First of all, let me say that I am a big fan - a big big fan - of Sarah Phelps. So I watched this. Then I watched it again. Then I thought about it.
It was a very good episode, written by a writer who knows Old Walford, particularly Sharon, so well. However, I have to say, it wasn't the best thing Phelps has ever written for the show, and it wasn't the best that she's written for Sharon.
I'm not about to give this episode a near-perfect rating because it was written by one of the best people ever to write for the programme. No one's perfect, and sometimes even the best at their trade make a faux pas.
As near as I could fathom this episode, it was all about two original characters from Old Walford, about to transition into a new phase of their lives.
Sharon. It was a bit much for Phil to remind Sharon that she's a bit long in the tooth for realising how the Mitchells operate. (If she's long in the tooth, Kathy - at sixty-five and formerly a bastion of judgemental high-mindedness - must be a tyrannosaurus rex). Sharon has every right to know where the hell her husband has been for a month with no word, leaving her to look after his businesses and the hangers-on populating his house, unquestioningly.
We're back now to Demon Denny, I see.
The kid's a brat, but mostly he's a brat because he's never ever had a male role model whom he could emulate. Well, now he's got one who's message is that it's OK to fight at school as long as you win; but Denny, it seems, targets the younger, smaller children, which is the actions of a bully.
Walford is going to be a scary place when he and Bobby grow up.
Denny smacked Sharon. It's pretty much a Mitchell thing to smack your mother around. Both Phil and Grant weren't above smacking Peggy, and that behaviour was learned from Eric, who smacked her about a fair bit also. Sharon was right about Denny having the tempers of both Den and Dennis, but his temper is uncontrollable because he's never had anyone stop him and curb it before it became a way of behaviour for him.
What he's doing now and what he's always done is to attract attention. And this is where the hypocrisy of Ian's parental advice comes from - Sharon is an abysmal parent. She's right to admit that she is, that she's afraid of her son hating her and disrespecting her, and in this way, she mirrors Ian.
Every bad parental trait of which Ian accused Sharon can be laid right at Ian's feet. Ian never disciplined his children. He threw money at them to buy whatever they wanted in order to get for himself a peaceful life. In the early days, when he was between wives, Pauline and Pat did the heavy work with the kids, but they weren't their children. Later, when he was married to Jane, whenever he'd try to instil discipline, Lucy would openly mock him, whilst Jane and Christian, who'd never been parents would undermine him.
The Beale twins had a succession of stepmothers for whom they held decreasing amounts of respect. Denny's had successive father figures who never stuck around long. His mother is excessive with him because he is, truly, the only blood relative she has left in the world, and the same holds true for him - bar distant Vicki.
Denny doesn't hate Sharon. He wants the right sort of attention from her. He wants boundaries and guidelines and structure, and she's not giving him that; instead, she's giving him silly and expensive toys in an effort to buy his love. He just needs some quality time from her.
Ian accusing Sharon of being the problem about her son is himself projecting exactly what's gone wrong with his children in his own household. For all he bleats on about Lucy, he wasn't a successful father at all, and Jane has been no mother at all. What she has been, however, is an accomplice in the murder of Ian's child, the person who dumped Lucy's body into the boot of her car and dragged that body - anyone with any nous would know that Jane couldn't have carried Lucy that far onto the common - and left the body outside all night in the elements.
Yet Jane takes great pleasure in mincing about Denny's problems at school to Sharon from her high-handed pedestal. Firstly, how would Jane know about Denny's problems from the mothers at the schoolgate? Bobby the Basher, murderer is at Walford High. Denny is still at Walford Primary. At least, for one brief moment, they acknowledged the hypocrisy in their remarks. Jane realises that they are presenting themselves as "normal"; now it's Ian who's reciting the mantra over and over again.
We're normal. We ARE normal.
