Boys and Girls Go Out to Play - Review:- 16.01.2014

Apologies for the blog being a day late. I watched the episode late last night, and it left me with much to ponder.

Last night's writer was the divine Daran Little, arguably one of the best soap genre writers of his generation. Coronation Street's loss is EastEnders' gain this time around, and - as usual - Little came up trumps.

It was a standard dichotomy episode - the ladies of the Square in the Vic on a Ladies' Night venture, the fellas at a poker game for high stakes. The episode was clever in that it threw out scores of hints at imminent storylines, as well as hints within those hints of storylines (if that makes sense), it re-introduced nuanced characters, gave other characters backbone and showed just how much of a member of an original EastEnders' family a particular legacy character is, and not in a nice way.

More than anything, the final scene gave us a hint of something very important to come, but most importantly, the episode was a blending of old characters with new, shaking them up and tossing out what really was EastEnders of the familiar hue.

I loved this episode.

The Black Widder.

So here we are on the day after the Big Secret was told. And the question reverberates around the last remnants of diehard ShannisVille about what Sharon's real intentions are.

Has she forgiven Phil? Does she love him? Is she going to bleed him dry financially? Is she betraying Saint Dennis's memory?

You know, it always amazes me how much you can gauge how long people have watched this show by their reaction to Sharon, in particular. Many long-term viewers have abandoned the show, starting - I think - in 2003, when Den was literally resurrected. So most of the catterwauling about Sharon has come from the dippy Shannis corner, those who keep candles lit in memory of the pretty boy, who went on, most recently, to play a rapist in Downton Abbey.

They're the ones actually convinced that what Phil Mitchell did on New Year's Eve 2005 was a crime, for which he should be imprisoned. These are the people who started watching the show under John Yorke's remit, and who refer to his tenure as "the Golden Age" of EastEnders.

Bullshit.

The long-term viewers remember Sharon with Grant, and how well Sharon intermingled with the Mitchells, who were, in essence, her second family. You cannot have Sharon on Albert Square without some involvement with the Mitchells, and if Grant's not around, it has to be Phil. But Grant really was the love of her life. Even when she had the affair with Phil, she specified that Phil was the nice part of Grant. (Yes, dumbasses, Phil Mitchell used to be the nice brother). Yet she dumped Phil unceremoniousy to return to Grant. To us long-termers, fey Dennis was a mere flash in the pan. He was her brother, and she spoke to him in baby-talk.

Then there are the big mouths who've only started watching the show since 2006 and ship the Brannings and whatever female they have at their fore.

So, to answer the above questions ... yes, she does, because she told Linda so. Sharon doesn't do deception, and she's an awful liar. Will she get even? Who knows? Remember that Sharon planned an elaborate revenge for Grant having bullied her out of Walford. She planned an elaborate ruse to get him to fall in love and propose to her, and then she would humiliate him in front of everyone in the pub. But this is what actually happened back in 1995:-

She ended up falling in love with him and falling pregnant.

But what about sweet Dennis? Well, as Sharon said to Phil and to Linda, she's finally left Dennis in the past. Her visit to his surprisingly fresh and well-kept grave symbolised the fact that she was finally saying good-bye to Dennis and leaving off living in the past, something the Shannisites sought for Sharon to do forever, keeping a vigil with a candle for Dennis ...

Perhaps this was her theme song ...

I don't believe she's out for revenge on Phil. I think she's probably being pragmatic about her situation. She's getting older, she's known Phil for over twenty years, longer than she'd ever known Dennis. She's trusted Phil, and for all the reasons Phil gave her for telling Dennis about what happened with Jonnie Allen, the real reason Phil told Dennis is because he wanted Dennis to beat the shit out of Jonnie Allen put out of action - nothing to do with wanting Sharon to stay in Walford.

Whilst I think Sharon loves Phil in her own way, I don't think she loves him as much as he loves her, and I think she intends to see that he makes her and her son happy.

Let's be brutally honest - the Dennis reveal was done and done immediately by DTC in order to get the thing out of the way. Had anyone wanted to do so and were EastEnders assured of a future of another ten years, this secret would have been left to fester until Denny was a teenager, old enough to understand the scope of Phil's actions, but this was clearly a sop to the Shannisites. 

Deal with it.

Far more important to DTC's vision of EastEnders and of his vision of Sharon within EastEnders is the fact that she now wants to be landlady of a pub again, and Phil can grant her wish; it's also important that Sharon is now one of a select few who know that Ronnie Mitchell killed Carl. And that is very important.

But actually, the most important aspect of everything is that Sharon is back in the old sense.

Ladies' Night.

So Linda throws an impromptu Ladies Night in the Vic, ostensibly to cheer Sharon up, stated reason to get to know "her ladies", real reason: Linda heard on the radio about a soldier being killed in Afghanistan, even though she knew it wasn't Lee, so she decided to throw herself a pity party, the height of which saw her breaking down and confessing all of this, after Shirley drunkenly told her she was "all right."

One wonders at Shirley's motive, because she didn't think of this at all until it was established that Linda and Sharon were friends, and Shirley behaved despicably toward Sharon - staring unobtrusively at her during the evening:-

Sharon: What are you looking at?
Shirley: Nothing much.

Then when Sharon tried to intervene in Linda's grief, Shirley irrationally snarled:-

You shut your mouf!

