With proposals, paternity reveals and pyrotechnics galore, the Days of Our Lives winter preview has viewers all fired up. It’s also left some folks scratching their heads or combing their memory banks where John’s extremely twisty backstory is concerned — myself included!

As you might expect, the bold text declaring “PAWNS” as something heading our way, paired with a scene of John at the Brady Pub, remembering “how lost I was when Steve found me,” is not about a really good game of chess they had while he was all bandaged up and bed-ridden some years ago. (Though if John and Steve want to do their own version of The Queen’s Gambit, I won’t complain.) It’s actually a callback to John’s introduction to the show!

Since I only started watching Days of Our Lives in 1991, I missed that entire storyline and only heard about it later — and promptly forgot the details. Don’t worry, I went back down the “What’s up with the Pawn?” rabbit hole (so you all don’t have to), and here’s what we Salem newbies need to know!

The Opening Move

The laid-back family patriarch we know now as John Black first appeared on the show in late 1985 as a mysterious bandaged man who had undergone facial reconstruction surgery. (As one does.) He was a hot commodity amongst a cadre of villains — Victor Kiriakis, slimy ISA chief George Nickerson and Stefano DiMera’s crony Illya Petrov — in a twisted game involving “The Purse,” “The Power” and “The Pawn.” (Couldn’t they play poker like normal people? Apparently not.)

Figuring out the chain of custody for the prized Pawn was no easy task, for the characters or for me! Fortunately, a seasoned Days of Our Lives viewer on Twitter came to my rescue. “We saw Petrov bring the Pawn to Salem and deliver him to Victor,” explains X user Joeiscool1981. “Nurse Honeycutt and Victor then worked on his brain conditioning. The Pawn later escaped out of the back of an ambulance and that’s when Steve found him.”

Steve knew who the pre-surgery Pawn really was and was happy to use that info to try and put the squeeze on Victor. (As the years passed, Days of Our Lives would hand-wave away that detail.) Money-hungry Steve was none-too-happy when his pay-dirt Pawn skedaddled from his custody on New Year’s Eve.

What do you mean, we weren’t always besties?

Credit: Jill Johnson/JPI

Getting Pawned Off

Drake Hogestyn aired in the role starting in January of 1986. The bandages were off, but the mystery man’s memory didn’t come along with that handsome face. The amnesiac took the name “John Black” off a war veterans wall memorial and began to grow close to a beautiful psychiatrist named Marlena Evans. The only moniker he’d known up to that point was the Pawn.

It would eventually turn out that he was Stefano’s pawn specifically and brainwashed to be an assassin. But that revelation only came after folks thought he might be the dastardly DiMera himself! While John and Marlena were trying to solve the puzzle of his real identity and his original face in April of 1986, Marlena spied the phoenix tattoo on his shoulder and was stunned to recognize Stefano’s signature image. It did not go well.

Pawn Takes Queen

That same year, John and Marlena would establish that he wasn’t the supervillain who, two years prior, had shot her husband Roman Brady on a clifftop and sent him plunging to his presumed death. Whew!

No, their conclusion was even weirder than that. After Marlena found a plastic surgeon’s file with before-and-after photos, she decided John was, in fact, a very not-dead Roman. (Did he get plastic surgery on his entire body, too? We don’t ask these questions in Salem.) Marlena and “Roman” settled back into happy married life, very much in love and raising kids Carrie, Eric and Sami — at least until it was Marlena’s turn to be presumed dead in 1987.

In the time following that tragedy, Days of Our Lives delved more deeply into what exactly Stefano had done to “Roman” during his Pawn years. Of course, since the real Roman (and this time they meant it!) came back in 1991, along with a very-much-alive Marlena, we know that’s not where the labyrinthine chess game of John’s identity ended.

Could this upcoming story, all these decades later, finally be checkmate?

Revisit the dizzying days of John Black’s life via our photo gallery below.