No, I'm sorry, you're not. You're anything but normal. You're covering for the fact that your youngest child wantonly killed Ian's daughter. Your wife kept that a secret from you for almost an entire year. You had sex on the very spot where your daughter was killed. You're reinforcing your psychopathic son's bad behaviour by telling him, repeatedly, that he didn't kill Lucy, when he knows damned well that he did.
Denny bit a child on the head. Bobby killed his sister.
Denny has the makings of a little thug. Bobby is a psychopath.
It's very typical of DTC's treatment of Sharon too, in this episode, that Sharon's story suddenly becomes all about Ian and his confliction about Cindy's decision to put Beth up for adoption, the return of Phil, and, ultimately, Kathy.
However, Sharon was extremely poignant in this episode. Never in her entire life has she ever felt so alone. Phil has swanned off, her birth mother died, and she's struggling to find her birth father who, according to old records, was trying to find her. As Ian willingly stepped back into the past in Thursday's episode, and did so again tonight, Sharon reaches out to find herself and wants to find that part that's missing in what she finds familiar from the past.
The first thing I noticed in Ian's first scene tonight was him moving the chair from the lounge portion of the room to just back of the dining room table. Of course, this is where first Lou, and then Pauline, would always sit. You could eye the window and the back gate from that position. Of course, Pauline's dining room and lounge were crammed into the space around the kitchen door in order to accommodate Lou in the front room (now the Beale lounge section). Ian was channeling his grandmother and his Auntie Pauline as familiar figures who - had they been alive - would have reached in and sorted the big mess at the Beales right now.
Am I wrong, or was Ian convinced that Cindy's wanting the baby adopted, at first, was the best measure? By the end of the episode and his interaction with Sharon, he'd changed his mind.
Sharon just wants to know who she is, but more important than that, she wants to belong to a dynamic. Den and Angie are dead. Dennis is dead. Phil, who's supposed to love her, treats her like a bastard at a family reunion, rounding on her and telling her to buck up or think about what she wants away from this set-up, then flouncing off to the lounge to play on a games console with his family, including her son. Sharon thinks her unknown gene pool can act as a calming deterrent for Denny's behaviour, but there is a thing called nurture vs nature.
Denny's temper may be inherited, but Sharon's nurtured it, just as Lucy (and Cindy) possess the Cindy gene, but Ian nurtured and will continue to nurture that as well - if not in Cindy, then in Beth.
The highlight of the episode was the eventual talk between Ian and Sharon about why she couldn't be his sibling, and every word Ian uttered, Phelps got 100% correct. First, there simply wouldn't have been a way Pete Beale could have cheated on his pregnant second wife, and even if he did, and Sharon was the eventual result of that cheating, there's no way Lou would have allowed Sharon to be adopted, much less to have been brought up across the road at the Vic with Den and Ange.
Lou had given away a child, herself, as a young unmarried woman. She knew the score. If she'd had to have done so, she'd have taken Sharon and raised her, herself, or foisted Pete's handywork on himself and Kathy and - as Ian surmised - Kathy would have had to shut up and accept it. Or leave, herself.
However, by the end of that episode, I'd never seen Sharon so bereft and lonely and feeling isolated, even from her one blood relation.
However, there's always irony in that situation. "K", who's certainly Kathy called. I think Phil's absence had something to do with Gavin Sullivan or whatever he's calling himself now. They certainly wouldn't have Sharon go through a tale like this only to find a dead father. And it's too much of a genuine coincidence that Sharon's father was named Gavin, and another set of producers introduced the concept of Kathy having a husband named Gavin a decade later, for DTC not to milk this for the wonderful soap moment it will prove to be.
I think Phil knows that Kathy's Gavin is Sharon's birth father. (Psst! Billy knows too. He's the weak link; Sharon should exploit him).
