I'm sorry, but this episode is only worth a 7 out of 10 and a mediocre 7 out of 10 at that, the high points being Nick and Yvonne and Stacey's confrontation with an increasingly annoying Linda.
I realise this is Christmas week, and the stage is set for the Big Carter Confabulation on Thursday and Friday, but the worst parts of Walford were blatantly on display tonight, and it wasn't pretty watching.
A filler episode of this calibre at the beginning of Christmas week? Whoda thunk that?
Mr Moral Max. Is this bad smell week? We've got the entire Square - and most of them have done far worse than Alfie Moon - avoiding Alfie like the plague, and the Branning household is treated poor Summerhayes like the bastard at a family reunion. Cold shoulder? Max's and Lauren's shoulders were positively made of ice.
Max blames Summerhayes for seemingly wanting to get Lauren in trouble. Lauren can do that very nicely, herself, and has done so in the past. Lauren is upset about attention being directed her way - something which usually pleases her - only this time, it's the wrong sort of attention.
Anyway, poor Summerhayes is being punished enough, having lost her job. It's official. She is no longer a cop.
Lauren's getting all sorts of unwanted attention, which makes her resort to silly voices and gurns (she did a good gurn at Fatboy and his new BFF Lee in the cafe). Lee's suspicious of Lauren, if only for the shot of her entering the Beale abode the night that Lucy was killed. Lee manages to tell Lauren another choice bit of home truth as well - that Whitney never told Lauren about wiping those messages from Lucy's social media because she felt that Lauren didn't have her back.
To an extent, that's true. Lauren and Lucy had always been friends, until Lucy left to live in Devon, and then Whitney and Lauren became friends, something Lucy didn't like when she returned. For the most part, Lucy and Whitney merely tolerated each other for Lauren's sake, but as a trio of so-called friends, they didn't really know each other that well at all. That's what comes of self-obsession, a trait which all three shared.
The big reveal tonight was, however, Summerhayes finding out from DC Bryant that it was Max who daubed her in about their relationship, costing her her job. Really, it was stupid of her to get involved with someone who, essentially, was a suspect in a murder investigation; but it was scurvy of Max to make that call.
But then, Max always likes his women to be manageable - it makes infidelity so much easier. A romantic interest at home who just happens to be an investigating police officer might make covering his tracks when he gets the itch to wander a bit difficult. So what Max did, in the guise of doing what he did for Emma's own interests, was, effectively, an effort to control her. Summerhayes might be dim and somewhat naive, but she's miles above someone like Tanya or Kirsty in inherent intelligence.
She walks.
But not after Lauren presents her with a piece of post addressed to her, which has seemingly laid on the Branning floor for a good two days. When Lauren heard Lee push that packet through the letterbox on Friday night, she just shuffled through the post and looked stupidly out the door, seeing nothing. It never dawned on her to bend over and pick up the pile of post that was accumulating on the floor.
Go figure. So now Summerhayes is finished with Max and sees Lauren go into the Beale abode on the fateful night, and she never even got that information from Lauren's laptop.
So now the big question about Summerhayes's incipient phonecall and the remark she'll make in it looms even bigger:-
I know YOU killed Lucy Beale.
This has got to be directed at someone whose mobile number she has. Is it Max? Lauren? Abi? Ian? (She has all of their numbers) ... or is it Cameron Bryant? Is this some sort of police surveillance accident gone wrong and covered up?
The Sex Pistols.
The comedy trio of Dot, Yvonne and Nick continue to amuse me. This is pure Carry-On humour, in the blackest sense possible. Dot loves Nick, but doesn't trust him; she doesn't trust Yvonne, but Yvonne knows how to prey on Dot's sense of indispensability and the fact that no one manages the launderette the way Dot does.
Nick and Yvonne getting up close and personal to the music of The Sex Pistols and being discovered in flagrante delicto put a whole new meaning on the phrase "keeping Nick inside."
What's Good for the Goose ...
The good folk of Walford are a judgemental bunch. How many amongst them have committed murder? Pam, it seems, has made a couple of judgemental remarks about Alfie, yet shields the fact that she's guilty of her son's death.
