The title of that piece should have been The Selfish Women of Walford.
The bottom had to fly out of that high-sailing boat sometime, and less than two weeks after the Anniversary episode, it tanked tonight.
What we saw in that episode was why there are no strong women in the show, why most of them are man-centric and why the majority are self-centred, self-obsessed and self-pitying.
What's more, I don't give a rat's arse if DTC says he didn't like the gangster era that lasted from 2003 until 2006 or so on the programme, it wasn't his gangster era, and more than anything tonight, we didn't get soupcons that the gangsters - DTC-style - were returning, we got flaming, great big chunks of hints that they were.
Mark me ... Phil is booted and suited and threatening Max, who's been freed of fatherhood in order to gangsterise, Gavin, who is probably Sharon's father and is Kathy's husband is probably some sort of Mr Big with Kathy as his moll (art imitating life, there), and Sharon will get sucked into gangsterism again, along with Ronnie, and Kim, and probably the pisspoor Moons, all linked by Mr Mystery-Lynchpin, the latest TMG*, himself, Vincent.
Give me strength.
MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMe.
Whitney and Lee, the wimpiest, wettest couple not to ignite the fires in Walford. Even in a night of thunder and lightning, they peter out cold. Whitney the dirty girl is back - whining, weeping and moaning because Lee is a soldier who has to report for duty. In Jordan (although I don't recall any mines being set to detonate in Jordan - they're on our side).
Just how ignorant is this girl? What is it she doesn't understand about Lee being in the army? It's not as if we've seen him living out of a barracks, doing guard duty or just generally being the enlisted man that he is since - oh, since God was a boy. In fact, he's been the Ava of all soldiers - living at home, working in the pub, doing just about everything but, well, being a soldier.
And now he has to get back to his day job, which will mean being away for the grand sum of six weeks, something Whitney just cannot abide. The other thing she can't abide is that she had to ask Lee if he would miss her, and then she gets the hump because he didn't volunteer that information.
Just like Lauren, just like Lucy, just like Abi ... in fact, just like most of that quartet of women in the pub tonight, everything has got to be all about Whitney. So much so, that even though she realises it's not fair to ask that Lee sacrifice his career for her, she asks him to do it anyway. She asks him not to leave her - not even for six weeks of duty.
Was it me, or was the wail that she gets so lonely, a subtle intimation to Lee that, were he away on duty, she'd find the temptation to sleep with some other guy too great? After all, that's been hermodus operandi forever. I guess she got lonely when she was with Todd, so she slept with Billy. When Billy dumped her, she got lonely and slept with Peter Beale, who made her even lonelier, so she slept with Connor. When Connor preferred Carol, she went on the game, came back and got with Fatboy, who made her lonely for Tyler who made her lonely for Joey Branning.
That's the message I got.
This is one needy, self-centred and self-obsessed girl - and as if Lee, the lowliest of the lowest non-coms, can just march (pun intended) right up to his Colonel-in-Chief and say, "Sorry to bother you, sir, but I'm requesting that I be kept her and put into some sort of training or recruitment role, because my girlfriend, you see, is lonely, and if I go away, she may cheat on me."
And the CO would most likely tell him to man up and grow a pair.
Lee and Whitney have never impressed me as a couple - mostly because Lee was heavily invested in Lucy the last two days of her life, to the point that he binned any thought of Whitney in favour of Lucy's returned attention. As well, I seem to remember Lucy informing Lee that Whitney had been a prostitute at some point in time, something, which I don't think would savour too well with Linda. He transferred those affections too easily and too readily to Whitney. It also seems to me that they're together because they're of the same age demographic, and because Lee gives the EP the excuse to keep Whitney around, when she's a spent character with no real purpose.
As long as she's hanging around, there's always a chance that King Drip Ryan will re-appear.
Also, they don't seem to be connecting at all. Lee is a family-centric person, and Whitney is invested only in him and his attention to her. However, she isn't above using his family as a means to emotionally blackmail him into staying in Walford. When he offers his family as company for her in his absence, she doesn't want to know; but the moment he succumbs to her emotional demands, all pretence is flung aside and she's happy as a pig in mud, having got her way.
Lee has always wanted to be a soldier. Thwarting his ambitions will not go well with Madame.
The irony of the situation is that this was all symbolically played out against a backdrop of a turbulent thunderstorm, when what existed between Lee and Whitney held about as much passion as a wet noodle.
