Here's the first award for EastEnders under Dominic Treadwell-Collins ... Ladies and gentlemen, I give you EastEnders, recipient of The Great Red Herring Award for presenting the public with so many obviously false clues ...
We're being promised a build-up, the likes of which we've never seen before, in the run-up to Lucy Beale's death. But will the public, apart from the fanbois, really care? Lucy, for all she is an important third, maybe fourth, generation legacy character (Lou-Pete-Ian-Lucy), is and always has been one of the most unlikeable young people on the show. People wanted to smack the shit out of Melissa Suffield's Lucy; viewers want to stuff roast chicken legs into the continuously opened gob of the underfed and distinctly undertalented Hetti Bywater.
Now we're being presented with the first red herring in this situation - Jamie Lomas's contract isn't being renewed. I'll wager Lomas has known this for quite awhile, or rather, he sniffed it out - otherwise, he wouldn't have made such a big hint remark at the NTA awards, about hoping for his contract to be extended beyond its summer deadline.
Jake is leaving, and suddenly, he's going to develop an interest in Lucy. WTF? My guess is that Jake will leave in a box, courtesy of Ronnie, because of an entanglement with Roxy, after having been entangled with Lucy, and for awhile, people will believe Jake was responsible for Lucy's death - in a way people believed (until Monday night) - that dead Bradley was responsible for Archie's demise.
It ain't necessarily so, fanbois ... as the song says ...
The Sacriment of Confession.
Before the usual suspects crawl from the woodwork and start hurling abuse, let me say that Monday's episode was a particularly good and watchable one, even though it was mainly Stacey-centric, and as you know, I'm no fan of Stacey's.
This episode was awash with confessions or allusions to confessions - Kat and Alfie, Max and Stacey, Stacey and Roxy, Stacey and Mick - all leading up to the grande finale, of course. Since many of these border over into the sacriment of penance, I'll only concentrate on Kat and Alfie here for the moment.
The "dark secret", which turned out to be nothing, and its resolution turned out to be more than nothing. It turned out to be a joke.
Kat's "confessed" to committing perjury, she informs Saint Stacey of the Furrowed Brow and Flared Nostrils that Janine has dropped all charges and Stacey is now free to return to Walford. However, the price to be paid will be Kat returning to court to be tried for perjury. Of course, she reckons she'll get no more than a slap on the wrist. I'll bet. The last thing you'll see around April time is the shocked look on Kat's face as she's led from the courtroom to the cellsto begin rehearsals for her West End play to serve a few months inside.
Of course, Alfie has a confession, himself, to make, and the off-hand and rushed way it was treated and resolved, gives the astute viewer the definite idea that Wonderboy DTC doesn't rated either Kat or Alfie as all that important in the general scope of characters. Alfie ... Billy ... Terry Spraggan ... nice guys, who'll always finish last.
But what skewed this morality tale was not Kat's instant forgiveness and the Moons' promise to each other to have no more secrets, it was the fact that both completely disregarded the fact that Alfie had scammed an innocent woman out of a lot of money, and she exacted revenge by taking the Moons' means of earning a living - so they're back to Square One, instead of Albert Square. In fact, they're back to diddly-squat if Kat's business sense is anything by which to judge the couple. I mean, Kat, Stacey and Bianca selling dingy, damp tat being made wet in the rain and making a living wage between the three?
I doubt - in fact, I hope - that the Moons enter into more self-serving scams and that Alfie gets a job in the bookies; but I have a curious feeling that this was DTC's way of backburnering the Moons into what he conceives to be their "place."
We'll see ...
The Sacrifice of Penance.
OK, so if this were a Friends episode, it would be entitled "The One Where Stacey Does Penance." Because that's what she does.
And as watchable as this was, this whole Stacey ordeal was one piece of cack-handed tripe. First, DTC must have been aware that there was a rather loud and rather intelligent contingent of viewers who, for some weird reason, don't particularly like to see a character walk free from what was a cold-blooded murder. I mean, who was more popular than Dennis Rickman as a character, and he killed Jack Dalton, a bad man? And Dennis paid for that with his life.
