OneBranningLess EastEnders: The Awful Truth - Review 22.02.2013

True to its recent form, EastEnders finished the week with yet another lame, circular episode, accomplishing nothing.

I mean, it's Friday night. Traditionally - i.e., when the show used to be good - the last episode of the week was a nail-biting cliffhanger ... someone revealed a secret, what would the response be? Someone's about to get caught at something, how would it play out?

People used to spend all weekend counting the hours until EastEnders would resume on Monday evening, wondering what the first weekly episode, an aftermath of Friday's cliffhanger, would entail.

No more.

Instead, we have unlikeable characters, treading the same path, being told the same euphemisms, seeing the same people, doing the same things they've done the day before (and most of those are things which make no sense, considering the characters involved).

Does anyone except the most inveterate of shippers (and, yes, I'm looking at wee Willie Wanker-Mitchell, who's rightly getting his Celtic arse smacked by sandbox colleagues on Walford Web for being a rude prick) really like or care about what happens to such poor, self-centred, hypocritical and narcissistic representatives of their gender as Tanya or the appalling Kat? Most viewers want to smack them silly.

And lazy, entitled Lauren, moving her clusterfucking cousin Joey into the family abode whilst Mommie Dearest is off indulging her selfishness and Cora the Bora lies drunk and stinking? Or Abi, who uses Valentine's day and a cuddly toy as an excuse to pop her cherry with Jay, ne'mind their sex was unprotected. Abi is sixteen-going on-eight and wants her mommy and daddy to start playing happy families - that way, there'll be someone around to raise the little chav grandson that's taken seed inside of Abi's blubbery belly.

And does anyone like Ayesha? I keep waiting for her to say "wey-hey mon". What kind of brazen bitch hauls arse on the next train when she's been stalking a man for months and hears his wife has left him, after condescending to disdain that wife in the original instance?

EastEnders used to do gritty, original kitchen-sink drama, but today it panders to an audience of romantic children and bitchy fanbois who don't share a braincell between them. Maybe they need to listen to some songs by some real songwriters about what goes down in a city of note, because they don't even have a clue about characterisation, except to deal in insulting stereotypes and generalisations.

Here's a song with vivid lyrics to jolt their imagination:-

Nahhh ... it's far too easier for them to write love triangles. And that's the awful truth.

The Awful Truth: Her Dreams Are Gone With the Wind (Yummy Mummy's Back):

Like the song says, Tanya is manless once again. Her dreams are gone with the wind.

Yes, Tanya's back, with gurning Oscar, and she's finding her two spoiled, entitled, totally unlikeable daughters scoffing fish and chips brought for them by the father they shun,who also gives them money on demand, pays the rent on the roof over their heads and pays their bills. He keeps the electric turned on and the heating pumping along.

His crime? To get married as a divorced man, after Yummy Mummy convinced the dimwit daughter brigade that Max seduced her into having an affair with him. It's OK for Tanya to divorce Max and marry Greg, but Max has to keep himself single and celibate at all times in order to attend to Tanya's needs.

After an appalling attempt to impose herself on the little group, stabbing fish and chips, which was really meant to isolate Kirsty into the position of interloper, she gets down to some hard negotiation with Max.

Let's remember one thing here: Kirsty is Max's wife. Max has been unfaithful to Kirsty for over one year, with Tanya. Tanya is the other woman, and I can't say this enough, but there are certain people like the fruit flower troll inhabiting Digital Spy 

or Walford Web Kindergarten's bullyboi brigade of Peege and Penn, the wannabe men, and their ringleader Wanker-Mitchell, who will forever cover their ears when presented with facts and go, "LALALALALALALALALALALA."

Remember when Tanya scarpered (and we found in this episode that she'd been enjoying a bit of bovine bonding in the wilds of Wales with Jane), she had agreed for Max to come over to the house so they could talk. Max arrived, only to find Tanya had vamoosed, leaving her drunken, putrid mother, Cora the Bora, to have someplace to stay rent-free, since she'd been kicked to the kerb by Dot, for abusing Dot's hospitality.

