Oh! Oh Sheila!

Ding dong, the witch is...? Out of nowhere, Steffy stabbed the attacking Sheila, whom a paramedic declared dead at 8:07PM. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief except Finn, who cried for his mommy. But is Sheila really dead? And what left-open details make this columnist think she ain't? Get ready for the world with Two Scoops' Mike!

Has your week been bold and beautiful? Did you take a stab at dealing with an enemy? Did you need a binky as you cried for your mommy when no one else would? And did the bucket you apparently kicked have a couple of holes in it? These and more situations faced the Forrester-Logan-Spencer-Finnegan clan this week!

Well, that was one helluva end to February Sweeps, Scoopers! Things were kinda ho-hum -- what, between Xander's Emma bomb not going off, everyone drinking the Thomas/Hope Kool-Aid, and spiked mints causing more lack-of-consent sex. But then, suddenly, on a Monday, Steffy stabbed a lunging Sheila, and by Tuesday the naughty nurse was dead! But is she? My money says no! Let's Scoop about it!

As Southern California's famous Santa Ana winds began to blow, talk about town was about Sheila. More specifically, how Steffy had clocked her monster mother-in-law yet again. Folks from Finn to Hope to Liam to Brooke worried that, if cornered, Sheila might try to make Steffy a guest on Six Feet Under once again. Then why does Steffy keep provoking Sheila?

It's true, it's not on Steffy to have any control over Sheila's behavior, but Steffy should still know better -- especially since it was Steffy getting in Sheila's face that prompted Sheila to whip out the gun that put bullets through both Steffy and Finn. And what happened to Steffy being so afraid of Sheila that she took the kids and split town? I know that was for Jacqueline MacInnes Wood's maternity leave, but it's a weird one-eighty.

Speaking of mixed M.O.'s, Sheila had tolerated Steffy trying to K.O. her before, and even smiled the marinara sauce away when Li treated Sheila to an up-close view of Il Giardino's pasta plate. So, why now did Sheila become ready to cut a bitch over one confrontation? I also have to say that Steffy's reaction to Sheila's proximity to Kelly was a little over the top.

Yes, Sheila probably should have gotten someone else to cover the table when she saw Kelly sitting there. But even Kelly's then-guardian Lucy could attest to the fact that Sheila had only said hi to the girl and that Sheila wasn't hovering or even coming back with bottomless bread sticks. I don't think the encounter was enough for Steffy to go off on Sheila the way she did.

"Tonight, you die," Sheila promised Steffy as she lurked outside Steffy's house. Isn't that a little extreme after a single fight with the sexy co-CEO? Yeah, Sheila's psycho, but she herself affirmed how she had been lying low, living a normal life. I'd even argue that enough time had passed that Sheila could have grown at least a little. Of course, the fault here is that we never really saw Sheila work on herself.

And that's a shame, because that made for must-see soap from 1995 to 1998. Back then, Sheila really was trying to recover from her severe mental illness, which we saw on-screen. It was a struggle; Sheila wanted to be good but couldn't help a scheme here and there, some more harmful than others. It was only toward the end of '98 that she fully lost it again, and she's been written like a cartoon more with every return.

Anyway, of course there was a full moon, and of course the power went out. I'd have thought Steffy would be used to her house creaking, given the prevalence of L.A.'s "devil winds." Still, the scene of Steffy's increasing fright, starting with the neat CGI-ing of the living room set into the actual establishing shot of the house, was pretty solid.

Despite Steffy locking the doors (why weren't they locked before? And why didn't Steffy hire security after provoking Sheila the way she had to have known she had?), Sheila managed to get in. How, I don't know. I also don't know how Steffy couldn't have heard the patio door lock being tinkered with or the howling winds once the door was open. But Sheila's shadow rose like the Great Pumpkin out of the pumpkin patch.

Good grief! Steffy did a cool roll over the couch and grabbed the big-ass butcher knife she had been cutting vegetables with. As Sheila loomed, Steffy warned her to stay back and that she'd use the knife...and when Sheila rushed her, Steffy followed through, plunging the blade into Sheila. Sheila fell to the floor and coughed up a considerable amount of blood before her head limped to the side with open, staring eyes.

