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EJ’s one step closer to recovery on Days of Our Lives now that he’s awake from his coma, but we, apparently, are no closer to finding out who shot him. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t remember seeing the shooter — in fact, he doesn’t even remember the shooting!

He does, though, remember a slew of visitors before he was shot. There was Belle and her wiretap. Chanel yelling at EJ about the adoption. Kristen raging at her brother over her mom’s disappearance. EJ remembered a lot. But there was one key visitor he seemed to forget: Rafe.

Because EJ also caught Rafe in his home the night of the shooting, after the PI planted a wiretap in the DiMera living room. Rafe was looking to record EJ and get proof that he was behind Arnold’s reappearance. We still aren’t entirely sure what’s on the recording that Rafe got. He recovered it, but we haven’t had a chance to see him review it just yet.

The thing is, EJ forgetting Rafe could be the tip-off we’re looking for. How, you ask? Well, one theory that’s been out there on who shot EJ is that he shot himself. Not necessarily literally, but the idea is that he set the whole thing up for some nefarious purpose.

Over on the Days of Our Lives Reddit forum, theGTAking101 explains it perhaps best, reminding us about EJ’s toast to Stefano’s portrait before the shooting, saying that he beat everyone.

“Maybe he found the bug that Rafe planted,” they suggest, “and that’s why he sat in the chair right next to it. When he said ‘What are you doing,’ he didn’t have a shocked look on his face, so maybe he just said that so the recording device would pick it up and sound like someone was pointing a gun at him.”

Heck, maybe EJ even spotted Rafe’s little pop-in visit out of the corner of his eye when he tried sneaking in the first time that night. As they also point out on Reddit, it wouldn’t be the first time a DiMera pulled a stunt like this, as Andre shot himself at one point to frame John. Is it risky? Definitely. But EJ would have learned from Stefano that sometimes you have to take big risks. Plus, Rolf’s always on standby if anything goes too wrong.

Add in EJ’s speech to himself before the shooting in which he listed off all his enemies, and he could have been setting up Rafe’s wiretap to set the stage and prepare the way for EJ to frame one of the folks he hates for trying to kill him. Which one? That’s not entirely clear, and it could be some time yet before we’d know.

If EJ did set the whole thing up after discovering the bug, but he’s forgotten everything from seeing Rafe onward, then he could have forgotten the plan. He might think he was genuinely shot.

In other words, his plan might have gone wrong. Maybe the bullet did more damage than he expected. Maybe he didn’t get shot where he was hoping. He was rushed to the hospital, suffered seizures, put in a coma and the trauma wiped the plan from his mind. For a time.

EJ forgetting about Rafe’s visit could be an important clue from the show writers, not because Gabi’s brother is the shooter — as we pointed out, planting a bug, then shooting someone afterwards would be utterly insane — but because the recording is integral to what happened and why. If he knew it was there, he may have used it as part of his plan.

So when EJ inevitably does remember that night and does name his shooter, we should all take what he says with a very large grain of salt. Because it might just be the culmination of the plan he set in motion that fateful night to punish an enemy and perhaps turn the town’s hatred into sympathy in the process.