A word to the wise is sufficient. People really should learn to read for comprehension, but the more I see that most people who watch this programme don't, then the more I understand the writers dumbing down the action and virtually re-writing history in order to fit the sort of episode they're writing.
It makes for too many cooks spoiling the broth, an example of which stood glaringly out in tonight's offering.
But let's make one thing abundantly clear before I begin the review. I want all the Luddites who see the names "Samantha Womack" and "Kacey Ainsworth" and "EastEnders" to take a deep breath, a big sip from a cup of tea and calm down.
Samantha Womack has not been asked to return to EastEnders - not by Kate Harwood, not by Lorraine Newman and not by the Queen. She has been asked in many interviews by many journalists if she would return, and she, quite diplomatically, has responded by saying, "Never say never." Womack is an actor and a pure professional. As much as she knows that as long as she's active in the profession, the door to EastEnders will always be open to her, she simply can't step across the threshold again until she's asked. And, apart from journalists exhibiting the curiousity of their profession, she hasn't been asked.
Kacey Ainsworth has not been asked to return to EastEnders - not by Kate Harwood, not by Lorraine Newman and not by the Queen. She is, at the moment, doing the interview rounds and touting a new sitcom in which she'll be starring shortly on BBC2. As an ex-EastEnders actor, she's asked the ubiquitous question as to whether or not she would return.
Ainsworth is also a professional, but she hints that a soap's schedule, professionally, is more conducive to her lifestyle now, as the mother of two school-aged children. However, she, like Womack, is currently contracted to do other work. If that were a hint she was throwing out, I hope TPTB aren't desperate enough to bite the bait. Little Mo was a spent character by the time she left, and the show has far too many village idiots slumming about to accommodate another. Creepy Jean's got the hunched shoulders' market wrapped up, and Bianca is the village idiot of not one, but three families. Besides, the last thing the show needs now is a revival of the Slater phenomenon, which introduced the misconception that loud, offensive women are strong characters, when they're not.
Barbara Windsor, on the other hand has been asked to return, but cannot make up her mind. This fact - and it's a fact, as it was presented by the actress, herself - fills me with hope, even if she contracts to return for limited periods in a guest capacity. It means that Lorraine Newman recognises that something significant is missing, and that's the presence of a strong central older woman, with a history on the Square, at the head of a consequential family. I know Peggy was never the all-encompassing matriarch that Pat was, but she has a presence in the Square that's missed badly, and which the ready-made matriarch who isn't, Cora the Bora, failed to accomplish.
The show needs Peggy, but they don't need her to return bringing a retconned, continuous war with Sharon. As I showed in my last blog, that feud ended in 2005, and any attempt to continue it is pure retcon.
Retconning things to fit a particular plot is something that's got out of hand on the show at the moment, and someone on the production team has to have balls enough to stop this shit. Simon Ashdown's been on the scene since 1995. If he can't rein his writers' deliberate faux pas in from time to time, he should be taken out and slapped - along with Carey Andrews, a vastly experiencec core writer who slipped a lie into tonight's proceedings, and should have known better than to do so.
Carey Andrews (and Simon Ashdown for allowing it), this is for you ...
Prelude to the Gangabanga Sequel - Spot the Retcon.
There's no doubt about it, Patsy Palmer reached into her limited repertoire of crying with her mouth open, shouting and being quietly tragic throughout this storyline; because - let's face it - it was less about Liam the Lunk and more about Bianca. The Tony paedophile storyline was all about Bianca, the centrepiece of everything, because ultimately these storylines are all about Bianca's reaction to a situation concerning her family, her arrogance, her misplaced self-confidence, which always ends up being skewed.
Liam knows the gangabanga and their behaviour better than Bianca, but - once again - no one knows anything better than Bianca. She simply won't be told. That sort of obstreporous behaviour comes as much from her Branning mother as it does from her great-auntie Pauline.
Liam knows ugly Kane and the boys, who aren't cool or even Kool and the Gang ...
and he knows that Kane and the gang are after his flat-headed ass. Liam is a grass, and he knows that they'll target his family in a war of attrition to get back at Liam, as evidenced by the brick thrown through the window. (Shame, it didn't brain Tiffany).
Liam wants to go to live with Ricky, because Ricky's his father and because his absence will draw the gang's limited attention span away from the Butcher family.
