My View From Beyond the Gates: Allergies Have Seasons. Feelings Don’t.

Do you ever get over grief? Or betrayal? Or great sex with an ex? You can try, but there’s still not a pill for that. A Beyond the Gates commentary by Soap Central founder Dan J Kroll for the week ending June 5, 2026.

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There’s a song from the 80s that says seasons change, feelings change. But do they really? Do you ever really get over the betrayal of a loved one? Yes, time marches… but something as simple as an “on this day” photo on your phone can set off a wave of emotions you’d thought were gone.

There was a time when it seemed possible that Hayley might reconsider her plan to kill Bill. She hasn’t. She still dislikes him and hates his family. Another thing that hasn’t changed? Her love of all of Bill’s coins.

Nicole didn’t want to be Chief of Staff back in the day and she doesn’t want to be chief today. She also claimed that relations with Ted was always electric and it would appear that she still gets charged up thinking about it. Much like her mother still enjoys the company of her longtime husband — even if they still can’t find a quiet place to make their own sparks.

Another feeling that hasn’t changed? My frustration with not knowing who the Impaler is! The scream of anguish that I let out at the end of Friday’s show?

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr *deep breath* rrrrrrrrrrrrrrghh!!!

I apologize, but I think I spoke this week’s big cliffhanger into existence. In last week’s column, “I Can’t Wallpaper Over What I’m Feeling”, I wrote, “I honestly expected the Friday cliffhanger to be [Joey] walking in and seeing the Impaler’s identity.

Fast forward a whole seven days and we still don’t know the identity of the Impaler. But we do have some clues. Okay, we have one clue. Joey knows whoever the person is. I have a handful of theories about who it is and I know that neither of them are going to be popular. I will give you a moment to head to your kitchen to grab tomatoes so you can hurl them at me.

Okay, are you ready? Let’s dive in.

You’ll Never See Them Coming

My first theory is that the Impaler is… Vanessa. Wait what?! Yeah, that’s what I said when the idea popped into my head. How could sweet Vanessa be the big bad blood boss bitch? Easy. She decided that she wanted to show Joey that she’s an equal. So she pulled some strings, made some calls, et voilà! She’s the Impaler.

I realize that this makes absolutely no sense, but that’s what makes it so twisted. How did Vanessa manage to escape from Joey’s home to make it back to the casino for the meeting? She’s also got leverage over Joey’s guard. Or maybe Randy is on her payroll and he lied to Joey about having someone watch her.

It was interesting how Vanessa and Randy took a little stroll down memory lane. They talked about how Doug finally seemed to be at ease when one of his old pals from Philly showed up in the DMV. There was also a passing mention of how Vanessa didn’t trust Randy back then – but there was no mention that she doesn’t trust him now.

Hiding In Plain Sight

My second theory is that the Impaler is Grayson. I know, I know. This makes even less sense than Vanessa being the Impaler. Grayson was recruited by Lia. He feared for his mother’s safety. He was stabbed! What better cover than all three of those things?

There is a really famous murder mystery – and I won’t reveal the title in case anyone is in the process of reading it – where one of the early murder “victims” turns out to be the actual murderer! Why can’t Grayson have been putting on an act this entire time?

It doesn’t really prove my theory, but Ren claimed to know the identity of the Impaler. Ren is also the one that stabbed Grayson and somehow managed to miss all of Grayson’s vital organs. Convenient, much?

Gone, But Not Forgotten

A third possibility is that the Impaler is Joey’s missing in action sister, Heather. I have no real reason to suspect her other than Joey randomly mentioning her the other week. If I remember correctly, there were passing mentions of Heather’s relationship with her father. Maybe a second apple didn’t fall too far from the tree and Heather decided to become her own made woman.

The biggest question now is whether or not we’ll see the Impaler’s face on Monday or if the show will skip ahead to a new day and leave us guessing.

Oh! I also have a fourth possible nominee for the office of Impaler, but it’s more of a wishful thinking sort of scenario. You can read all about that in the next section.

Hail to the Chief

Well, it is looking more and more likely that Dr. Monica McCormick will be the new Chief of Staff at Garland Memorial. While I am still on board with the idea, I have to admit that I’ve become slightly less enthusiastic about it. I’m not entirely sure why.

It seems odd that Monica would leave her work as an oncologist at one of the nation’s top cancer centers to… craft budgets and approve hirings. Yes, I know that Monica has requested that she still be able to consult on select patients back in Houston and at Garland. But it seems like a substantial reduction of her core skills.

Maybe she wants to do something more administerial at this point in her career. Maybe she just wants to be closer to her family in the DMV. Either way, it will be interesting to see if her presence on the canvas becomes more pronounced or if she’ll be as unseen as Lia was before the whole blood and theft thing popped off.

