Quite frankly, that was embarrassing. Kirkwood tried to Hollyoaksify this programme, but DTC's self-congratulatory look at what the spawn of the original or leading families would be like makes Kirkwood's cack smell.
Apart from Ben, the Mitchells are done for me, and their progeny can take a running jump off the next cliff. This show tonight was riddled with all manner of social and soap genre clichés. Plot-driven dross with noticeably glaring retcons by one of the worst and laziest writers in the writing room.
What a load of snot drivel.
CBeebies Have a Party. Shakil, the only character who could ever make Dexter look good - the only character who could make Tyler Moon look iconic. I really wonder about the people who write this shite. I mean, I wonder if they're even human, I wonder what sort of childhood and adolescence they had. I wonder if they have children, or nieces and nephews. You know, I listen to a lot of what leading comedians and impressionists say, especially those comedians who have stock characters they employ as part of their acts - take Harry Enfield, for example. A lot of the characters he uses are based on people he observed when he was young and working in a Currys outlet in Crawley. We've all seen people like Loadsamoney and the guy who chirps "Only meeeee".
At least Tony Jordan based his characters on people he knew or types he'd observed. Hell, Alfie Moon was based on him.
But these characters, these teens, arguably the worst representatives of that dynamic since the show began, are cartoon characters. They are stereotypical types brought to life - and the fact that they're brought to life by substandard actors, ex-models, and adults trying and failing to portray very young teens makes them that much more painful to watch. I don't watch Corrie, but I hear people talking about it turning the corner since Kate Oates arrived on the scene. I see Emmerdale going from strength to strength and firing on all cylinders, blending drama, pathos and actually amusing comedy, and it's EastEnders who's coming up the poor relation.
Shakil is the ubiquitous horny teenager. The statement here is that every teenaged boy aged sixteen is horny. After all, didn't we have ploddy, blobby Liam Butcher rogering Cindy Williams on the floor of Ian Beale's front room - the same spot where Lucy died, the same spot where Ian and Jane fucked each other only days after Lucy's death. That should be called the Fuck-and-Death spot.
This show is founded on the premise of horny teenagers. Michelle got pregnant at sixteen. Mick and Linda were teenaged parents. Carol and David were teenaged parents. Sonia and Martin were teenaged parents. People on this show are grandparents before they are forty and great-grandparents in their fifties. And yet Tuesday's episode's writer injected an appallingly offensive and ignorant remark denigrating Americans, implying that they all fucked around with their own relatives, and tonight's writer had a line about America being the land where no one can wait for anything to happen.
Incest, partner-sharing amongst siblings and gymslip mums abound in Walford. Actually, there's a name Americans have for people who behave pretty much like most everyone behaves in Walford nowadays ... trailer trash.
But, hey, we're all suppose to like Shakil. He's supposed to have some sort of gauche charm, and tonight he was eventually presented as a sympathetic figure whose father cancelled spending his birthday with him and instead sent a PA with some expensive trainers for the little git.
This version of the Brat Pack are a nest of losers. All of them. Shakil the horny sixteen year-old, who has no tact and wastes no time talking about how he's just got to pop his cherry; Rebecca, the vestal virgin, who - since her make-over, has suddenly been told by somebody else in the cast (either Jossa or Tilly Keeper or the poseur who plays Mark) that the camera is on her. I never saw so much hair-tossing since Mimi Keene left tonight. There's Louise, the spoiled blonde British version of Alicia Silverstone's Clueless, who lives for spending her father's money and whines incessantly about not having a boyfriend. (Oh, wait ... I forgot. This is the 21st Century, where a woman isn't validated unless she's got a man in tow). There's Courtney, who started out interesting,but quickly went rotten, strutting about, swelling up her chest like a bull frog in order to tell the camera (as well as the person she's trying to impress) that she has big tits, rolling her eyes at the prospect of "babysitting" her fifteen year-old cousin, who looks all of twenty-five, when just the other day, she couldn't spend enough time with her. And finally, there's Mark. What a poseur. The hair is a work of greasy art. It would take hours on end to effect that pompadour, along with the hair replenishing shampoo and the expensive male scent. The fact that he chooses to hang around with a bunch of little kids is creepy, that he buys booze to fuel their party is even creepier.
