Less than two weeks before the 30th Anniversary reveal and the mediocrity level is high. I would have rated this episode lower than the generous seven I gave it, were it not for the performances of Danny Dyer (and I never thought I'd say that) and Matt di Angelo and the presence of Lacey Turner which salvaged the episode.
The show is still CarterVille, and the overkill is beginning to show, as well as DTC's relentless campaign to force-feed the public a marmite character as the focal point of the programme. I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that Shirley's not supposed to be a sympathetic character, but we're supposed to be on her side as the principal dame in the show? She's bitter, vitriolic, self-pitying and a bully, the latter characteristic identifying her as vulnerable; but vulnerability doesn't always render sympathy on the part of the viewer, and on EastEnders in recent years, it's wont to denote victimhood. She's not even a character viewers love to hate (like Janine); apart from her shippers, she's just a character most viewers simply hate.
Torn Between Two Brothers.
Mick and his new-found brother go for a little evening walk. Well, he pulls him bodily from the salon Dean runs in order to talk about Linda. As good as this part of the episode was, and it was clearly the best of the evening's offering, it curiously reminded me of a similar scene between two brothers at the front of the show, It's certainly a re-mix, with and interesting twist, to this original scene from 21 years ago:-
Danny Dyer owned those scenes, and Matt di Angelo met him, line for line. Mick wanted vengeance for what Dean had done to Linda, and Dean showed he had the brass mettle to stick with his lies and stick it to Mick. For one brief glimmer of a moment, when Dean kept saying that Linda came onto him, that she told him she and Mick weren't married, that she pursued the relationship, I thought I saw some doubt cross Mick's face, but I was relieved that there was none of that.
Mick has lived with Linda since the two were children. More than anyone else in the world, more than Tina, more than Shirley, Mick knows Linda better than any person in the world, and even though he wasn't on the premises or anyplace near the Vic on the day of the rape, Mick almost certainly knew the circumstances under which the crime occurred. Since Linda told him, Mick's been mentally beating himself up for having run off after Shirley that day and having told Linda to look after Dean, who - as Mick so graphically said tonight - was crying after his mummy.
You really felt the rawness of Mick's emotions with every tear that ran down his cheeks as he berated Dean. He knew that Dean was in a state, he knew that Linda felt moved, maternally, to comfort Dean, to give him a hug, touch his arm; but with every suggestion from Mick, Dean, coldly, shot back in refutation.
I didn't do anything that a million other men aren't doing at this very moment - go after another man's wife.
Dean actually told the truth. He just didn't add the bit about Linda repeatedly refusing his advances or how she tried to stop him on that fateful day. And he kept asserting this, over and over, maybe in the misguided belief that, if he said it enough, Mick just might believe it, or it might just begin to plant some doubt in Mick's mind about Linda's innocence.
Mick would have loved to have killed Dean, and I'm glad he didn't. Telling him to leave Walford and not come back, however, only means Dean is going to return. I'm also afraid the prop in the sequence - the shovel - is an awful foreshadowing of what might happen to Dean, eventually, which would put the spectre of murder on Mick or Linda and admit them to the all-inclusive society of murderers who inhabit Albert Square.
At the end of the day, Mick thought of Linda and his family and how they would cope with Mick in prison for killing or hurting Dean, and they, ultimately, proved to sway Mick's thoughts; however, even when he returned home to inform Linda that Dean had gone for good, Linda doesn't feel safe, and she won't until Dean was behind bars.
But Linda and the kids aren't the only people with whom Mick has to deal.
There's Shirley, the star of our show.
The second best scene of the piece tonight came when Mick was returning from the allotments, alone, only to be confronted by Shirley, desperate for news of Dean. Because it's Shirley who's really torn between two brothers, or rather, sons. There's Mick, the secret son, whom she's cleaved close as a sibling throughout all these years, and Dean, the son whom she's continued to abandon and who now needs her.
Great dialogue, too, from this brief, but compelling scene.
Shirley demands to know what Mick's done with Dean, and Mick tells her he's literally thrown Dean out of Walford. He's gone away, and he won't be returning. Mick literally spits his lines venomously at Shirley, accusing her for believing her son the rapist, and even though in her heart of hearts, Shirley knows or suspects Dean isn't 100 per cent with the truth, she sticks up for her belief in him.
Mick: Mother or sister, you're nothing to me! We're finished!
