This is what EastEnders is NOT at the moment ...
That's ten minutes worth of entertainment. As far as tonight's episode went, there wasn't much, especially since it centred around Hallowe'en. It was more or less another one of the endless filler episodes which seem to dominate the landscape on the show for the moment.
I feel as though we're watching bits and bobs of bits and bobs that fill in the blanks and spaces in wait for the next big thing to happen, and what that is is anyone's guess. Christmas, I suppose, or the Big Branningapalooza that's going to start with the car crash.
I could yawn eternally in boredom. It's now the end of October, and this is the excitiing autumn EastEnders promised us?
Chryed is winding down, and it's sad that a couple who were touted, once, as "the next big thing" devolved into glorified extras and whose leaving line is now one of the most uninteresting ever shown.
Why?
Once again, it's down to "likeability." As Nebraska, the commentator on Walford Web Kindergarten stated recently, Syed is one of the many physically beautiful characters on the show, who - whilst he's lovely to look at on the outside - is stinking rotten on the inside. He's a liar, a manipulator, a cheat and a whiny asshole who can never ever take responsiblity for his actions. He's also a vicious little tart, who doesn't love Christian.
It's interesting that Danny has known Syed all of five minutes and can read him like a book, where Christian can't. I think Christian has lived a life playing the field for years and suddenly, approaching forty, decided to settle down. Syed was the sort of pretty boy he thought he'd like to share the rest of his days. But Syed's only just come to terms openly with his sexuality, and as he blurted a few weeks ago, he felt he was too young to get married - rather, he wasn't ready. He was forced into a heterosexual relationship by his mother, who forced him to repress his sexuality; now that he's come out, he wants, basically, what Christian had for years - the ability to sow his wild oats. Instead, now, as he was forced into marriage with his only girlfriend; he's not being gently coerced into marriage with his first serious boyfriend.
The juxtaposition of Syed's situation tonight, alongside Kat's with Alfie was interesting. Both Syed and Kat are dishonest, sly, manipulative, cheaters, who are adept at shifting any blame for inappropriate behaviour away from themselves and onto the shoulders of their partners or their families.
Consider this: Kat has confessed to having had an affair, but only when Alfie caught her in her lie.She confessed because she had to, but she only confessed so much. She still lied to Alfie and told him that he didn't know her shagger. We suspect (we know) it's Derek Branning. And soon (at Christmas), Alfie will discover Kat's perfidious behaviour yet again.
Syed, on the other hand, confessed to having kissed Danny. Well, he actually intimated that they had slept together, but then he walked back that confession and settled on telling Christian that they'd kissed. In fact, Syed kissed Danny and slept with him in exchange for the loan of £500. When Danny sought Syed out the night before his wedding, had Syed called the wedding off and gone off with Danny, the debt would have been forgotten; but Danny's been spurned, and he's out to make Syed suffer.
The thing that baffles me is that 500 quid isn't a vast sum of money. Christian is self-employed as a personal trainer, and their fees aren't cheap. Now that Syed confessed to the loan, Christian could have forked over the money and that would have been the end of that. Christian must have that money to hand in his account - or he could come by it on his credit card. Instead, Syed does the Syed thing of burying his head in the sand and ignoring Danny, who reminds Syed that he won't go away until he's had his money.
So Christian steps in, learns that in Syed's case, a kiss is not a kiss, and he and Danny come to blows. I mean, real blows. Christian can pack a punch with the best of them, and he's even floored Phil, but it looks as though Danny can match punch for punch.
Gary Lucy is wasted in a guest performance. Since Chryed are leaving, there has to be a place on the Square for someone like Danny, only please don't make him Suzy Branning's son or the retconned son of April. I couldn't stand that.
The rest of the episode wasn't anything to write home about. Alfie and Roxy still have chemistry, and Kat is plainly jealous of that, and feeling the guilt that they've now been demoted from landlord status to having to submit everything past Roxy for approval. I'm glad she's feeling guilty, but I also feel her scenes with Alfie are forced. I do feel that Jessie Wallace hasn't come to grips with Kat this time around. Part of that has been the bad writing and abysmal characterisation, but also I feel that (and maybe because of the characterisation), she's past the point of fixing. Shane Richie as Alfie has plenty of mileage, especially with Roxy; but Alfie and Kat are a spent force. She should leave, ostensibly when the identity of her shagger is found out. Alfie should kick her to the curb and move on. She's bringing him down as a character in much the same way Jack Branning brings everyone down.
