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Over the years, fans of The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless have thought countless times that they’d seen the last of Sheila Carter. She’d been “killed.” She’d been institutionalized. She’d been incarcerated. She’d been run out of town. But like the bad penny that she is, she’s just kept turning up again and again.

Well, not this time. The Bold and the Beautiful has on its hands a golden opportunity to not only dispatch the homicidal maniac once and for all but to return to the fore Susan Flannery’s much-missed queen bee, Stephanie Forrester. How? By having Brooke take a whack at stepping into that role.

Pushed beyond her wit’s end by Sheila’s continued presence in the proximity of the lives of everyone she loves, Brooke says to herself, “Look, somebody’s gotta do it. If Stephanie was here, it would be her. But she’s gone. Who does that leave?

“Steffy tried. She failed,” she goes on. “It’s not gonna be Donna, that’s for sure. My sister is many things, but tough ain’t one of them. Hell, if Quinn could leave her shaking in her shoes, Sheila would altogether give her seizures!”

Brooke reasons that she’s perfectly positioned to pick up where Stephanie left off. “With every slap, every insult, every cruel plot, she was training me,” Brooke thinks to herself. “I may not have known it at the time. She may not have realized it, either. But she was grooming her replacement. And her replacement is ready.”

Ridge, Hope, everyone around Brooke would watch with a mixture of horror and fascination as she took to wearing brooches and tossing out greetings of “Hi” and “Hello” for greetings of “Who let you in?” and “On second thought, who cares? Get out!” And Sheila… oh, she wouldn’t know what hit ’er.

“You’ve changed?” Brooke scoffs. “Big whoop. Be changed somewhere else. You’ve tried to kill everybody that you now want to play Jenga with. We won’t tolerate you. We won’t forgive you. We won’t embrace you. And if anybody is dumb enough to even think about giving you a break — lookin’ at you, Finn — I’ll smack ’em so hard upside the head that they can feel it in their abs!”

Imagine it. Brooke unnerves Sheila by hiring a security detail to follow her everywhere she goes. She calls the police on Sheila if she so much as turns the radio up when “Sweet But Psycho” comes on. She drops by Deacon’s at all hours “just seeing if Hope might be here.” Beside himself, Deacon would ask what his babymama is doing? “Saving your ass,” Brooke hisses, “because apparently, you’re too stupid to do it yourself.”

“I don’t need saving,” he insists. “I love Sheila. She loves me.”

“I rest my case,” Brooke says, adding, “It’ll be a shame for Hope to lose her father, but if you’re really determined to play mental asylum with Miss Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, I suggest you do it somewhere far, far away from Los Angeles.”

“I’m not leaving my daughter,” Deacon argues.

“So long as you’re with Sheila,” Brooke counters, “you don’t have a daughter. You don’t have [bleep].

“Don’t worry, though,” she continues on her way out the door. “If you really want a kid that badly, I hear your girlfriend is great at stealing them.”