The Fish(y) Dinner - Review:- 09.05.2014

Listen up, Millennials, this piece of information is going to help you out.

When DTC said "everyone will be involved" in Lucy's death, he didn't mean EVERYBODY WOULD BE INVOLVED.

That is to say, he didn't mean that literally, and it's a sad reflection that so many people, especially those in today's target audience for EastEnders 2.0, seem to think that's what he meant or even to will him to mean just that.

DTC is a very clever man ...

... not the Messiah, by a long shot, but still a very clever man, and with this storyline, he knows what he's doing. If he were as literal as a lot of Millennials would want, EastEnders would be re-located to CBBC.

The world doesn't exist in black and white, and we're not about to spend the next ten months watching various and sundry characters, from Tommy Moon to Patrick Trueman, go all shifty-eyed and evasive every time Lucy Beale's name is mentioned.

One Millennial in particular, noted for his belligerance, questions how I know DTC doesn't mean what he said literally.

Here's how I know: Because educated people, of which DTC is one, often speak euphemistically. This man is using the run up to the 30th Anniversary to do a detailed character study of most of the established characters in the show, demonstrating how the death of a young woman, known to all, yet totally unknown to those closest to her, might affect them, their lives and their behaviour.

We've seen her father, use his grief as an excuse to reveal his true feelings for his youngest child - that this child isn't as important as his brother and sister or even as important as the waif and stray who showed up, unbidden and uninvited, to cause bother in the household, simply because his mother wasn't named Cindy. After all, the child Ian Beale ran after down the street was Cindy's daughter, not his son.

We've seen Phil Mitchell show compassion, Peter Beale behave despicably, his Uncle David relate more strongly than normal to his niece's death because it stirs memories of the death of his youngest daughter.

Bad boys have shown good sides, good boys have become prats.

And Lauren will build a career around waiting for an e-mail.

Surfer Girl.

The idea of Lauren, the walking poster girl of the Millennial generation, trying to run a business is a big joke. Even bigger is the fact that this so-called "letting agency" seems to consist of Lauren surfing through her e-mails daily. Not a difficult thing to do.

This past week was an off-week for EastEnders. As Dickens would say (and he knew a fair bit about the East End), it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.

The worst of times was Lauren, and I know many will disagree. Is the character better presented under DTC than she was under Newman? Probably, but the actress not only portrays a singularly annoying character - selfish, self-obsessed and entitled - but she's annoying to watch as well. Someone needs to help her work on voice modulation. Bianca intentionally screeches, but Lauren's voice is like chalk grating against a chalkboard.

I know this part of the episode was supposed to be filled with tension and lead up to the suspicion as the first full-fledged suspect in Jake Stone, but all I kept thinking was that Jossa's Lauren was like a bad cross between Buffy the Vampire-Slayer, Nancy Drew and Katniss from The Hunger Games - and that's supremely ironic since Jossa's tried to emulate Jennifer Lawrence's look from that film for quite awhile. I almost expect her to trip at the BSA's.

I've never found Jamie Lomas convincing as any part of Albert Square. I never bought this clandestine romance between Jake and Lauren. They had negative chemistry, but then Lauren had negative chemistry with Joey, and the only chemistry articulated between her and Peter is the fact that they are basically two spoiled kids whose respective universes centre around their navels. The scenes between the two tonight bordered on the embarrassing.

However, Jake Stone is no murderer. Nor is he a cocaine addict or a dealer. He is, however, a drunk. And desperate. And lonely and misguided. He's upset at the fuck-up he's made of his marriage, and he's missing his child. He's naturally (and in a self-pitying and sordid way) turning to Lauren for his emotional needs and support. I'm sure he wanted to meet Lauren that night, as well, to show her the photo of Max with Lucy, in a warped way to get her back onside. 

Jake's behaviour is that of the proverbial drunk, who's been on a bender. At least, if he's telling the truth, we know a bit about Lucy's movements - that she met Jake, saw he was drunk, shoved him in a cab and left him to it.

Lauren, however, believes otherwise, so she shops him to the police. But I think Jake's undoing will come when he sobers up enough to realise that he does remember more of what happened that night. Consider this: He remembers "Lucy" shoving him in an unlicensed cab, driven by a dark man who sported a tattoo of a woman's name on the back of his neck.

Immediately, the Millennial hue and cry is NICK!

Believe me, it's not. Nick's tattoo is found on the side of his neck, and it certainly isn't a woman's name. For some reason, I remember a spider's web. But Not Charlie seems to favour scarves and high-necked shirts and jackets. Sometime in the near future, Jake might remember that it wasn't Lucy who binned him off in a taxi, but another blonde who was with her.

And that will be when Jake leaves in a box.

Jossa should lay off the collagen. It doesn't help her because she's still ...

THE. WORST. ACTRESS. EVER. TO. 

APPEAR. IN. EASTENDERS.

Prater Beale.

