One of the reasons I like EastEnders so much is that, unlike a lot of other soaps I've watched on both sides of the Pond, it's provocative enough to make you think about things. Granted, it came close to dumbing down considerably and playing to the pits under Kirkwood and Newman, but most of the time, DTC seems to be striving towards critical thinking once again.
This was the best episode thus far this week, after two mediocre ones. We said good-bye to Aleks, a character who was never meant to last a long time anyway (the actor wanted to move on), and it was nice to have a "normal" episode where the recent deaths seem to take a backseat to the action.
Starting at the top and going down ...
Say Goodbye to the Fly Guy.
Now, let me get my head around this.
In one episode, Aleks goes from betrayed boyfriend (and a victim) to a callous thief and a cheat, whilst Ronnie becomes the sympathetic victim.
I want to scream with laughter at the sheer audacity and brilliance of EastEnders in this respect.
Do I like Ronnie? No. I think she's a psychopath, and I'll never ever stop shouting from the rafters that she's a fucking cold-blooded murderer, for Christ's sake, and she's allowed the freedom of Walford. Add kidnapping to her rap sheet, something for which she's never shown remorse.
The poor woman. She's suffered enough.
Thus saith Aleks, who intended to tell her all about her husband's infidelity with her sister, as "the poor woman" sat weakly in her hospital bed. Aleks should know that "the poor woman" is sitting in that hospital bed because she robbed her cousin blind in order to try to get her lowlife father-in-law to leave town. He got word of the fact that she wanted him dead and thought he'd beat her to the punch.
People can argue with me until they're blue in the face about Ronnie's psychopathy, Michael Moon, also a psychopath, recogised and pronounced her one, and that's good enough for me.
Here's what I mean by EastEnders making me think: The irony of this whole Roxy-Aleks situation, one year ago, was Ronnie trying to stop the relationship from developing, so convinced was she of Aleks betraying Roxy[ but in the end, it was Roxy who betrayed Aleks.
It doesn't matter how Aleks found out; Roxy and Charlie did little to hide their innate chemistry; but Aleks has other things to think about, with Tamwar finding out how he's been overcharging pitch fees from the market traders. Cast your mind back to one of Aleks's first episodes, which saw him taking Kat's and Bianca's pitch fees from Tamwar (who didn't have a receipt) and pocketing them. Also, remember something else: Aleks's callously erasing Alfie's sicknote message, and causing him his pitch - and Tamwar colluding with the lie. I hope Tamwar remembers to tell Alfie the truth, now that Aleks has gone.
So in one fell swoop, Aleks goes from hero to zero, but he still eludes justice. I imagine he slinks back to Latvia with Marta and Ineta. The door's been left open for his return.
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Roxy the eternal teenager:-
Charlie married Ronnie, the mother of his child, and now he loves Roxy. Roxy loved Aleks, and now she's conflicted. And full of self-pity. Throughout this whole ordeal the only piece of truth that issued from Roxy's mouth was this:-
I love mah sis-TAH.
That's her mantra, repeated over and over. This could mean one of two things.
It could mean that she doesn't really love Ronnie, that she's repeating that over and over until she actually believes it, and she subconsciously acts upon the opposite by making a beeline for every man who's interested in Ronnie.
It could also mean that she really does love Ronnie, that she loves Ronnie and no one else, that her love for Ronnie is almost incestuous and sapphic, but knowing she can't have her in the carnal sense, she contents herself with cultivating an attraction to whatever man happens to be her sister's latest fancy, as a substitute for Ronnie, herself. I actually think Roxy's dilemma is a curious combination of the two.
Ronnie has never allowed Roxy to mature emotionally. Ronnie's has actually convinced Roxy that she couldn't possibly function without Ronnie at hand to clean up whatever mess she left in her wake, and Roxy now believes this. It's the classice low-esteem syndrome, almost. No one looks after Roxy like Ronnie, and their adult lives have consisted mainly of Ronnie wilfully breaking up relationships Roxy begins of her own initiative (Damien, Sean, Alfie) or Roxy spearing men attracted initially to Ronnie (Jack, Charlie) almost as a comeuppance.
Roxy is so woefully inept at everything she does - she's one of the worst mothers in the Square, she's hopeless at business and money management, she's entitled and she regularly betrays her sisiter. As she so accurately put it tonight:-
Even when I try to do right, I get it wrong.
