I watched that episode getting angrier and angrier at the obvious culprits. I know the show seeks to provoke emotion, so maybe it's achieving it's purpose, although I doubt my reaction mirrors many others. Watching the episode tonight was like watching a train wreck about to happen. Knowing what's transpired with some of the characters featured for the past year or so, it's difficult to fathom some of the reactions we saw tonight.
We saw the Carters briefly. Shirley aside (and she and Dean were part of the problem), Linda, Mick and Johnny were subtle perfection and a joy to watch. I was almost wishing them back on our screens instead of the calamity of co-dependence that the Beales have become.
Jane the Pain and Peter the Prick Prevail. Let me make it abundantly clear. Ian Beale is not a nice or a likeable person. He's selfish, he's greedy and he's a weasel. However, without a doubt, Ian loves his children more than he loves life, itself, and I thought he was well within his reason to do and to say what he did to that posh piece of shite that Peter has become in the previous episode.
Peter whines to Jane, an interfering, clueless and sly hypocritical bitch, that poor widdle Peter has to do all the fence mending whilst big bad Dad does nothing. I mean, petulant Pete, figuratively stomps his feet and wonders what Ian has ever done to him.
Well ...
Listen up, Scrote ... he's your father. For all his faults, he loves you more than life, itself. There isn't anything he wouldn't do for any of his children. Your mother plotted to have him killed and then absconded to Italy with you and weird Steven. Maybe that's why Ian bonded so closely with Lucy, because she was inadvertanly left behind in the melee. He spent a lot of time and money looking for you and fought tooth and nail for custody of you. He may have cut a swathe through a number of wives, but he was always there for you. He encouraged you in athletics - something the writers and DTC seem to have forgotten; he's provided you with a comfortable home, warm clothes and money whenever you held your grubby hand out to get you what you wanted. He gave you the run of the market stall and probably tops your wages and most likely gave you extra money for your extended trip to see your putrid brother. It was almost certainly some of Ian's money the bought the drugs for Lucy.
Has Ian made mistakes? Of course, he has. Whoppers, the biggest of which being the fact that he told a massive lie about Lucy having cancer as a child in order to keep Mel onside to marry him. Ian is petty, vindictive, childish and weak, but his sense of family is strong, and since Jane and her brother Christian came into his life, they've often undermining his parenting techniques, when the pair of them were less than clueless. Since 2007 and the advent of Steven and slightly before, Ian has allowed Lucy to call the shots. She treated Ian with absolutely no respect and did as she pleased from early adolescence.
One of the most accurate lines Ian has ever said in his entire adult life on the show was when he uttered earlier this year - I think it may have even been to Peter - that there were times when he didn't even like Lucy; but whilst Lucy was running riot in her previous incarnation, Ian was bigging up and supporting Peter's endeavours. Funny, how this has all changed.
The most bizarre aspect of all of this was Jane's unmitigated support of Peter in all of this, asserting that Ian was entirely wrong to cast him out and declare Peter dead. So much for Jane's support. Undermining again. So, let me get this straight ... Jane's perfectly all right with Peter buying drugs and supplying Lucy with them as a means of "controlling" her addiction and keeping her from dodgy folk? She's OK with drug dealers coming to the house when Bobby is there or even coming to Billy Mitchell's flat when Lexi was there?
Yet more undermining of Ian's position, because Jane is oh-so-wise. The truth is that Peter would listen to anyone who would denigrate his father right now, and Jane was playing a despicable game of divide and conquer. First of all, Ian was compelled to apologise - apologise - to Peter when Peter was the one who'd manhandled his father and spewed a lot of verbal shit in his face when what he'd said was mostly his interpretation of events (as well as being retconned content) filled with ad hominem insults. Peter's apology had the aura of a spoiled child, awfully sorry for being caught out, but not sincere. Peter wanted an apology on his terms and then backed it up with the pithy and pathetic reaction of a seven year-old by demanding Ian, literally, tell him whom he liked best - him or Lucy.
I was as astounded as Ian, who was being presented as the bad man of the piece, and who, belatedly, decided that he wanted to hand the phone and the purse over to the police, if only for DNA purposes; but Phil is panicking because of Ben's revelation, and Jane, inexplicably, wants to get rid of the things - so much so that she stands up to Phil Mitchell and says she's thrown the stuff in the canal.
Phil has the line of the night:-
Fings frown in the canal have a strange way of coming back!
And so do things buried under floorboards. Question is: Why did Jane hide them? I know she is odds-on favourite for being Lucy's killer, and I would so love it if she were. I'd love to see that smug Stepford Frump being handcuffed and escorted to a waiting cop car. Instead, Jane's found a flat - above the bookies, no less - no job, no income, but just like that, she's found a flat to accommodate both her, Leave-It-To-Beaver-Bobby and Peter the Prick. (No mention of the odious Cindy and the child she carries around like a bad smell; she gets to stay with Ian). That was a ploy. Jane is sly enough to know that, more than anything, Ian hates being alone, and more than anything, this threat would spur him to try to mend fences with Peter - in other words, Jane knows Ian would compromise himself morally in order to keep his Oedipal object closer. Once again, Ian is de-balled within his own home. Lucy dies, and he gets the Stepford Frump and the odious Cindy in return. Were I Ian, I'd turf them all out and fight tooth and nail, yet again, for his youngest child.