So, is that the end of Denise and Fatboy, whom she addressed as Arthur tonight? I can see Arthur's side of being attracted to Denise, and I can see her wariness too. She's being realistic. Arthur's barely into his twenties, and Denise is fortysomething. It wouldn't take long before he was hankering after someone his own age. In a way, she's right to keep the relationship light and her letting him down was dignified and kind. So does that mean that Poppy is now destined to be Arthur's squeeze, especially after the contrived ghost hunt - which was nothing along the proportions the media presented it? Well, Poppy is a nice enough girl and Arthur is the Alfie of his generation.
Speaking of which, Alfie was the heart of the Square yet again, dropping everything to help Carol find Tiff and Morgan - how obvious was it that Carol was going to mistake two skeleton-clad kids with masks for Tiff and Morgan. Lucy Beale could have played Skeletor without a costume.
Speaking of Lucy, here we go again ... a tale of the most unlikeable ingenues in the history of EastEnders. Lucy is a rude, little bitch who treats Ian like a piece of shit whilst she sleeps with a real piece of shit. I still cannot fathom her as anyone inclined to business acumen. It wasn't that long ago - last year, in fact -that she was confessing to Mandy that she didn't have a clue about the economics course she was studying, and I always thought it was Peter who had the business brain. She proved how fucking stupid she was tonight when she begged Turdhopper to see the bank manager with her. How much does she have to have it spelled out to her that this steroid squirt was only after the sex and a place to stay -and a chance to project his daddy issues onto her.
Melissa Suffield's Lucy was one-dimensional and cold. This Lucy is failing at a multi-dimensional level. She can't even do cold. She is totally unlikeable in her arrogance, but at eas with it, as I suspect, she's yet another actress, hired for looks, whose character has been moulded around the actress's real personality. Even Suffield came across in softer scenes with Peter and Ian better than Bywater, who's yet another crap actress, with no real experience. Her crying scene at the end, when she'd turfed the turd out, was embarrassing. And, like Jac Jossa, she gurns. When she has to express upset, her face is more gargoylish than Jessie Wallace's was when she was on botox.
Speaking of gurners, Lauren was out in full force today, albeit in a minimalist sense, accidentally on purpose assuming that Turdhopper had gone ahead with what he'd told Lauren he wanted to do and binned Lucy. Still, at least it gave Lucy the opportunity to bin him before he'd done the same to her. For that, I salute her. Oh, and I liked Morgan's revenge when Lucy got shitty and wouldn't do Trick or Treat with the kids. She deserved that. I hope when she falls, her fall is mighty, because at the beginning of the year, it was Lucy who was reminding Ian of their family ties to Bianca and her kids and saying how they should do more with and for them. Now she treats them like dog poo on a curb.
Having said that, the best - albeit small - scene in the show was the brief interchange between Carol and Ian sat at the bar of the Vic. Carol seemed surprised at the change in Ian,and I thought that those two would make a good pairing. As Ian told Lucy, he was crap at relationships, especially with the trophy blonde variety. I wouldn't be averse to seeing an Ian-Carol pairing, although it would make Ian his niece's stepfather, if he and Carol married. But, I'd just like to see them forge a good friendship with Ian helping out with his nieces and nephews. I liked that. It looked good and natural.
Speaking of unnatural, surely TPTB can see, after all the unintellible dialogue he had tonight, just how awful David Witts is. His delivery sucks. Those initial scenes with Lucy were terrible. He was barely understandable, and I watched the scenes twice. I really do think it's because he doesn't close his mouth properly, coupled with the fact that, at times, he's trying to imitate Jamie Foreman and at other times, Jake Wood. He's said he's learned from Foreman, but learning is about how to project your lines, how to make yourself the centre of a scene when you're not, it's not about imitation, and bad imitation at that.
Last night, he was in Derek mode. Tonight, he was trying to act like Max. Whatever the hell he was doing, it didn't work. If Lorraine Newman cannot see from these scenes tonight how pathetically awful this boy is, then she doesn't deserve to be in her job. Those scenes with him tonight were, without a doubt, some of the worst ever shown - if for no other reason than he was totally and utterly unintelligible. I hope when Derek bows out or croaks, Joey's departure is imminent.
As I said in another blog, whenever EastEnders go looking for testosterone, they never find it. Epic fail. In fact, Joey, Lucy, Lauren and Twitney are so unlikeable, they really should be top of the axe list. I'd rather see a dozen Poppies than suffer thirty minutes of that lot.
And Lola with Jay and Abi, what was that all about? I thought they were taking Oscar trick-or-treating, but they end up in ghost sheets cadging drinks at the Vic? Hasn't Lola learned anyting, although the last scene with Phil was clearly meant to give her food for thought about convincing Sharon to act for her by pretending to be Phil's fiancee. Still, Lorna Fitzgerald seems to have lost her Abi mojo since returning from her break. She's like a 12 year-old dressed up in Tanya's clothes. I think most of the youngsters need a re-think.