And herein lies the retcon moment. But first, watch these two clips, taken from the episodes which aired on the 16th and 17th of January 2012, in the wake of Pat's funeral (which turned out to be a Branningfest and David Wick's defection of loyalties from the love affair that never was with Carol. Watch, pay attention and learn ...
In the first clip, pay particular attention from the 6:00 minute mark onward ...
Notice that throughout this clip, Bianca maintains that she and Ricky are determined to make a go of their marriage, in the wake of a confession by Ricky of a one-night stand with Mandy Salter, and his finding out that, years before - before he even knew Bianca - Mandy had lost a baby she had conceived as a teenager with Ricky. Bianca even states categorically that she loves Ricky.
However, Carol, who's just been dumped by commitment-shy, narcissistic David Wicks, is a miseryguts who is determined that everyone around her will share in her woe. If a man's dumped Carol, then Carol is determined that Bianca will dump her man. The week before this episode aired, when Carol was all loved-up with David and romping Pat's bed, she was encouraging Bianca to put this incident with Mandy behind her, that Ricky loved her and that he was worth the fight. Now it's a different story; but this is still the dynamic with Carol and Bianca - hence, the real reason that Bianca threw a strop and insisted that Carol finish with creepy Steve. There was no one on the horizon for Bianca.
Right. That's established. Carol encouraged Bianca to dump Ricky, even though Bianca didn't want to.
And here's further proof that Bianca did the dumping ... and that Ricky didn't want to be dumped.
Got that? Ricky was effectively exiled from Walford, not allowed to see his children, not even allowed to stay with his sister who lived next door. In fact, he was frog-marched to the station and despatched.
That was fifteen months ago.
Yet tonight, we are told in a dialogue between Bianca and Carol that Ricky slept with Mandy Salter and walked out, that he abandoned his family, that Liam had been more of a man to that family than Ricky.
What a crock of horseshit! Either Bianca is a blatant liar, who sees the world in her terms, or this writer is lazy. I think the latter. From the clips above, we see that Ricky didn't want to leave, that he never wanted to leave his children, and for weeks after this, we also saw Bianca berating Ricky for not sending her enough money when he needed money for a deposit on a flat, so if the children were allowed to visit him, they'd have a place to stay.
As for Liam being more of a man to the family, I seem to recall it was Shitney the Walford Mattress who ordered Liam to get a job at McKlunkey's - something illegal in itself as Liam was only thirteen at the time, and ... oh yes, Liam went and got involved with a gang, which led to his being involved in mugging a neighbour, which brought all the trouble down on the family that they're now experiencing.
As a final kick, where the fuck does Carol get off telling Bianca that she's not a failure by asking Ricky to step up. She's never told Ricky what's been going on with Liam, never advised him of his entanglement with this gang, never apprised him of his stabbing. In fact, she's brought Ray more into the family dynamic as a father figure, and Ray is the ultimate of retconned characters. Besides, Ray is the one who told Liam that if he were his son and skived off school, he'd get a slap.
So spare me the needless retconning. It's an insult to my intelligence and the intelligence of countless long-term viewers who are being left by the wayside as this programme panders more and more to the tastes and predilctions of people who can't think critically and who share a collective brain cell amongst them.
This single incident spoiled an otherwise good vignette, which provided real tension and apprehension for the fate of Liam the Lunk.
Another criticism ... Janine has been back in Walford for almost a week now. Why have TPTB not had her interacting with the rest of her family who remains in Walford? She is Liam's aunt. Why hasn't she visited them or why hasn't Bianca sought her out, if only to scream at her about Liam's predicament? They were good enough to remember that Janine owns the house they live in and reluctantly pay rent, but they couldn't provide any sort of scene with her? Oh, yes ... lest we forget ... Bianca works with Katshit Slutter, who'll make her forget that she's living in Pat's house as a grace-and-favour gesture.
Bianca really is the worst kind of village idiot.
The Psychopath and the Stupid Girl.
From South London's finest to EastEnders' Alice:-
This could be about her ...
The way she talks about someone else
That she don't even know herself
She's the sickest thing in this world
Well, look at that stupid girl
That sums Alice up tonight completely. Alice is thick as pigshit and twice as stupid, and she's cannon fodder for a psychopath like Michael Moon.
