Days of Our Lives Exclusive Update: Take a Breath, Because John Isn’t Going Anywhere!

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The good news is, after that disaster of a wedding on Days of Our Lives, Steve looks like he’s going to live to fight another day. Provided he survives Kayla’s wrath, that is. The bad news is, while John snapped himself out of The Pawn trance in time to avoid murdering his best friend, it’s clear his problems are far from over. And then on Tuesday, he informed Marlena that it was time for him to leave Salem. (Check out Tuesday’s recap here.)

That’s not a terrible thing, John tried to reassure his wife — he just wanted to get some closure by finding Catharina’s grave. But he wanted to go alone… and that’s almost never good. Add to that John’s certainty that he’s a “ticking time bomb” and that eerie music we got when he glanced at the card while hugging Marlena and we were a bit worried where this was going.

Sending characters out of the country together to investigate something is one thing. That gives the show more of a chance for a “location” shoot — you know, like everyone off in Montana grabbing Goldman and Clyde. But characters leaving town on their own tend to end up more like Gwen, who’s been off in Europe trying to get Dimitri’s money and was only seen during one brief call about The Spectator. 

But this is John Black we’re talking about here, and it seemed unlikely the show would send him off without a word. Still, it was enough to get fans talking, with folks over on the Soaps.com Message Boards pondering if, perhaps, Drake Hogestyn was taking a brief vacation or an extended break.

The good news is, though we didn’t hear John’s voice, he did call Marlena on Wednesday’s episode to let her know that his plane was about to leave. And even better? We learned from a reliable backstage source that this was all just a red herring. Hogestyn is still on contract and neither he, nor John are going anywhere.

And that’s certainly reassuring, because he’s still got some deprogramming to do! We’d hate for John to disappear while The Pawn is still very much lurking within him. And hopefully, once he’s back and made peace with Catharina, we can put all of this Konstantin business behind us for good!

At least until the Xander/Alex shoe drops.