Tuesday, April 30, 2013

EastEnders: Bullies and Entitlement - Review 30.04.2013

I realised tonight that, for the most part, I find many of the characters pushed at us deeply unpleasant and unlikeable. They are the worst sort of people, and the fact that so many brainless, dimwits oozing admiration in their direction from the confines of fora, Facebook, Twitter and other assorted places reflect the worst part of Britain - the selfish, entitled, ignorant, semi-literate I'm-All-Right-Jack-Fuck-You borderline violence of chav society.

I found tonight's episode extremely difficult to watch - not because it was bad (it was), but because it showed various sorts of bullying, belligerant behaviour in several of the main characters toward people who were clearly vulnerable. The other scenes fed off a formerly iconic original character who's been so badly written this time around that the actress in question has requested a time out for her character, with instructions to a singularly inadequate writing room to sort her character out, because Sharon Mach III is all wrong.

I wish more actors had the chutzpah of Letitia Dean. How many read what's said about them on fora and recognise, themselves, that a characterisation is wrong from the getgo. No one knew Sharon better than the actress who's played her, off and on, for the past 28 years. Her latest reincarnation depicts her as a weak-willed wet blanket, utterly dependent off a man's company, desperate to be friends with the Square's resident yummy mummy, who happens to be a scrubbed-up version of poor white trash.

Letitia Dean was right in suggesting to TPTB that Sharon needed a female friend. As much as she was always into the Mitchells, Sharon always interacted well with other females on the show - the fable friendship with Michelle, Pauline, Pat, her sister Vicky and (until she was exposed as Den's murderer) Chrissie. But Dean, in no way, suggested a Tanya-Sharon friendship. However, in pitching a female friend for Sharon, she gave Simon Suck-the-Brannings'-Collective-Asshole Ashdown free rein to create Sharon in Tanya's shallow image and not only make the two bosom buddies, but attach Sharon emotionally to Jack Branning and bring her into the Branning fold.

And that was disastrous.

Tonight was the worst of the ethos EastEnders is promoting at the moment - bullying culture.

It's no wonder that a strain of bullyboi behaviour pervades Digital Spy and, especially, Walford Web discussion fora.

I hated this episode.

Since EastEnders is now appealing to the childish element (yes xTonix lollol, I mean you and you, Mr Bex and *Betty*), this song is for you ... and Kat and Bianca and Michael and Carol ...


Mr Passive-Aggressive

Michael Moon is doing what we've seen him try to do before. 

Scarper.

Remember when Janine was sitting, waiting at the hospital with a very ill baby and a consultant who wanted to speak to both of Scarlett's parents, and Michael was nowhere to be found. His phone was turned off, he was incommunicado. Janine sent Whitney, in desperation, to Walford to find him, and find him, she did ... with his bags packed and ready to leave.

He was caught again tonight.

Please. Disabuse yourself of the notion that Michael loves his daughter. He doesn't. She is a tool whereby he's able to scam and use other people to his own advantage. A single man with a young child is always pitiable - so pitiable that people whom he's hurt and hurt badly in the past (Roxy, Kat, Janine) are willing to forget his lamentable sins, for which he's never apologised.

Odd, how Michael scammed major money from Jean, even ensuring that she embezzled from her family and employer, only to have Janine, who was wealthy in her own right, be blamed for that sting - even though it was Janine who repaid, in full, every penny of the money Michael scammed. Oh, and the money was scammed off Michael's family, it must be said.

Scarlett is also an object, which is how Michael sees her. An object that someone else wants, so he's willing to take his toy and run away with it. Pschopaths can charm the magnolia blossoms off trees, but they can't love or bond with other people. Scarlett is an object which is necessary for Michael's scamming success. Without her, he becomes just another dodgy businessman in a sharp suit, with no money and no hope of any.

Michael has a thing against mothers. In his own warped mind, his very own psychopathic mother betrayed him with her death, which was orchestrated inadvertantly by herself, so now he projects all that anger and rage onto Janine, which is what he did from the very beginning - telling her how inadequate and awful a mother she was, planting doubts in her mind at a time in her life when she was most vulnerable, suffering from PND and clearly hormonal.

It's easy for him to promote a sympathetic image of himself and Janine as the bugaboo, especially since Janine wasn't the most popular of people in Walford, herself, and also since she has no real family to come to her aid and defend her person.

He plays himself as the eternal victim - whining to the insipid and singularly stupid Alice about how unfair "the system" was in that he was unable to qualify for legal aid. He's supposedly the part-owner of a business, so he has assets in excess of a certain amount of money, yet he as no bank account and takes whateve is given him by the real owner as cash-in-hand.