Bleyacchhhh!
The Mothers' Meeting. Right, it's March, and that's the month of Mothers' Day. We had a quartet of real winners self-analysing and navel-gazing sat in the Vic tonight. We always knew the culprits would be Kat, Kim, Shirley and Linda - all, in their own way, examples of self-obsessed motherhood. Kat and Kim, drunken slatterns, who use their more dependable relatives to do the heavy work with the children they aren't above using to present themselves as victims, but whom they find, at various times, excuses to exercise bratty behaviour, themselves; Linda, the over-possessive, judgemental mother, who judged her own son's sexuality for months before she ultimately accepted him for what he was, who allows her passive-aggressive husband to encourage her childlike behaviour in the belief that she's safe in such mode; and Shirley, the mother who cuts and runs when the going gets tough, and who views herself always as the eternal victim.
Oddly enough, out of all of these, Linda is the strongest, because Linda is the only one who puts her hand up and admits responsibility or guilt.
Kat and Kim were just plain stupid tonight, Kat especially. I am so over the Moons at this point, I cannot wait for them to be axed, because they'll never leave of their own volition. Whatever redemption Newman handed Kat has been wiped away by DTC and his writing room. Kat leaves Stacey at home to watch her children, Kim leaves Denise at the hospital with Pearl, and they both break into the Vic to lift a bottle of wine to complete the evening - as if they hadn't drunk enough. It's not enough for them to take the purloined booze and split, they had to crouch behind the bar and make insulting remarks about Linda, as if she wouldn't hear. What I can't understand is where Mick was? Surely, he'd have heard all this commotion?
Linda was pretty accurate in her initial assessment of Kat's behaviour. It's not the brightest or the best of mothers who take their three small children into a pub so they could get half-cut, never mind allowing their toddler to sample the proceeds, himself. I guess Walford's Social Services have a 24-Hour call line, but this was hardly an emergency. Kat's children were home, in bed and under the care of a responsible adult. This complaint is the sort which is made during office hours. The phone stayed on, after Kat had knocked it out of Linda's hand, but surely the only thing that could be heard were four women, two of them drunk, having a boozy conversation.
I thought the ATM machine at Walford East was outside the station, but I suppose it's been moved inside. At least, tonight we got the truth about Kim's marriage, which was a little hazy, but one aspect shone through abundantly clear - Vincent, the guy whom Kim met in a kebab shop and married one month later, is a gangster. Not only is he a gangster, he is the undisputed boss of gangsters, as evidenced by Kim's story about how she went to tell Vincent she was pregnant at his flat - his flat? Don't married people usually live together? - she found him covered in blood and being wiped down by two acolytes as if he were some sort of big boss or something.
Something doesn't ring right anymore. Kim's baby's original due date was April, which means Kim conceived in July 2014. We know when she spoke with Denise by Skpye in early 2014 - late January, to be precise - she had just got married and was on a cruise, which tallies with the story Denise told at Christmas 2013, that Kim had met a man in a kebab shop and gone off on a cruise with him. However, in the flashback episode we saw almost two weeks ago, when Vincent met Ronnie, which would have been Good Friday, he told her he was "newly single" again. Yet he wasn't. And was Kim alone on the cruise ship all this time? Did Vincent return to her long enough to get her up the duff?
What kind of a marriage was that? Anyway, he's got one of his henchmen keeping an eye on the situation and Kim. The other women can't fathom how Vincent would have found out where Kim and Pearl were on the strength of a picture texted to him from Kim's phone, but Kim would, more than likely, have told Vincent about Denise and Walford, and - coincidence of all coincidences - Vincent had some sort of connection there via Ronnie and Phil. He'd have known anyway that she'd have made a beeline for home. Kim really isn't that subtle.
Three of the four women in the pub made it evident that this was the night to shit on Linda. Shirley's snide comment ~oh, here we go ~ when Linda made an attempt to bond with Kim over the fact that she'd had a premature baby as well, was uncalled for. There was the symbolism of Shirley, a loud-mouthed and antagonistic Kat and Kim hovered around a pub table with Linda perched above on a barstool - obviously, meaning that she held herself above them. Not a mention was made of the rape by any of the three, yet Linda was looked at as if she were a demon for being unaware of Kat's dirty girl history.