Garland Memorial: The Bizzarro World

Whether or not Monica accepts the position of Chief of Staff at Garland Memorial, in an alternate universe she is the Impaler. No, I have no concrete reason to believe that she is the head of a “red market” blood and plasma operation. That’s why I said it was in an alternate universe.

The reasons for me anointing Monica “the Impaler” are actually pretty straight forward. First, since she doesn’t live in the DMV, she’d be the last person that anyone would suspect. Second, I think actress Iona Morris would absolutely excel as a big bad blood boosting boss. There’s nothing like a little alliteration to waken up the senses.

If we are going down the road of fan fiction, I suppose Monica being the Impaler could also lead to the possibility that Shanice is somehow involved. She’s been on the show since the very beginning, hiding in plain sight. Again, this all just made-up story in my mind. It would explain why Shanice has been hit so hard by Derek’s death – she’s part of the ring and thereby tangentially responsible for his death.

When Hammy Met Vally

I don’t know if it was just me, but I thought it was a little jarring to have an entire episode devoted to Hayley’s past just randomly pop up in the middle of the week. Don’t get me wrong. It was eye-opening to see how everything went down. It just seemed to come out of nowhere.

Since all of the Hayley moving to town stuff happened before Beyond the Gates officially hit the airwaves, all of the flashbacks had to be newly created. Some of those were more successful than others.

The weird meeting between Hayley and Randy on some random bench didn’t work for me. It felt like something was missing. Was part of the scene edited out due to timing constraints? What wasn’t missing was a callback to Hayley’s previous comments that she had initially wanted Joey Armstrong to be her mark. When Hayley suggested that to Randy in the flashback, he warned her that Joey was dangerous and that he’d see through any con she tried to run on him.

Hayley then turned to obsessing over Joey’s middle initial – R. And, of course, now I am, too.

How It All Started

Even though I knew Randy was involved in the process, it was a bit surprising to me to see that Randy was the one who had researched and pitched the idea of Hayley targeting Bill. He gave her what looked like an entire dossier on his life. Love her or hate her, Hayley certainly put the info she was given to good use. The show artfully dodged exactly how long it took from Hayley’s first appearance until she was eating Bill’s face in his office.

I still haven’t changed my mind about how jarring the episode was, but I did like that we got to see how everything played out from the vantage point of five different people: Bill. Chelsea, Dani, Hayley, and Naomi. There didn’t seem to be any discrepancies in the tale-telling, which is rare whenever more than one person tells the same story. I guess – at least for now – we are to believe that everything played out the same way to everyone.

Something that stuck out to me in Bill’s story was how he mentioned that upon his first meeting with Hayley he felt like he knew her. At the risk of making a Dani Dupree-approved age joke, Bill couldn’t have felt like he’d known Hayley that long because she was a child just a few years earlier.

Bill’s comment seemed like more than just the romcom standard, “I feel like I’ve known you forever.” I just haven’t figured out what that something more is. I feel like maybe it could have something to do with a throwaway line that Ted had while talking to Eva about Derek’s death. He mentioned that when his brother and sister-in-law died, he found solace in an unexpected place: Bill Hamilton. Bill had lost a friend around the same time and they bonded over the loss. This was the first time that this was ever mentioned. Could Hayley be related to this friend that Bill lost?

Same Game, Different Rules?

Which leads me to an interesting observation. I saw someone on social media – and I apologize for not linking to it, but Twitter/X refreshed the feed before I had a chance to grab the link – compare Bill’s sextracurricular activities to Ted’s. The gist of the tweet was that Bill was banging every woman in sight and somehow gets a free pass for his behavior. Ted, on the other hand, had an affair with just one woman and he’s trashed at every turn.

Does the fact that Ted’s affair resulted in a child make it “worse” to viewers? We definitely don’t know that Bill’s multiple affairs didn’t produce a child. You know how soaps are. Is it that Ted betrayed Nicole while she was enduring the pain of multiple miscarriages? Is fan reaction saying that it’s okay to cheat on your spouse if they are traveling around the globe and rarely at home?

Okay, one more comment about the abruptness of the Hayley origin story. Why now? There has to be some sort of reason. Does this mean that we are about to see the walls close in on Hayley? Is there something looming in the crossover with The Young and the Restless next week? Obviously, Y&R has been on the air a lot longer than Beyond the Gates, so if Hayley tried to con a Genoa City resident it would have had to have been done off-screen.