OK, Luddites, let's get Moon straight (and this is for all you dummies wanting Michael to get custody of Scarlett).
Michael is a psychopath. Pyschopathy can be an inherited trait, and considering Michael's mother's really erratic behaviour, which resulted in her inadvertant suicide, Michael probably got his tendencies from Mommie Dearest.
Psychopaths are incapable of loving. They are also incapable of compassion and empathy, so disabuse yourself of any notion that Michael has bonded with Scarlett. He hasn't. He can't. Whilst Janine was away, Scarlett was the means by which Michael gleaned sympathy from various people, something which resulted in him not having to struggle as a single parent raising a child. A single mother with a child is always regarded askance by society, regardless of whether she's an unmarried mother or widowed or divorced. A man left holding a baby is viewed with sympathy, concern and pity.
Michael didn't even let it get that far before he was turning on the charm for Roxy, getting her to move into the house to look after Scarlett, freeing him up to mooch about and raise dodgy money. Since Derek's death, he's been sitting on a pile of counterfeit money he's hoping to launder. And since the early part of the year, as she surprisingly pointed out tonight, Alice has been doing the heavy lifting with Scarlett.
Actually, I'm glad she corrected him when he was whining about working 24/7 with Scarlett, because he hasn't. She has. Another thing about psychopaths ... they've got a superiority complex, which is rampant in Michael's case. They are also social predators, meaning if they think a woman can be swayed by a fuck, they'll do her (Kat, Roxy, probably Janine). And they are also control freaks.
All the boxes are ticked for Michael. Anyone wanting a child to be raised by someone like that is just sick. Another thing, Michael projects his adverse feelings about his mother onto women on whom he preys. This is exactly what and why he was tormenting Janine. She was a mother, and he was chipping away at her self-esteem, making her believe she was the worst of the worst in projecting his own conflicting emotions about his own mother. He wanted to break Janine in the worst way, and he did. But she's back.
Points to her for putting silly Alice in her place when Alice parrotted Michael's pointed remark about Janine being a stranger. Janine knows just how to fight back in that respect. She's read Alice's vapidity and vanity like a book. And she knows Michael is using her as a pawn.
Now that Janine's back, Scarlett becomes the tool by which he hopes to gain even more sympathy for his plight (and help so he can abscond heavy-duty responsibility). He knows the community have no good feelings for Janine, but his hope might float, like the piece of shit he is.
Oh, and for what it's worth ... psychopaths can't be cured.To wish a child a lifetime with someone like that is cruel.
The good thing is that Janine knows Michael for exactly what and who he is. I hope she wins.
Observation: Please, someone tell Lorraine Newman that painting Katshit with false concern is not working. She never gave a rat's arse about the Butcher family prior to this year, and she won't again. This making her into some sort of Cockney sparrow Mother Theresa sucks shit, and the viewing public aren't buying her cack-handed redemption. Fact is, Bryan Kirkwood stuffed Kat and Lorraine Newman signed off on it. The show has countless other problems to solve other than repairing a character just to suit the EP's vanity. Axe the bitch and move on.
Oh, and Alice making remarks about Janine's "abandonment" of Scarlett made me want to reach throught the screen and wring her scrawny neck. She knows nothing about what happened in that house, and I'd like to see Michael pull the same treatment with her. Just a thick and ignorant dumbass girl.
The Return of Ian Beale.
This is the real Ian we saw tonight - weasely and wanton. For further evidence of Moon's psychopathy, watch the episode again and clock his face in the background as Ian does his compliment-laden con of Jean, having found that Jean's built a nest-egg for her granddaughter. Ian is having money raising the first month's downpayment on the lease for the lock-up, and he's after Jean to "invest" her savings in his restaurant venture.
It was more than ironic that Michael should have been earwigging that conversation, which was highly reminiscent of Michael's full-on con of Jean last June, which so many people have forgotten. That was a pretty good scene, because Ian was quite honest in some respects with Jean - how he wanted the restaurant to be a success so Lucy would be proud of him - but he cancelled it out with his smarmy lies about Jean's involvement - how she was his financial advisor, how she had a brain for business.
