To be blunt and to the point, I thought this was a cracking episode. Pitch perfect in every way, even the Carters.
In fact, let's start with the Carters.
The Endless Pit of Secrets.
I confess. I actually miss Mick and Linda. I can't wait for them to return. Tonight, yet another woman attempting to break into the Carter conundrum was pushed to the periphery again: Cora.
Tina, who's grown in character, but not to the point where she actually thinks before her actions, brings her mother, suffering from Alzheimers, to the 50s Dance. Sylvie shows up and, as Tina has done at various times, causes havoc - dancing with Dean and thinking he's Stan, then dancing with Stan and thinking he's Stan enough to kiss him. Stan was having a pretty good time too, after Cora had left, declaring she intended to be nobody's gooseberry.
But then the shit hit the fan when, for some reason, Babe came running into the Community Centre, followed by Cora.
As Peggy would say, W-e-e-e-llllllll.
Yet another Carter secret emerges. Babe was originally in love with Stan, and Sylvie nabbed him from her. For all these years, Babe has been harbouring intense jealousy against her sister and masking her love of Stan with pretend hatred. So this was why Babe slithered into the Carter domain after Sylvie left. Wait, this begs the question ... did Sylvie leave her home voluntarily or did Babe manipulate her?
This is very interesting. Even more interesting (and more vile) is the smirking Shirley, who seems to have surreptitiously got her way about Den being allowed back into the pub. Nancy and Lee are giving him the look of death, but now Stan (obviously in his dotage during his last days on earth) admits that he thinks Linda is lying, and Shirley looks like the cat that's got the canary at this admission.
Dean: It's not the brightest thing I've done ... I'm not proud of it.
Stan: You gotta be careful where you dip your wick ...
This is the next step in Shirley's plan to discredit Linda and reign supreme as Queen of the Vic. Yuck. Pardon me while I puke.
Sisters in Spirit.
How brilliant do Stacey and Shabnam look in red? And how genuine does their friendship look? Beautiful scenes with the girls tonight, and I applaud Dominic Treadwell-Collins in establishing a solid female friendship along the lines of Sharon-Michelle and Tiffany-Biance. (Please, don't mention the toxic combination of BitchTanya and BitchJane and their supercilious, judgemental hypocrisy. Awful women).
Stacey refuses to be in the room with Dean, and Shabnam follows her out, demanding to know if the reason Stacey split with Dean was down to Dean having slept with Linda. Apparently, according to Tamwar, this is all over the market. I know Pam heard this first and propagated the gossip, but who started the rumour?
Again, quoting Peggy ... W-e-e-e-llll!
My guess is that wicked, evil Shirley Queen of Scrotes has been surreptitiously planting this meme about Walford. It wouldn't surprise me.
Stacey soon puts Shabnam in the right about Linda's situation, but Shabnam can't understand why Linda would lie about a situation and cover it up. In the end, they both agree that Dean just isn't a nice guy, which Shabnam said she could have told Stacey, and here's something a little strange, which stopped the episode getting a perfect ten from me.
Stacey: But you barely know him. (Meaning Dean).
Of course Shabman would know Dean and know him reasonably well, from her last time in Walford. She was the best friend of Dean's sister.
As the conversation moves to Kush, it seems that Shabnam's guard is being let down a bit, only for Kush to show up on her doorstep with Shabnam's handbag, which she'd left behind in the Vic. Stacey's joking about him leaving his number inside and Kush's joke about how untidy the inside of the bag was, caused Shabnam to freak out. Rifling through the bag after having thrown Stacey and Kush out, she finds a newspaper clipping, which obviously is very important to her.
Shabnam's bottomless pit of money and this mysterious clipping ... what's this all about? Maybe Ronnie should have asked Shabnam for a loan instead of stealing from Phil.
The Stupid Boy.
Ben.
I sat up tonight when Jay almost mouthed "You stupid boy". Ben is all over the place. He confessed tonight his modus operandi is to please Phil. This is the reason behind his assertion that he's no longer gay and his association with Abi. As he told Jay tonight, he wanted to make Phil proud of him and prove he could do something productive on his own and show Sharon in a bad light.
So he signed The Arches over to Max. And he began to cry.