DTC knew that somehow, Stacey would need to acknowledge responsibility for her crime, something she'd never done, and something she probably never would have done, had Kat not spied her on a London street. Nope, Stacey was that entitled, that she'd have happily lived out the rest of her life as Jenny, with Luke and Lily, the five year-old three year-old who looks uncannily like the very first actress to have played Janine.
Even though she didn't intend on doing it, even though Kat was deluded and desperate enough to tell Stacey that she'd "done nothing wrong," the truth was ... that Stacey had done something wrong. Even though the increasingly insane Ronnie told Stacey that she had "paid her dues," she hadn't. More than anything, this act of confession and penance was done to clear Bradley's name. Coming back to Walford was something Stacey didn't want to do, because she knew that the past would rear its head and bite her skinny arse. She'd be forced to see Bradley on every street corner, forced to walk past the place he fell to his death, forced to deal with his sisters and Archie Mitchell's one unforgiving daughter.
I'm glad she was made to feel uneasy. She deserved it.
And so TPTB, on a PR drive to make Stacey likeable once more (and, face it, her return has been a wash-out), spend an entire episode turning her from victim into saintly martyr - first, after cowardly hiding from Bianca's gobby rant, she endeavours to make Bianca see why Kat told the lie she did. (One niggling part of this Kat-Stacey shit was Kat refusing to "allow" Stacey even to consider living with Jean in Brighton. Why ever not? Jean is her mother, and they are close. All well and good that Jean "has Ollie," but Stacey is her daughter, and the sprog is her granddaughter, and Jean has been low on family since Stacey left.
Next, she made things abundantly clear to Max - and to Max is awarded the line of the night, after warning Jake Stone off Lauren:-
Sometimes a person gets in your head and you can't get'em out.
That's the problem with Max re Stacey, but I don't believe Stacey when she says that the tie that binds the two of them is really Bradley. For Max, it's not. Max is governed by lust for Stacey, and something that he imagines is love. When she's around, every other woman takes second place. She's moved on, but I was intrigued by the two brief scenes she had with Mick tonight, because I don't think Stacey's finished with married men. For Bradley, read "Dean," and for Stax, read "Stick."
Finally, not only does she admit responsibility for Archie's death to Roxy, and receives a reluctant approbation from the daughter who loved Archie, she then effects a public penance and confession, calling the police and confessing to the crime at that moment.
Of course, Turner is going away to film six weeks of "Stacey Slater Goes Large in Afghanistan" "Our Girl."
She won't be missed. Well, not by me.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa.
The Creep Factor.
Jake was creepy enough when he had his stubble, needed a bath and had his tongue literally lolling out of his mouth for Lauren, a teenaged girl who looked even younger than her nineteen years. Now, we're asked to believe that both he and Aleks are attracted to the mumbling, anorexic mouth-breather known as Lucy Beale. Lucy looks like a child dressed in grown-up clothing, but watching Aleks and Jake leer after Lucy's emaciated arse and bony legs wasn't only unreal, it was disgusting. It was like two pervs gawping after a child playing grown-up.
And through it all, Lucy comported herself like the spoiled and sulled child she usually is - mumbling her lines petulantly, looking at everything, including sly looks at herself in the camera, except her co-star. To think that Jake would even think about consorting with not one, but two girls only slightly older than his daughter confirms that he's a dirty old man. Maybe that's why Ronnie will kill him. At least, that's what I think. We'll see. But he's the first red herring in Lucy's impending death.
The Sins of Pride and Arrogance.
Out of pride does come a modicum of truth. Full credit to Shabbitch for saying what everyone else, including Jane the Cow ...
isn't saying about Alice. Forget all this bullshit about "innocent Alice, the nice girl," Alice did stab a man, she did conspire to kill a woman and take her child - and Tamwar's grieving her? He's grieving someone who treated him, essentially, like a cold turd. And Mas still describes Alice as a nice girl? Myra Hindley's neighbours said the same thing about her.
Shabnam certainly is MiniZainab, thinking that the way to Tamwar's happiness is a nice lunch, but nooooooooooo .....
Here we have Jane, the Wise Woman of Walford, the Sacred Cow plopped amongst a household of Muslims, who knows exactly what Tamwar needs - tickets to a stand-up comedy night. And Shabnam's efforts go unnoticed and unappreciated.