Ian's dependence on Jane and craven Masood's inexplicable devotion to her are appalling. She stuck it to Masood big time the last time she was around, yet - as Denise pointed out - he's sniffing around and protecting her yet again. I just want to know why and what the attraction of this supercilious, condescending and judgemental beeyatch is.
Family Affairs. Charlie wants to expose Aleks's lies? Well, maybe someone should expose Charlie's lies. Sorry, but you don't get to take the moral high ground with someone when our entire existence in Walford has been one great, bit, stonking lie.
I felt sorry for Aleks's daughter in all of this. Roxy is a mother, herself, and had to undergo a similar experience with Amy when Alfie abandoned her for Kat. You'd have thought she would have had some compassion for the child, who was standing there, bewildered at what she'd witnessed.
For me, this was the highlight of the episode, although the use of Latvian and English was totally inconsistent. Marta went from speaking Latvian to speaking an sort of English no one in Walford can even hope to speak (I want to know with whom ...) to speaking broken, pidgin English in the end. The two highlights of the piece was the market scene where Marta overhears Aleks and Roxy exchanging words of love and contrives to give Roxy a vicious shove as she passes her, and the scene where she and the child show up on Roxy's doorstep.
That was classic, and there was one word that came through in all of this that everyone understood - Marta called Roxy a prostitute. That was a single comedy moment. The look on both of the Blisters' faces was brilliant - they, who think their shit doesn't smell. It never once dawned on either of them that Roxy was, indeed, the other woman of the piece, and that from the getgo, Aleks told her that he couldn't divorce Marta because of the daughter and his love for her; it's also obvious that Aleks also had deep feelings for Marta, and you knew that the way he told Charlie he needed one more day before he split with his wife was indicative that he didn't want to go through with this.
Roxy may not have been a prostitute, but she wasn't above, basically, becoming the mistress of a married man. At first, I thought the writers had got it wrong again, when Roxy referenced Aleks promising to divorce his wife, but then I remembered when Marta showed up, in a panic, Aleks made a promise to Roxy to divorce her and stay with Roxy. Of course, Roxy had no way of knowing that his wife and child were in Walford.
The game-changer wasn't Marta leaving. The game-changer was that she left and left her daughter with Aleks, promising that England held a better future for her with better schools. Roxy's eyes were daggers, and Ronnie's look she gave the little girl as she swept from the room was truly frightening.
Aleks was smarmy, and he was a bit oleaginous, but he was likeable, and I hope the sight of him, his daughter and the Christmas tree traipsing away from the Square wasn't the last we see of him. Still, it means Roxy gets to spend another miserable Christmas. What was that she was saying about this being the first time the Blisters would both have a man by the fireside?
Pater Noster Nunc. Here's some more unbelieveable facts. Dean was raised by Kevin Wicks. He bears his name, yet he's seen a poor man's Phil of a sperm donor once in his life, and he's now referring to Buster as dad?
Dad won't see me.
No, he won't see you, Dean, because Kevin - you know, your dad? the man who raised you after your putrid mother left - is dead. The deadbeat in the prison cell just donated the sperm. So that's how they whitewash Kevin out of the equation. Of course, it does help that he's dead. No thanks, just a passing kind word from the scrote who duffed up Kevin's asshat of a wife.
Oh, and what's this? Dean does anger? Dean? Deano? What the feck does Shirley know about her son's anger issues, when she didn't see him from the time he was a toddler until he was in his late teens? The only anger issue she saw from him was when he left Walford the first time and left her snivelling in the street after a few unfounded remarks, reminiscent of the bully session Peter gave Ian and equally as undeserving?
Then there's Stacey, who's fast becoming my favourite character in this piece, but wait ... Stacey may have forgiven Dean's drugging her in an attempt to seduce her as a teenager, but she surely hasn't forgotten how Dean was responsible for Sean being wrongfully imprisoned on Dean's set-up? In fact, Sean hasn't even been mentioned this time around by Stacey, and surely she'd remember what Dean's lies did to him?
But then, Ian appears to have forgiven Steven. Has Dot's Christianity enfolded Walford?
Ironic line of the night by Johnny Carter, whose scooter heralds the beginning of what appears to be a limp leaving line for the sausage ...
Sometimes Dean does nice fings. (Cue the look of Death from Linda).
Fat Bastards. I have no sympathy for Sonia and no sympathy for the insipid Tina, who does nothing but lie to Tosh. I don't condone domestic violence, but honestly, Tina would try the patience of a saint. Sonia is so deluded that she honestly thinks Martin doesn't love her because she's fat. He doesn't love her because she mouths about him like shit.
Is she ever home? She spends all her time, it seems, at Carol's. Does she work? Again, she seems to spend all her time on the Square. Not only has she stolen the charity money, she's used it to cheat at Fat Bastards and win the prize, herself.
The absolute highlight of the piece was the appearance at the very end - hazy focusing to sharp - of James Bye as the new Martin Fowler. I like the look of him.
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