Verdict on this episode .....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
In fact, this is more entertaining:-
That's ten minutes worth of entertainment. As far as tonight's episode went, there wasn't much, especially since it centred around Hallowe'en. It was more or less another one of the endless filler episodes which seem to dominate the landscape on the show for the moment.
I feel as though we're watching bits and bobs of bits and bobs that fill in the blanks and spaces in wait for the next big thing to happen, and what that is is anyone's guess. Christmas, I suppose, or the Big Branningapalooza that's going to start with the car crash.
I could yawn eternally in boredom. It's now the end of October, and this is the excitiing autumn EastEnders promised us?
Chryed is winding down, and it's sad that a couple who were touted, once, as "the next big thing" devolved into glorified extras and whose leaving line is now one of the most uninteresting ever shown.
Why?
Once again, it's down to "likeability." As Nebraska, the commentator on Walford Web Kindergarten stated recently, Syed is one of the many physically beautiful characters on the show, who - whilst he's lovely to look at on the outside - is stinking rotten on the inside. He's a liar, a manipulator, a cheat and a whiny asshole who can never ever take responsiblity for his actions. He's also a vicious little tart, who doesn't love Christian.
It's interesting that Danny has known Syed all of five minutes and can read him like a book, where Christian can't. I think Christian has lived a life playing the field for years and suddenly, approaching forty, decided to settle down. Syed was the sort of pretty boy he thought he'd like to share the rest of his days. But Syed's only just come to terms openly with his sexuality, and as he blurted a few weeks ago, he felt he was too young to get married - rather, he wasn't ready. He was forced into a heterosexual relationship by his mother, who forced him to repress his sexuality; now that he's come out, he wants, basically, what Christian had for years - the ability to sow his wild oats. Instead, now, as he was forced into marriage with his only girlfriend; he's not being gently coerced into marriage with his first serious boyfriend.
The juxtaposition of Syed's situation tonight, alongside Kat's with Alfie was interesting. Both Syed and Kat are dishonest, sly, manipulative, cheaters, who are adept at shifting any blame for inappropriate behaviour away from themselves and onto the shoulders of their partners or their families.
Consider this: Kat has confessed to having had an affair, but only when Alfie caught her in her lie.She confessed because she had to, but she only confessed so much. She still lied to Alfie and told him that he didn't know her shagger. We suspect (we know) it's Derek Branning. And soon (at Christmas), Alfie will discover Kat's perfidious behaviour yet again.
Syed, on the other hand, confessed to having kissed Danny. Well, he actually intimated that they had slept together, but then he walked back that confession and settled on telling Christian that they'd kissed. In fact, Syed kissed Danny and slept with him in exchange for the loan of £500. When Danny sought Syed out the night before his wedding, had Syed called the wedding off and gone off with Danny, the debt would have been forgotten; but Danny's been spurned, and he's out to make Syed suffer.
The thing that baffles me is that 500 quid isn't a vast sum of money. Christian is self-employed as a personal trainer, and their fees aren't cheap. Now that Syed confessed to the loan, Christian could have forked over the money and that would have been the end of that. Christian must have that money to hand in his account - or he could come by it on his credit card. Instead, Syed does the Syed thing of burying his head in the sand and ignoring Danny, who reminds Syed that he won't go away until he's had his money.
So Christian steps in, learns that in Syed's case, a kiss is not a kiss, and he and Danny come to blows. I mean, real blows. Christian can pack a punch with the best of them, and he's even floored Phil, but it looks as though Danny can match punch for punch.
Gary Lucy is wasted in a guest performance. Since Chryed are leaving, there has to be a place on the Square for someone like Danny, only please don't make him Suzy Branning's son or the retconned son of April. I couldn't stand that.
The rest of the episode wasn't anything to write home about. Alfie and Roxy still have chemistry, and Kat is plainly jealous of that, and feeling the guilt that they've now been demoted from landlord status to having to submit everything past Roxy for approval. I'm glad she's feeling guilty, but I also feel her scenes with Alfie are forced. I do feel that Jessie Wallace hasn't come to grips with Kat this time around. Part of that has been the bad writing and abysmal characterisation, but also I feel that (and maybe because of the characterisation), she's past the point of fixing. Shane Richie as Alfie has plenty of mileage, especially with Roxy; but Alfie and Kat are a spent force. She should leave, ostensibly when the identity of her shagger is found out. Alfie should kick her to the curb and move on. She's bringing him down as a character in much the same way Jack Branning brings everyone down.
So, is that the end of Denise and Fatboy, whom she addressed as Arthur tonight? I can see Arthur's side of being attracted to Denise, and I can see her wariness too. She's being realistic. Arthur's barely into his twenties, and Denise is fortysomething. It wouldn't take long before he was hankering after someone his own age. In a way, she's right to keep the relationship light and her letting him down was dignified and kind. So does that mean that Poppy is now destined to be Arthur's squeeze, especially after the contrived ghost hunt - which was nothing along the proportions the media presented it? Well, Poppy is a nice enough girl and Arthur is the Alfie of his generation.