There are so many incongruencies about this character. The writing room ignored everything that was established by Vicki more than a decade ago. Tell me, did Michelle actually marry a man who's surname is Fowler? Tonight we learned that her husband had no hair; we know he has no surname because Mark's surname is "Fowler." According to Vicki, Tim No-Name adopted Mark as a baby. He came as a package deal with Michelle. Because Vicky was older and didn't gel with him, he didn't bother to adopt her. We also know that Michelle didn't try to palm Mark off as Tim's child, so all that bumpf Ian said some while ago about how pleased everyone in Walford was whan Tim and Michelle announced she was pregnant. That's an outright lie. Michelle was single when she gave birth to Mark in Birmingham, Alabama. She met and married Tim about a year or so later. Pauline went to the US for the wedding.
Anyway, if Mark genuinely believes Tim is his father, why hasn't he queried the reason he's got a different surname - unless, of course, Tim was a Fowler as well? This was the whole premise behind Gavin (before he was re-introduced as a psychopath) wanting to adopt Ben as a toddler - so he wouldn't have a surname different to Gavin's, Kathy's (or Gavin's three children which this lot of assholes forgot about along the way).
Once again, why is this person here? If he's a university student, he's missing classes. More importantly, he's missing classes in the autumn semester of his junior year, which is when hardcore studies in your chosen specialisation commence. Even more important for someone on a sports scholarship and someone who "says" he's a quarterback for the university football team, gridiron practice began three weeks ago, with the first inter-collegiate games being played this weekend. Mark's coach would be on the next plane over here, drop-kicking his skinny arse onto the plane to go home.
And of course there's the cack-handed EastEnders' version of the oldest soap chestnut in the world - unknown siblings falling in love with each other. Who the fuck goes up to someone you've only seen once in your life and asks if they fancy them? And what girl in her right mind would reply in the affirmative or even make a game of Truth or Dare out of it. Sue Osman, TimWil and I have mentioned the first big soap story of this kind, going back some fifty years to early Days of Our Lives and concerning Marie and Tommy Horton.
This developed over a period of some months. It involved the return of a man who's looks had been altered after an horrific accident in the Korean War. He'd had amnesia and a new identity. Circumstances brought him, unwittingly, into contact with Marie, who'd been through a big hurt in a love affair previously and was vulnerable. They fell in love, only to find out that he was her brother. This was all done, over a period of time where viewers got to know this character - they'd already known Marie - and there was a poignant feel about it. At the end of the day, she had a breakdown and became a nun.
But this Hey-I-fancy-you-do-you-fancy-me-let's-party attitude is cheap, rushed and totally contrived. It was there, it was a temptation and DTC fed his enormous ego.
In the background to all of this, we have the real adults - Sharon, Phil and Ian. Actually, Sharon looks like sanded mahogany right now. It's summertime, and God knows where Denny is. He should be sitting at the table in the Mitchell kitchen, eating with his mother and stepfather. Here's an even bigger and more laughable retcon. Phil reminds Sharon that she's doing the same thing to Mark as he did to her - i.e., keeping him from knowing his father, and Sharon carries this tale right to Ian (who seems to have done away with Jane - perhaps she's sleeping on the Fuck-and-Death spot), and this is where the confusion begins.
Sharon thinks she should tell Mark about his father's identity, based on how Phil tried to keep her from her father.
Ex-cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me. Where's TimWil when I need him? Because he maintained all along that Phil didn't know that Gavin was Sharon's father, when I kept maintaining that he did, because he'd arranged a phony dad to show up and shame Sharon and had sent her on a wild goose chase to what happened to be Gavin's house. Yet on Hallowe'en 2015, it was established that Phil didn't know that Gavin was Sharon's father at all.