Side note: the scene where Chelsea and Dani returned home unexpectedly and caught Bill and Hayley together were probably the best of the reminiscing moments. RhonniRose Mantilla (Chelsea Hamilton) really stepped up and Karla Mosley (Dani Dupree) has always been great at showing her characters process major life drama.

Beside, Behind, and Beyond The Gates: The Speed Round

Here are some of the thoughts and observations about other things happening on Beyond the Gates.

Beyond the Restless

Speaking of The Young and the Restless, it looks like next week is going to be eventful on Beyond the Gates. Victor Newman and his gang of merry men and women will be descending upon the DMV for Martin’s big fundraiser.

First, let’s address the elephant – or the donkey – in the room. Apparently, Victor was one of Vernon’s earliest backers. According to Vernon, Victor stood up for him with party bosses when the establishment thought Vernon was “too Black” to run for office. It’s been an unspoken thing, but we’ve all assumed that the Duprees are Democrats, right? I don’t know that I thought of Victor as a Democrat. I guess, technically, he doesn’t have to be. Anyone can support any candidate they want. It’s just fun to watch the show tightrope walk over the pit of identity politics.

I’m not saying Martin’s campaign is in trouble, but the person doing the seating charts for the fundraiser did not know that one should not seat Victor Newman and Jack Abbott together? This would usually be the point of a commentary where I’d mention all the character profiles that are posted on “the soap site,” but since I no longer own “the soap site,” she didn’t think to Google or Wikipedia the keynote speaker to see if he had any enemies? Tsk tsk.

Cousin Emerson

Poor Anita and Vernon Dupree. All they want to do is have a little sexytimes in their own home and they are thwarted at every attempt. Last week, Kat and Martin got an eyeful of the grands. This week, it was Nicole getting an earful of her parents’ amorousness.

I’ve seen a lot of folks on social media grumble about Vernita not having a bedroom set. If we didn’t get one when Anita was going through chemotherapy, I don’t see us getting one anytime soon.

And why do they need a bedroom anyway? The Dupree manse has wings. Surely there are other places that Vernita can get it on. I’d suggest the kitchen, but we’ve never seen that set either. Maybe Rowena caught the Duprees getting frisky in there at some point and she chased them off with a whisk and banned them from ever returning.

I suppose Anita and Vernon could always go visit Cousin Emerson again if they really wanted another three-day, um, “vacation.” It amused me that whatever-age-she-is-now Nicole just learned that she has no Cousin Emerson.

Let’s Talk About Sex, 2.0

I thought it was… let’s call it “interesting” that Vanessa encouraged Nicole to tell Ted that she’s been having sex dreams about him. It was even more…. let’s continue to call it “interesting” that Nicole thought that was good advice.

Are we supposed to contact everyone we’ve ever had an errant sex fantasy about? Is there a specific checklist that we need to complete to determine if we do or do not need to notify someone about our naughty fantasies?

In the end, Nicole decided not to go through with the confession. At least for now. Will the truth set her panties free? Will Ted ultimately tell her that her sexytimes dreams are TMI and unwelcome? Is Nicole going to double-book and have two of her male partners show up at the same time? Only time will tell.

Like Nicole, I am very sex-positive. That said, is it normal — or rather common — to talk to you mom about having sex fantasies? I’m not implying it’s weird or wrong. It’s just something that I’ve never experienced or heard about firsthand.

We Are Family

I have to say that I really, really like how everyone has stepped up over the past few weeks to remind Samantha that she is and will always be a Dupree. Her insecurity seemed to have started around the same time that Anastasia hurled those hateful comments about Samantha not being a “real” Dupree. It’s possible, though, that Samantha’s teenage angst had her feeling that way long before.

Rather than having people tell her to “get over it” or simply “forget” what Anastasia said, everyone has been taking conscious and concerted steps to ease Samantha’s fears. It might seem like a really small or unnecessary story moment, but I think the importance of chosen family has long been overlooked. Samantha and Tyrell are Smitty and Martin’s children no matter what a DNA test might say.

UFC: Let Them Eat Cake

Forget about the UFC fight on that other lawn in the DMV, the fight I am itching to see is the Ultimatum: Fairmont Crest smackdown between Leslie “LSD” Thomas and Darlene “Chocolate Cakes” Hawthorne.

I don’t condone violence, but these two women are seemingly headed toward some sort of confrontation. Honestly, I thought that there would be cake thrown during Jacob’s commendation ceremony – especially since Beyond the Gates has had a history of vile anti-dessert rhetoric over the past year.

I am not sure who would win in a battle between LSD and Darlene. Leslie looks like she would fight dirty, so I think she would get the edge. Darlene, however, seems scrappy, so I am not ruling her out.