Kat and Linda have had nothing to do with each other since the Carters' arrival. Kat was fishing for sympathy whilst emanating nothing but bitterness. Kim admits that she's selfish, that she likes partying and has little patience. As long as either of these women have a Denise or a Stacey or an Alfie on whom to lumber their kids, they'll carry on doing what they're doing. Kat's kidding no one when she says she's a good mother. Without Alfie, she simply isn't. She's thrown caution to the wind and gone off on a bender of drink and self-pity. When Alfie walks away from her, it enrages her even more, because she doesn't have a whipping boy on whom to heap misery.
Shirley offered little but the odd one-liner and nary an apology to Linda.
The "moment" that passed between Linda and Kat was somewhat of a retcon on Kat's part. I recall Kat telling Zoe about the day Zoe was born. Kat wasn't allowed to hold Zoe. I distinctly remember Kat telling Zoe that, that she wasn't allowed to hold her - Viv's words being "Best not" - although she was allowed to name the baby. All that gumpf about holding Zoe in her arms and seeing her gaze up at her and realising "this was my little girl" was not the way it was presented in 2002. It wasn't some sort of pep talk designed to gee Linda up in her doubts about her child, Kat wouldn't do that, especially since she admitted to Kim after leaving that she still hated Linda and that the hug counted for nothing.
It was a totally weak duff-duff too, Kat stumbling home in her marital aid boots, looking every inch the streetwalker, eliciting no sympathy, was totally off. We've gone one mile too far in the Dirty Girl saga, and that one brilliant episode which Newman pulled out of the hat, written by Simon Ashdown, about the epiphany that Whitney and Kat had, was all put to nowt tonight.
Absolutely mediocre episode. More than mediocre, it was bordering on poor.
The bottom had to fly out of that high-sailing boat sometime, and less than two weeks after the Anniversary episode, it tanked tonight.
What we saw in that episode was why there are no strong women in the show, why most of them are man-centric and why the majority are self-centred, self-obsessed and self-pitying.
What's more, I don't give a rat's arse if DTC says he didn't like the gangster era that lasted from 2003 until 2006 or so on the programme, it wasn't his gangster era, and more than anything tonight, we didn't get soupcons that the gangsters - DTC-style - were returning, we got flaming, great big chunks of hints that they were.
Mark me ... Phil is booted and suited and threatening Max, who's been freed of fatherhood in order to gangsterise, Gavin, who is probably Sharon's father and is Kathy's husband is probably some sort of Mr Big with Kathy as his moll (art imitating life, there), and Sharon will get sucked into gangsterism again, along with Ronnie, and Kim, and probably the pisspoor Moons, all linked by Mr Mystery-Lynchpin, the latest TMG*, himself, Vincent.
Give me strength.
MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMeMe.
Whitney and Lee, the wimpiest, wettest couple not to ignite the fires in Walford. Even in a night of thunder and lightning, they peter out cold. Whitney the dirty girl is back - whining, weeping and moaning because Lee is a soldier who has to report for duty. In Jordan (although I don't recall any mines being set to detonate in Jordan - they're on our side).
Just how ignorant is this girl? What is it she doesn't understand about Lee being in the army? It's not as if we've seen him living out of a barracks, doing guard duty or just generally being the enlisted man that he is since - oh, since God was a boy. In fact, he's been the Ava of all soldiers - living at home, working in the pub, doing just about everything but, well, being a soldier.
And now he has to get back to his day job, which will mean being away for the grand sum of six weeks, something Whitney just cannot abide. The other thing she can't abide is that she had to ask Lee if he would miss her, and then she gets the hump because he didn't volunteer that information.
Just like Lauren, just like Lucy, just like Abi ... in fact, just like most of that quartet of women in the pub tonight, everything has got to be all about Whitney. So much so, that even though she realises it's not fair to ask that Lee sacrifice his career for her, she asks him to do it anyway. She asks him not to leave her - not even for six weeks of duty.
Was it me, or was the wail that she gets so lonely, a subtle intimation to Lee that, were he away on duty, she'd find the temptation to sleep with some other guy too great? After all, that's been hermodus operandi forever. I guess she got lonely when she was with Todd, so she slept with Billy. When Billy dumped her, she got lonely and slept with Peter Beale, who made her even lonelier, so she slept with Connor. When Connor preferred Carol, she went on the game, came back and got with Fatboy, who made her lonely for Tyler who made her lonely for Joey Branning.
That's the message I got.
