What's the phrase from the Simon and Garfunkel song? "Shades of mediocrity?" The run of extremely good episodes had to end someplace, and it ended tonight with what was, obviously, a filler episode.
I gave it a seven out of ten, solely by virtue of the performance of two actors - step forward Mr Matt di Angelo and Miss Linda Henry, with honourable mention to the Masoods and Stacey. The rest, I'm afraid to say, were abject shite.
Rattle, Rattle, Rattle, Here Come the Cattle.
If you've listened to the above, you've just heard the music as Jane and Sonia process down the aisle.
Seriously, I don't know whom I hate more - Jane or Sonia. Two of the biggest trash-mouthing bitches in Walford. All we got tonight was the pair of them trash-talking mothers, all because Jane's mother can't be arsed to come to Jane's wedding.
Ian opines that Jane and her mother aren't close, even though Jane spent a gaggle of months with her in the States when Linda was ill. Linda is a woman who speaks her mind, and everything she actually had to say about Jane was true. Ian is puerile, and Jane's first marriage apart, which left her a widow, this is only the second wedding she had with Ian, as the original wedding was a sham concocted to humiliate her for her infidelity with Grant - an attraction so totally out of the loop as to be almost fanciful.
If we're asked to believe that Jane is so distraught or upset at what her mother told her about not coming to the wedding that she promptly goes out and buys the sort of matronly suit her mother would wear to a wedding in recompense, that's idiotic. If anything, the piece showed that Ian needs Jane in an Oedipal sort of way and has no romantic notion about their wedding, and Jane certainly doesn't love Ian.
Tonight was a bitchfest against mothers, with Carol getting subtle abuse (moaning at Sonia for "not having a life") to blatant trash-mouthing of Pauline - Sonia reckoning out loud that Linda's collective awfulness as a mother made Jane able to be totally unfased by Pauline. When Jane actually remarks that Pauline wasn't mean, Sonia humpfs that that's a matter of opinion. Nice one, Sonia. It's one thing to trashmouth Martin, your husband, but it's quite another thing to speak ill of the dead.
Sonia's next line was fraught with irony - about mothers getting on your nerves. Well, Sonia, no doubt you get on Rebecca's nerves. One day, twenty years in the future, Rebecca will sit on some other couch with Ineta Shirovs and bitch, big-time, about what a totally awful, emotionally blackmailng, passive aggressive bully you are.
Sonia called Linda Clark a cow. Well, I saw two cows sitting, drinking, on Carol's sofa, and neither of them were named Linda.
I'm also bemused by how suddenly Sonia's become part of the Linda-Sharon-Jane set. Linda is a woman in her late thirties with grown children. Sharon and Jane are women in their forties. Sonia's contemporaries are, or should be, Stacey and Shabnam; but Sonia comes across as such a self-righteous, snotty-nosed stick-in-the-mud, I doubt either of them could stick a minute of her. Even Tina, the subtle object of her affections, is fortyish.
Jane is such a bovine, tactless bitch, the way she staggered into the Vic, announcing Sonia's elevation, by appointment of the Queen of Bovine, to matron-of-honour, dismissing Sharon as more of Ian's friend than hers - and this is Sharon, who has a plethora of serious things on her mind (like a husband unjustly imprisoned, a comatosed cousin who'd swiped the Mitchell assets, and Max hoarding The Arches), who took a day to help Jane choose a dress in which she sulkily chose to spite herself. And is she really so socially gauche that she has to snobbily dismiss Linda Carter going shopping with the gang because the pristine Jane wouldn't know what to say to her? She sniffily regarded Linda as if she were sullied by her ordeal.
Ian remarked in the Vic that this would be the last of Ian Beale's weddings. I wonder if that were foreshadowing.
I hope Jane is the killer, and I hope Tina dupes Sonia into euthanising Stan and both of them are imprisoned.
Comfortably Numb.
So it seems that Tina's been roped into helping Stan commit suicide - or rather, doing the deed for him.
Whereas Stan had been one of my favourite characters, I'm finding him tiring and whining now - cadging free drinks "for a dying man" from the bar and wheedling his children into hurrying his death along. It also seems as if Timothy West is phoning it in now whilst occasionally glimpsing at his watch.
We get it. Stan doesn't want the long, painful and protracted death from cancer, so he wants to end his life when he's ready, before the pain becomes too much - except he's not up to doing it, himself. Instead, he wants Tina to kill him, specifically, to slip him an overdose. Tonight, we saw the Carters experiment with cocktails as a background to Tina blatantly questioning Tina about strong painkillers and how she could get some.
