All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Soaps.com may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

Someone wanted to kill EJ on Days of Our Lives. That’s not a surprise. We’ve known for ages that the shooting was coming and we’ve known he’s angered virtually everyone in Salem in the lead up to it. But that gunshot wound was not playing around. (Check out Thursday’s shooting recap here.)

Whoever shot him took aim for EJ’s heart. (Though we’re also guessing the shooter — whomever they are — would claim he doesn’t have one.) That shot, in other words, wasn’t just meant to scare or maim. It was very much meant to kill.

Still, Chad found him on the floor and rushed him to the hospital. But Thursday’s show ended before Kayla could tell us whether EJ lived or died.

When we chatted with Martha Madison a little while back about Belle and EJ and the upcoming shooting, we mentioned how EJ’s ticked off just about everyone in town. In fact, his behavior has been so bad, even quite a few of the viewers are angry!

And as Madison noted, “I think they’re supposed to be, right?” In fact, she went a step farther, adding that, “We want the viewers to want him dead, too.”

Ouch. That doesn’t make us feel good about his survival prospects. But while pushing everyone to the brink of murder ups the emotional stakes, that doesn’t mean they’ll let him die.

As we pointed out yesterday, Dan Feuerriegel hasn’t stopped filming at Days of Our Lives since this was shot back in July of last year. Now, this being Salem, we supposed he could be playing an EJ lookalike or some long-lost twin brother after EJ’s death… But we doubt it.

EJ’s going to live, you can bet on it. With that said, he may be a bit under the weather for a while. In order for a murder mystery to play out, you can’t have the man who was shot (and clearly saw his assailant) just tell everyone what happened.

So EJ may end up in a coma for a little bit, and mostly off our screens. If this was a head wound, we’d say he’d likely end up with amnesia, but that seems like a stretch. Unless, of course, someone got their hands on the DiMera memory wiping serum and injected him with it after shooting him.

But that seems a bit like overkill. Because, as we said above, that shot was aimed for his heart, and you aren’t meant to survive that.

As Madison put it, “I think most people want to see this happen to him, but then they’re also gonna really want justice, too. So it’s a fun story.”

The question is, justice for whom? Justice for EJ or for everyone he’s wronged? To find that out, we’ll just have to wait and see.