Now ... consider this:-
- Gavin was looking for Sharon. (She found this out from the letters a teenaged Gavin had written a teenaged Carol Stretton.)
- Yet Gavin knew where Sharon was all along because he'd given her to Den (a much older Gavin and his bird Carol Stretton kept the baby until Carol had a breakdown and left Gavin for middle class mediocrity).
- Gavin had three children in 2000 when he married Kathy.
- Gavin only had one child, Sharon, whom Kathy didn't know about.
- Phil knew that Gavin was Sharon's father and kept the knowledge from her.
- Phil didn't know a thing about Gavin being Sharon's father.
All of these views have been put forth on this show. Do you see now why it's chickenshit compared to Emmardale at the moment? OK, it's a soap, but it's also a continuing drama and for a continuing drama, there simply has to be a sense of continuity, which is totally non-existent in this show at the moment.
And in elevating Sharon to the position of Mitchell matriarch, they've created a monster. Only a couple of weeks ago, she was begging Phil not to tell this cypher who his real father was. Now, she's all for telling him, herself. Really, Sharon? That is no one but Michelle's responsibility, although I can see this as something of a subtle bit of payback because of Michelle's betrayal of Sharon's friendship on two ginormous occasions. Ian's reason, really, for not wanting the cypher to know the truth about his paternity is because it creates yet another indelible link between the Beales and the Mitchells, but one thing he said tonight rang true - actually two things:-
Why in the world would someone want to stick around wet, rainy, miserable Walford with a bunch of social misfits when he could go back to a happy, well-adjusted family in sunny Florida? And, as he pointed out, once the Mitchells get their tentacles around a "blood" Mitchel who's been kept away from the tribe, they turn him or her toxic.
On the other hand, we have Stacey and Martin, and sitcom city. The show is turning Martin into the ubiquitous over-protective father a la Max Branning ten years ago. Rebecca might be sensible, but she was easily led into becoming a Goth, and with the wrong boy, she could be easily led into having sex before she's ready. I can understand Martin's attitude. His first time was with Sonia. It led to Rebecca being conceived, and eventually it led to them both literally sticking together (after she'd been adopted and unrealistically re-claimed) literally for her sake, and no one was happy. Also, Martin has another reason not to trust Shakil after what happened between Kush and Stacey.
I want to see the looks on Ian's and Martin's faces when they find out that the cypher was the one who bought alcohol for all the little kiddies.
It doesn't matter if Mark goes or stays - and, quite honestly, he should go; he'd be shallow anywhere. At the end of the day, he was just another one of the ex-EP's wet dreams.
Mark's "father" is bald. I still like my casting of Billy Bob Thornton as a redneck Tim. He's bald too.
A Fine Bromance. The only interesting bit of this shower tonight was the bit with Ben and Jay, although Jay's coming up a right little prick in this instance. Tonight I came to the conclusion that Ben is gay and Jay is straight; and that although Ben loved Paul and is mourning him, his real true love is Jay. Remember the time Ben leaned in and tried to kiss Jay? He knows Jay is straight, and I think this is why Ben has picked up on the "brothers" motif, calling Jay "bruv" and referring to them as brothers all of the time, including tonight.
If he can't have Jay as a lover, he'll have him the next best way and a way of which Jay would approve - as a brother. After all, an isolated Jay would jump at any crumb dropped from the Mitchells' high table. Once, he was at the heart of that family, even changing his surname to "Mitchell" by deed poll and from time to time, people even refer to him as Jay "Mitchell."
Jay is drawn to the Mitchells like a moth to a flame. On Tuesday, he stormed off, saying he was off up North, but he got no further than sleeping in the children's playground, just outside The Arches. He simply cannot leave the Mitchells. Ben's show of solidarity with Jay was a statement. It was an emotional blackmail of an increasingly doddery Phil - thinking Phil would be shamed by his business associates and neighbours seen Ben sleep rough. I don't think anyone in Walford would really give a toss, because the Mitchells have lost their relevance.