Well, it's not rocket science, is it? Does this mean yet another killer will walk the Square.
There's a killer amongst them. Actually, Dominic, there are several.
All That Shit for a Piece of Paper.
Please can we grow the fuck up and stop with the topless males strutting about showing their six-packs (and I don't mean the type you buy at the Minute Mart)? We get it. People like Kush and Peter are eye candy, but this shit gets old fast, and the whole idiocy of Peter getting his feathers (or rather his pubes) ruffled because Lauren remarked that Kush was hotter and fitter than Peter, resulting in, not one, but two gratuitous scenes of Ben Hardy stripping down and strutting his stuff, just to remind us that the missing piece to Emma's paper jigsaw puzzle is still partly protruding from the cupboard on the Branning kitchen floor.
Peter's worried about Max lurking about whilst he and Lauren rush upstairs fora quick fuck some afternoon delight; he ought to be worried about the hygiene in the Brannings' kitchen. Don't those girls or Max clean the floor? If they did, they'd have found the piece of paper. Eeeeuuuuw.
Friendship.
Shabnam and Stacey. Stacey and Shabnam. EastEnders has been looking for a female friendship like this for years. Forget about the bitchy, toxicity that were Jane and Tanya, this is the real deal.
Stacey is pushing Shabnam to talk about her child, whom Shabnam insists isn't her child anymore. That's what adoption is about.
In that respect, Shabnam is right. Sad but true, when you abandon or sign a child away for adoption, you cease to become a mother and become the person who gave birth to that child - hence, the birth mother. I don't know how they are going to play this. Are we going to have yet another search for a missing child, only to find her adopted and settled into a home and a family? This has to be taken into consideration. This child, if she's been adopted, would be settled into and an integral part of an adopted family. She's six years old. Having Shabnam appear out of the blue now would totally confuse her. If, however, she's still in care and being fostered, that's a different kettle of fish.
I know Stacey's concerned, but does she want Shabnam to tell Dean about the child? And, please, once again, this was not a rape.It was consensual sex - drunken sex, but consensual nonetheless. Shabnam is ashamed, as much for the fact that Dean doesn't remember the deed, as for betraying the morals instilled in her by her parents.
Guilty.
Obviously, the highlight of tonight's episode was the dynamic and storyline building up between Dean and Shirley. Vigilante justice has been out in force - from Peter and Kush staring Dean down as he walked through the Square to confronting Sharon to Kat verbally baiting Shirley about Dean to the shopfront being vandalised.
So Dean is still under arrest, but out on bail, which means he broke the conditions of his bail when he and Shirley entered the Vic on Friday night to announce his "release." Obviously, the terms of his bail are that he not go within a certain radius of Linda and that he not frequent the Vic.
Whilst Shirley is wise in cautioning Dean to keep his head down, he's intent on business as usual and determined to prove his innocence, except all his staff have deserted him, except the one he treated like a piece of shit - Lola. She honestly believes in his innocence more than, I think, Shirley does. Shirley's cautious at first, and even tries to secure colourists for him by using Lola's contacts, until she fails miserably and approaches Stacey, which results in one of two electrifying scenes in the piece tonight.
Stacey doesn't stint on telling Shirley a few home truths - that Dean is a rapist, that he raped Linda, that Stacey knew that for a fact just from Liinda's behaviour and that if Shirley would bother to look more closely at the people in the pub, she'd see it for herself.
When Dean tries a promotional tactic and encourages Lola to work with him, asking her out for an evening to "discuss her future at Blades," Shirley deflates the gesture by calling Lola a tart and sending her home.
Then the truths are out with Dean.
I wondered how long it would be before Dean started blaming Shirley, and at first, I thought the blame was going to be all about how she deserted him years ago and he'd turned out the way he did, but he carried this ball too far. It's Shirley's fault for what Dean did to Linda. That's right. Dean's words were ...
If you hadn't gone that day, I'd never have done what I did with Linda.
Wow. How much of a euphemistic admission of rape can you get? Until this point, Dean had been feeding Shirley a line about how Linda had been colluding with him, how she'd been coming onto him and how she'd been up for it. That they'd had an affair. Now, his remarks tell Shirley that whatever happened between him and Linda, happened once and happened the day she went missing. That, and Stacey's words reverberate with her. Shirley's face was a picture.
She buys him a ticket to York, where, I gather, Carly is living now. She minces no words. She doesn't want him to just leave Walford, but to leave London. Surely that is against his bail conditions? He would have been released to his mother's care, surely?