Speaking of which, Alfie was the heart of the Square yet again, dropping everything to help Carol find Tiff and Morgan - how obvious was it that Carol was going to mistake two skeleton-clad kids with masks for Tiff and Morgan. Lucy Beale could have played Skeletor without a costume.
Speaking of Lucy, here we go again ... a tale of the most unlikeable ingenues in the history of EastEnders. Lucy is a rude, little bitch who treats Ian like a piece of shit whilst she sleeps with a real piece of shit. I still cannot fathom her as anyone inclined to business acumen. It wasn't that long ago - last year, in fact -that she was confessing to Mandy that she didn't have a clue about the economics course she was studying, and I always thought it was Peter who had the business brain. She proved how fucking stupid she was tonight when she begged Turdhopper to see the bank manager with her. How much does she have to have it spelled out to her that this steroid squirt was only after the sex and a place to stay -and a chance to project his daddy issues onto her.
Melissa Suffield's Lucy was one-dimensional and cold. This Lucy is failing at a multi-dimensional level. She can't even do cold. She is totally unlikeable in her arrogance, but at eas with it, as I suspect, she's yet another actress, hired for looks, whose character has been moulded around the actress's real personality. Even Suffield came across in softer scenes with Peter and Ian better than Bywater, who's yet another crap actress, with no real experience. Her crying scene at the end, when she'd turfed the turd out, was embarrassing. And, like Jac Jossa, she gurns. When she has to express upset, her face is more gargoylish than Jessie Wallace's was when she was on botox.
Speaking of gurners, Lauren was out in full force today, albeit in a minimalist sense, accidentally on purpose assuming that Turdhopper had gone ahead with what he'd told Lauren he wanted to do and binned Lucy. Still, at least it gave Lucy the opportunity to bin him before he'd done the same to her. For that, I salute her. Oh, and I liked Morgan's revenge when Lucy got shitty and wouldn't do Trick or Treat with the kids. She deserved that. I hope when she falls, her fall is mighty, because at the beginning of the year, it was Lucy who was reminding Ian of their family ties to Bianca and her kids and saying how they should do more with and for them. Now she treats them like dog poo on a curb.
Having said that, the best - albeit small - scene in the show was the brief interchange between Carol and Ian sat at the bar of the Vic. Carol seemed surprised at the change in Ian,and I thought that those two would make a good pairing. As Ian told Lucy, he was crap at relationships, especially with the trophy blonde variety. I wouldn't be averse to seeing an Ian-Carol pairing, although it would make Ian his niece's stepfather, if he and Carol married. But, I'd just like to see them forge a good friendship with Ian helping out with his nieces and nephews. I liked that. It looked good and natural.
Speaking of unnatural, surely TPTB can see, after all the unintellible dialogue he had tonight, just how awful David Witts is. His delivery sucks. Those initial scenes with Lucy were terrible. He was barely understandable, and I watched the scenes twice. I really do think it's because he doesn't close his mouth properly, coupled with the fact that, at times, he's trying to imitate Jamie Foreman and at other times, Jake Wood. He's said he's learned from Foreman, but learning is about how to project your lines, how to make yourself the centre of a scene when you're not, it's not about imitation, and bad imitation at that.
Last night, he was in Derek mode. Tonight, he was trying to act like Max. Whatever the hell he was doing, it didn't work. If Lorraine Newman cannot see from these scenes tonight how pathetically awful this boy is, then she doesn't deserve to be in her job. Those scenes with him tonight were, without a doubt, some of the worst ever shown - if for no other reason than he was totally and utterly unintelligible. I hope when Derek bows out or croaks, Joey's departure is imminent.
As I said in another blog, whenever EastEnders go looking for testosterone, they never find it. Epic fail. In fact, Joey, Lucy, Lauren and Twitney are so unlikeable, they really should be top of the axe list. I'd rather see a dozen Poppies than suffer thirty minutes of that lot.
And Lola with Jay and Abi, what was that all about? I thought they were taking Oscar trick-or-treating, but they end up in ghost sheets cadging drinks at the Vic? Hasn't Lola learned anyting, although the last scene with Phil was clearly meant to give her food for thought about convincing Sharon to act for her by pretending to be Phil's fiancee. Still, Lorna Fitzgerald seems to have lost her Abi mojo since returning from her break. She's like a 12 year-old dressed up in Tanya's clothes. I think most of the youngsters need a re-think.
Verdict on this episode .....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
In fact, this is more entertaining:-
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