Not just cry, but weep copiously, feeling awfully sorry for himself and fearing that Phil would kill him. Once again, to quote Peggy ... W-e-e-llll!
Phil Mitchell's no killer, but he just might make an exception for Ben in this case. At least, he might knock the shit out of him, the way so many others have.
Jay is so concerned about Ben that he attempts to comfort him as he weeps, promising that they would sort this out and promising to talk to Max (as if Max would condescend to listen to him), and Ben takes advantage of a lull in Jay's conversation to misread a moment and try to kiss Jay, who reacts adversely.
Line of the night goes to Jay.
You need to get your head straight.
Ben's response to that piece of advice is to snog Abi and attempt to run his hands up her top, until Jay storms in and warns him off.
Have you told her? Jay demands, and that remark is ambiguous - has Ben told Abi that he tried to snog Jay or has Ben told Abi that he signed The Arches over to Max? Naturally, Abi can't believe this - Jay did say that Max had stolen The Arches, whilst Ben kept whining that he thought Max was trying to help him.
As bloody if. I can't wait for Sharon - and Phil - to find out.
The Awful Truth: The Cottons.
Mrs Doyle tells CharlieBoy the truth - well, almost. She lies a bit about how long she knew that Nick had cut the brake line on the car in which Ronnie was riding. The gothic Cottons, the horror family of the Square, were on fire tonight, with Nick at his Nickiest, turning the tables to make it seem that Yvonne was lying about what had happened.
I'm convinced now that Charlie's not the brightest lightbulb in the pack, because he so easily believed Nick turning the tables on Yvonne, making it look as though she came between Nick and his son every time, with Charlie piping up about Ma Cotton disdaining every girlfriend he'd ever had, and Dot joining in the slanging match, branding Yvonne an evil woman.
This is head-bobbing Dot, the Dot I can't stand, panto Dot - pure melodrama in essence, every inch the tortured soul, lashing out at anyone who would dare utter a bad word against her son.
At that point, I was actually feeling sorry for Yvonne, who was desperate to prove Nick was the guilty party by producing the money Ronnie had given him, telling all and sundry that the money had been stolen from Phil and that Phil had been around hassling Nick for its return ... until everyone's attention was diverted by Aleks raising the alarm that his daughter, Ineta, had disappeared with Baby Cotton.
Ineta, tonight, was the only adult in the room. Take the baby back to its parents, and she could have her father back, because in reality, the Mitchells have swooped and engulfed Aleks, but left his poor daughter, again, on the periphery of things. The poor kid, and in the end, she was punished by Aleks.
All of that gave Mrs Doyle time to find, and burn, Phil's money, and time enough for Dot to have thought and realised that Nick had form in that sort of thing, reminding him of how much he hated Mark Fowler, to the extent that he'd cut the brake leads on Mark's motorbike, resulting in the death of Ashley, his other son, right in front of the launderette. Nick protests that this was an accident, before revealing to Charlie that Yvonne was the one who planted evidence on Phil Mitchell and gave a witness statement.
Charlie orders Yvonne from Dot's house, for which he has no right, before telling everyone that he's moving back to chez Mitchell with his son. That must be a Tardis house, with Ronnie, Charlie, Roxy, Aleks, Ineta, talking Amy and now the baby. Some of the family dynamics living under one roof in Walford are, to say the least, dysfunctional, puerile and just plain weird.
And finally, Tragic Dot squares her bobbing head and orders Nick to leave, with a big home truth for everyone of the lot of them.
Every one o'you have lied to me at one time since you came into this house.
Nick doesn't want to go, and were he not Nick, I'd believe his desperation not to leave was genuine, even his near-tearful admission that the months he'd spent there with Ma were the best times of his life actually did have a ring of truth about it.
But now Dot's right back where she was before Charlie showed up at her front door, pretending to be the policeman he wasn't. Alone.
A word about Charlie the policeman: He weaselled out of his fraud with Summerhayes, saying he was Special Ops, and even Summerhayes said that division was so deeply entrenched in undercover that no one knew they were even cops ... yet Charlie spent months swanning about the Square telling all and sundry he was a cop.
Are the people in Walford that dumb?
