John Oliver’s second day in Salem found Devlin St. John getting down to business—and possibly getting himself in real trouble.
After making his Days of Our Lives debut Tuesday as Salem’s chief water inspector, the Last Week Tonight host returned for Wednesday’s episode with a nearly 12-minute scene opposite Dan Feuerriegel’s EJ DiMera, pressing the flu-stricken DiMera heir over a contaminated-well cover-up involving DiMera Pharma.
The confrontation picked up from Tuesday’s cliffhanger, with Devlin arriving at the DiMera mansion to question EJ about Coraseal, a drug manufactured by DiMera Pharma. Devlin told EJ that George O’Halloran, the company’s head, had drunkenly confessed during a golf outing that he and EJ were involved in covering up a faulty batch of the drug.
From there, Devlin laid out the charge in full: DiMera Pharma, he said, had dumped a contaminated batch of Coraseal on Smith Island, poisoning the Horton well and potentially threatening Salem’s wider water supply.
In other words, exactly the kind of municipal emergency Devlin St. John was apparently born to monologue about.
Oliver’s character came armed with some very Oliver-ish turns of phrase, warning EJ not to “treat the truth like a streaming subscription that you’re desperately trying to cancel,” and comparing Salem’s environmental complacency to ignoring a check-engine light until “the car is on fire.”
But Devlin was not there purely as a public servant. He also presented EJ with an itemized accounting of expenses, including a line for “reputation management”—which EJ correctly interpreted as hush money.
“Blackmail is such an unpleasant word,” Devlin replied. “Sounds like something that a villain does in a Dickens novel while twirling their mustache and foreclosing on an orphanage.”
For a moment, Devlin appeared to have the upper hand. Then EJ turned the tables, asking whether anyone would notice if the happily single inspector “drift[ed] away for a while.” When Devlin tried to leave, EJ held him down as Rita Lesley injected him with something that immediately knocked him out.
So, yes: on day two of his Days of Our Lives arc, John Oliver got the full soap treatment—blackmail, environmental menace, and a cliffhanger drugging.
Oliver’s three-episode Days arc concludes Friday on Peacock.