Well, Tanya's come back, it seems, because she loves Max.

Now, isn't that stating the bleeding obvious. Recently, the show's been looking at the two other dysfunctional co-dependent relationships extant on the Square - Kat and Alfie Moon and Zainab and Masood. But there's no avoiding the daddy of them all: Max and Tanya.

Tanya loves Max, and Max loves Tanya. He says. No, wait ... He loves Kirsty. After all, he married her. He even rescued her. What does he want?

This (and this is what defines Tanya and Max):-

Tanya loves sex with Max. She's never met a man before or after Max who could satisfy her in bed the way he does. Not Sean. Not Jack. And definitely not Greg Jessop. All roads led eventually to Max. I'm not certain that Tanya confuses sex with love, it's just that, for her, sex with Max is as close to love as she can get, and she wants to hold onto that. 

Also, like Alfie to Kat, Max is Tanya's security blanket. He's the means by which she can set her up as a middle-class wife with middle class values and mores, none of which she has. Another awful truth is that Tanya is so addicted to Max being in her life, Max sorting things out, setting her up in business etc, that when he's not around, she totally decompensates. 

She decompensates because Tanya is all about Tanya. The kids are an added bonus when she's in a good mood, and an obstacle when she isn't. She's never achieved anything in her life without the help of a man, and when she's manless, she falls to pieces. The very fact that she threw Max to the kerb when he told her the truth about how he felt about Kirsty is indicative of the fact that when she hears something she doesn't want to hear, this is how she reacts. It's also how both her pithy daughters react.

Max, on the other hand, is fond of Tanya. He loves her because she's the mother of his children, and he wants to stay with her because she's familiar territory. He's cheated on her before, and he'll cheat again. Because he can. Because Tanya will always have him back. He knows that. Kirsty, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity for Max. In actual fact, she's his first adult relationship. Max has been married three times. The first two times, he married Rachel and then Tanya, because he'd got each one up the duff. He did the done thing. But Kirsty is Max's first relationship which didn't entail getting married because the bride was breeding. They connected, they fell in love and they married.

Tanya was surprisingly right tonight when - even though Max brought Kirsty back to Walford, even though he told her he loved her, he would still throw her under a bus to get back with Tanya - she told him he was weak for that, and that she was weak also, because Tanya would have him back ... and so it would go until the next time. The person who wrote this had the Brannings down pat - they carry on going round and round in circles and just hurt the people around them.

I'm actually glad she told Max that she loved him, but they had to move on; they couldn't reconcile again. And Max is not only weak, but he's a coward, the way he brazenly lied to Kirsty about his conversation with Tanya.

Observation: Ever notice how closely Max resembles the character he voices in the States, the GEICO Gecko?

The GEICO Gecko

Max Branning

I think it's the soulful expression.

The Awful Truth: Marriage Is a Beautiful Thing (Kat and Alfie. Again. Again).

So on and on and on we drone, navel-gazing at the Moons' predicament. Kat knows she's acted like Queen Bitch with the only remnant of a brain remaining between her legs, when she tells Michael she's told Alfie that she slept with his cousin.

This makes Michael shit himself, and it makes Kat scurry back to the house she shares with My Aa-aaasss and Joey, with Jean trotting along in tow.

I'll be honest. I don't like Jean. I find her creepy, judgemental and annoying. However, I'm surprised she hasn't blindly supported Kat in a catastrophe of her own making. Of course, all Kat, Life's Eternal Victim, wants is some outward sympathy to support her own self-pity. She wants to cry so she makes sure she announces to Jean that she doesn't want to cry. Like a big girl ...

Jean's home truth to Kat is that she's upset because the man she loves is divorcing her, and her response to that was to go off and shag another man whom she didn't love, and then rub Alfie's nose in it.