But when Ben attested to Phil tonight that he didn't care what Jay had done or hadn't done, that he'd always be there for him, that was easily a statement someone would make about their lover. So Ben keeps up the brotherly masque as a means to keep close and cleave to Jay, his real true love, and Jay laps this up; because it will mean that he's back in the Mitchells' bosom, that - like him or not - the "family" will have his back. As long as Ben is around, Jay, on the Sex Offenders' list, is safe.
Phil's aversion to Jay being under his roof is understandable. Phil has a young daughter the same age of the girl Jay was pursuing. Social Services would be interested to know that Jay is living in a household where an underaged girl lives, one the same age as Star.
Jay's done something very naughty again, however. By coercing Ben into pursuing Paul's killer, he's exposed Ben to these people, who now are looking for him and who have found him.
Who's the Daddy Storyline Number 5,324,692. You have to wonder what would have happened had Denise confided in Shirley about her little secret rather than the odious Carmel? She may have kept schtum about the father - knowing Shirley's history with Phil - but how long before this would come out? At least,Shirley wouldn't have blabbed to all the Carters.
Carmel, of course, tells Kush, who - understandably - thinks his super sperm have done the business yet again. Who are we kidding? It's Phil's. This should be a positive storyline about abortion - it mirrors Libby's pregnancy storyline so well (getting pregnant by a man you don't love and who doesn't love you, feeling that bringing this child into the world wouldn't be fair to the child) - but it won't be. The men who controll(ed) this programme, and an EP with a decidedly Catholic background, makes every soap character pro-Life and a would-be Trump supporter.
Instead of having Denise be forced to face what Libby endured and making a decision similar to Libby's and striking a path, this will disintegrate into yet another Who's the Daddy shitfest. A big piece of irony was that this was played out against a background of a horny teenaged boy pursuing a reluctant girl. At the end of the day, it's the teenagers who decide to practice celibacy, and it's the supposedly responsible adult who ends up up the duff.
Oh, and Kush is hardly the person to be lecturing Shakil about responsible sex, with his track record.
Awful and embarrassing episode.
Apart from Ben, the Mitchells are done for me, and their progeny can take a running jump off the next cliff. This show tonight was riddled with all manner of social and soap genre clichés. Plot-driven dross with noticeably glaring retcons by one of the worst and laziest writers in the writing room.
What a load of snot drivel.
CBeebies Have a Party. Shakil, the only character who could ever make Dexter look good - the only character who could make Tyler Moon look iconic. I really wonder about the people who write this shite. I mean, I wonder if they're even human, I wonder what sort of childhood and adolescence they had. I wonder if they have children, or nieces and nephews. You know, I listen to a lot of what leading comedians and impressionists say, especially those comedians who have stock characters they employ as part of their acts - take Harry Enfield, for example. A lot of the characters he uses are based on people he observed when he was young and working in a Currys outlet in Crawley. We've all seen people like Loadsamoney and the guy who chirps "Only meeeee".
At least Tony Jordan based his characters on people he knew or types he'd observed. Hell, Alfie Moon was based on him.
But these characters, these teens, arguably the worst representatives of that dynamic since the show began, are cartoon characters. They are stereotypical types brought to life - and the fact that they're brought to life by substandard actors, ex-models, and adults trying and failing to portray very young teens makes them that much more painful to watch. I don't watch Corrie, but I hear people talking about it turning the corner since Kate Oates arrived on the scene. I see Emmerdale going from strength to strength and firing on all cylinders, blending drama, pathos and actually amusing comedy, and it's EastEnders who's coming up the poor relation.
Shakil is the ubiquitous horny teenager. The statement here is that every teenaged boy aged sixteen is horny. After all, didn't we have ploddy, blobby Liam Butcher rogering Cindy Williams on the floor of Ian Beale's front room - the same spot where Lucy died, the same spot where Ian and Jane fucked each other only days after Lucy's death. That should be called the Fuck-and-Death spot.