And by the end of the episode in BealeLand, Ian's heeded Lou's own reaction and decided to keep baby Beth within the Beale fold ... except the obvious difference there is that Beth is no Beale nor any relation to a Beale. Sure, she's the twins' niece, but she's no relation of Ian's or Bobby's. Beth is the replacement daughter with the Cindy gene, an attribute commonly shared with Lucy. She's his opportunity not to fuck parenthood up this time around.
He has no right to that child, and neither does Jane. They should honour Cindy's wishes. There's a psychopath in the house who might not be able to tolerate a favoured child again.
Martin. There's a saying where I come from about certain people who are generous to a fault: They'd rather give up their arseholes to someone in need, and shit through their ribs.
That's Alfie.
Haters gonna hate him, so suck it up.
One thing Alfie does have in abundance is compassion, and he's concerned about Martin's plight.
I'm not sure whether I like Donna's direct approach, which was pretty brutal, telling him to man up over the loss of Sonia, railing at him about looking sad and dejected and not even rating a pity snog; but Martin struck a chord with Alfie when he told the truth about what happened.
One thing's weird, however. Sonia allegedly owned half the house they had, which means her name was on the mortgage, which means her wages were part and parcel of the calculation to advance funds to buy the house. I can see her not being aware of the repossession if Martin never bothered to show her correspondence addressed to her in relation to that, but when Sonia walked away from Martin - and she knew they were on precarious ground last year, because she mentioned to Carol that they were struggling with the mortgage - that she never paid her share towards the house. She left him high and dry.
Oh, and Saint Sonia has been officially deemed a lesbian because Donna the Vile has labelled her so.
Well, it wasn't rocket science to ascertain that Alfie was going to insist that Martin take over the stall he originally fronted. I guess that means Alfie will go back to sweeping the streets until he wins the Lottery.
So another piece of Old Walford, Martin, comes home full circle, but this time as a man, struggling, amidst losing his home and his livelihood and being betrayed by his bitch of a wife, to keep his daughter's love and his own self-respect.
Stacey's just up the road.
A very good and very emotive episode, but Phelps has done better. No one writes Sharon like Sarah Phelps, and I hope this episode isn't just a one-off from her.
It was a very good episode, written by a writer who knows Old Walford, particularly Sharon, so well. However, I have to say, it wasn't the best thing Phelps has ever written for the show, and it wasn't the best that she's written for Sharon.
I'm not about to give this episode a near-perfect rating because it was written by one of the best people ever to write for the programme. No one's perfect, and sometimes even the best at their trade make a faux pas.
As near as I could fathom this episode, it was all about two original characters from Old Walford, about to transition into a new phase of their lives.
Sharon. It was a bit much for Phil to remind Sharon that she's a bit long in the tooth for realising how the Mitchells operate. (If she's long in the tooth, Kathy - at sixty-five and formerly a bastion of judgemental high-mindedness - must be a tyrannosaurus rex). Sharon has every right to know where the hell her husband has been for a month with no word, leaving her to look after his businesses and the hangers-on populating his house, unquestioningly.
We're back now to Demon Denny, I see.
The kid's a brat, but mostly he's a brat because he's never ever had a male role model whom he could emulate. Well, now he's got one who's message is that it's OK to fight at school as long as you win; but Denny, it seems, targets the younger, smaller children, which is the actions of a bully.
Walford is going to be a scary place when he and Bobby grow up.
Denny smacked Sharon. It's pretty much a Mitchell thing to smack your mother around. Both Phil and Grant weren't above smacking Peggy, and that behaviour was learned from Eric, who smacked her about a fair bit also. Sharon was right about Denny having the tempers of both Den and Dennis, but his temper is uncontrollable because he's never had anyone stop him and curb it before it became a way of behaviour for him.
What he's doing now and what he's always done is to attract attention. And this is where the hypocrisy of Ian's parental advice comes from - Sharon is an abysmal parent. She's right to admit that she is, that she's afraid of her son hating her and disrespecting her, and in this way, she mirrors Ian.