I'm glad Janine's guard went down briefly tonight, when she mentioned counselling and control being an issue. So it's clear that Janine's journeying - if, indeed, she did travel the earth - included an extended spell of counselling. It wouldn't surprise me if she didn't flee Britain for someplace like France or Australia (where she has relatives, one of whom is a healthcare professional) or even Canada or the US, where she sought psychiatric help - not necessarily for her PND, but for all her other demons stemming from her childhood and her parental situation.

It showed her humanity and her vulnerability. It also showed, although the Michael-shippers will refuse to see it, what a totally heartless, cold and ruthless bully Michael was - the way he insinuated how inadequate a person and a mother Janine was, chipping away, bit by bit, at her fragile self-esteem; but I'm glad she rose to the occasion and reminded him of one of the common bonds held between them - that they'd both grown up with and lost mothers early on in their lives under tragic circumstances, something she never wanted her daughter to suffer.

Interesting to note - and again, the Michael-knicker-creamers will disagree - that Janine clung to the hope that Michael did, one time, love her, yet he maintains that he never did. That's probably the one bit of truth he's told. He wanted her money, and he wanted control of her and her fortune. Once she took that away and left him with the child, after being convinced that she was the lowest of the low, he had nothing and had to use the child to get by.

Michael didn't grow up; Janine did. MIchael used Alice to get free childcare, first from Roxy, then from the totally stupid Alice, who sees everything through a schoolgirl crush, and who's ripe for the manipulations of a psychopath, and occasionally from creepy Jean.

Don't ever forget that Jean told Janine her baby wouldn't be loved, and Katshit the bitch told her that Michael didn't love either her or the baby.

Don't feel sorry for Michael. He wouldn't feel sorry for you. He's lost his meal ticket, otherwise known as Scarlett.

Fat Barbituate: Denny is NOT Mother's Little Helper



Sharon the drug addict. No wonder Letitia Dean is taking a break. Not just taking a break, but taking a break whilst putting a flea in Lorraine Newman's ear either to sort out Sharon or else.

What a drag it is being jilted at the altar by Jack Branning! To this version of Sharon, that's a fate worse than death.

Dean's doing the right thing by stepping back and giving the incompetents running this programme a chance at damage limitation re her character. It's one thing to destroy Kat, a character TPTB had raised to near-iconic status. It's another to make Bianca totally vile and borderline retarded. It's quite another thing entirely to utterly destroy an original character and one who was the daughter of Den and Ange.

She went from eating Phil's face to having a self-pity party with Tanya to taking funds from a business in which she has a share to fund her habit.

Question: Why did she take money from the till? Sharon is management and a shareholder in the business. Surely she had enough money of her own to buy her fix. And from the way she told the dealer that what she wanted could be bought on prescription but not int the UK, I would reckon she's addicted to Vicodin, which is a Class A drug in the UK and not available by prescription - so any of the assholes on Walford Web Bullyboi Academy or Digital Spy reckoning she's addicted to paracetamol or ibuprofen need to insert foot into mouth and shove.

If the sobstory she told Tanya were true, I'm not surprised that Denny is having nightmares every three hours a night. His mother is a bloody walking nightmare, herself; and she's enough to frighten the kid, with her peripatetic lifestyle. 

This Sharon is not Sharon. She's some totally weak and vapid character introduced as Sharon, but the long-term viewer sees only a stranger, whom we're told is Sharon (as much as we're told that Cora the Bora is the new Square matriarch). We're not buying either.

Yep, Sharon's an addict. She lies to cover the fact that she'd do anything for a fix, and she knows Tanya (who was weaned on drugs, herself) is dim enough to buy the pity line about migraine headaches.

Spare me.

I don't know what was more comical - Sharon chewing two capsules purloined from Tanya's kitchen bin (why is it soap characters seem to be able to take capsules without a swallow of water?) or whiney, self-entitled, selfish Lauren sulking on the sofa and mourning being dumped by Joey.

I'm still baffled that Tanya and the rest of the family seem to take Lauren fucking her cousin as totally normal.

Still, as Lauren asserted, at least she's not a "feevin' junkie."

WORST. ACTRESS. EVER. IN. EASTENDERS.


The Embarrassment Known as The Masoods.

Even Men Behaving Badly and Two-and-a-Half Men are better by far, and they're pretty cringeworthy.

Masood is mooning after Carol Jackson. This is Masood, a practicing Muslim, although this seems to have been left by the wayside, as well as the fact that Masood wouldn't touch a single mother with four children by four different men and lax morals even in the wake of the menopause with a barge pole.

