Well, Sophia’s back in Salem on Days of Our Lives, and her and Melinda’s plan seems to have gone off without a hitch. Yes, Tate is torn and working through a barrage of emotions in learning he’ll never meet his and Sophia’s baby, but he’s made clear every chance he’s gotten to back out that this adoption is what he wants.
And while Sophia may feel torn, too, after the lengths she went to, she is very much content with giving the baby up! This isn’t Nicole’s baby being stolen while she mourns his death. Fans aren’t clamoring for a resolution to end the pain or reunite a lost child with a parent.
And that means that Days of Our Lives has an amazing chance right now to just… let this go. They shouldn’t just drop it, of course, but they could easily let it remain a secret that WE all know is percolating for years. Let Javi and Leo adopt Tesoro, let him grow up (well, Soap Opera Rapid Aging him up) and keep the secret under the radar.
Soaps used to let stories play out over years, whether it was an extreme like Nina’s baby being stolen on The Young and the Restless and vanishing for decades, or something more abbreviated like Will’s paternity. Sami pretended Austin was the father for a good while, through a baby kidnapping, a car accident, faked amnesia… It took time for the truth to come out about Lucas and it blew things up!
Modern soaps breeze through story much faster and honestly, audiences have learned to expect that. But this story doesn’t have to. Sophia and Tate are young and can move on. They don’t have to pine for years over the loss — as Melinda said, the pain goes away faster than you think.
Days Sophia, wearing her fake pregnancy pad, talks to Leo and Javi in the square as they push baby Tesoro in a stroller
This can be it for their story. Maybe they’d run into Tesoro from time to time, but the show doesn’t have to hit us over the head with constant teases of “Ooh, maybe they’ll figure it out!” It can just be running into him as Leo and Javi’s kid, with audience knowing the underlying tension is always there.
Letting it go would let the baby be raised in a loving family (even if it’s not Leo and Javi), let Tate and Sophia move on with other story and, after years, it would devastate everyone all the more when the truth did come out!