Steffy did the right thing and called 9-1-1; of course, as soon as she clicked off, the lights came back on. Steffy turned to view the bloody sight in her living room, and I half expected Sheila to be gone. But Sheila was still there, and when the paramedics came, they noted she still had a pulse, however faint, and confirmed she had been stabbed in the "upper extremity." Hmm.

In the next scene, however, the emergency techs told Steffy that Sheila had bled out. There was nothing more they could do. They called it: time of death, 8:07PM. And they reported that the coroner was coming to pick up the body. We didn't see Sheila's cadaver carried out, but we were told it was -- nice of the professionals to leave the bloody carpet in Steffy's house. Do they always leave items soiled with body fluids behind for the victim of a crime to contend with?

I've been a diehard Sheila fan since 1992. Well, not as hard in recent years; as I pointed out, the character has spent the 21st century being written two-dimensionally. But I'm looking at the history, a couple of dropped clues, and the way the whole thing went down, and...I don't think Sheila is dead. I really don't. First let's have a quick tutorial on the previous dirt naps she woke up from:

1992: Died in a fire. Of course, it was only Y&R's Genoa City residents who thought Sheila was dead; audiences knew that Sheila had migrated to La-La Land and that a man who had come to check the gas meter had burned to death instead.

1995: Died from poisoning herself. After going soft on the idea of gunning down the Forresters, Sheila took a homemade toxin and slipped away in front of her enemies. We discovered later that, off-screen, Sheila had had her stomach pumped and survived the suicide attempt.

2007: Died by gunshot. Back in Genoa City, Lauren Fenmore, tormented by a Sheila who'd had plastic surgery to look like Phyllis Summers, had to decide which "Phyllis" to plug and apparently picked the right one. But not so fast! Sheila turned up alive on B&B in 2017, saying the stories of her death had been exaggerated.

2022: Died by bear mauling. Prison escapee Sheila ran into the woods and had an unfortunate encounter with a cousin of Smokey; the cops found her toe and blood that matched her DNA. Turned out, Sheila had hacked off her own piggie to fake her demise, except Hardy Boy Finn caught on and outed her.

HONORABLE MENTION:

2023: Died by fall/heart attack. Sheila gained Jack Bauer status when she fell from a two-story balcony; Bill saw her broken body and assumed she'd perished, only for her to get up and walk away. She soon had a heart attack unrelated to those injuries and flatlined, only for Finn to save her once again.

This time, Sheila is supposed to be "morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably dead," as the Munchkins sang. But...yeah. First off, that it happened so out of nowhere -- do we really think an exit as high profile as Kimberlin Brown's could be kept a soap secret? And the big death scene happened on a Monday. A Monday! Don't those facts seem odd to you?

Suppose the paramedics were in on some kind of scheme and made a show of declaring Sheila dead. That would, of course, have to mean that Sheila knew, going into the house, she was going to be subjected to a life-threatening injury meted out by Steffy. That's a bit of a stretch. Then there's the working theory that Sheila sent in Sugar, and that's who died instead.

Who's Sugar, newer viewers might ask? Sugar was a cohort of Sheila's who helped kidnap Ridge and Brooke (and ultimately Nick) in South America in 2003 (played by Robin Mattson, whose "Janet from Another Planet" similarly terrorized Pine Valley citizens on All My Children). In 2006, forced by Sheila, Sugar had plastic surgery on Y&R to look like Sheila, and swore revenge on her former friend.

I have said all these years that Sugar was the one who got done up to look like Phyllis to frame Sheila and that Sugar was who Lauren shot. Of course, if Sugar-as-Sheila died on our screens this week, who did Lauren kill? This is what happens when you have different writers on different shows crafting outlandish plots for the same character without checking with each other first.

There are two other rather large clues that B&B left before Sheila (or whoever she was) took her supposed last breath. First...what was in Sheila's pocket? She went for the concealed item twice but never revealed it, and Steffy made several points to mention that she thought Sheila was going for a gun. Does this hidden object, assuming there was one, provide Sheila a loophole of some sort?

