Surprise! Days of Our Lives’ Nicole Is Back in Salem

OK, Nicole being in town is not exactly a surprise to those who’ve been following Days of Our Lives through Holly’s hospitalization. They mentioned last week that she’d just flown into Chicago and was on her way to see her ailing daughter. But it was still jarring on Wednesday’s episode when Sarah asked Tate to bring flowers into Holly’s room — where Nicole was currently sitting with her daughter.

Sorry, we mean Holly’s “mom.” Sarah didn’t use Nicole’s name, which, we suppose, was meant to keep the obviousness of not having one of Days of Our Lives’ biggest characters offscreen.

Honestly, we’re still half-surprised that they brought her to Salem at all. Sarah’s been stepping in as Holly’s surrogate mom, so we figured there’d be some sort of emergency or flight issue that would keep Nicole out of town. But no. She’s here, she’s in and out of the hospital visiting her daughter and she’s… entirely invisible to us.

We know things are tricky, to say the absolute least, with Arianne Zucker’s lawsuit against the show, but bending over backwards to acknowledge Nicole, without acknowledging her and keeping her off our screens just feels absurd. On top of that, Abe was like a surrogate father to Nicole, so to have her in town while he’s dealing with Lexie’s resurrection just doubles down on how odd the whole offscreen thing is.

We’re not even going to speculate as to why they didn’t or couldn’t recast, even temporarily, but the current “She’s here but she’s not and no we won’t name Her” situation is just weird. Days of Our Lives has never had a problem coming up with reasons why family couldn’t be around during a crisis before. (Just ask any of Sami’s kids!)

It seems like they could have found one here, as well. Instead, they brought “Holly’s mom” to town and expect viewers to just gloss over the fact that a major character is around for a front-burner story, but is somehow always just offscreen. Are you happy to have Nicole “home” or would you have preferred they just kept her away since we won’t see her?