I'm not a fan of Shabnam, but I'm even less a fan of the smug, bovine woman full of her own self-importance and quick to make a judgement on a life she voluntarily left behind.
I want to see Shabnam nut her one in her big fat face.
Good episode.
We're being promised a build-up, the likes of which we've never seen before, in the run-up to Lucy Beale's death. But will the public, apart from the fanbois, really care? Lucy, for all she is an important third, maybe fourth, generation legacy character (Lou-Pete-Ian-Lucy), is and always has been one of the most unlikeable young people on the show. People wanted to smack the shit out of Melissa Suffield's Lucy; viewers want to stuff roast chicken legs into the continuously opened gob of the underfed and distinctly undertalented Hetti Bywater.
Now we're being presented with the first red herring in this situation - Jamie Lomas's contract isn't being renewed. I'll wager Lomas has known this for quite awhile, or rather, he sniffed it out - otherwise, he wouldn't have made such a big hint remark at the NTA awards, about hoping for his contract to be extended beyond its summer deadline.
Jake is leaving, and suddenly, he's going to develop an interest in Lucy. WTF? My guess is that Jake will leave in a box, courtesy of Ronnie, because of an entanglement with Roxy, after having been entangled with Lucy, and for awhile, people will believe Jake was responsible for Lucy's death - in a way people believed (until Monday night) - that dead Bradley was responsible for Archie's demise.
It ain't necessarily so, fanbois ... as the song says ...
The Sacriment of Confession.
Before the usual suspects crawl from the woodwork and start hurling abuse, let me say that Monday's episode was a particularly good and watchable one, even though it was mainly Stacey-centric, and as you know, I'm no fan of Stacey's.
This episode was awash with confessions or allusions to confessions - Kat and Alfie, Max and Stacey, Stacey and Roxy, Stacey and Mick - all leading up to the grande finale, of course. Since many of these border over into the sacriment of penance, I'll only concentrate on Kat and Alfie here for the moment.
The "dark secret", which turned out to be nothing, and its resolution turned out to be more than nothing. It turned out to be a joke.
Kat's "confessed" to committing perjury, she informs Saint Stacey of the Furrowed Brow and Flared Nostrils that Janine has dropped all charges and Stacey is now free to return to Walford. However, the price to be paid will be Kat returning to court to be tried for perjury. Of course, she reckons she'll get no more than a slap on the wrist. I'll bet. The last thing you'll see around April time is the shocked look on Kat's face as she's led from the courtroom to the cells
Of course, Alfie has a confession, himself, to make, and the off-hand and rushed way it was treated and resolved, gives the astute viewer the definite idea that Wonderboy DTC doesn't rated either Kat or Alfie as all that important in the general scope of characters. Alfie ... Billy ... Terry Spraggan ... nice guys, who'll always finish last.
But what skewed this morality tale was not Kat's instant forgiveness and the Moons' promise to each other to have no more secrets, it was the fact that both completely disregarded the fact that Alfie had scammed an innocent woman out of a lot of money, and she exacted revenge by taking the Moons' means of earning a living - so they're back to Square One, instead of Albert Square. In fact, they're back to diddly-squat if Kat's business sense is anything by which to judge the couple. I mean, Kat, Stacey and Bianca selling dingy, damp tat being made wet in the rain and making a living wage between the three?
I doubt - in fact, I hope - that the Moons enter into more self-serving scams and that Alfie gets a job in the bookies; but I have a curious feeling that this was DTC's way of backburnering the Moons into what he conceives to be their "place."
We'll see ...
The Sacrifice of Penance.
OK, so if this were a Friends episode, it would be entitled "The One Where Stacey Does Penance." Because that's what she does.
And as watchable as this was, this whole Stacey ordeal was one piece of cack-handed tripe. First, DTC must have been aware that there was a rather loud and rather intelligent contingent of viewers who, for some weird reason, don't particularly like to see a character walk free from what was a cold-blooded murder. I mean, who was more popular than Dennis Rickman as a character, and he killed Jack Dalton, a bad man? And Dennis paid for that with his life.