The market posse seems to be led by Donna the Poisoned Dwarf, but I still harken back to the fact that Alfie lost his livelihood unjustly, because he revealed to Roxy that Aleks was married, and Tamwar lost his moral terpitude and lied to support Aleks. Kat's back in martyr-victim mode again, and with an audience, she's loving it.
Was it only two years ago that she had to do the Walk of Shame amidst a shunning market for her gross infidelity with Derek Branning? And wasn't it Alfie who made it possible for her to have a market stall at all? He loaned her the money, when they'd split, and he convinced the market traders not to shun her.
Yet, there she is, screeching at the top of her voice and ordering Alfie away from his child, and as good as saying that same old chestnut that every gobby woman screams to every man on the Square, that they have no right to their own children. Tanya did the same with Max in his ritual year-long humiliation in 2008. Now Kat's doing it to Alfie.
Really, are we supposed to feel sympathetic for these people? Alfie could have kicked Kat's skanky arse back to the gutter after the Derek reveal and shut her out of his life forever. He could have and should have done it when she got jiggly with the delivery man in the alleyway, but he didn't. She's come off lightly in this, but - in pure EastEnders' fashion - she takes the moral high ground.
Give me a break. Alfie does have rights, and he also has a friend in Ian - and I'm glad they haven't forgotten this. As Ian says, people make mistakes in life, sometimes big ones, and Ian's certainly made his share. I was a bit worried that Jane the Moral Arbitre of Walford might react adversely - although she has no right to do so. Ian's house is his house, and she really has no say there, although in her self-opinionated way, she thinks she owns the place. I caught the look on her face as Alfie picked up his crying son, after listening to Pam's brief remark about Alfie to her in the cafe, and wondered if she'd pass judgement, but surprisingly, she didn't; and she seemed touched by Ian's act of kindness in allowing Alfie to stay. The old Ian, as well, would have been urging Alfie to fight, introducing him to solicitors to fight Kat for the right to see his children.
Yeah, Kat Slater is back all right - the same old pugnacious dirty girl that went after knee-tremblers in alleyways. She made me gag a maggot in the last episode, wondering why she couldn't attract a doctor or a banker rather than someone like Alfie. The answer is obvious, just like this story is obvious. What will happen in 2015 is that Kat will struggle - she'll struggle to earn enough money for the kids and she'll revert to her old dirty girl ways. And that's when Alfie will step in and save the day, and he'll redeem her once again - a redux of 2003. If we have to live with that, then please, let this be the swansong of a couple who were once iconic, but who were fucked over by an EP who didn't have a clue and who haven't been the same since.
They really should have left last year. I hope 2015 is the last year for them both.
Secrets and Lies. I'm glad that Stacey was conflicted by Kat's encounter with Alfie. She may not like Alfie, and she may think he's done wrong, but she does know that what ensued was a terrible accident and unintentional. She also knows this from the position of someone who is in no position to judge, having willfully taken the life of someone else. Archie raped Stacey, but as Luke told her, she had no right to kill him.
I'm becoming a bit constrained by Linda's rape storyling, basically because it's gone on for so long, and I've found her behaviour so frustrating - understandably so, but she's come so close for sometime to telling people, yet the only person she's come closest to telling is the one who's involved in a relationship with Dean.
Now this is the little niggly bit about Dean and Stacey.
First, there's this ...
Or this, relating to Stacey's brother, whom she hasn't mentioned since her return:-
It amazes me how Stacey can find romance with Dean after all that history. Still, maybe she has a forgiving nature. Sean wouldn't. I miss Sean, the last semblance of an Alpha male on the show.
It's clear that something Linda was about to say Friday struck a chord with Stacey - enough to make her seek solace in Lily's room in the Tardis flat, although her fear is unfounded when Mick appears at the Salon, hyping a raffle and announcing that Linda is pregnant. (Stacey, being with Dean, is now tangential to the Carter dynamic, something which semi-validates their existence and which will be wholly validated once Peggy gives Mick her blessing to say Ge'ourra mah pub!) Stacey can easily put Linda's jitters down to pregnancy hormones, but something isn't right when she attends the raffle.