Shirley screams after Mick that Dean is her son; she gets Dutch courage, however, from Denise, Dean's stepmother and Shirley's friend, who admonishes Shirley for letting Mick bully her (as Mick is wont to do to various women on various levels), because if Shirley allows Mick to do what he's doing, Denise says, Shirley will end up alone, as she always does. So what does Shirley do?
Why, she interposes herself, forcefully, onto the family dynamic again (see below).
The Bully Pulpit.
I'm so totally off Stan now. The identifying characteristic of the Carters is their preponderance to bully, and there are several different shades of it. Dean's aggressive misogyny, Mick's passive aggressiveness, Shirley's open aggression and Stan's sly manipulation.
Stan's children are a means to an end. He's got terminal cancer, and he's in pain; but he's too much of a coward to do himself in, rather, he wants someone to do the deed for him. Of all his children and grandchildren, he picks the weakest link - Tina.
She's simple and trusting (when she's not sly and manipulative, herself), but she's the easiest of the lot to convince that the kindest thing to do for Stan is to put him out of his pain. The only thing holding Tina back is her fear of Mick hating her, and also her fear of Lee's words that once you've killed someone, you're never the same. Well, she'd be in a good company of killers in Walford.
Credit to Tina, she puts up good resistance, but Stan plays up the pain factor. He hammed it down in that pub. Self-pity - he was talking to his pint, as that's the only thing which would listen to poor pitiful Stan. He felt as though he had a knife poking in his liver (boo-hoo). All of this chipping away at Tina's resolve and preying on her stupidity. She's got the overdose mixed and in a tumbler to give him when Mick walks in and susses what she's doing.
Then it's hell to pay until Queen Bitch Bully of them all, Shirley, storms in to re-conquer her rightful place - sorry, her entitled place as head of the family. Queen Bitch, Queen Bully ... I don't want to see her under the same roof as Linda. Mick needs to turf her to the gutter where she belongs. Maybe she should have left with her son.
The Phoenix.
Yet another eatery on the Square? Is Masood thinking that Shabnam's 10,000-pound inheritance will buy a London restaurant and restore it to its grandeur? Hang on, I thought Masood worked for Ian, part-time? Isn't Mr Smug going to have something to say about this competition?
Shabnam can't seem to do anything right, except have her friendship with Stacey. It's good to see a solid, believeable (if rather rapid) female friendship again on the Square that isn't fraught with bitchery and witchery the way the Tanya-Jane drinkfest of friendship was a few years ago.
I know it was cheesy and romcommish - and the part where Kush rushed from the Vic to sweep Shabnam, literally, off her feet and into his arms, was quite pukeworthy, but Shabnam and Stacey, in the pub, had some good lines - especially Stacey:-
What is it wiv you men? A girl pours her heart out to ya and ya stand there like a tailor's dummy?
On other matters Masood, I'm glad Mas finally declared that the Zainab thing was over, done and dusted. He referred to the marriage as a nightmare, ultimately, although Zainab was his first true love. They had good and bad times, as you do in a marriage, but in the end, Zainab was more than Mas could handle and both have moved on. Line drawn under the fact. Nicely tied up.
All This for a Piece of Paper.
The most vomit-inducing moment of the episode was Ian Beale demanding service at the bar of the pub and Jane, single-handedly clapping Peter Posh-Prick's placing an engagement ring on Lauren's finger.
(Big PSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT: Peter is the killer.)
Everything is hunky-dory, with Max agreeing to a burger meal at Beale's to celebrate the event of two unemployed people starting a new poorhouse to be funded by their respective fathers, when Emma makes her spiritual presence known.
Honestly, if I were a spiritualist, I'd say Emma had made her intentions to Lauren known, short of appearing in a ghostly form and shouting, Don't DO it!
Max brings home a big bouquet of flowers, which Lauren, in her self-absorption, thinks are for her. Nope, says Max, they're for Emma. He's going to the graveside the next day with the bunch and a few cheesy things to say to the corpse underground. Lauren offers to put them in water and whilst she's shuffling around that filthy kitchen floor - honestly, couldn't you hear the crud crunching beneath her feet, she steps on the missing piece of Emma's notes that has been protruding from the space between the floor and the kitchen cupboard for a month.
She doesn't know it until she notices it stuck to her boot. (Eeeeuuuuw, you don't know what that boot's picked up off that singularly unhygienic floor which hasn't been cleaned since poor Tramp was killed). She finds it, realises what it was, and places it in its rightful place in the file. The notes meant nothing to me, but they surely meant something to Lauren, and she was shocked.
Bet there won't be a wedding now.