Clue Number Two is that both Sheila and Deacon alluded to Sheila visiting "someone from her past" off-screen. A few weeks ago, Bill dealt with an innocuous Realtor named Diana. Diana just happens to be the name Sheila said belonged to the baby she waved around in South America, claiming Massimo was Diana's father. It was never clear that "Diana" was Sheila's child at all...but if she is, could she be helping mama somehow?

I guess we could add a third clue in that Sheila reminded Steffy that she had other children. That's debatable. Mary (a.k.a. Erica Lovejoy) is the only child of Sheila's born on-screen; we last saw a SORASed Mary in 2002, but Sheila and James talked about her in 2017. As for Y&R's Ryder and Daisy, supposedly sired by Sheila and Terrible Tom, they only ever said Sheila was their mom. It was never proven.

So, could Sheila have been stealing away to hang with Mary and/or Diana, and could these daughters have helped set it up to make it look like Sheila was dead? I'm not sure what purpose that would serve, considering Sheila "dying" would mean being unable to cultivate a relationship with Finn. But I'm not convinced. Sheila's not dead. Hell, they told us Finn was dead, dead, dead, and he certainly turned up alive! Didn't he? Didn't he! I rest my case.

News got around, thanks to Carter and his new beard, that Sheila had finally bit the big one. Hope and Brooke smartly opined that they had seen this movie before. But Ridge and Thomas were convinced after rushing to Steffy and getting her side of the story. (I just realized this week that I really like Thomas as long as he's not with Hope or talking about her!)

Lt. Baker was back! I just happen to be watching episodes from 1997, where Baker was first introduced as Ridge was accused of shooting Grant Chambers. No one seemed to think Steffy had committed a crime, though Aly did die at Steffy's hands, also -- should Baker be worried? Anyway, the Forresters were glad Sheila was gone, but Finn wasn't. He kept saying that Steffy had killed his mom.

Huh? Since when does Finn refer to Sheila as his mother? Whatever tie he feels to Sheila, he's always maintained that Li is his mother. But Finn wouldn't let it go, to the point Ridge had to take a hard line with him, which was actually a pretty cool scene. Steffy asked for alone time with Finn, who took forever to see "the blood stains on the carpet," thank you, Michael Jackson.

Finn wept, kneeled down at the carpet, and then pressed his hand into the blood. Eww! Would it still be that wet? I half expected Finn to rub it on his face, like Ridge did when he cut his hand on a Spencer award in 2010. I also half expected Finn to declare that the red fluid wasn't blood. Instead, he whined that, as of that moment, both he and Steffy had Sheila's blood on their hands.

Finn ran out and went to Deacon's pad to be among Sheila's things. Deacon arrived and received the news about his dead girlfriend -- though in that case, Finn insisted Steffy had killed Sheila in self-defense. How come Finn couldn't be that pro-Steffy to Steffy's face? Soon, along came Hope, the only one who could see Finn's side of things.

Hope cradled Finn as he admitted he shouldn't be as upset as he was over Sheila's death; he asked why he didn't hate Sheila yet added that he didn't think he loved her. Hmm, another bonding moment with Hope and Finn. Could Finn achieve his forgotten promise to separate Hope from Thomas by separating from Steffy and getting with Hope himself?

With Steffy not getting support from Finn, and Liam whispering in Steffy's ear about leaving Finn, could it be long before we get a Steam redux and Hope leaves Thomas for Finn, the latter of which I would be all about? That's not the only mystery we have on our hands. Adding to the loopholes surrounding Sheila's supposed death, Lt. Baker also said Sheila had been unarmed. Then what the hell did she have in her pocket? Lunch? And Sheila was only stabbed in the shoulder, not the chest. Which also makes me wonder.

There's only one question I can ask you, Scoopers -- do you think Sheila is dead? Ready your comments in the Soap Central message boards, or simply click here to submit feedback!

Answers, I need answers. Will B&B give us any in the coming week? Have they actually brought back another of Sheila's errant children to help her fake another death? Now more than ever, keep watching, be alert, and most of all, be bold!

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