Tonight, I realised that the strongest male character on EastEnders is Patrick Trueman. This show is at its lowest ebb in its depiction of men, in general. It's not on its own. It's in very good company with Coronation Street, who is losing Peter Barlow, the character who is arguably one of the two last flawed Alpha males left in the English soap genre, the other being Cain Dingle on Emmerdale.
Phil Mitchell is led via a psychological hook through the brain by his psychopathic cousin, Ronnie, and via a ring through his dick by Sharon. Ian can't be without a female companion; David is defined by the women who control his libido. Masood is a shadow of the man he once was without Zainab around. Max is another one whose life decisions have been influenced by whatever woman he happened to be fucking at a particular time. Jack left town, crying because Ronnie dumped him. Jay is ordered about by Abi; Lola dictates to Peter and Billy. Hairy Cindy the Greek is calling the shots with TJ as much as Bianca does with Terry, and Alfie has long been labelled Kat's doormat.
Johnnie Carter is a mamma's boy. Women drive Jake Stone to drink.
And now we know that Mick Carter, brought in to front the Vic, is a pussy man too. He's not the central male focal point in charge of the central focal point of action on the show. He's a plot device, a weak and wavering man caught between his shill of a wife and his skank of a sister. He will be the bitch of whoever can psychologically play him best.
It's about time this dynamic changed.
Emotional Blackmail.
As annoying as she can be (which means Kellie Bright is doing her job to perfection), I'm Team Linda here. Linda is right. There should be no "choice" for Mick to make between his sister and his wife. His loyalty first is to his wife and the mother of his children. To be held and twisted by the short and curlies by Shirley telling what was essentially a tissue of lies is degrading.
Let's disabuse Shirley of some of her ego-inflated notions.
I got that money for you.
You agreed to see your father after 25 years. It's not unusual for a parent, no matter how bad they'd been, to want to see a child after a lengthy amount of time. But pardon me for thinking that Stan's condition was that Shirley come upstairs and he'd give Mick the money.
Mick walks around like a scared little kid because Daddio told Shirley that "her type" would be dead before thirty. That wasn't something awful to say, especially if he were speaking to a woman who'd walked out on her husband and three small children, one of whom had special needs. Shirley left Kevin and their three vulnerable children to party down with Heather. In fact, she was much more of a parental figure to Heather than she ever was to her kids, so much so that Heather was jealous of them.
Mick's frightened at "what happened" between Stan and Shirley. Well, nothing happened, except he told her a few unpleasant home truths about the fact that Mick had established his own family - a wife and three kids - and Shirley was on the periphery. She had no right to dictate and interfere in Mick's life, because she had a son, with whom she'd not been in contact for years, and she owed him one hell of an explanation. That wasn't anything bad; it was the truth. Just as it's the truth that Shirley doesn't want to face Dean because it would mean explaining to Dean, and to Mick, why she really wasn't any better than her father. In fact, she was worse.
Linda's stated that Stan was "a monster," and that's sparked speculation amongst the one collective braincell on Digital Spy that maybe Stan raped Linda - you know, the way Derek raped Tanya. Stan was a weak and ineffectual man whose loins produced a weak and ineffectual man whose loins produced two weak and ineffectual men. We've had the off-screen tale of a man who consigned his children to care because he couldn't cope - Billy Mitchell's father, and the senior branch of the Mitchells thought him the epitome of weakness. We've had the father whose wife died, who was unable to cope and consigned his youngest and most vulnerable child to a lifetime of being passed between pillar and post and treated as an inconvenience. Step forward, Frank Butcher.
That's Stan's sin - putting two very young children in care.
And so, because she's been told a few home truths, Shirley is going to take Mick's balls, in the shape of ten thousand pounds and leave. Mick should have taken his balls back and called her bluff. There's such a thing as a loan, and even if it meant Mick would have to - heaven forbid - mortgage the Vic, he'd still get the money to pay for the repair of the rising damp.
Shirley is more interested in getting in a position of power within Mick's dynamic and thus displacing Linda. She's more interested in doing that, than in seeing her son. Why? Because Mick is more malleable to emotional manipulation than Dean. Dean is the son she abandoned. He's the one who sussed she'd rather fuck a Polish builder than spend time with her child. When Mick found Dean's telephone number and confronted Shirley, it gave her the opportunity to play the victim and tell him what Stan had said about Mick's duty to his wife and children.
As much as Mick recognises this as Stan playing Shirley, he doesn't recognise that Shirley is playing him. It's emotional blackmail.
I'm so insecure and I have no one. Make me the licencee and give me a stake in the Vic, so I'll feel important. After all, I found the place for you.
Shirley took advantage of the fact that Mick had spent most of his married life working for his dominant mother-in-law and coddling his dominant wife. So Shirley convinced him to buy the Vic, sight unseen, and was handed a bill of sale, at half-a-million pounds more than the asking price. And now Mick is forced into the position of having to choose between Linda and Shirley.