As much as I like Linda, there is one flaw about her personality that I don't llke, and that's her overt ability to judge someone from the onset. She was right to have a go at Sonia for thieving the charity money, but her treatment of Denise, on the whole, has been a bit whiffy, and I'm reminded of one of the Carters' first remarks in the wake of Nancy wanting to marry Wayne ~ Some of our best friends are black~.
Unpleasant as it might seem, racism - subtle racism - is still with us, and even a nice person like Linda might harbour tendencies like that. Remember how homophobic she was? She gives Denise, as a cleaner, short shrift, and tonight accused her of stealing the whiskey Mick gave her as a Christmas gift, citing the reason for her dismissal from The Minute Mart - so are the entire Square now supposed to shun Denise as well? Denise is the one who confessed to what she'd done and willingly. The fact that Patrick's raffle prize was dinner for two at Beale's must have seemed like enough of a slap in the face for Denise, without Linda insisting, even in the face of punters saying Mick had given Denise the gift, that Denise had stolen the booze.
Line of the night goes to Kush:-
Mick gave it to her. He was just trying to be nice, something you might try from time to time.
Yeah, I get it. She's hormonal, and she's unnerved by Dean being at close hand, which leads to the one scene that was the salvation of this episode - Stacey forcing Linda to confront and admit that she was raped by Dean.
Look, I know that the rape of Stacey by Archie was a Santer afterthought. I remember both actors - Lacey Turner and Larry Lamb - expressing surprise that there had even been a rape. We just saw Archie corner Stacey in the launderette, and the next thing we saw Stacey coming home with a hurt arm. Right before she left Walford, fleeing, in 2010, she opened up to Jean a bit about the rape, and tonight took that confession to a different level.
Stacey's relation of her rape was a public service announcement tailor-made to fit what Linda had experienced and what countless scores of other women face when they become victims of the most awful crime of power and control that can be perpetrated against a woman. Before anyone jumps down my throat and starts a condemnation, I'm saying that I totally understand the message and the reason behind such a scene. It was powerful, it was necessary and it was good. And it was more about the nameless victims that suffer in silence from such an ordeal than about Linda, specifically.
Lacey Turner carried that scene and for that, she deserves all manner of praise.
But the episode was still plebeian.
I realise this is Christmas week, and the stage is set for the Big Carter Confabulation on Thursday and Friday, but the worst parts of Walford were blatantly on display tonight, and it wasn't pretty watching.
A filler episode of this calibre at the beginning of Christmas week? Whoda thunk that?
Mr Moral Max. Is this bad smell week? We've got the entire Square - and most of them have done far worse than Alfie Moon - avoiding Alfie like the plague, and the Branning household is treated poor Summerhayes like the bastard at a family reunion. Cold shoulder? Max's and Lauren's shoulders were positively made of ice.
Max blames Summerhayes for seemingly wanting to get Lauren in trouble. Lauren can do that very nicely, herself, and has done so in the past. Lauren is upset about attention being directed her way - something which usually pleases her - only this time, it's the wrong sort of attention.
Anyway, poor Summerhayes is being punished enough, having lost her job. It's official. She is no longer a cop.
Lauren's getting all sorts of unwanted attention, which makes her resort to silly voices and gurns (she did a good gurn at Fatboy and his new BFF Lee in the cafe). Lee's suspicious of Lauren, if only for the shot of her entering the Beale abode the night that Lucy was killed. Lee manages to tell Lauren another choice bit of home truth as well - that Whitney never told Lauren about wiping those messages from Lucy's social media because she felt that Lauren didn't have her back.
To an extent, that's true. Lauren and Lucy had always been friends, until Lucy left to live in Devon, and then Whitney and Lauren became friends, something Lucy didn't like when she returned. For the most part, Lucy and Whitney merely tolerated each other for Lauren's sake, but as a trio of so-called friends, they didn't really know each other that well at all. That's what comes of self-obsession, a trait which all three shared.
The big reveal tonight was, however, Summerhayes finding out from DC Bryant that it was Max who daubed her in about their relationship, costing her her job. Really, it was stupid of her to get involved with someone who, essentially, was a suspect in a murder investigation; but it was scurvy of Max to make that call.