Roxy has loved Aleks for the better part of a year. Even when she found out he was married, she was content enough to be his bit on the side, as long as the wife wasn't in the country. She withstood Aleks's wife calling her a whore to her face for the love of him, and Aleks chose Roxy over Marta. Roxy's big baby lament tonight was that no one ever chose her first - not Jack (who loved Ronnie) or Alfie (who loved Kat). Max turned her down to return to Tanya, with whom he was committed at the time and who was ill. She reckoned Sean didn't choose her first either, but the combined efforts of Archie and Suzy Branning, that horse bolted. Sean left Roxy because he found that Roxy deceived him, so she could have spared the pity party for that one - and for Dr Al Jenkins, who "chose" Roxy to go to Devon with him, but she refused.
I am sure Roxy's feeling guilty (and more than a llittle afraid, considering Ronnie has been known to smash a glass in her face) for having slept with her sister's husband, but I'm betting more that she's feeling guilty and feeling a lot of trepidation at the thought of getting caught in the act. Roxy's done worse by Ronnie this time. Her previous betrayal occurred with Jack, when he and Ronnie were on the outs, but not committed, and then when their divorce was final.
Charlie's the maverick in this instance. He genuinely wants to be with Roxy. He's realised, whilst Ronnie's been whacked out in a coma, that her sister really is the better egg - that Roxy's warm, loving, and kind as opposed to Ronnie's cold and mildly affectionate reserve. Maybe Charlie's had time to think about Ronnie's confession to him that she's killed a man. You kill once, you may kill again, and this woman has shown no remorse.
Make no mistake: that's not a poor, wronged woman lying in a hospital bed whilst her husband and her sister romp in another. This is a bona fidepsychopath, who's heard, from the horses' mouths, themselves, that they've been sleeping together, and believe you me, Ronnie is going to make them pay.
This is, arguably, one of the best unsung storylines of the coming months. It's got all the makings of a psychological thriller. Forget your Kathy-Come-Home; forget Long-Lost-Daddy. This is the one to watch.
Charlie's chosen Roxy.
Somebody gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Man Up.
Oh, look! Tamwar found Charlie's balls!
Thanks to a pep talk by Nancy, Tamwar dropped his usual attitude of not getting involved and avoiding any controversy, to do what was right - confront Aleks, and be canny enough to have a contingency plan to ensure that Aleks gets his just reward. Then, emboldened by his audacity, he stakes a claim to Nancy's affections, by kissing her in the middle of the Vic, under the eyes of her father and his own.
I like Tamcy or Namwar or simply Tamwar and Nancy.
What the Hell Was That All About: Part I - The Cheeky Girls (Puke).
Sonia sucks. Tina sucks. The fact that they've got matching tattoos sucks royally. Carol is right; does Sonia ever think about what that will look like when she gets old?
But noooooooo ... Sonia doesn't think about getting old. Sonia lives for today. For having fun.
Really, Sonia? You have a teenaged daughter, who's responsible and probably miles more mature than you're acting at the moment, under the kosh of a fortysomething woman who's feckless, a liar and a cheat. When Carol ticked the pair of them off in the Vic, Tina assumed the sulky face of a five year-old. I'd so LOVE to see someone smack the shit out of her, and round on Sonia also. But then, Sonia was the one who bullied her daughter out of going to music school for her own selfish interests.
Sonia as the wise woman of Walford, the one who gets Carol to voice her fears? Pur-LEEESE. Carol's encouraged to voice her fears on the simple happy-clappy premise that "life's too short?"
Of course, Carol's worried about her cancer coming back, although the show's given up even pretending that she doesn't have breasts. Most people who've come through cancer worry about that constantly, but all of this was the premise for Carol deciding to attend the Post-Op Support Group, which - I suspect - just might be the beginning of the end of Carol's stay on the Square. That doesn't mean she's going to die. It actually means that Carol might train as a counsellor and leave for a career in that field, for post-op cancer patients. That would be a positive and a first.
But Sonia (and Tina) stank up that entire portion of the episode.
What the Hell Was That All About: Rude Masood.
Oh dear, what happened to Shabnam and Kush? They were so appealing to begin with, even as she acknowledged he hadn't finished grieving for his wife and agreed that their relationship could go ahead without marriage on the horizon.