And then Mick plays Linda.
There is no choice when it comes to you, L.
But there is a choice, and Mick made it: he chose to make Shirley the licencee of the pub he bought with his money. And once again, Shirley, has achieved a position of power and influence via emotional blackmail. She gained the position of living with Phil by lying to Social Services in an effort to gain custody of Phil's daughter for Phil and she cashed in on her faux position as the quasi-Mrs Mitchell. She also emotionally blackmailed Phil into giving her money (which Carl took) in order to buy a bar in Greece.
Now she's in the DoyouknowwhoIam mode again, not through any efforts of her own, but by emotional manipulation of a more vulnerable and weaker person - Heather, Jean and now Mick.
It astounds me how Mick can judge his father for putting him into care, and not spare a single judgemental thought for Shirley abandoning her three small children.
Linda's been displaced, and I hope she makes Mick live to rue the day. This couple, because of Shirley, is now living on a time bomb. Within a year, one will be ensconced in an affair with a secret partner who "understands" him or her better than the spouse, and the other will be a fully paid-up member of the lush club, but who will it be?
The Carter siblings are nothing more than three overgrown and very puerile children. Tina's only concerned about them all "being togevva" again - we're talking about two adult women, one pushing forty and the other post-menopausal, living under the care of their younger brother, who's being emotionally manipulated by both.
And we also are going from the sublime to the ridiculous with the Carter dynamic with Mick telling his twenty-one year-old adult daughter that he wanted to keep her right with him, always. There's no balance at all here, just blatant immaturity all around.
DTC says this isn't going to be The Carter Show. Maybe not, but it's fast becoming The Shirley Show. Shirley makes a demand, doesn't get the answer she wants right away, and so she sulks enough to make her object suffer from enough guilt to oblige her demands.
Linda isn't happy. I don't blame her.
A Partial Admission of Responsibility.
Carol is all loved up, having been fucked by David, and so she can afford to be generous and show some patronising compassion to Masood, who's in a very bad place. He's drinking, he's gambling and he's stolen from his son. He's on suspension from work and in danger of losing his job.
Why?
Because of Carol. So desperate, so alone and so frightened is this man, who's never put a foot wrong as a husband or father within his faith, that he misinterprets Carol's concern for his having cut himself as a return of the affections she stopped.
When he breaks down and tells Carol what he's done to Tamwar, she tells him what Arthur has told him - he has to talk to his son.
David clocks him leaving and is immediately suspicious. Let's get one thing straight. David might be fond of Carol, he might have a bond with her via Bianca, but he doesn't love her. David, like Ian, wants comfort sex, and at the moment, Granny Carol is the only thing on offer. With her, comes free room and board and the opportunity to be the Big I Am father figure to a family of idiots, headed by his Village Idiot daughter. When something better comes along, in the form of a woman like Nikki Spraggan, Granny Carol will be forgotten.
So convincing is David's motif that Carol's feeling smug enough to admit that "part" of Masood's problem just might be because of her, but hey ... she's not losing any sleep over it.
Unbelieveable line of the night came from David:-
I'm going to make this all about you, and it's time you started thinking about yourself too.
Carol has never ever stopped thinking about herself. She's a Branning, after all. And now David has given her tacit permission to acknowledge the fact that she comes before anyone else, in sickness and in health. This cancer crisis has been all about Carol, but for the wrong reasons.
More Carter Pejoratives.
Mick to Nancy: Have you farted?
That was as charming as the scene at Christmas 2007 when Heather was sitting on the sofa beside Shirley and lifted one half of her fat arse to cut a loud fart. OK, this is normal and natural daily activity/dialogue in the privacy of one's own home, but we don't need it shoved down our throats. It's disgusting. What's next? Shots of Mick wiping his hairy arse in the family loo? Shots of Nancy or Linda flushing bloody tampons down the toilet?
Honker the hero tonight, when Tina is still skanky enough to try to pull special privileges after having worked in the pub for only a couple of days. It's this stuff that isn't charming, but grating on some viewers' nerves about the incredibly stupid and entitled Carters.
Poopy Pops Out.
I'm glad Arthur called out Poopy's passive-aggressive nature. She was wrong to say what she said to the caller on Dot's phone, but I was curiously sympathetic to her when she confronted Denise about what went on between her and Arthur. Poopy is much younger than Denise, and rather than admitting she'd done something wrong, Denise stood her ground, irrespective of the fact that she's engaged to Ian and really shouldn't have kissed Arthur at all. I agree with Denise that what happened between her and Arthur last year, the affair, happened well before he was attracted to Poopy.
This is Poopy's exit. We won't miss her, but the repercussions of her final act of revenge as a woman scorned, was classic. She deserved the duff-duff.
And, Poopy, there is no rule in the laws of love about who dumps whom. Deal with it.
Watchable episode, but infuriating the way Shirley is being forced on the viewer.
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