Credit: Jill Johnson/JPI, Peacock screenshot (2), NBC/Courtesy of the Everett Collection
And we’re off! Monday’s Days of Our Lives finally set the stakes for what’s been going with Marlena… and what’s to come. In the episode, Marlena told Kayla about her dream of being the Queen of the Night once again — which is probably confusing those viewers who weren’t watching the show over 30 years ago when the story first aired!
Worse than that, we’ve got a feeling between the ominous sounding name and Kayla’s questions about the devil, folks are probably getting a bit nervous that we might be heading for Possession 3.0. But don’t worry, while the Queen of the Night was a lead up to Mardevil, she was not Satan.
The Queen of the Night story started towards the end of 1994, when Stefano returned to Salem after… well, not one of his “deaths” — he returned from that the year before. This was just Stefano returning after skipping town for a bit when things got a bit too heated for him.
He came back and rented the apartment next to Marlena’s to stalk her. First, he blackmailed Mike Horton into giving him the key-code to Marlena’s apartment. Then he hollowed out a secret passage between her armoire and his rented apartment. And with that done, he started slipping drugs to Marlena and visiting her in the middle of the night while wearing a Phantom of the Opera-esque mask to hide his identity.
He messed with her mind, making his visits seem like creepy, weird dreams and called her his Queen of the Night. It was all kinds of twisted. Even worse, the drugs ended up scrambling Marlena’s mind enough to leave her an “open vessel” for the devil to come in and possess her.
The joke was on Stefano, though, because once Satan took over, his Queen of the Night days were done. Mardevil attacked him, then tossed him out her bedroom window during her attempted exorcism. Stefano was left paralyzed and with amnesia, which kind of made him a half-decent human being for a bit!
Eventually, Marlena was freed from the devil, felt horrible about what she’d done and insisted on treating Stefano herself as a sort of self-imposed penance. That was all well and good until Stefano’s memory returned with a literal bolt of lightning (no really, he was struck by one) and the villain came with a vengeance — having learned nothing, of course.
All of that is why Marlena is worried about her soul with these dreams returning, and Kayla made sure to ask if she might be heading towards possession again. No, Marlena assured her, she’s not worried about the literal devil… But perhaps Salem’s own. Between that reassurance and Marlena letting that “Hopefully” slip out when Kayla reminded her that Stefano was dead, it feels like we just got a preview of where the story is heading.