Jean was right to be quite hurt about this, because previously, when she'd worked with Ian, she thought she'd gained his respect in certain ways; and she also felt that the two of them had a bond, somewhat, having had mental health issues. The person who really showed compassion tonight was Shirley,when Jean broke down in the Minute Mart and Shirley took her into the back room to calm her down with biscuits and tea. And good commonsense advice and a great assessment of Ian as a petty, little man, who couldn't be fought.
Line of the night came in a brief exchange between Phil, waiting in a queue that had formed, and Shirley:-
Phil: Anybody serving around here?
Shirley (recognising his voice): NO!
There's no Phil and Shirley future, no great love story. Shirley, herself, ruefully admitted to Jean that she had had her share of petty little men, whom she couldn't fight. That's the end of it, Mona.
The greatest irony of Ian Beale's situation is the only person who can help him in his financial dilemma with the restaurant is the woman whom he paid twice for sex and made her scrub the floor of his chippy. To see him sat in humble supplication awaiting Janine's attention and guarded by her rottweiler, Billy Mitchell, was a classic. Ian Beale wore the same face he wore when he returned from the clinic after having his secret vasectomy. Emasculated.
Fat Barbie Bits.
Does Dennis want a haircut? And did I hear correctly that Sharon told him if he had his haircut, he'd look like all the other little boys in Walford? Uhhhhhh ... sorry, Sharon, but Dennis is at the age where he will want to look like everyone else or risk being ostracised by his peers.
One thing struck me tonight, however, as there was a close-up of a sullen Dennis, sulking at the table because Jack the Peg had gone. (Get over it, kid; Jack was only interested in you as long as he was interested in Fat Barbie, your mother, and as soon as that waned, you were toast.)
What struck me was how much Denny resembled Janine Butcher when Janine was a sulky little girl.
Look:-
Take away the blonde hair and the smile, and you've roughly the same up-turned nose, same cherubic face and chin. Denny could be a male version of Janine, the child from hell. He'll certainly have enough daddy (and mummy) issues. He'll fit in well in Walford.
Yet another watchable episode, bad retcon aside. Makes you wonder what Friday will bring.
Max and Kirsty: Foreshadowing ...
Max's phone kept ringing. It couldn't have been Tanya ... By the prickling of my thumbs, someone's family this way comes. You have been warned.
Final Observation: Masood corrected Liam's grammatical error and then promptly made one of his own.
It makes for too many cooks spoiling the broth, an example of which stood glaringly out in tonight's offering.
But let's make one thing abundantly clear before I begin the review. I want all the Luddites who see the names "Samantha Womack" and "Kacey Ainsworth" and "EastEnders" to take a deep breath, a big sip from a cup of tea and calm down.
Samantha Womack has not been asked to return to EastEnders - not by Kate Harwood, not by Lorraine Newman and not by the Queen. She has been asked in many interviews by many journalists if she would return, and she, quite diplomatically, has responded by saying, "Never say never." Womack is an actor and a pure professional. As much as she knows that as long as she's active in the profession, the door to EastEnders will always be open to her, she simply can't step across the threshold again until she's asked. And, apart from journalists exhibiting the curiousity of their profession, she hasn't been asked.
Kacey Ainsworth has not been asked to return to EastEnders - not by Kate Harwood, not by Lorraine Newman and not by the Queen. She is, at the moment, doing the interview rounds and touting a new sitcom in which she'll be starring shortly on BBC2. As an ex-EastEnders actor, she's asked the ubiquitous question as to whether or not she would return.
Ainsworth is also a professional, but she hints that a soap's schedule, professionally, is more conducive to her lifestyle now, as the mother of two school-aged children. However, she, like Womack, is currently contracted to do other work. If that were a hint she was throwing out, I hope TPTB aren't desperate enough to bite the bait. Little Mo was a spent character by the time she left, and the show has far too many village idiots slumming about to accommodate another. Creepy Jean's got the hunched shoulders' market wrapped up, and Bianca is the village idiot of not one, but three families. Besides, the last thing the show needs now is a revival of the Slater phenomenon, which introduced the misconception that loud, offensive women are strong characters, when they're not.