I do need some additional information about Darlene’s chocolate cake. Everyone referred to it as her “famous” chocolate cake. I can’t tell if they were praising the cake or just being shady. Is her cake not that great but no one wants to tell her? Are people just caked out because she makes it all the time?

Happy Wife, Happy Life

I’ve been so focused on Jacob’s mental health in the aftermath of Derek’s death that I’ve not been as tuned into what Naomi is going through. This week, she basically said that when she married Jacob she didn’t sign up for having him put his life on the line. I’d counter that police put their lives on the line every day, but I think she was specifically talking about the danger Jacob faced working undercover.

I worry that Jacob’s determination to bring down the Impaler is going to cause irreparable harm to Jacob, Naomi, or their marriage – possibly all three. I don’t think that nabbing the Impaler is going to be the heal all that Jacob believes it will be.

Naomi, meanwhile, in her attempts to “help” Ashley decided that it would be a good idea to speak ill of the dead. Paraphrasing here, yes Grayson did some bad things, but Derek lied about being paralyzed and because of that Ashley needs to stop mourning Derek.

BTG: Behind the Graphic

In case you are wondering what in the world this week’s header image is all about, you’re in luck. I have the answer and I won’t make you wait until next week to find out. The “connect the dots” image comes from a conversation between Randy and Joey. Randy said Joey had a way with words while he was more of a connect the dots kind of guy. The connect the dots makes an apple, which was inspired by Kat mutilating the principles of law. Instead of “fruit of the poisonous tree,” Kat came up with “poisonous apple on a tree.” The coffee mug is the gift that Marcel presented to Jacob. The blue ribbon came up when Leslie was dismissive of Jacob’s commendation. Hayley mentioned “grippie” socks when she showed up unprepared at her first Pilates class.

Quick Takes

Kat is mulling the idea of doing a podcast. It seems everybody has a podcast. Yes, I realize that I am saying this as someone who has a podcast. I would note that I had first had a podcast some 20 years ago before it was cool. That said, I really hope Kat’s podcast doesn’t become a storyline. Another soap did a podcast story and it was b-o-r-i-n-g-zzzzzz.

Maybe feelings really do change. It was a bit wild to hear that Anastasia was donating to Martin’s campaign. She’s been snotty and snooty since we met her, but politics does make for strange bedfellows.

The canned applause during Jacob’s commendation ceremony was weird. They couldn’t get the cast and crew to make real applause? And if it was real applause, it sounded very unreal.

Beyond the Gates: Lines of the Week

The Beyond the Gates writing team seems to be having a little too much fun. Here are some of the lines of dialogue that tickled my funny bone or that I found memorable over the past week (and haven’t already mentioned in this column).

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“He was all procedures, chain of custody, poisonous apple on a tree.”
Kat grumbling about how Jacob basically took all the fun out of her Leslie Thomas attempted murder investigation.

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“They are not fantasies. They are intrusive thoughts.”
That’s how Nicole is describing her lurid daydreams of Ted.

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“It’s just filing papers, girl. Calm down.”
Chelsea’s reaction to then-friend Hayley’s excitement over being hired at Bill’s law firm.

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“Things that may never happen happen all the time.”
Andre’s somewhat depressing take on how life sometimes sucks.

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“You were born listening.”
Monica’s polite way of calling Shanice nosy.

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Gatecrashers: Reader and Viewer Feedback

I love interacting with other Beyond the Gates fans. So I thought I’d create a section to share some of the comments I’ve received on my columns and social media posts. If you’d like to see your comments shared here, you can scroll down to the Comments section below this column and post away. You can also chat with me on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and/or TwitterX.

And I don’t only post feedback where people agree with me. While the idea of a podcast scares me, this is proof that there could be a fun way to do it.

Follow my Random Acts of Dan

That’s all I have for this week’s My View From Beyond the Gates column. Thank you for reading and, as always, please feel free to share your thoughts on my column or Beyond the Gates in the Comments section below.

If you’ve enjoyed my column this week and want to see what I have written about Beyond the Gates in previous weeks, you can check those out in the My View From Beyond the Gates archive.

Have a penchant for gardening, interior design, or fixing up old houses? Check out my Manor Makeover series where I write about all of the things I’ve been up to here at Kroll Manor in Allentown, PA, over the past decade.

To keep up with all of the shenanigans I engage in on social media, please consider giving my a follow on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and TwitterX.

Life outside the gates

Two of my former Two Scoops columnists from Soap Central, Liz Masters and Tamilu, have joined me here on my personal web site — and they are still writing about General Hospital. Liz is on deck with week with a new column called, Dial K For Killow.

To read more thoughts, opinions, rants, and raves about daytime television, be sure to check out our Editorial section.

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