Every bad parental trait of which Ian accused Sharon can be laid right at Ian's feet. Ian never disciplined his children. He threw money at them to buy whatever they wanted in order to get for himself a peaceful life. In the early days, when he was between wives, Pauline and Pat did the heavy work with the kids, but they weren't their children. Later, when he was married to Jane, whenever he'd try to instil discipline, Lucy would openly mock him, whilst Jane and Christian, who'd never been parents would undermine him.
The Beale twins had a succession of stepmothers for whom they held decreasing amounts of respect. Denny's had successive father figures who never stuck around long. His mother is excessive with him because he is, truly, the only blood relative she has left in the world, and the same holds true for him - bar distant Vicki.
Denny doesn't hate Sharon. He wants the right sort of attention from her. He wants boundaries and guidelines and structure, and she's not giving him that; instead, she's giving him silly and expensive toys in an effort to buy his love. He just needs some quality time from her.
Ian accusing Sharon of being the problem about her son is himself projecting exactly what's gone wrong with his children in his own household. For all he bleats on about Lucy, he wasn't a successful father at all, and Jane has been no mother at all. What she has been, however, is an accomplice in the murder of Ian's child, the person who dumped Lucy's body into the boot of her car and dragged that body - anyone with any nous would know that Jane couldn't have carried Lucy that far onto the common - and left the body outside all night in the elements.
Yet Jane takes great pleasure in mincing about Denny's problems at school to Sharon from her high-handed pedestal. Firstly, how would Jane know about Denny's problems from the mothers at the schoolgate? Bobby the Basher, murderer is at Walford High. Denny is still at Walford Primary. At least, for one brief moment, they acknowledged the hypocrisy in their remarks. Jane realises that they are presenting themselves as "normal"; now it's Ian who's reciting the mantra over and over again.
We're normal. We ARE normal.
No, I'm sorry, you're not. You're anything but normal. You're covering for the fact that your youngest child wantonly killed Ian's daughter. Your wife kept that a secret from you for almost an entire year. You had sex on the very spot where your daughter was killed. You're reinforcing your psychopathic son's bad behaviour by telling him, repeatedly, that he didn't kill Lucy, when he knows damned well that he did.
Denny bit a child on the head. Bobby killed his sister.
Denny has the makings of a little thug. Bobby is a psychopath.
It's very typical of DTC's treatment of Sharon too, in this episode, that Sharon's story suddenly becomes all about Ian and his confliction about Cindy's decision to put Beth up for adoption, the return of Phil, and, ultimately, Kathy.
However, Sharon was extremely poignant in this episode. Never in her entire life has she ever felt so alone. Phil has swanned off, her birth mother died, and she's struggling to find her birth father who, according to old records, was trying to find her. As Ian willingly stepped back into the past in Thursday's episode, and did so again tonight, Sharon reaches out to find herself and wants to find that part that's missing in what she finds familiar from the past.
The first thing I noticed in Ian's first scene tonight was him moving the chair from the lounge portion of the room to just back of the dining room table. Of course, this is where first Lou, and then Pauline, would always sit. You could eye the window and the back gate from that position. Of course, Pauline's dining room and lounge were crammed into the space around the kitchen door in order to accommodate Lou in the front room (now the Beale lounge section). Ian was channeling his grandmother and his Auntie Pauline as familiar figures who - had they been alive - would have reached in and sorted the big mess at the Beales right now.
Am I wrong, or was Ian convinced that Cindy's wanting the baby adopted, at first, was the best measure? By the end of the episode and his interaction with Sharon, he'd changed his mind.
Sharon just wants to know who she is, but more important than that, she wants to belong to a dynamic. Den and Angie are dead. Dennis is dead. Phil, who's supposed to love her, treats her like a bastard at a family reunion, rounding on her and telling her to buck up or think about what she wants away from this set-up, then flouncing off to the lounge to play on a games console with his family, including her son. Sharon thinks her unknown gene pool can act as a calming deterrent for Denny's behaviour, but there is a thing called nurture vs nature.
