The Chaotic Soapbox - Episode 6

Roman, Ew - Let it go already!

The writers want to pair Roman and Marlena — again. Jenn and Rachael are here to explain exactly why that's a hard no.

In this episode, the girls break down the full history of Roman Brady on Days of Our Lives: from Wayne Northrop's original Irish-Catholic detective who arrived in Salem in 1981 alongside the whole Brady family, to Drake Hogestyn's wildly popular recast that had audiences on Good Day America begging for him to be Roman, to Josh Taylor's three-decade tenure as what fans lovingly call "Fauxman." They dig into every attempt the writers have made to reignite a Roman/Marlena romance — 1986, 1997, 2004, 2014 — and why each one has flopped harder than the last, despite the show's stubborn refusal to take the hint.

They also tackle the long-running myth that Marlena only fell for John because she thought he was Roman. Jenn makes the case — passionately — that anyone who actually watched 1986 knows that Marlena was falling for this man while she believed he was Stefano DiMera, the villain who murdered her husband and kidnapped her children. The reveal that he was Roman didn't create the love; it just gave the audience permission to root for it. It's a fundamental misreading of those characters that the writers have repeated lazily for decades, and both hosts have feelings about it.

From there, the conversation spirals (as it tends to) into the consent issues buried in the '94 post-Maison Blanche hospital scene, the infamous castle storyline where Roman and Marlena are essentially shackled to a bed while watching their spouses move on without them, and the sheer suspension of disbelief required to accept a pregnancy storyline at Marlena's age — not to mention the fun maths of how she could possibly have been a fully qualified psychiatrist at nineteen when she arrived in Salem in 1976.

They also explore what makes Josh Taylor's Roman so fundamentally different from the character Wayne Northrop built — a proud, morally black-and-white man who would never have tolerated a relationship with Kate Roberts, let alone pined after his ex-wife for decades like a sad old dog. And they make a genuine case for who Roman should have been paired with all along (Laura Horton, for the record), and what a missed opportunity it was to build a meaningful friendship between Roman and Marlena instead of repeatedly forcing a romance nobody asked for.

Underneath it all is a bigger question: what does it say about how the show treats women when its answer to a grieving widow is to immediately hand her off to the nearest available man? And with Drake Hogestyn barely gone and the writers already hinting at a Roman storyline filmed a year in advance, is there even a mechanism to course-correct anymore?

Plus: the case for writing Marlena more like Alice Horton, why writing a year ahead is killing the show's ability to respond to its audience, and a final, heartfelt plea to the current writers — please, for the love of Salem, let it go.