But then, Max always likes his women to be manageable - it makes infidelity so much easier. A romantic interest at home who just happens to be an investigating police officer might make covering his tracks when he gets the itch to wander a bit difficult. So what Max did, in the guise of doing what he did for Emma's own interests, was, effectively, an effort to control her. Summerhayes might be dim and somewhat naive, but she's miles above someone like Tanya or Kirsty in inherent intelligence.
She walks.
But not after Lauren presents her with a piece of post addressed to her, which has seemingly laid on the Branning floor for a good two days. When Lauren heard Lee push that packet through the letterbox on Friday night, she just shuffled through the post and looked stupidly out the door, seeing nothing. It never dawned on her to bend over and pick up the pile of post that was accumulating on the floor.
Go figure. So now Summerhayes is finished with Max and sees Lauren go into the Beale abode on the fateful night, and she never even got that information from Lauren's laptop.
So now the big question about Summerhayes's incipient phonecall and the remark she'll make in it looms even bigger:-
I know YOU killed Lucy Beale.
This has got to be directed at someone whose mobile number she has. Is it Max? Lauren? Abi? Ian? (She has all of their numbers) ... or is it Cameron Bryant? Is this some sort of police surveillance accident gone wrong and covered up?
The Sex Pistols.
The comedy trio of Dot, Yvonne and Nick continue to amuse me. This is pure Carry-On humour, in the blackest sense possible. Dot loves Nick, but doesn't trust him; she doesn't trust Yvonne, but Yvonne knows how to prey on Dot's sense of indispensability and the fact that no one manages the launderette the way Dot does.
Nick and Yvonne getting up close and personal to the music of The Sex Pistols and being discovered in flagrante delicto put a whole new meaning on the phrase "keeping Nick inside."
What's Good for the Goose ...
The good folk of Walford are a judgemental bunch. How many amongst them have committed murder? Pam, it seems, has made a couple of judgemental remarks about Alfie, yet shields the fact that she's guilty of her son's death.
The market posse seems to be led by Donna the Poisoned Dwarf, but I still harken back to the fact that Alfie lost his livelihood unjustly, because he revealed to Roxy that Aleks was married, and Tamwar lost his moral terpitude and lied to support Aleks. Kat's back in martyr-victim mode again, and with an audience, she's loving it.
Was it only two years ago that she had to do the Walk of Shame amidst a shunning market for her gross infidelity with Derek Branning? And wasn't it Alfie who made it possible for her to have a market stall at all? He loaned her the money, when they'd split, and he convinced the market traders not to shun her.
Yet, there she is, screeching at the top of her voice and ordering Alfie away from his child, and as good as saying that same old chestnut that every gobby woman screams to every man on the Square, that they have no right to their own children. Tanya did the same with Max in his ritual year-long humiliation in 2008. Now Kat's doing it to Alfie.
Really, are we supposed to feel sympathetic for these people? Alfie could have kicked Kat's skanky arse back to the gutter after the Derek reveal and shut her out of his life forever. He could have and should have done it when she got jiggly with the delivery man in the alleyway, but he didn't. She's come off lightly in this, but - in pure EastEnders' fashion - she takes the moral high ground.
Give me a break. Alfie does have rights, and he also has a friend in Ian - and I'm glad they haven't forgotten this. As Ian says, people make mistakes in life, sometimes big ones, and Ian's certainly made his share. I was a bit worried that Jane the Moral Arbitre of Walford might react adversely - although she has no right to do so. Ian's house is his house, and she really has no say there, although in her self-opinionated way, she thinks she owns the place. I caught the look on her face as Alfie picked up his crying son, after listening to Pam's brief remark about Alfie to her in the cafe, and wondered if she'd pass judgement, but surprisingly, she didn't; and she seemed touched by Ian's act of kindness in allowing Alfie to stay. The old Ian, as well, would have been urging Alfie to fight, introducing him to solicitors to fight Kat for the right to see his children.