I'm so pissed off with the blatant attempt of Newman and her merry men to force Kat's redemption upon us. I gagged a maggot when I heard Jessie Wallace wonder aloud why she always hurts Alfie. Tosh, this "something dark" in Kat that Jean started to qualify.

Kat hurts Alfie because she can. She's the abuse victim turned abuser. Michael says they're addicted to each other. I don't agree. I think Alfie genuinely and sincerely loves Kat and will always love her. You can't help whom you love. Ian will always love Cindy, and if she were to rise from the dead today and appear before him, everyone he's ever loved since would mean toast. Pat will always love Frank, even though he betrayed her time and again. And the first name off Sharon's lips when she landed back in Walford wasn't Saint Dennis, but Grant.

Alfie loves Kat unconditionally, but he knows now he has to move on with his life, because he can't trust her. And without trust, that relationship is nothing. So he has to give her up, move on with his life with someone who genuinely loves him.

As for Kat, Alfie is her security blanket. He's made her the respectable Mrs Moon, he's taken on her child and he cleans up the shit she leaves stinking behind. If Alfie cuts her loose, she has nothing - no job, no skill, no friends. She's at the mercy of whatever old coot she can fanagle into buying her booze in exchange for a quick fumble. The last time Alfie cut her loose, she descended into a morass of alcoholism and prostitution. Perhaps it's time she visited those venues again. She belongs in the gutter.

Kat doesn't want help. She wants pity and petting and mollycoddling and exoneration from any kind of responsibility she should shoulder in determining her own fate.

As for Michael the Amoral, he got handed his arse by Alfie tonight, when he slithered into the bar to try to make amends for taking advantage of Kat's situation. As if he cared. He genuinely thought Alfie would be all "hail-fellow-well-met" and benign. I, personally, loved the fact that Alfie told Michael he felt sorry for him.

But enough of this Moon malarkey. It's old, it's trite and it's bound to happen again.

The Awful Truth: A Middle-Aged Man's Ego is Stroked (As Well as Something Else): Masood

So Masood's date with Carol is totally strewn awry with the arrival of creepy Ayesha. Let's see ... Ayesha's returned for Masood. So she says, and she's probably telling the truth. No need to beat around the bush. She heard he'd split with Zainab - as if she didn't know that was coming - so she returned to Walford forthwith to stake her claim.

Throughout this episode, there were numerous references made to the fact that Zainab's been out of Masood's life for only two weeks, and already he was entertaining Carol Jackson and getting picked up by a stunning (but boring and creepy) woman half his age. Tamwar pointed the speed of his movements out to him on two occasions - his date with Carol and the appearance of Ayesha. Tamwar also wanted to know if Masood's feelings for Ayesha in any way affected what happened between him and Zainab, but he didn't get a straight answer.

I don't know how long Ayesha is here for this stint. I hope she isn't permanent, because if Masood gave up Zainab for a warm, lush young body, then this storyline sucks.

Patrick's Predicament.

This is a social issue which EastEnders is doing decently - the plight of the elderly when they're either recovering from an illness or simply ageing rapidly. Patrick's left on his own for a couple of hours so Denise and Kim can go to the pub, and he finds even opening a flask impossible, a fact which results in him falling from the chair and having to lie on the floor until Denise returns.

It was well-done, but I have one question: Why didn't Denise and Kim take Patrick with them to the pub? He'd have enjoyed the company and they could have easily wheeled him across the Square.

The Witches of Walford.

Bianca is still poor, but she can drink in the pub or eat in the cafe. Cora is a drunk, and all the women sat around that table this evening were moaning the fact that they were manless. Including the mysterious Ava the Rava, whose child's father ran out on her after the little Cock was born. Well, wouldn't you? Ava, you'll find your man out in the Vic's kitchen, and don't worry about snatching an intimate moment with Ray. They're not fussy about sex in their kitchens.