We’ve got to give credit to Days of our Lives where credit is due. Most of the time, when a show decides to whitewash a distasteful character’s bad deeds, they do it subtly by turning them into a victim, and suddenly having other characters wax poetic about the goodness they see buried deep, deep down inside. But, DAYS doesn’t have time for that subtle nonsense when it comes to Leo. They’re laying their whitewashing right on the table.
Leo Stark: Up Close and Personal
Instead of writing Leo (Greg Rikaart) as a newly canonized saint, they’re having Stephanie (Abigail Klein) do it. She says she’s only doing it for the good of her uncle Jack’s (Matthew Ashford) newspaper. She, personally, doesn’t love Leo but it’s her job to make others do. You know, for the clicks. So Stephanie is flat-out saying out loud what, in the past, would have been implied.
Read It and Weep
Leo isn’t bad, he’s just misunderstood. Everything he did, he did for love. And, who doesn’t love love? Who cares that Leo’s love included such personal offenses as betraying the one person in the whole world who ever gave a damn about him? (That would be BFF Gwennie, whose husband Leo blatantly slept with practically under Gwen’s nose.) There was also the minor, actual crime of breaking Dimitri (Peter Porte) out of police custody, going on the run with him, knocking out a police officer, and running a pregnant woman off the road in a stolen cop car.
Sure, Leo then delivered Nicole’s (Arianne Zucker) baby and was a good sport about it. He even got all googly-eyed about the miracle of birth and how cute the tyke was. But, none of that nullifies his alliance with Dimitri.
What I Did For Love
And yet, the fact that Dimitri is about to break Leo’s heart is supposed to wipe his slate clean – at least in the viewers’ eyes. We’re supposed to feel his pain and forget all the pain he’s caused. And, in case we’re not getting the message, well, Stephanie is literally here to spell it out for us. Like, in writing.