Whatever the case, whilst she's not letting on that doubt is seeping in, Shirley wants Dean well away from Walford.
I gave it a seven out of ten, solely by virtue of the performance of two actors - step forward Mr Matt di Angelo and Miss Linda Henry, with honourable mention to the Masoods and Stacey. The rest, I'm afraid to say, were abject shite.
Rattle, Rattle, Rattle, Here Come the Cattle.
If you've listened to the above, you've just heard the music as Jane and Sonia process down the aisle.
Seriously, I don't know whom I hate more - Jane or Sonia. Two of the biggest trash-mouthing bitches in Walford. All we got tonight was the pair of them trash-talking mothers, all because Jane's mother can't be arsed to come to Jane's wedding.
Ian opines that Jane and her mother aren't close, even though Jane spent a gaggle of months with her in the States when Linda was ill. Linda is a woman who speaks her mind, and everything she actually had to say about Jane was true. Ian is puerile, and Jane's first marriage apart, which left her a widow, this is only the second wedding she had with Ian, as the original wedding was a sham concocted to humiliate her for her infidelity with Grant - an attraction so totally out of the loop as to be almost fanciful.
If we're asked to believe that Jane is so distraught or upset at what her mother told her about not coming to the wedding that she promptly goes out and buys the sort of matronly suit her mother would wear to a wedding in recompense, that's idiotic. If anything, the piece showed that Ian needs Jane in an Oedipal sort of way and has no romantic notion about their wedding, and Jane certainly doesn't love Ian.
Tonight was a bitchfest against mothers, with Carol getting subtle abuse (moaning at Sonia for "not having a life") to blatant trash-mouthing of Pauline - Sonia reckoning out loud that Linda's collective awfulness as a mother made Jane able to be totally unfased by Pauline. When Jane actually remarks that Pauline wasn't mean, Sonia humpfs that that's a matter of opinion. Nice one, Sonia. It's one thing to trashmouth Martin, your husband, but it's quite another thing to speak ill of the dead.
Sonia's next line was fraught with irony - about mothers getting on your nerves. Well, Sonia, no doubt you get on Rebecca's nerves. One day, twenty years in the future, Rebecca will sit on some other couch with Ineta Shirovs and bitch, big-time, about what a totally awful, emotionally blackmailng, passive aggressive bully you are.
Sonia called Linda Clark a cow. Well, I saw two cows sitting, drinking, on Carol's sofa, and neither of them were named Linda.
I'm also bemused by how suddenly Sonia's become part of the Linda-Sharon-Jane set. Linda is a woman in her late thirties with grown children. Sharon and Jane are women in their forties. Sonia's contemporaries are, or should be, Stacey and Shabnam; but Sonia comes across as such a self-righteous, snotty-nosed stick-in-the-mud, I doubt either of them could stick a minute of her. Even Tina, the subtle object of her affections, is fortyish.
Jane is such a bovine, tactless bitch, the way she staggered into the Vic, announcing Sonia's elevation, by appointment of the Queen of Bovine, to matron-of-honour, dismissing Sharon as more of Ian's friend than hers - and this is Sharon, who has a plethora of serious things on her mind (like a husband unjustly imprisoned, a comatosed cousin who'd swiped the Mitchell assets, and Max hoarding The Arches), who took a day to help Jane choose a dress in which she sulkily chose to spite herself. And is she really so socially gauche that she has to snobbily dismiss Linda Carter going shopping with the gang because the pristine Jane wouldn't know what to say to her? She sniffily regarded Linda as if she were sullied by her ordeal.
Ian remarked in the Vic that this would be the last of Ian Beale's weddings. I wonder if that were foreshadowing.
I hope Jane is the killer, and I hope Tina dupes Sonia into euthanising Stan and both of them are imprisoned.
Comfortably Numb.
So it seems that Tina's been roped into helping Stan commit suicide - or rather, doing the deed for him.
Whereas Stan had been one of my favourite characters, I'm finding him tiring and whining now - cadging free drinks "for a dying man" from the bar and wheedling his children into hurrying his death along. It also seems as if Timothy West is phoning it in now whilst occasionally glimpsing at his watch.
We get it. Stan doesn't want the long, painful and protracted death from cancer, so he wants to end his life when he's ready, before the pain becomes too much - except he's not up to doing it, himself. Instead, he wants Tina to kill him, specifically, to slip him an overdose. Tonight, we saw the Carters experiment with cocktails as a background to Tina blatantly questioning Tina about strong painkillers and how she could get some.