Barbara Windsor, on the other hand has been asked to return, but cannot make up her mind. This fact - and it's a fact, as it was presented by the actress, herself - fills me with hope, even if she contracts to return for limited periods in a guest capacity. It means that Lorraine Newman recognises that something significant is missing, and that's the presence of a strong central older woman, with a history on the Square, at the head of a consequential family. I know Peggy was never the all-encompassing matriarch that Pat was, but she has a presence in the Square that's missed badly, and which the ready-made matriarch who isn't, Cora the Bora, failed to accomplish.
The show needs Peggy, but they don't need her to return bringing a retconned, continuous war with Sharon. As I showed in my last blog, that feud ended in 2005, and any attempt to continue it is pure retcon.
Retconning things to fit a particular plot is something that's got out of hand on the show at the moment, and someone on the production team has to have balls enough to stop this shit. Simon Ashdown's been on the scene since 1995. If he can't rein his writers' deliberate faux pas in from time to time, he should be taken out and slapped - along with Carey Andrews, a vastly experiencec core writer who slipped a lie into tonight's proceedings, and should have known better than to do so.
Carey Andrews (and Simon Ashdown for allowing it), this is for you ...
Oh, and just so the Luddites and bullybois don't think I'm bitching unduly, this was another watchable episode. Shame about the needless retcon, however.
Prelude to the Gangabanga Sequel - Spot the Retcon.
There's no doubt about it, Patsy Palmer reached into her limited repertoire of crying with her mouth open, shouting and being quietly tragic throughout this storyline; because - let's face it - it was less about Liam the Lunk and more about Bianca. The Tony paedophile storyline was all about Bianca, the centrepiece of everything, because ultimately these storylines are all about Bianca's reaction to a situation concerning her family, her arrogance, her misplaced self-confidence, which always ends up being skewed.
Liam knows the gangabanga and their behaviour better than Bianca, but - once again - no one knows anything better than Bianca. She simply won't be told. That sort of obstreporous behaviour comes as much from her Branning mother as it does from her great-auntie Pauline.
Liam knows ugly Kane and the boys, who aren't cool or even Kool and the Gang ...
and he knows that Kane and the gang are after his flat-headed ass. Liam is a grass, and he knows that they'll target his family in a war of attrition to get back at Liam, as evidenced by the brick thrown through the window. (Shame, it didn't brain Tiffany).
Liam wants to go to live with Ricky, because Ricky's his father and because his absence will draw the gang's limited attention span away from the Butcher family.
And herein lies the retcon moment. But first, watch these two clips, taken from the episodes which aired on the 16th and 17th of January 2012, in the wake of Pat's funeral (which turned out to be a Branningfest and David Wick's defection of loyalties from the love affair that never was with Carol. Watch, pay attention and learn ...
In the first clip, pay particular attention from the 6:00 minute mark onward ...
Notice that throughout this clip, Bianca maintains that she and Ricky are determined to make a go of their marriage, in the wake of a confession by Ricky of a one-night stand with Mandy Salter, and his finding out that, years before - before he even knew Bianca - Mandy had lost a baby she had conceived as a teenager with Ricky. Bianca even states categorically that she loves Ricky.
However, Carol, who's just been dumped by commitment-shy, narcissistic David Wicks, is a miseryguts who is determined that everyone around her will share in her woe. If a man's dumped Carol, then Carol is determined that Bianca will dump her man. The week before this episode aired, when Carol was all loved-up with David and romping Pat's bed, she was encouraging Bianca to put this incident with Mandy behind her, that Ricky loved her and that he was worth the fight. Now it's a different story; but this is still the dynamic with Carol and Bianca - hence, the real reason that Bianca threw a strop and insisted that Carol finish with creepy Steve. There was no one on the horizon for Bianca.
Right. That's established. Carol encouraged Bianca to dump Ricky, even though Bianca didn't want to.
And here's further proof that Bianca did the dumping ... and that Ricky didn't want to be dumped.
That was fifteen months ago.
Yet tonight, we are told in a dialogue between Bianca and Carol that Ricky slept with Mandy Salter and walked out, that he abandoned his family, that Liam had been more of a man to that family than Ricky.
What a crock of horseshit! Either Bianca is a blatant liar, who sees the world in her terms, or this writer is lazy. I think the latter. From the clips above, we see that Ricky didn't want to leave, that he never wanted to leave his children, and for weeks after this, we also saw Bianca berating Ricky for not sending her enough money when he needed money for a deposit on a flat, so if the children were allowed to visit him, they'd have a place to stay.