The show is still CarterVille, and the overkill is beginning to show, as well as DTC's relentless campaign to force-feed the public a marmite character as the focal point of the programme. I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that Shirley's not supposed to be a sympathetic character, but we're supposed to be on her side as the principal dame in the show? She's bitter, vitriolic, self-pitying and a bully, the latter characteristic identifying her as vulnerable; but vulnerability doesn't always render sympathy on the part of the viewer, and on EastEnders in recent years, it's wont to denote victimhood. She's not even a character viewers love to hate (like Janine); apart from her shippers, she's just a character most viewers simply hate.
Torn Between Two Brothers.
Mick and his new-found brother go for a little evening walk. Well, he pulls him bodily from the salon Dean runs in order to talk about Linda. As good as this part of the episode was, and it was clearly the best of the evening's offering, it curiously reminded me of a similar scene between two brothers at the front of the show, It's certainly a re-mix, with and interesting twist, to this original scene from 21 years ago:-
Danny Dyer owned those scenes, and Matt di Angelo met him, line for line. Mick wanted vengeance for what Dean had done to Linda, and Dean showed he had the brass mettle to stick with his lies and stick it to Mick. For one brief glimmer of a moment, when Dean kept saying that Linda came onto him, that she told him she and Mick weren't married, that she pursued the relationship, I thought I saw some doubt cross Mick's face, but I was relieved that there was none of that.
Mick has lived with Linda since the two were children. More than anyone else in the world, more than Tina, more than Shirley, Mick knows Linda better than any person in the world, and even though he wasn't on the premises or anyplace near the Vic on the day of the rape, Mick almost certainly knew the circumstances under which the crime occurred. Since Linda told him, Mick's been mentally beating himself up for having run off after Shirley that day and having told Linda to look after Dean, who - as Mick so graphically said tonight - was crying after his mummy.
You really felt the rawness of Mick's emotions with every tear that ran down his cheeks as he berated Dean. He knew that Dean was in a state, he knew that Linda felt moved, maternally, to comfort Dean, to give him a hug, touch his arm; but with every suggestion from Mick, Dean, coldly, shot back in refutation.
I didn't do anything that a million other men aren't doing at this very moment - go after another man's wife.
Dean actually told the truth. He just didn't add the bit about Linda repeatedly refusing his advances or how she tried to stop him on that fateful day. And he kept asserting this, over and over, maybe in the misguided belief that, if he said it enough, Mick just might believe it, or it might just begin to plant some doubt in Mick's mind about Linda's innocence.
Mick would have loved to have killed Dean, and I'm glad he didn't. Telling him to leave Walford and not come back, however, only means Dean is going to return. I'm also afraid the prop in the sequence - the shovel - is an awful foreshadowing of what might happen to Dean, eventually, which would put the spectre of murder on Mick or Linda and admit them to the all-inclusive society of murderers who inhabit Albert Square.
At the end of the day, Mick thought of Linda and his family and how they would cope with Mick in prison for killing or hurting Dean, and they, ultimately, proved to sway Mick's thoughts; however, even when he returned home to inform Linda that Dean had gone for good, Linda doesn't feel safe, and she won't until Dean was behind bars.
But Linda and the kids aren't the only people with whom Mick has to deal.
There's Shirley, the star of our show.
The second best scene of the piece tonight came when Mick was returning from the allotments, alone, only to be confronted by Shirley, desperate for news of Dean. Because it's Shirley who's really torn between two brothers, or rather, sons. There's Mick, the secret son, whom she's cleaved close as a sibling throughout all these years, and Dean, the son whom she's continued to abandon and who now needs her.
Great dialogue, too, from this brief, but compelling scene.
Shirley demands to know what Mick's done with Dean, and Mick tells her he's literally thrown Dean out of Walford. He's gone away, and he won't be returning. Mick literally spits his lines venomously at Shirley, accusing her for believing her son the rapist, and even though in her heart of hearts, Shirley knows or suspects Dean isn't 100 per cent with the truth, she sticks up for her belief in him.
Mick: Mother or sister, you're nothing to me! We're finished!
Shirley screams after Mick that Dean is her son; she gets Dutch courage, however, from Denise, Dean's stepmother and Shirley's friend, who admonishes Shirley for letting Mick bully her (as Mick is wont to do to various women on various levels), because if Shirley allows Mick to do what he's doing, Denise says, Shirley will end up alone, as she always does. So what does Shirley do?
Why, she interposes herself, forcefully, onto the family dynamic again (see below).