This show is founded on the premise of horny teenagers. Michelle got pregnant at sixteen. Mick and Linda were teenaged parents. Carol and David were teenaged parents. Sonia and Martin were teenaged parents. People on this show are grandparents before they are forty and great-grandparents in their fifties. And yet Tuesday's episode's writer injected an appallingly offensive and ignorant remark denigrating Americans, implying that they all fucked around with their own relatives, and tonight's writer had a line about America being the land where no one can wait for anything to happen.
Incest, partner-sharing amongst siblings and gymslip mums abound in Walford. Actually, there's a name Americans have for people who behave pretty much like most everyone behaves in Walford nowadays ... trailer trash.
But, hey, we're all suppose to like Shakil. He's supposed to have some sort of gauche charm, and tonight he was eventually presented as a sympathetic figure whose father cancelled spending his birthday with him and instead sent a PA with some expensive trainers for the little git.
This version of the Brat Pack are a nest of losers. All of them. Shakil the horny sixteen year-old, who has no tact and wastes no time talking about how he's just got to pop his cherry; Rebecca, the vestal virgin, who - since her make-over, has suddenly been told by somebody else in the cast (either Jossa or Tilly Keeper or the poseur who plays Mark) that the camera is on her. I never saw so much hair-tossing since Mimi Keene left tonight. There's Louise, the spoiled blonde British version of Alicia Silverstone's Clueless, who lives for spending her father's money and whines incessantly about not having a boyfriend. (Oh, wait ... I forgot. This is the 21st Century, where a woman isn't validated unless she's got a man in tow). There's Courtney, who started out interesting,but quickly went rotten, strutting about, swelling up her chest like a bull frog in order to tell the camera (as well as the person she's trying to impress) that she has big tits, rolling her eyes at the prospect of "babysitting" her fifteen year-old cousin, who looks all of twenty-five, when just the other day, she couldn't spend enough time with her. And finally, there's Mark. What a poseur. The hair is a work of greasy art. It would take hours on end to effect that pompadour, along with the hair replenishing shampoo and the expensive male scent. The fact that he chooses to hang around with a bunch of little kids is creepy, that he buys booze to fuel their party is even creepier.
There are so many incongruencies about this character. The writing room ignored everything that was established by Vicki more than a decade ago. Tell me, did Michelle actually marry a man who's surname is Fowler? Tonight we learned that her husband had no hair; we know he has no surname because Mark's surname is "Fowler." According to Vicki, Tim No-Name adopted Mark as a baby. He came as a package deal with Michelle. Because Vicky was older and didn't gel with him, he didn't bother to adopt her. We also know that Michelle didn't try to palm Mark off as Tim's child, so all that bumpf Ian said some while ago about how pleased everyone in Walford was whan Tim and Michelle announced she was pregnant. That's an outright lie. Michelle was single when she gave birth to Mark in Birmingham, Alabama. She met and married Tim about a year or so later. Pauline went to the US for the wedding.
Anyway, if Mark genuinely believes Tim is his father, why hasn't he queried the reason he's got a different surname - unless, of course, Tim was a Fowler as well? This was the whole premise behind Gavin (before he was re-introduced as a psychopath) wanting to adopt Ben as a toddler - so he wouldn't have a surname different to Gavin's, Kathy's (or Gavin's three children which this lot of assholes forgot about along the way).
Once again, why is this person here? If he's a university student, he's missing classes. More importantly, he's missing classes in the autumn semester of his junior year, which is when hardcore studies in your chosen specialisation commence. Even more important for someone on a sports scholarship and someone who "says" he's a quarterback for the university football team, gridiron practice began three weeks ago, with the first inter-collegiate games being played this weekend. Mark's coach would be on the next plane over here, drop-kicking his skinny arse onto the plane to go home.