Now Shabnam's pushing marriage again? Also, her bigotry has moved to the forefront again. Has she forgotten her friendship with Stacey? Or the fact that her secret child - whom, I hope, has been safely adopted and out of the reaches of any search engine - has a father who's a white man? How did such an open-minded and friendly girl become such an old stick? She's judgemental on everything - sitting in the pub watching people get drunk, when she used to neck G & T's quite happily with Dawn and Carly, begrudging Kush a second pint, simply having fun, even eschewing him being affectionate in public.
She's so offended by Tamwar's behaviour that she leaves the pub. She's serious about wanting things done "properly," so she's asking her burka-clad auntie to fix her up with an arranged marriage? Really, Shabnam?
What the hell was that all about? The Masoods, like the Carters, are seriously losing their way a bit.
Two Men and a Boy. Another interesting development tonight was in the Max-Jay-Phil predicament.
Max is in the denial phase of grief over Jim, with a jar of lemon sherberts raining down all sorts of memories of Jim's preference of Jack to Max. He's so affected by the sum content of Jim's late existence, that he leaves Carol alone with the detritus of Jim's life. Sympathy is coming for Max from an odd corner - Jay, who informs Phil that, amongst the gaggle of cars Phil arranged for Max to buy, there may be some stolen vehicles, if not all.
Phil's reaction? Not my problem.
The best scene of the night was the confrontation between Jay and Phil. Jay's sympathetic to Max, because Max has just lost his father, and that resonates with Jay, which causes Phil to go straight for the jugular.
He plays his trump card: Does Jay want to be a part of this family or does he want to back a loser?
More than anything, this hits home to Jay, again, just how much his position in the Mitchell dynamic depends on Phil's grace and favour and his own appropriate behaviour; but Jay is conflicted. Selling stolen cars is something that could land Max in prison, and he doesn't want to see that. He reminds Phil that Max's father has just died.
Phil's defence is magnificently arrogant. He didn't know those cars were bent, and the only thing he's guilty of is feeding the well-known Branning greed. I loved Phil's callous injunction on Jay - Jay could do what he thought was right, or he could do what he's told.
Jay chose the latter, but later his conscience chose something else.
Better episode than the others this week.
This was the best episode thus far this week, after two mediocre ones. We said good-bye to Aleks, a character who was never meant to last a long time anyway (the actor wanted to move on), and it was nice to have a "normal" episode where the recent deaths seem to take a backseat to the action.
Starting at the top and going down ...
Say Goodbye to the Fly Guy.
Now, let me get my head around this.
In one episode, Aleks goes from betrayed boyfriend (and a victim) to a callous thief and a cheat, whilst Ronnie becomes the sympathetic victim.
I want to scream with laughter at the sheer audacity and brilliance of EastEnders in this respect.
Do I like Ronnie? No. I think she's a psychopath, and I'll never ever stop shouting from the rafters that she's a fucking cold-blooded murderer, for Christ's sake, and she's allowed the freedom of Walford. Add kidnapping to her rap sheet, something for which she's never shown remorse.
The poor woman. She's suffered enough.
Thus saith Aleks, who intended to tell her all about her husband's infidelity with her sister, as "the poor woman" sat weakly in her hospital bed. Aleks should know that "the poor woman" is sitting in that hospital bed because she robbed her cousin blind in order to try to get her lowlife father-in-law to leave town. He got word of the fact that she wanted him dead and thought he'd beat her to the punch.
People can argue with me until they're blue in the face about Ronnie's psychopathy, Michael Moon, also a psychopath, recogised and pronounced her one, and that's good enough for me.
Here's what I mean by EastEnders making me think: The irony of this whole Roxy-Aleks situation, one year ago, was Ronnie trying to stop the relationship from developing, so convinced was she of Aleks betraying Roxy[ but in the end, it was Roxy who betrayed Aleks.
It doesn't matter how Aleks found out; Roxy and Charlie did little to hide their innate chemistry; but Aleks has other things to think about, with Tamwar finding out how he's been overcharging pitch fees from the market traders. Cast your mind back to one of Aleks's first episodes, which saw him taking Kat's and Bianca's pitch fees from Tamwar (who didn't have a receipt) and pocketing them. Also, remember something else: Aleks's callously erasing Alfie's sicknote message, and causing him his pitch - and Tamwar colluding with the lie. I hope Tamwar remembers to tell Alfie the truth, now that Aleks has gone.