The Bully Pulpit.
I'm so totally off Stan now. The identifying characteristic of the Carters is their preponderance to bully, and there are several different shades of it. Dean's aggressive misogyny, Mick's passive aggressiveness, Shirley's open aggression and Stan's sly manipulation.
Stan's children are a means to an end. He's got terminal cancer, and he's in pain; but he's too much of a coward to do himself in, rather, he wants someone to do the deed for him. Of all his children and grandchildren, he picks the weakest link - Tina.
She's simple and trusting (when she's not sly and manipulative, herself), but she's the easiest of the lot to convince that the kindest thing to do for Stan is to put him out of his pain. The only thing holding Tina back is her fear of Mick hating her, and also her fear of Lee's words that once you've killed someone, you're never the same. Well, she'd be in a good company of killers in Walford.
Credit to Tina, she puts up good resistance, but Stan plays up the pain factor. He hammed it down in that pub. Self-pity - he was talking to his pint, as that's the only thing which would listen to poor pitiful Stan. He felt as though he had a knife poking in his liver (boo-hoo). All of this chipping away at Tina's resolve and preying on her stupidity. She's got the overdose mixed and in a tumbler to give him when Mick walks in and susses what she's doing.
Then it's hell to pay until Queen Bitch Bully of them all, Shirley, storms in to re-conquer her rightful place - sorry, her entitled place as head of the family. Queen Bitch, Queen Bully ... I don't want to see her under the same roof as Linda. Mick needs to turf her to the gutter where she belongs. Maybe she should have left with her son.
The Phoenix.
Yet another eatery on the Square? Is Masood thinking that Shabnam's 10,000-pound inheritance will buy a London restaurant and restore it to its grandeur? Hang on, I thought Masood worked for Ian, part-time? Isn't Mr Smug going to have something to say about this competition?
Shabnam can't seem to do anything right, except have her friendship with Stacey. It's good to see a solid, believeable (if rather rapid) female friendship again on the Square that isn't fraught with bitchery and witchery the way the Tanya-Jane drinkfest of friendship was a few years ago.
I know it was cheesy and romcommish - and the part where Kush rushed from the Vic to sweep Shabnam, literally, off her feet and into his arms, was quite pukeworthy, but Shabnam and Stacey, in the pub, had some good lines - especially Stacey:-
What is it wiv you men? A girl pours her heart out to ya and ya stand there like a tailor's dummy?
On other matters Masood, I'm glad Mas finally declared that the Zainab thing was over, done and dusted. He referred to the marriage as a nightmare, ultimately, although Zainab was his first true love. They had good and bad times, as you do in a marriage, but in the end, Zainab was more than Mas could handle and both have moved on. Line drawn under the fact. Nicely tied up.
All This for a Piece of Paper.
The most vomit-inducing moment of the episode was Ian Beale demanding service at the bar of the pub and Jane, single-handedly clapping Peter Posh-Prick's placing an engagement ring on Lauren's finger.
(Big PSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT: Peter is the killer.)
Everything is hunky-dory, with Max agreeing to a burger meal at Beale's to celebrate the event of two unemployed people starting a new poorhouse to be funded by their respective fathers, when Emma makes her spiritual presence known.
Honestly, if I were a spiritualist, I'd say Emma had made her intentions to Lauren known, short of appearing in a ghostly form and shouting, Don't DO it!
Max brings home a big bouquet of flowers, which Lauren, in her self-absorption, thinks are for her. Nope, says Max, they're for Emma. He's going to the graveside the next day with the bunch and a few cheesy things to say to the corpse underground. Lauren offers to put them in water and whilst she's shuffling around that filthy kitchen floor - honestly, couldn't you hear the crud crunching beneath her feet, she steps on the missing piece of Emma's notes that has been protruding from the space between the floor and the kitchen cupboard for a month.
She doesn't know it until she notices it stuck to her boot. (Eeeeuuuuw, you don't know what that boot's picked up off that singularly unhygienic floor which hasn't been cleaned since poor Tramp was killed). She finds it, realises what it was, and places it in its rightful place in the file. The notes meant nothing to me, but they surely meant something to Lauren, and she was shocked.
Bet there won't be a wedding now.
Cat has reverted to type, a 'dirtee gurrl' wearing thigh length boots & belt/mini skirt complete with her chest hanging out !
ReplyDeleteUrgh NO thanks - rank personified ! There's nothing worse than a desperate old slapper. Totally & utterly UNattractive.