As for Liam being more of a man to the family, I seem to recall it was Shitney the Walford Mattress who ordered Liam to get a job at McKlunkey's - something illegal in itself as Liam was only thirteen at the time, and ... oh yes, Liam went and got involved with a gang, which led to his being involved in mugging a neighbour, which brought all the trouble down on the family that they're now experiencing.
As a final kick, where the fuck does Carol get off telling Bianca that she's not a failure by asking Ricky to step up. She's never told Ricky what's been going on with Liam, never advised him of his entanglement with this gang, never apprised him of his stabbing. In fact, she's brought Ray more into the family dynamic as a father figure, and Ray is the ultimate of retconned characters. Besides, Ray is the one who told Liam that if he were his son and skived off school, he'd get a slap.
So spare me the needless retconning. It's an insult to my intelligence and the intelligence of countless long-term viewers who are being left by the wayside as this programme panders more and more to the tastes and predilctions of people who can't think critically and who share a collective brain cell amongst them.
This single incident spoiled an otherwise good vignette, which provided real tension and apprehension for the fate of Liam the Lunk.
Another criticism ... Janine has been back in Walford for almost a week now. Why have TPTB not had her interacting with the rest of her family who remains in Walford? She is Liam's aunt. Why hasn't she visited them or why hasn't Bianca sought her out, if only to scream at her about Liam's predicament? They were good enough to remember that Janine owns the house they live in and reluctantly pay rent, but they couldn't provide any sort of scene with her? Oh, yes ... lest we forget ... Bianca works with Katshit Slutter, who'll make her forget that she's living in Pat's house as a grace-and-favour gesture.
Bianca really is the worst kind of village idiot.
The Psychopath and the Stupid Girl.
From South London's finest to EastEnders' Alice:-
This could be about her ...
The way she talks about someone else
That she don't even know herself
She's the sickest thing in this world
Well, look at that stupid girl
That sums Alice up tonight completely. Alice is thick as pigshit and twice as stupid, and she's cannon fodder for a psychopath like Michael Moon.
OK, Luddites, let's get Moon straight (and this is for all you dummies wanting Michael to get custody of Scarlett).
Michael is a psychopath. Pyschopathy can be an inherited trait, and considering Michael's mother's really erratic behaviour, which resulted in her inadvertant suicide, Michael probably got his tendencies from Mommie Dearest.
Psychopaths are incapable of loving. They are also incapable of compassion and empathy, so disabuse yourself of any notion that Michael has bonded with Scarlett. He hasn't. He can't. Whilst Janine was away, Scarlett was the means by which Michael gleaned sympathy from various people, something which resulted in him not having to struggle as a single parent raising a child. A single mother with a child is always regarded askance by society, regardless of whether she's an unmarried mother or widowed or divorced. A man left holding a baby is viewed with sympathy, concern and pity.
Michael didn't even let it get that far before he was turning on the charm for Roxy, getting her to move into the house to look after Scarlett, freeing him up to mooch about and raise dodgy money. Since Derek's death, he's been sitting on a pile of counterfeit money he's hoping to launder. And since the early part of the year, as she surprisingly pointed out tonight, Alice has been doing the heavy lifting with Scarlett.
Actually, I'm glad she corrected him when he was whining about working 24/7 with Scarlett, because he hasn't. She has. Another thing about psychopaths ... they've got a superiority complex, which is rampant in Michael's case. They are also social predators, meaning if they think a woman can be swayed by a fuck, they'll do her (Kat, Roxy, probably Janine). And they are also control freaks.
All the boxes are ticked for Michael. Anyone wanting a child to be raised by someone like that is just sick. Another thing, Michael projects his adverse feelings about his mother onto women on whom he preys. This is exactly what and why he was tormenting Janine. She was a mother, and he was chipping away at her self-esteem, making her believe she was the worst of the worst in projecting his own conflicting emotions about his own mother. He wanted to break Janine in the worst way, and he did. But she's back.
Points to her for putting silly Alice in her place when Alice parrotted Michael's pointed remark about Janine being a stranger. Janine knows just how to fight back in that respect. She's read Alice's vapidity and vanity like a book. And she knows Michael is using her as a pawn.