Denny's temper may be inherited, but Sharon's nurtured it, just as Lucy (and Cindy) possess the Cindy gene, but Ian nurtured and will continue to nurture that as well - if not in Cindy, then in Beth.
The highlight of the episode was the eventual talk between Ian and Sharon about why she couldn't be his sibling, and every word Ian uttered, Phelps got 100% correct. First, there simply wouldn't have been a way Pete Beale could have cheated on his pregnant second wife, and even if he did, and Sharon was the eventual result of that cheating, there's no way Lou would have allowed Sharon to be adopted, much less to have been brought up across the road at the Vic with Den and Ange.
Lou had given away a child, herself, as a young unmarried woman. She knew the score. If she'd had to have done so, she'd have taken Sharon and raised her, herself, or foisted Pete's handywork on himself and Kathy and - as Ian surmised - Kathy would have had to shut up and accept it. Or leave, herself.
However, by the end of that episode, I'd never seen Sharon so bereft and lonely and feeling isolated, even from her one blood relation.
However, there's always irony in that situation. "K", who's certainly Kathy called. I think Phil's absence had something to do with Gavin Sullivan or whatever he's calling himself now. They certainly wouldn't have Sharon go through a tale like this only to find a dead father. And it's too much of a genuine coincidence that Sharon's father was named Gavin, and another set of producers introduced the concept of Kathy having a husband named Gavin a decade later, for DTC not to milk this for the wonderful soap moment it will prove to be.
I think Phil knows that Kathy's Gavin is Sharon's birth father. (Psst! Billy knows too. He's the weak link; Sharon should exploit him).
And by the end of the episode in BealeLand, Ian's heeded Lou's own reaction and decided to keep baby Beth within the Beale fold ... except the obvious difference there is that Beth is no Beale nor any relation to a Beale. Sure, she's the twins' niece, but she's no relation of Ian's or Bobby's. Beth is the replacement daughter with the Cindy gene, an attribute commonly shared with Lucy. She's his opportunity not to fuck parenthood up this time around.
He has no right to that child, and neither does Jane. They should honour Cindy's wishes. There's a psychopath in the house who might not be able to tolerate a favoured child again.
Martin. There's a saying where I come from about certain people who are generous to a fault: They'd rather give up their arseholes to someone in need, and shit through their ribs.
That's Alfie.
Haters gonna hate him, so suck it up.
One thing Alfie does have in abundance is compassion, and he's concerned about Martin's plight.
I'm not sure whether I like Donna's direct approach, which was pretty brutal, telling him to man up over the loss of Sonia, railing at him about looking sad and dejected and not even rating a pity snog; but Martin struck a chord with Alfie when he told the truth about what happened.
One thing's weird, however. Sonia allegedly owned half the house they had, which means her name was on the mortgage, which means her wages were part and parcel of the calculation to advance funds to buy the house. I can see her not being aware of the repossession if Martin never bothered to show her correspondence addressed to her in relation to that, but when Sonia walked away from Martin - and she knew they were on precarious ground last year, because she mentioned to Carol that they were struggling with the mortgage - that she never paid her share towards the house. She left him high and dry.
Oh, and Saint Sonia has been officially deemed a lesbian because Donna the Vile has labelled her so.
Well, it wasn't rocket science to ascertain that Alfie was going to insist that Martin take over the stall he originally fronted. I guess that means Alfie will go back to sweeping the streets until he wins the Lottery.
So another piece of Old Walford, Martin, comes home full circle, but this time as a man, struggling, amidst losing his home and his livelihood and being betrayed by his bitch of a wife, to keep his daughter's love and his own self-respect.
Stacey's just up the road.
A very good and very emotive episode, but Phelps has done better. No one writes Sharon like Sarah Phelps, and I hope this episode isn't just a one-off from her.
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