DTC knew that somehow, Stacey would need to acknowledge responsibility for her crime, something she'd never done, and something she probably never would have done, had Kat not spied her on a London street. Nope, Stacey was that entitled, that she'd have happily lived out the rest of her life as Jenny, with Luke and Lily, the five year-old three year-old who looks uncannily like the very first actress to have played Janine.
Even though she didn't intend on doing it, even though Kat was deluded and desperate enough to tell Stacey that she'd "done nothing wrong," the truth was ... that Stacey had done something wrong. Even though the increasingly insane Ronnie told Stacey that she had "paid her dues," she hadn't. More than anything, this act of confession and penance was done to clear Bradley's name. Coming back to Walford was something Stacey didn't want to do, because she knew that the past would rear its head and bite her skinny arse. She'd be forced to see Bradley on every street corner, forced to walk past the place he fell to his death, forced to deal with his sisters and Archie Mitchell's one unforgiving daughter.
I'm glad she was made to feel uneasy. She deserved it.
And so TPTB, on a PR drive to make Stacey likeable once more (and, face it, her return has been a wash-out), spend an entire episode turning her from victim into saintly martyr - first, after cowardly hiding from Bianca's gobby rant, she endeavours to make Bianca see why Kat told the lie she did. (One niggling part of this Kat-Stacey shit was Kat refusing to "allow" Stacey even to consider living with Jean in Brighton. Why ever not? Jean is her mother, and they are close. All well and good that Jean "has Ollie," but Stacey is her daughter, and the sprog is her granddaughter, and Jean has been low on family since Stacey left.
Next, she made things abundantly clear to Max - and to Max is awarded the line of the night, after warning Jake Stone off Lauren:-
Sometimes a person gets in your head and you can't get'em out.
That's the problem with Max re Stacey, but I don't believe Stacey when she says that the tie that binds the two of them is really Bradley. For Max, it's not. Max is governed by lust for Stacey, and something that he imagines is love. When she's around, every other woman takes second place. She's moved on, but I was intrigued by the two brief scenes she had with Mick tonight, because I don't think Stacey's finished with married men. For Bradley, read "Dean," and for Stax, read "Stick."
Finally, not only does she admit responsibility for Archie's death to Roxy, and receives a reluctant approbation from the daughter who loved Archie, she then effects a public penance and confession, calling the police and confessing to the crime at that moment.
Of course, Turner is going away to film six weeks of "
She won't be missed. Well, not by me.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa.
The Creep Factor.
Jake was creepy enough when he had his stubble, needed a bath and had his tongue literally lolling out of his mouth for Lauren, a teenaged girl who looked even younger than her nineteen years. Now, we're asked to believe that both he and Aleks are attracted to the mumbling, anorexic mouth-breather known as Lucy Beale. Lucy looks like a child dressed in grown-up clothing, but watching Aleks and Jake leer after Lucy's emaciated arse and bony legs wasn't only unreal, it was disgusting. It was like two pervs gawping after a child playing grown-up.
And through it all, Lucy comported herself like the spoiled and sulled child she usually is - mumbling her lines petulantly, looking at everything, including sly looks at herself in the camera, except her co-star. To think that Jake would even think about consorting with not one, but two girls only slightly older than his daughter confirms that he's a dirty old man. Maybe that's why Ronnie will kill him. At least, that's what I think. We'll see. But he's the first red herring in Lucy's impending death.
The Sins of Pride and Arrogance.
Out of pride does come a modicum of truth. Full credit to Shabbitch for saying what everyone else, including Jane the Cow ...
Shabnam certainly is MiniZainab, thinking that the way to Tamwar's happiness is a nice lunch, but nooooooooooo .....
Here we have Jane, the Wise Woman of Walford, the Sacred Cow plopped amongst a household of Muslims, who knows exactly what Tamwar needs - tickets to a stand-up comedy night. And Shabnam's efforts go unnoticed and unappreciated.
I'm not a fan of Shabnam, but I'm even less a fan of the smug, bovine woman full of her own self-importance and quick to make a judgement on a life she voluntarily left behind.
I want to see Shabnam nut her one in her big fat face.
Good episode.
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