And of course there's the cack-handed EastEnders' version of the oldest soap chestnut in the world - unknown siblings falling in love with each other. Who the fuck goes up to someone you've only seen once in your life and asks if they fancy them? And what girl in her right mind would reply in the affirmative or even make a game of Truth or Dare out of it. Sue Osman, TimWil and I have mentioned the first big soap story of this kind, going back some fifty years to early Days of Our Lives and concerning Marie and Tommy Horton.
This developed over a period of some months. It involved the return of a man who's looks had been altered after an horrific accident in the Korean War. He'd had amnesia and a new identity. Circumstances brought him, unwittingly, into contact with Marie, who'd been through a big hurt in a love affair previously and was vulnerable. They fell in love, only to find out that he was her brother. This was all done, over a period of time where viewers got to know this character - they'd already known Marie - and there was a poignant feel about it. At the end of the day, she had a breakdown and became a nun.
But this Hey-I-fancy-you-do-you-fancy-me-let's-party attitude is cheap, rushed and totally contrived. It was there, it was a temptation and DTC fed his enormous ego.
In the background to all of this, we have the real adults - Sharon, Phil and Ian. Actually, Sharon looks like sanded mahogany right now. It's summertime, and God knows where Denny is. He should be sitting at the table in the Mitchell kitchen, eating with his mother and stepfather. Here's an even bigger and more laughable retcon. Phil reminds Sharon that she's doing the same thing to Mark as he did to her - i.e., keeping him from knowing his father, and Sharon carries this tale right to Ian (who seems to have done away with Jane - perhaps she's sleeping on the Fuck-and-Death spot), and this is where the confusion begins.
Sharon thinks she should tell Mark about his father's identity, based on how Phil tried to keep her from her father.
Ex-cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me. Where's TimWil when I need him? Because he maintained all along that Phil didn't know that Gavin was Sharon's father, when I kept maintaining that he did, because he'd arranged a phony dad to show up and shame Sharon and had sent her on a wild goose chase to what happened to be Gavin's house. Yet on Hallowe'en 2015, it was established that Phil didn't know that Gavin was Sharon's father at all.
Now ... consider this:-
- Gavin was looking for Sharon. (She found this out from the letters a teenaged Gavin had written a teenaged Carol Stretton.)
- Yet Gavin knew where Sharon was all along because he'd given her to Den (a much older Gavin and his bird Carol Stretton kept the baby until Carol had a breakdown and left Gavin for middle class mediocrity).
- Gavin had three children in 2000 when he married Kathy.
- Gavin only had one child, Sharon, whom Kathy didn't know about.
- Phil knew that Gavin was Sharon's father and kept the knowledge from her.
- Phil didn't know a thing about Gavin being Sharon's father.
All of these views have been put forth on this show. Do you see now why it's chickenshit compared to Emmardale at the moment? OK, it's a soap, but it's also a continuing drama and for a continuing drama, there simply has to be a sense of continuity, which is totally non-existent in this show at the moment.
And in elevating Sharon to the position of Mitchell matriarch, they've created a monster. Only a couple of weeks ago, she was begging Phil not to tell this cypher who his real father was. Now, she's all for telling him, herself. Really, Sharon? That is no one but Michelle's responsibility, although I can see this as something of a subtle bit of payback because of Michelle's betrayal of Sharon's friendship on two ginormous occasions. Ian's reason, really, for not wanting the cypher to know the truth about his paternity is because it creates yet another indelible link between the Beales and the Mitchells, but one thing he said tonight rang true - actually two things:-
Why in the world would someone want to stick around wet, rainy, miserable Walford with a bunch of social misfits when he could go back to a happy, well-adjusted family in sunny Florida? And, as he pointed out, once the Mitchells get their tentacles around a "blood" Mitchel who's been kept away from the tribe, they turn him or her toxic.
On the other hand, we have Stacey and Martin, and sitcom city. The show is turning Martin into the ubiquitous over-protective father a la Max Branning ten years ago. Rebecca might be sensible, but she was easily led into becoming a Goth, and with the wrong boy, she could be easily led into having sex before she's ready. I can understand Martin's attitude. His first time was with Sonia. It led to Rebecca being conceived, and eventually it led to them both literally sticking together (after she'd been adopted and unrealistically re-claimed) literally for her sake, and no one was happy. Also, Martin has another reason not to trust Shakil after what happened between Kush and Stacey.