To quote Peggy ... W-e-e-e-llll!
In fact, let's start with the Carters.
The Endless Pit of Secrets.
I confess. I actually miss Mick and Linda. I can't wait for them to return. Tonight, yet another woman attempting to break into the Carter conundrum was pushed to the periphery again: Cora.
Tina, who's grown in character, but not to the point where she actually thinks before her actions, brings her mother, suffering from Alzheimers, to the 50s Dance. Sylvie shows up and, as Tina has done at various times, causes havoc - dancing with Dean and thinking he's Stan, then dancing with Stan and thinking he's Stan enough to kiss him. Stan was having a pretty good time too, after Cora had left, declaring she intended to be nobody's gooseberry.
But then the shit hit the fan when, for some reason, Babe came running into the Community Centre, followed by Cora.
As Peggy would say, W-e-e-e-llllllll.
Yet another Carter secret emerges. Babe was originally in love with Stan, and Sylvie nabbed him from her. For all these years, Babe has been harbouring intense jealousy against her sister and masking her love of Stan with pretend hatred. So this was why Babe slithered into the Carter domain after Sylvie left. Wait, this begs the question ... did Sylvie leave her home voluntarily or did Babe manipulate her?
This is very interesting. Even more interesting (and more vile) is the smirking Shirley, who seems to have surreptitiously got her way about Den being allowed back into the pub. Nancy and Lee are giving him the look of death, but now Stan (obviously in his dotage during his last days on earth) admits that he thinks Linda is lying, and Shirley looks like the cat that's got the canary at this admission.
Dean: It's not the brightest thing I've done ... I'm not proud of it.
Stan: You gotta be careful where you dip your wick ...
This is the next step in Shirley's plan to discredit Linda and reign supreme as Queen of the Vic. Yuck. Pardon me while I puke.
Sisters in Spirit.
How brilliant do Stacey and Shabnam look in red? And how genuine does their friendship look? Beautiful scenes with the girls tonight, and I applaud Dominic Treadwell-Collins in establishing a solid female friendship along the lines of Sharon-Michelle and Tiffany-Biance. (Please, don't mention the toxic combination of BitchTanya and BitchJane and their supercilious, judgemental hypocrisy. Awful women).
Stacey refuses to be in the room with Dean, and Shabnam follows her out, demanding to know if the reason Stacey split with Dean was down to Dean having slept with Linda. Apparently, according to Tamwar, this is all over the market. I know Pam heard this first and propagated the gossip, but who started the rumour?
Again, quoting Peggy ... W-e-e-e-llll!
My guess is that wicked, evil Shirley Queen of Scrotes has been surreptitiously planting this meme about Walford. It wouldn't surprise me.
Stacey soon puts Shabnam in the right about Linda's situation, but Shabnam can't understand why Linda would lie about a situation and cover it up. In the end, they both agree that Dean just isn't a nice guy, which Shabnam said she could have told Stacey, and here's something a little strange, which stopped the episode getting a perfect ten from me.
Stacey: But you barely know him. (Meaning Dean).
Of course Shabman would know Dean and know him reasonably well, from her last time in Walford. She was the best friend of Dean's sister.
As the conversation moves to Kush, it seems that Shabnam's guard is being let down a bit, only for Kush to show up on her doorstep with Shabnam's handbag, which she'd left behind in the Vic. Stacey's joking about him leaving his number inside and Kush's joke about how untidy the inside of the bag was, caused Shabnam to freak out. Rifling through the bag after having thrown Stacey and Kush out, she finds a newspaper clipping, which obviously is very important to her.
Shabnam's bottomless pit of money and this mysterious clipping ... what's this all about? Maybe Ronnie should have asked Shabnam for a loan instead of stealing from Phil.
The Stupid Boy.
Ben.
I sat up tonight when Jay almost mouthed "You stupid boy". Ben is all over the place. He confessed tonight his modus operandi is to please Phil. This is the reason behind his assertion that he's no longer gay and his association with Abi. As he told Jay tonight, he wanted to make Phil proud of him and prove he could do something productive on his own and show Sharon in a bad light.
So he signed The Arches over to Max. And he began to cry.