Now that Janine's back, Scarlett becomes the tool by which he hopes to gain even more sympathy for his plight (and help so he can abscond heavy-duty responsibility). He knows the community have no good feelings for Janine, but his hope might float, like the piece of shit he is.
Oh, and for what it's worth ... psychopaths can't be cured.To wish a child a lifetime with someone like that is cruel.
The good thing is that Janine knows Michael for exactly what and who he is. I hope she wins.
Observation: Please, someone tell Lorraine Newman that painting Katshit with false concern is not working. She never gave a rat's arse about the Butcher family prior to this year, and she won't again. This making her into some sort of Cockney sparrow Mother Theresa sucks shit, and the viewing public aren't buying her cack-handed redemption. Fact is, Bryan Kirkwood stuffed Kat and Lorraine Newman signed off on it. The show has countless other problems to solve other than repairing a character just to suit the EP's vanity. Axe the bitch and move on.
Oh, and Alice making remarks about Janine's "abandonment" of Scarlett made me want to reach throught the screen and wring her scrawny neck. She knows nothing about what happened in that house, and I'd like to see Michael pull the same treatment with her. Just a thick and ignorant dumbass girl.
The Return of Ian Beale.
This is the real Ian we saw tonight - weasely and wanton. For further evidence of Moon's psychopathy, watch the episode again and clock his face in the background as Ian does his compliment-laden con of Jean, having found that Jean's built a nest-egg for her granddaughter. Ian is having money raising the first month's downpayment on the lease for the lock-up, and he's after Jean to "invest" her savings in his restaurant venture.
It was more than ironic that Michael should have been earwigging that conversation, which was highly reminiscent of Michael's full-on con of Jean last June, which so many people have forgotten. That was a pretty good scene, because Ian was quite honest in some respects with Jean - how he wanted the restaurant to be a success so Lucy would be proud of him - but he cancelled it out with his smarmy lies about Jean's involvement - how she was his financial advisor, how she had a brain for business.
Jean was right to be quite hurt about this, because previously, when she'd worked with Ian, she thought she'd gained his respect in certain ways; and she also felt that the two of them had a bond, somewhat, having had mental health issues. The person who really showed compassion tonight was Shirley,when Jean broke down in the Minute Mart and Shirley took her into the back room to calm her down with biscuits and tea. And good commonsense advice and a great assessment of Ian as a petty, little man, who couldn't be fought.
Line of the night came in a brief exchange between Phil, waiting in a queue that had formed, and Shirley:-
Phil: Anybody serving around here?
Shirley (recognising his voice): NO!
There's no Phil and Shirley future, no great love story. Shirley, herself, ruefully admitted to Jean that she had had her share of petty little men, whom she couldn't fight. That's the end of it, Mona.
The greatest irony of Ian Beale's situation is the only person who can help him in his financial dilemma with the restaurant is the woman whom he paid twice for sex and made her scrub the floor of his chippy. To see him sat in humble supplication awaiting Janine's attention and guarded by her rottweiler, Billy Mitchell, was a classic. Ian Beale wore the same face he wore when he returned from the clinic after having his secret vasectomy. Emasculated.
Fat Barbie Bits.
Does Dennis want a haircut? And did I hear correctly that Sharon told him if he had his haircut, he'd look like all the other little boys in Walford? Uhhhhhh ... sorry, Sharon, but Dennis is at the age where he will want to look like everyone else or risk being ostracised by his peers.
One thing struck me tonight, however, as there was a close-up of a sullen Dennis, sulking at the table because Jack the Peg had gone. (Get over it, kid; Jack was only interested in you as long as he was interested in Fat Barbie, your mother, and as soon as that waned, you were toast.)
What struck me was how much Denny resembled Janine Butcher when Janine was a sulky little girl.
Look:-
Take away the blonde hair and the smile, and you've roughly the same up-turned nose, same cherubic face and chin. Denny could be a male version of Janine, the child from hell. He'll certainly have enough daddy (and mummy) issues. He'll fit in well in Walford.
Yet another watchable episode, bad retcon aside. Makes you wonder what Friday will bring.
Max and Kirsty: Foreshadowing ...
Max's phone kept ringing. It couldn't have been Tanya ... By the prickling of my thumbs, someone's family this way comes. You have been warned.
Final Observation: Masood corrected Liam's grammatical error and then promptly made one of his own.
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