Yeah, Kat Slater is back all right - the same old pugnacious dirty girl that went after knee-tremblers in alleyways. She made me gag a maggot in the last episode, wondering why she couldn't attract a doctor or a banker rather than someone like Alfie. The answer is obvious, just like this story is obvious. What will happen in 2015 is that Kat will struggle - she'll struggle to earn enough money for the kids and she'll revert to her old dirty girl ways. And that's when Alfie will step in and save the day, and he'll redeem her once again - a redux of 2003. If we have to live with that, then please, let this be the swansong of a couple who were once iconic, but who were fucked over by an EP who didn't have a clue and who haven't been the same since.
They really should have left last year. I hope 2015 is the last year for them both.
Secrets and Lies. I'm glad that Stacey was conflicted by Kat's encounter with Alfie. She may not like Alfie, and she may think he's done wrong, but she does know that what ensued was a terrible accident and unintentional. She also knows this from the position of someone who is in no position to judge, having willfully taken the life of someone else. Archie raped Stacey, but as Luke told her, she had no right to kill him.
I'm becoming a bit constrained by Linda's rape storyling, basically because it's gone on for so long, and I've found her behaviour so frustrating - understandably so, but she's come so close for sometime to telling people, yet the only person she's come closest to telling is the one who's involved in a relationship with Dean.
Now this is the little niggly bit about Dean and Stacey.
First, there's this ...
Or this, relating to Stacey's brother, whom she hasn't mentioned since her return:-
It amazes me how Stacey can find romance with Dean after all that history. Still, maybe she has a forgiving nature. Sean wouldn't. I miss Sean, the last semblance of an Alpha male on the show.
It's clear that something Linda was about to say Friday struck a chord with Stacey - enough to make her seek solace in Lily's room in the Tardis flat, although her fear is unfounded when Mick appears at the Salon, hyping a raffle and announcing that Linda is pregnant. (Stacey, being with Dean, is now tangential to the Carter dynamic, something which semi-validates their existence and which will be wholly validated once Peggy gives Mick her blessing to say Ge'ourra mah pub!) Stacey can easily put Linda's jitters down to pregnancy hormones, but something isn't right when she attends the raffle.
As much as I like Linda, there is one flaw about her personality that I don't llke, and that's her overt ability to judge someone from the onset. She was right to have a go at Sonia for thieving the charity money, but her treatment of Denise, on the whole, has been a bit whiffy, and I'm reminded of one of the Carters' first remarks in the wake of Nancy wanting to marry Wayne ~ Some of our best friends are black~.
Unpleasant as it might seem, racism - subtle racism - is still with us, and even a nice person like Linda might harbour tendencies like that. Remember how homophobic she was? She gives Denise, as a cleaner, short shrift, and tonight accused her of stealing the whiskey Mick gave her as a Christmas gift, citing the reason for her dismissal from The Minute Mart - so are the entire Square now supposed to shun Denise as well? Denise is the one who confessed to what she'd done and willingly. The fact that Patrick's raffle prize was dinner for two at Beale's must have seemed like enough of a slap in the face for Denise, without Linda insisting, even in the face of punters saying Mick had given Denise the gift, that Denise had stolen the booze.
Line of the night goes to Kush:-
Mick gave it to her. He was just trying to be nice, something you might try from time to time.
Yeah, I get it. She's hormonal, and she's unnerved by Dean being at close hand, which leads to the one scene that was the salvation of this episode - Stacey forcing Linda to confront and admit that she was raped by Dean.
Look, I know that the rape of Stacey by Archie was a Santer afterthought. I remember both actors - Lacey Turner and Larry Lamb - expressing surprise that there had even been a rape. We just saw Archie corner Stacey in the launderette, and the next thing we saw Stacey coming home with a hurt arm. Right before she left Walford, fleeing, in 2010, she opened up to Jean a bit about the rape, and tonight took that confession to a different level.
Stacey's relation of her rape was a public service announcement tailor-made to fit what Linda had experienced and what countless scores of other women face when they become victims of the most awful crime of power and control that can be perpetrated against a woman. Before anyone jumps down my throat and starts a condemnation, I'm saying that I totally understand the message and the reason behind such a scene. It was powerful, it was necessary and it was good. And it was more about the nameless victims that suffer in silence from such an ordeal than about Linda, specifically.
Lacey Turner carried that scene and for that, she deserves all manner of praise.
But the episode was still plebeian.
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