Tamwar had the most sensible line of the night: He still missed his mother, although Masood admits to only missing her occasionally.

It was, frankly, butt-clinchingly pukeworthy to watch Carol and Masood kabuki-dance, throwing sheep's eyes and blushing smiles at each other like a couple of shy high-school kids, determining who would ask whom on a date. Nice that Carol's got the innate approval of her margially retarded daughter, Bianca; it means free tutorials for her ungrateful children and all the curry they can eat.

This is not love's young dream. It's Lorraine's attempt at love and warmth by throwing together two people of similar age with nothing in common simply because they were both at loose ends. If nothing better can be drummed up for Lindsey Coulson or Nitin Ganatra, then these characters should just be discontinued.

Mas and Carol are not Fred and Ginger.



The Emasculation of Jay ...

Abi the Dough-Faced Girl, the Little Cock her cousin, and Jay have become bores. This is nothing new for Abi the Dough-Faced Girl or Cock, who is a pointless character whose very being detracts from Jay's screen presence. Jay has now been domesticated to a point where actually death was welcomed by Jamie Mitchell. The next thing we'll see is Jay in a pinny, doing the washing up. As things stand, this riveting storyline is a contest between him and Little Cock, the show's resident stereotypical workshy urban Negro youth, to see who works harder.

In a broader sense, Jay's complaining about Cock trying to boss him around. Could this be a subtle manifestation of white privilege? Unintentionally, I think it is.

Abi is just a crushing bore of an unpleasant girl. She should just leave with her mother. Jay used to be an interesting and edgy character. The worst mistake was pairing him with this doughgirl. She looks, acts and sounds like a twelve year-old.

The Big Bullies.

I hate Kat and Bianca.

I'm not a fan of Mr Lister, and I know he's supposed to be an occasional, blustering and comic figure, but he's also someone who's just doing his job. As much as Bianca has spent the past month wah-wah-wahing about how her boy was being bullied by Kane and the Gang, how "nuffink" was his fault and how everyone should help her wah-wah-wah, she indulges in full-scale bullying of someone who's simply doing his job. 

This isn't funny. Lister, out of the kindness of his heart and after the two spoke of their own family situation before Christmas, lifted his ban, which was part of her probation, from working on the Square or on Bridge Street. This is how she repays him. And not only that, she and Kat have openly and brutally bullied Tamwar - calling him weirdo, Kat taking him to her home for a bit of passive-aggressive bullying. Their behaviour tonight was nothing short of cruel - undermining his position with the market traders by labelling him a prat, mucking about with the joke sunglasses and filling his tea with salt.

People should try that tactic with them. And I wonder how smitten Masood would be if he saw Carol unjustly badger and berate Lister whilst harbouring the disgusting Kat and Bianca who were hidden in the cafe's loo. These are not some teenaged idiots like Lauren. We're talking about a thirtysomething and fortysomething, both of whom have children. It's no wonder Bianca's kids are rude and misbehaving, and I fear for Tommy, with that as an example. And, of course, it was all a joke when their livelihood is justifiably ripped from them for three weeks.

Actually, he was right to condemn the state of their stall. Anyone could easily have tripped over those cardboard boxes, and that was contravening Health and Safety rules.

I also wonder how attracted Masood would be to Carol if he knew her putrid daughter was responsible for bullying his son during working hours.

Yet another forced friendship that does nothing for either Kat or Bianca.

I'm still waiting for this journey of self-discovery Newman promised us in Kat's redemption; because it's almost May now, and all I see is a cold-hearted, mean and sniping skank bitch, who's always the victim, but never the perp.

Someone should have balls enough to call time on these two.

Bad episode,for all the wrong reasons.


1 comment:

  1. Horrendous episode. Bianca and Kat as screaming unsympathetic banshees picking on someone whose only crime is to be short, overweight and take his job seriously.

    Last week Mon-Thurs were pretty decent (relatively speaking) but Friday's and this week have declined. In the past month, her kid has run off with a gang, been stabbed and now moved to be with his father. Is it ridiculous to expect Bianca to be subdued, wondering about Liam, still fearful for her family. If she is, then the writer decided to take the easy/lazy way out and have her overcompensating by being the loudmouth bully. It's atrocious and symptomatic of the misogyny that runs through this show - ironic for one that harps on about the importance of the 'matriarch'.

    Kat strikes me as a character who doesn't have a clue who she is - or should that be the writers don't have a clue? She's a mother, she's a seductress, she's hard as nails, she's a slut who'll give the market inspector a flash of tit for a casual pitch. I'm all for complex characters but Kat's just a mish-mash these days, she doesn't make sense. She should go. Now.

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