Deconstructing Last Blast Reunion
Credit: Image: Jill Johnson/JPI

The whodunit angle held interest, but the ending fell flat.

The first chapter of Last Blast Reunion ended with Jan’s plans to blow the crew up thwarted. It was a fun series that made great use of Days of our Lives’ history with the Last Blast Crew and the mystery kept viewers guessing the whole time. Of course, now that it’s over, I have some thoughts on the second wave of the DOOL App’s digital series, especially that finale.

Write what you know

Even though I was pretty confident legacy characters weren’t being killed off on the DOOL App’s digital series, Last Blast Reunion definitely had me questioning what was really going on. And that was the best thing about this installment. Chad & Abby in Paris had good moments, but the murder mystery aspect in this chapter offered more intrigue as we all questioned if the murders were real and who would get offed next. It’s rare to constantly be guessing what’s going to happen on soap operas with all the spoilers and obvious storylines that usually ruin the surprise. It was a good assumption Jan was the killer from the start, but it didn’t take away from the fun reveal that it was all part of her fantasy put into words as a manuscript.

Come back to Salem

It was great having these characters together again (all those flashbacks!) and the sparks between Philip and Chloe made me want more, especially of Philip returning to mix it up with his family. Sure, Belle and Shawn pop in Salem every now and then, which makes me even happier Belle and Philip’s affair was fiction within fiction, but they could very easily be brought back permanently as well. Shawn is returning to Days of our Lives to help Rafe figure out what is going on with his mother Hope, why not keep him and Belle around? I’m on the fence though about bringing Jan back. We recently had Jordan terrorizing Ciara, and Kristen is free to spread her special brand of villainy around Salem. We don’t need another psycho running around town. There’s also been enough redemption of bad characters like Ben and Xander, who is still shady but he has way more rooting value these days. Sometimes it’s nice to have a villain do bad things and then go away never to reform.

Jason did save the day

The story was fun, the flashbacks were great and I loved the blooper reel at the end. However, the ending didn’t do it for me. This still being Days of our Lives, they, of course, had Jan try to rape Shawn when she started to undo his pants while he was tied up, which was a throwback to what she did so many years ago. And then Belle got turned on by Shawn tied down to the bed in nothing but baseball pants? What in the actual heck? That’s taking the NBC soap’s love of rape to a whole other disturbing level. I realize the episodes are short, but it was also tied up too neatly, too quickly. I would have preferred an open-ended finale. Instead of being the reason Jan was caught (sorry, but Jason’s arrival is the reason the crew was saved, Philip just helped), maybe Jason could have been in cahoots with her and been the one to get arrested as Jan slipped away. Then in a flashforward, the gang could have been seen exiting the movie Jan had made or picking up the book she wrote anonymously. Or something that would have kept the momentum the previous episodes created going.

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Those are just my thoughts. What did you think of the Last Blast Reunion? Do you want these characters back on Days of our Lives? Who would you like to get the next digital series treatment?