days of Our Lives looks to be revisiting his shooting years ago — and diving back into all the pain and trauma around it!
For those who weren’t watching, the shooting happened back in 2017 when Kate pushed Theo (played then by Kyler Pettis) to help her find out who was hacking DiMera Enterprises. He reluctantly agreed, tracked the hacker down to an office building and with Kate’s eventual blessing, tried breaking into the building to find the culprit. An alarm went off, Theo tried running away and JJ, seeing someone in a hoodie fleeing the crime, shot him.
Theo was in a coma for a month, then woke up to find he was paralyzed. He left for South Africa to try rehabilitation. At the time, it had seemed pretty clear that Days of Our Lives was setting it up to delve into tough topics like unconscious bias and racial profiling. Theo was a black man wearing a hoodie who was shot by a police officer before he could even be identified or react.
But the show never really talked about those things or got into them, which is why this always felt like something of a dropped storyline. The show seemed to back off of the tougher aspects of the shooting. JJ simply said he couldn’t trust his own judgement and quit the force, becoming an EMT instead. And it weighed so heavily on him, he tried taking his own life.
Eventually, Theo forgave him and they moved on, everything right with the world once again. In fact, just a couple years later, we learned that they had become roommates offscreen and were best buddies! The storyline that was set up seemed to just… evaporate..
But now, it seems Days of Our Lives is intent on revisiting what happened and finally delving into the tough topics that it didn’t quite deal with before. It may not be a perfect fit — it would have been better if they’d gotten into the racial profiling aspects when it happened — but they’re doing their best to explain why this is happening now.
Theo clearly has PTSD that he may not have ever truly dealt with. When JJ quit the force, maybe Theo thought he could just stuff it down and ignore things. But coming back to town and seeing JJ as a cop again has clearly shaken him, especially since part of forgiving JJ, Theo said, was promising he was done being a cop.
And then getting stopped by JJ in the square in Tuesday’s episode just pushed that PTSD over the edge. It may have been a bit forced for something as simple as losing power for a few hours to have caused looting and a town curfew, but it did set JJ and Theo on a collision course again.
From being unable to move when he heard JJ’s voice, to the panicked tics he tried getting under control — it was clear that the trauma of what happened before was still very much a part of Theo.
He laid into JJ about stopping him again because he saw an unknown black man from behind. After, Theo coldly informed Jada and Paulina that he feels JJ has a problem with racial profiling and needed to be talked to. And the show ended with JJ, staring morosely at his own badge, very much shaken on his own end by the encounter.
Telling this story with two legacy characters that viewers care about won’t be easy. And there likely are no winners in this. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to tackle these issues, but there’s no simple fix. No “Aha! We figured out how to make everything right again!” moment.
We’ll have to see where this goes, but one thing we do know is that it certainly won’t be easy. But we suppose few things are in life.