Shirley really hates Sharon - and everyone else, if her behaviour is anything to go by.

The ladies got together, mixing the new characters with the old, when Bianca got drunk and blurted out that Kat was pregnant with twins, which is why she wasn't drinking champers, not even a smidgeon. This prompted some great lines from Cora, or "Nora" as Linda referred to her, and for the first time ever, I found myself warming to this character, but her first foray was met with a tactless and cruel riposte from The Creature from the Black Lagoon ...

Cora: I smoked and drank all through my pregnancies and my girls turned out all right.
Shirley: Except one got cancer and the other's a junkie.

I know Shirley had issues with Rainie - like she was jealous of her involvement with Phil and tried to get Rainie hooked on crack cocaine again; but her remark about Tanya was well out of order.

Or this gem from Cora:-

I knew this woman once, she had three sets of twins in three years. She used to take them out walking on leads ...
Sharon: You mean reins. Denny had reins.
Cora: No, I mean leads. Her old man ran a pet shop, and she had them all kitted out with leads and dog collars.

Classic Daran Little dialogue, and classic snippets interjected - like Cora refusing to sit in judgement on Denise after Cora's discovery of her with Fatboy. And then there was the ultimate discovery of Carol the Stupid, acting like the fourteen year-old girl she thinks she is when David's around, and revealing that she and David were back together, and this time they'd make a go of it.

Famous last words.

The Ladies' Night was good, but I felt that Kellie Bright's Afghanistan soliloquy was forced and maudling. .That's not the writer's fault, it's the actor's.

One thing niggled me about this, and that was Shirley's remark that she "brought Mick up."

How? 

Linda was married when she was seventeen and has been with Mick for more than twenty years. If Mick is forty-one, he's twelve years younger than Shirley, who married Kevin when she was eighteen, making Mick six years old. By the time she left Kevin, Mick was a teenager. There's been no mention of her much younger siblings being part of her Wicks family household, so this "bringing up baby" storyline is one concocted by DTC to fit his pet project of making Shirley the star of the show.

Let's Hear It for the Boys.

The poker game, I felt, was better than the ladies' night. It was smaller, more intimate and more relaxed and natural. It combined more established characters - Alfie, Ian and Masood - with two of the newer ones - Terry and Mick - and everyone fitted just fine.

You'd be forgiven for forgetting that Mas was once a gambler (and a drinker, obviously) in the days prior to his having met Zainab. The gist of the game, as we know, was for Alfie to win the funds necessary to pay for a trip Down Under to see Spencer and get some dosh; and it was a means by which Masood asserted his freedom from the strictures of his religion and a statement that he was his own man.

Prior to the actual climax, it offered a chance to hear a bit about the background of Terry and Mick - Terry's father was a cabbie, like him; Mick's dad was a "wrong'un" (foreshadowing), and a chance for Mas to expound upon David Wicks and to get a sympathy vote from Ian, without (frustratingly so) Ian acknowledging that David was his brother.

But the highlight of that storyline was Alfie finding his balls and his darker side again, during the piss break, when Fatboy implored him, idiotically but well-meaningly, to let "Mr Mas" win that hand, because Mas was gambling all of Tamwar's university money (which would have seen Tamwar go to uni when he was forty). For one brief moment, you thought Alfie would do the Alfie thing, fold and let Mas be the hero; but he didn't.

Good. He's got a wife and child of whom to think, and for once Alfie put his needs before Masood's vanity and stupidity.

Of course the entire evening ended badly when TamBORE realised that the racist sister from hell didn't really need him and returned home, much to Mas's chagrin.

The Inner Beale.

Remember when Ian Beale lied about a very young Lucy getting cancer in order to manipulate an increasingly disinterested Mel into marrying him?

Well, that manipulation resulted in this:-

In this episode, we saw David Wicks (who's really David Beale) use disclosure of Carol's cancer to Max in order to manipulate him into selling half his business to David. All these lines about caring for her and looking after her might even be believed by David, but the fact that he used her illness, telling her brother when it was Carol's place to tell Max was scurvy and wrong.

The good thing about this vignette is that we was the re-emergence of Max as a nuanced character. He might be unlikeable, but we've long forgotten - as with Phil - that Max Branning does, indeed, have a good side. He's got the most emotive eyes in the programme since Sue Tully, and Max is one of the few characters who doesn't have to rely on dialogue when his face is so expressive.

He still doesn't trust David, and he has reason not to do so.

But this action by David only illustrates further how much like Ian he is - oily, sneaky, deceptive, condescending, bllying and manipulative. If Ian's a weasel, then David's a snake in the grass.

Twister.

For once, it was good to see Lauren, Whitney and Johnnie spending an evening playing Twister and just acting like normal young people, although we know that this scene was a prelude to the teenage pregnancy storyline, a who's-the-daddy gripper, featuring hairy Cindy the Greek, Liam and TJ, all of whom were upstairs at the Butchers' and one of whom dumped a pregnancy test in the kitchen bin right where Carol could find it. 

That will take her mind off her cancer.

I deplore this gratuitously sensationalist storyline. We've already got a teenaged mum (Lola) on the Square, and hairy Cindy the Greek is the last character who needs something like this. I hope she aborts the child and leaves. 

I guess that means she's not a boy in drag then.