Well, it's not rocket science, is it? Does this mean yet another killer will walk the Square.
There's a killer amongst them. Actually, Dominic, there are several.
All That Shit for a Piece of Paper.
Please can we grow the fuck up and stop with the topless males strutting about showing their six-packs (and I don't mean the type you buy at the Minute Mart)? We get it. People like Kush and Peter are eye candy, but this shit gets old fast, and the whole idiocy of Peter getting his feathers (or rather his pubes) ruffled because Lauren remarked that Kush was hotter and fitter than Peter, resulting in, not one, but two gratuitous scenes of Ben Hardy stripping down and strutting his stuff, just to remind us that the missing piece to Emma's paper jigsaw puzzle is still partly protruding from the cupboard on the Branning kitchen floor.
Peter's worried about Max lurking about whilst he and Lauren rush upstairs for
Friendship.
Shabnam and Stacey. Stacey and Shabnam. EastEnders has been looking for a female friendship like this for years. Forget about the bitchy, toxicity that were Jane and Tanya, this is the real deal.
Stacey is pushing Shabnam to talk about her child, whom Shabnam insists isn't her child anymore. That's what adoption is about.
In that respect, Shabnam is right. Sad but true, when you abandon or sign a child away for adoption, you cease to become a mother and become the person who gave birth to that child - hence, the birth mother. I don't know how they are going to play this. Are we going to have yet another search for a missing child, only to find her adopted and settled into a home and a family? This has to be taken into consideration. This child, if she's been adopted, would be settled into and an integral part of an adopted family. She's six years old. Having Shabnam appear out of the blue now would totally confuse her. If, however, she's still in care and being fostered, that's a different kettle of fish.
I know Stacey's concerned, but does she want Shabnam to tell Dean about the child? And, please, once again, this was not a rape.It was consensual sex - drunken sex, but consensual nonetheless. Shabnam is ashamed, as much for the fact that Dean doesn't remember the deed, as for betraying the morals instilled in her by her parents.
Guilty.
Obviously, the highlight of tonight's episode was the dynamic and storyline building up between Dean and Shirley. Vigilante justice has been out in force - from Peter and Kush staring Dean down as he walked through the Square to confronting Sharon to Kat verbally baiting Shirley about Dean to the shopfront being vandalised.
So Dean is still under arrest, but out on bail, which means he broke the conditions of his bail when he and Shirley entered the Vic on Friday night to announce his "release." Obviously, the terms of his bail are that he not go within a certain radius of Linda and that he not frequent the Vic.
Whilst Shirley is wise in cautioning Dean to keep his head down, he's intent on business as usual and determined to prove his innocence, except all his staff have deserted him, except the one he treated like a piece of shit - Lola. She honestly believes in his innocence more than, I think, Shirley does. Shirley's cautious at first, and even tries to secure colourists for him by using Lola's contacts, until she fails miserably and approaches Stacey, which results in one of two electrifying scenes in the piece tonight.
Stacey doesn't stint on telling Shirley a few home truths - that Dean is a rapist, that he raped Linda, that Stacey knew that for a fact just from Liinda's behaviour and that if Shirley would bother to look more closely at the people in the pub, she'd see it for herself.
When Dean tries a promotional tactic and encourages Lola to work with him, asking her out for an evening to "discuss her future at Blades," Shirley deflates the gesture by calling Lola a tart and sending her home.
Then the truths are out with Dean.
I wondered how long it would be before Dean started blaming Shirley, and at first, I thought the blame was going to be all about how she deserted him years ago and he'd turned out the way he did, but he carried this ball too far. It's Shirley's fault for what Dean did to Linda. That's right. Dean's words were ...
If you hadn't gone that day, I'd never have done what I did with Linda.
Wow. How much of a euphemistic admission of rape can you get? Until this point, Dean had been feeding Shirley a line about how Linda had been colluding with him, how she'd been coming onto him and how she'd been up for it. That they'd had an affair. Now, his remarks tell Shirley that whatever happened between him and Linda, happened once and happened the day she went missing. That, and Stacey's words reverberate with her. Shirley's face was a picture.
She buys him a ticket to York, where, I gather, Carly is living now. She minces no words. She doesn't want him to just leave Walford, but to leave London. Surely that is against his bail conditions? He would have been released to his mother's care, surely?
Whatever the case, whilst she's not letting on that doubt is seeping in, Shirley wants Dean well away from Walford.
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