So in one fell swoop, Aleks goes from hero to zero, but he still eludes justice. I imagine he slinks back to Latvia with Marta and Ineta. The door's been left open for his return.
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Roxy the eternal teenager:-
Charlie married Ronnie, the mother of his child, and now he loves Roxy. Roxy loved Aleks, and now she's conflicted. And full of self-pity. Throughout this whole ordeal the only piece of truth that issued from Roxy's mouth was this:-
I love mah sis-TAH.
That's her mantra, repeated over and over. This could mean one of two things.
It could mean that she doesn't really love Ronnie, that she's repeating that over and over until she actually believes it, and she subconsciously acts upon the opposite by making a beeline for every man who's interested in Ronnie.
It could also mean that she really does love Ronnie, that she loves Ronnie and no one else, that her love for Ronnie is almost incestuous and sapphic, but knowing she can't have her in the carnal sense, she contents herself with cultivating an attraction to whatever man happens to be her sister's latest fancy, as a substitute for Ronnie, herself. I actually think Roxy's dilemma is a curious combination of the two.
Ronnie has never allowed Roxy to mature emotionally. Ronnie's has actually convinced Roxy that she couldn't possibly function without Ronnie at hand to clean up whatever mess she left in her wake, and Roxy now believes this. It's the classice low-esteem syndrome, almost. No one looks after Roxy like Ronnie, and their adult lives have consisted mainly of Ronnie wilfully breaking up relationships Roxy begins of her own initiative (Damien, Sean, Alfie) or Roxy spearing men attracted initially to Ronnie (Jack, Charlie) almost as a comeuppance.
Roxy is so woefully inept at everything she does - she's one of the worst mothers in the Square, she's hopeless at business and money management, she's entitled and she regularly betrays her sisiter. As she so accurately put it tonight:-
Even when I try to do right, I get it wrong.
Roxy has loved Aleks for the better part of a year. Even when she found out he was married, she was content enough to be his bit on the side, as long as the wife wasn't in the country. She withstood Aleks's wife calling her a whore to her face for the love of him, and Aleks chose Roxy over Marta. Roxy's big baby lament tonight was that no one ever chose her first - not Jack (who loved Ronnie) or Alfie (who loved Kat). Max turned her down to return to Tanya, with whom he was committed at the time and who was ill. She reckoned Sean didn't choose her first either, but the combined efforts of Archie and Suzy Branning, that horse bolted. Sean left Roxy because he found that Roxy deceived him, so she could have spared the pity party for that one - and for Dr Al Jenkins, who "chose" Roxy to go to Devon with him, but she refused.
I am sure Roxy's feeling guilty (and more than a llittle afraid, considering Ronnie has been known to smash a glass in her face) for having slept with her sister's husband, but I'm betting more that she's feeling guilty and feeling a lot of trepidation at the thought of getting caught in the act. Roxy's done worse by Ronnie this time. Her previous betrayal occurred with Jack, when he and Ronnie were on the outs, but not committed, and then when their divorce was final.
Charlie's the maverick in this instance. He genuinely wants to be with Roxy. He's realised, whilst Ronnie's been whacked out in a coma, that her sister really is the better egg - that Roxy's warm, loving, and kind as opposed to Ronnie's cold and mildly affectionate reserve. Maybe Charlie's had time to think about Ronnie's confession to him that she's killed a man. You kill once, you may kill again, and this woman has shown no remorse.
Make no mistake: that's not a poor, wronged woman lying in a hospital bed whilst her husband and her sister romp in another. This is a bona fidepsychopath, who's heard, from the horses' mouths, themselves, that they've been sleeping together, and believe you me, Ronnie is going to make them pay.
This is, arguably, one of the best unsung storylines of the coming months. It's got all the makings of a psychological thriller. Forget your Kathy-Come-Home; forget Long-Lost-Daddy. This is the one to watch.
Charlie's chosen Roxy.
Somebody gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Man Up.
Oh, look! Tamwar found Charlie's balls!