The other drippy fly in the ointment of tonight's episode was Pretty Peter the Prat and the way he's rapidly becoming his father's son in the most pejorative of ways. Here's a question to ponder: How many "friends" did Lucy really have? If you recall the awful "Teens in the Wood" week some years back, featuring Peter, Fatboy, Leon, Mercy, Zsa Zsa and Lucy, it seemed to end with everyone, including Peter, considering Lucy a nasty little piece of work. Well, apart from Lauren, who vicariously fell out with Lucy whenever they were at odds over a boy they shared or Lauren was drinking, Lucy didn't appear to have any friends at all. Whitney certainly didn't like her. In fact, she disliked her so much that she was trolling her social media page. The truth was that Lucy was a nasty, little piece of work, but she didn't deserve to die.

Peter is understandably angry and confused about Lucy's death, but the way he treats Lola is as if he blames her for the deed. Nothing she can do is right, because he wants nothing tobe right that she does. She is there to help and support him, she's only young herself, and doesn't know what to say, but he treats her worse than a piece of poo. In fact, he'd rather be around gurning Lauren, who's done nothing but obsess about Lucy's murder being all about her, rather than someone who's genuinely interested in his welfare and emotional state.

He's just like Ian - too cowardly to tell either Denise or Lola that it's over between them, rather treat them with disdain until they decide they've had enough and walk - and that will make Prat(er) or Ian look like the victim. I wonder what memories about Saint Lucy that Lola was going to share with the newspaper?

Woman's Intuition.

Wherein Carol has a Lesley Gore moment.

David so doesn't lurve Carol. Oh, he's fond of her and he was sympathetic in her cancer plight - enough to agree to setting a wedding date, but since he saw her with her slap on and a wig, he's shocked to the core. Why?

Because David doesn't do commitment. 

At least, not long commitment, anyway. He was perfectly happy, in a perverse sort of way, to play the concerned partner - concerned enough about Carol's health to use her cancer as a sympathy ploy to drum up business - but he's figuring that Carol won't survive this, and he'll come out the other end as the grieving, but supportive widower and a hero for the first time in his life. Now, he's not so sure.The sight of her in a wig and wearing make-up makes him realise that when he marries her, he's in it for the long haul. She may live and he may find himself as Grandad once more.

Carol is no fool either. She can sense that David's going off the fact of maybe spending another 30 years dancing attendance on Carol's moods, so she constantly has to re-inforce this wedding topic, forcing him to talk about marriage and make plans. And make no mistake, David may have spurned her tonight, but the spark is definitely there between Nikki and David, and it's only a matter of time before they connect.

But, please, stop this incessant retconning of David and Carol as a love affair. It's not. David never "love" loved Carol, and they were neversome sort of Romeo and Juliet combo. She was, respectively, a bunk-up, comfort sex and sympathy sex.

Liam's sussed his grandfather. Right or wrong, he knows David's attracted to Nikki and that Nikki is determined to nab David this time. This will all end in tears. It won't be cancer that kills Carol. Carol lives for men. It will be being dumped by yet another man who's rammed through her life.

And, you know, it should end in tears, because David Wicks shouldn't be domesticated.

It's Only Make-Believe, Dot.

Finally, the best part of the show was the creepy dynamic developing between Dot and Not-Charlie. If anyone thinks this is a separate storyline to Lucy's death, think again. More Christie-esque clues dropped all over the place tonight - Charlie's comment about "a young girl being killed on the Common", Max bringing the subject to the fore once again in the pub, only to be told by Not-Charlie that that case wasn't "his department."

Let's be clear, Not-Charlie wants Dot away from Walford for fear of her fraternising with the Cokers. Les knows something about Not-Charlie that isn't kosher. And let's be clear again: This is not a scam of Dot. Dot is an apparatus and an unwitting instrument in a bigger and more sinister scam, and peripherally, Lucy's death will figure into this.

Not-Charlie did enough in getting Dot to trust him, enabling him to do what he had to do, which really had nothing to do with Dot. What he didn't bank on, however, was Dot being lonely. She thinks she's lost Nick, and Charlie is, she believes, part of Nick. She's been incorporated into the Branning family, but those to whom she mattered most are either ill (Jim), dead (Bradley), away (Jack) or revising (Abi).

Arthur's right to be suspicious. Not-Charlie, like someone else, is a psychopath, who's managed to charm and manipulate people into believing he is who he is and that he has good intentions. He is anything but good.

Oh, and here's another prize bit of inconsistency - Arthur's description of his parents. I thought DTC said the time was past when the show depicted parents through the eyes of their children. Arthur's parents split, and his father had been a bank manager and had drinking issues; but when he first arrived on the show and passed his driving licence, there was a scene where he was phoning his mother, using proper, middle-class English, and it was implied that he was from a middle-class family with a mother who was somewhat overprotective, and now he doesn't even get a birthday card?

Pull the other one!

The penny dropping for Dot, after she'd been preening for so long about her new long-lost grandson,was one of the most subtle and best scenes of this DTC tenure. Dot reckons she's been scammed again, but she's wrong. She's been used as part of the scam. Not-Charlie is not Charlie and he's not a policeman.

Good episode, but too much dross to be excellent.