I want to see the looks on Ian's and Martin's faces when they find out that the cypher was the one who bought alcohol for all the little kiddies.
It doesn't matter if Mark goes or stays - and, quite honestly, he should go; he'd be shallow anywhere. At the end of the day, he was just another one of the ex-EP's wet dreams.
Mark's "father" is bald. I still like my casting of Billy Bob Thornton as a redneck Tim. He's bald too.
A Fine Bromance. The only interesting bit of this shower tonight was the bit with Ben and Jay, although Jay's coming up a right little prick in this instance. Tonight I came to the conclusion that Ben is gay and Jay is straight; and that although Ben loved Paul and is mourning him, his real true love is Jay. Remember the time Ben leaned in and tried to kiss Jay? He knows Jay is straight, and I think this is why Ben has picked up on the "brothers" motif, calling Jay "bruv" and referring to them as brothers all of the time, including tonight.
If he can't have Jay as a lover, he'll have him the next best way and a way of which Jay would approve - as a brother. After all, an isolated Jay would jump at any crumb dropped from the Mitchells' high table. Once, he was at the heart of that family, even changing his surname to "Mitchell" by deed poll and from time to time, people even refer to him as Jay "Mitchell."
Jay is drawn to the Mitchells like a moth to a flame. On Tuesday, he stormed off, saying he was off up North, but he got no further than sleeping in the children's playground, just outside The Arches. He simply cannot leave the Mitchells. Ben's show of solidarity with Jay was a statement. It was an emotional blackmail of an increasingly doddery Phil - thinking Phil would be shamed by his business associates and neighbours seen Ben sleep rough. I don't think anyone in Walford would really give a toss, because the Mitchells have lost their relevance.
But when Ben attested to Phil tonight that he didn't care what Jay had done or hadn't done, that he'd always be there for him, that was easily a statement someone would make about their lover. So Ben keeps up the brotherly masque as a means to keep close and cleave to Jay, his real true love, and Jay laps this up; because it will mean that he's back in the Mitchells' bosom, that - like him or not - the "family" will have his back. As long as Ben is around, Jay, on the Sex Offenders' list, is safe.
Phil's aversion to Jay being under his roof is understandable. Phil has a young daughter the same age of the girl Jay was pursuing. Social Services would be interested to know that Jay is living in a household where an underaged girl lives, one the same age as Star.
Jay's done something very naughty again, however. By coercing Ben into pursuing Paul's killer, he's exposed Ben to these people, who now are looking for him and who have found him.
Who's the Daddy Storyline Number 5,324,692. You have to wonder what would have happened had Denise confided in Shirley about her little secret rather than the odious Carmel? She may have kept schtum about the father - knowing Shirley's history with Phil - but how long before this would come out? At least,Shirley wouldn't have blabbed to all the Carters.
Carmel, of course, tells Kush, who - understandably - thinks his super sperm have done the business yet again. Who are we kidding? It's Phil's. This should be a positive storyline about abortion - it mirrors Libby's pregnancy storyline so well (getting pregnant by a man you don't love and who doesn't love you, feeling that bringing this child into the world wouldn't be fair to the child) - but it won't be. The men who controll(ed) this programme, and an EP with a decidedly Catholic background, makes every soap character pro-Life and a would-be Trump supporter.
Instead of having Denise be forced to face what Libby endured and making a decision similar to Libby's and striking a path, this will disintegrate into yet another Who's the Daddy shitfest. A big piece of irony was that this was played out against a background of a horny teenaged boy pursuing a reluctant girl. At the end of the day, it's the teenagers who decide to practice celibacy, and it's the supposedly responsible adult who ends up up the duff.
Oh, and Kush is hardly the person to be lecturing Shakil about responsible sex, with his track record.
Awful and embarrassing episode.
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