Thanks to a pep talk by Nancy, Tamwar dropped his usual attitude of not getting involved and avoiding any controversy, to do what was right - confront Aleks, and be canny enough to have a contingency plan to ensure that Aleks gets his just reward. Then, emboldened by his audacity, he stakes a claim to Nancy's affections, by kissing her in the middle of the Vic, under the eyes of her father and his own.
I like Tamcy or Namwar or simply Tamwar and Nancy.
What the Hell Was That All About: Part I - The Cheeky Girls (Puke).
Sonia sucks. Tina sucks. The fact that they've got matching tattoos sucks royally. Carol is right; does Sonia ever think about what that will look like when she gets old?
But noooooooo ... Sonia doesn't think about getting old. Sonia lives for today. For having fun.
Really, Sonia? You have a teenaged daughter, who's responsible and probably miles more mature than you're acting at the moment, under the kosh of a fortysomething woman who's feckless, a liar and a cheat. When Carol ticked the pair of them off in the Vic, Tina assumed the sulky face of a five year-old. I'd so LOVE to see someone smack the shit out of her, and round on Sonia also. But then, Sonia was the one who bullied her daughter out of going to music school for her own selfish interests.
Sonia as the wise woman of Walford, the one who gets Carol to voice her fears? Pur-LEEESE. Carol's encouraged to voice her fears on the simple happy-clappy premise that "life's too short?"
Of course, Carol's worried about her cancer coming back, although the show's given up even pretending that she doesn't have breasts. Most people who've come through cancer worry about that constantly, but all of this was the premise for Carol deciding to attend the Post-Op Support Group, which - I suspect - just might be the beginning of the end of Carol's stay on the Square. That doesn't mean she's going to die. It actually means that Carol might train as a counsellor and leave for a career in that field, for post-op cancer patients. That would be a positive and a first.
But Sonia (and Tina) stank up that entire portion of the episode.
What the Hell Was That All About: Rude Masood.
Oh dear, what happened to Shabnam and Kush? They were so appealing to begin with, even as she acknowledged he hadn't finished grieving for his wife and agreed that their relationship could go ahead without marriage on the horizon.
Now Shabnam's pushing marriage again? Also, her bigotry has moved to the forefront again. Has she forgotten her friendship with Stacey? Or the fact that her secret child - whom, I hope, has been safely adopted and out of the reaches of any search engine - has a father who's a white man? How did such an open-minded and friendly girl become such an old stick? She's judgemental on everything - sitting in the pub watching people get drunk, when she used to neck G & T's quite happily with Dawn and Carly, begrudging Kush a second pint, simply having fun, even eschewing him being affectionate in public.
She's so offended by Tamwar's behaviour that she leaves the pub. She's serious about wanting things done "properly," so she's asking her burka-clad auntie to fix her up with an arranged marriage? Really, Shabnam?
What the hell was that all about? The Masoods, like the Carters, are seriously losing their way a bit.
Two Men and a Boy. Another interesting development tonight was in the Max-Jay-Phil predicament.
Max is in the denial phase of grief over Jim, with a jar of lemon sherberts raining down all sorts of memories of Jim's preference of Jack to Max. He's so affected by the sum content of Jim's late existence, that he leaves Carol alone with the detritus of Jim's life. Sympathy is coming for Max from an odd corner - Jay, who informs Phil that, amongst the gaggle of cars Phil arranged for Max to buy, there may be some stolen vehicles, if not all.
Phil's reaction? Not my problem.
The best scene of the night was the confrontation between Jay and Phil. Jay's sympathetic to Max, because Max has just lost his father, and that resonates with Jay, which causes Phil to go straight for the jugular.
He plays his trump card: Does Jay want to be a part of this family or does he want to back a loser?
More than anything, this hits home to Jay, again, just how much his position in the Mitchell dynamic depends on Phil's grace and favour and his own appropriate behaviour; but Jay is conflicted. Selling stolen cars is something that could land Max in prison, and he doesn't want to see that. He reminds Phil that Max's father has just died.
Phil's defence is magnificently arrogant. He didn't know those cars were bent, and the only thing he's guilty of is feeding the well-known Branning greed. I loved Phil's callous injunction on Jay - Jay could do what he thought was right, or he could do what he's told.
Jay chose the latter, but later his conscience chose something else.
Better episode than the others this week.
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