Not just cry, but weep copiously, feeling awfully sorry for himself and fearing that Phil would kill him. Once again, to quote Peggy ... W-e-e-llll!
Phil Mitchell's no killer, but he just might make an exception for Ben in this case. At least, he might knock the shit out of him, the way so many others have.
Jay is so concerned about Ben that he attempts to comfort him as he weeps, promising that they would sort this out and promising to talk to Max (as if Max would condescend to listen to him), and Ben takes advantage of a lull in Jay's conversation to misread a moment and try to kiss Jay, who reacts adversely.
Line of the night goes to Jay.
You need to get your head straight.
Ben's response to that piece of advice is to snog Abi and attempt to run his hands up her top, until Jay storms in and warns him off.
Have you told her? Jay demands, and that remark is ambiguous - has Ben told Abi that he tried to snog Jay or has Ben told Abi that he signed The Arches over to Max? Naturally, Abi can't believe this - Jay did say that Max had stolen The Arches, whilst Ben kept whining that he thought Max was trying to help him.
As bloody if. I can't wait for Sharon - and Phil - to find out.
The Awful Truth: The Cottons.
Mrs Doyle tells CharlieBoy the truth - well, almost. She lies a bit about how long she knew that Nick had cut the brake line on the car in which Ronnie was riding. The gothic Cottons, the horror family of the Square, were on fire tonight, with Nick at his Nickiest, turning the tables to make it seem that Yvonne was lying about what had happened.
I'm convinced now that Charlie's not the brightest lightbulb in the pack, because he so easily believed Nick turning the tables on Yvonne, making it look as though she came between Nick and his son every time, with Charlie piping up about Ma Cotton disdaining every girlfriend he'd ever had, and Dot joining in the slanging match, branding Yvonne an evil woman.
This is head-bobbing Dot, the Dot I can't stand, panto Dot - pure melodrama in essence, every inch the tortured soul, lashing out at anyone who would dare utter a bad word against her son.
At that point, I was actually feeling sorry for Yvonne, who was desperate to prove Nick was the guilty party by producing the money Ronnie had given him, telling all and sundry that the money had been stolen from Phil and that Phil had been around hassling Nick for its return ... until everyone's attention was diverted by Aleks raising the alarm that his daughter, Ineta, had disappeared with Baby Cotton.
Ineta, tonight, was the only adult in the room. Take the baby back to its parents, and she could have her father back, because in reality, the Mitchells have swooped and engulfed Aleks, but left his poor daughter, again, on the periphery of things. The poor kid, and in the end, she was punished by Aleks.
All of that gave Mrs Doyle time to find, and burn, Phil's money, and time enough for Dot to have thought and realised that Nick had form in that sort of thing, reminding him of how much he hated Mark Fowler, to the extent that he'd cut the brake leads on Mark's motorbike, resulting in the death of Ashley, his other son, right in front of the launderette. Nick protests that this was an accident, before revealing to Charlie that Yvonne was the one who planted evidence on Phil Mitchell and gave a witness statement.
Charlie orders Yvonne from Dot's house, for which he has no right, before telling everyone that he's moving back to chez Mitchell with his son. That must be a Tardis house, with Ronnie, Charlie, Roxy, Aleks, Ineta, talking Amy and now the baby. Some of the family dynamics living under one roof in Walford are, to say the least, dysfunctional, puerile and just plain weird.
And finally, Tragic Dot squares her bobbing head and orders Nick to leave, with a big home truth for everyone of the lot of them.
Every one o'you have lied to me at one time since you came into this house.
Nick doesn't want to go, and were he not Nick, I'd believe his desperation not to leave was genuine, even his near-tearful admission that the months he'd spent there with Ma were the best times of his life actually did have a ring of truth about it.
But now Dot's right back where she was before Charlie showed up at her front door, pretending to be the policeman he wasn't. Alone.
A word about Charlie the policeman: He weaselled out of his fraud with Summerhayes, saying he was Special Ops, and even Summerhayes said that division was so deeply entrenched in undercover that no one knew they were even cops ... yet Charlie spent months swanning about the Square telling all and sundry he was a cop.
Are the people in Walford that dumb?
To quote Peggy ... W-e-e-e-llll!
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