This is one needy, self-centred and self-obsessed girl - and as if Lee, the lowliest of the lowest non-coms, can just march (pun intended) right up to his Colonel-in-Chief and say, "Sorry to bother you, sir, but I'm requesting that I be kept her and put into some sort of training or recruitment role, because my girlfriend, you see, is lonely, and if I go away, she may cheat on me."
And the CO would most likely tell him to man up and grow a pair.
Lee and Whitney have never impressed me as a couple - mostly because Lee was heavily invested in Lucy the last two days of her life, to the point that he binned any thought of Whitney in favour of Lucy's returned attention. As well, I seem to remember Lucy informing Lee that Whitney had been a prostitute at some point in time, something, which I don't think would savour too well with Linda. He transferred those affections too easily and too readily to Whitney. It also seems to me that they're together because they're of the same age demographic, and because Lee gives the EP the excuse to keep Whitney around, when she's a spent character with no real purpose.
As long as she's hanging around, there's always a chance that King Drip Ryan will re-appear.
Also, they don't seem to be connecting at all. Lee is a family-centric person, and Whitney is invested only in him and his attention to her. However, she isn't above using his family as a means to emotionally blackmail him into staying in Walford. When he offers his family as company for her in his absence, she doesn't want to know; but the moment he succumbs to her emotional demands, all pretence is flung aside and she's happy as a pig in mud, having got her way.
Lee has always wanted to be a soldier. Thwarting his ambitions will not go well with Madame.
The irony of the situation is that this was all symbolically played out against a backdrop of a turbulent thunderstorm, when what existed between Lee and Whitney held about as much passion as a wet noodle.
Bleyacchhhh!
The Mothers' Meeting. Right, it's March, and that's the month of Mothers' Day. We had a quartet of real winners self-analysing and navel-gazing sat in the Vic tonight. We always knew the culprits would be Kat, Kim, Shirley and Linda - all, in their own way, examples of self-obsessed motherhood. Kat and Kim, drunken slatterns, who use their more dependable relatives to do the heavy work with the children they aren't above using to present themselves as victims, but whom they find, at various times, excuses to exercise bratty behaviour, themselves; Linda, the over-possessive, judgemental mother, who judged her own son's sexuality for months before she ultimately accepted him for what he was, who allows her passive-aggressive husband to encourage her childlike behaviour in the belief that she's safe in such mode; and Shirley, the mother who cuts and runs when the going gets tough, and who views herself always as the eternal victim.
Oddly enough, out of all of these, Linda is the strongest, because Linda is the only one who puts her hand up and admits responsibility or guilt.
Kat and Kim were just plain stupid tonight, Kat especially. I am so over the Moons at this point, I cannot wait for them to be axed, because they'll never leave of their own volition. Whatever redemption Newman handed Kat has been wiped away by DTC and his writing room. Kat leaves Stacey at home to watch her children, Kim leaves Denise at the hospital with Pearl, and they both break into the Vic to lift a bottle of wine to complete the evening - as if they hadn't drunk enough. It's not enough for them to take the purloined booze and split, they had to crouch behind the bar and make insulting remarks about Linda, as if she wouldn't hear. What I can't understand is where Mick was? Surely, he'd have heard all this commotion?
Linda was pretty accurate in her initial assessment of Kat's behaviour. It's not the brightest or the best of mothers who take their three small children into a pub so they could get half-cut, never mind allowing their toddler to sample the proceeds, himself. I guess Walford's Social Services have a 24-Hour call line, but this was hardly an emergency. Kat's children were home, in bed and under the care of a responsible adult. This complaint is the sort which is made during office hours. The phone stayed on, after Kat had knocked it out of Linda's hand, but surely the only thing that could be heard were four women, two of them drunk, having a boozy conversation.
I thought the ATM machine at Walford East was outside the station, but I suppose it's been moved inside. At least, tonight we got the truth about Kim's marriage, which was a little hazy, but one aspect shone through abundantly clear - Vincent, the guy whom Kim met in a kebab shop and married one month later, is a gangster. Not only is he a gangster, he is the undisputed boss of gangsters, as evidenced by Kim's story about how she went to tell Vincent she was pregnant at his flat - his flat? Don't married people usually live together? - she found him covered in blood and being wiped down by two acolytes as if he were some sort of big boss or something.
Something doesn't ring right anymore. Kim's baby's original due date was April, which means Kim conceived in July 2014. We know when she spoke with Denise by Skpye in early 2014 - late January, to be precise - she had just got married and was on a cruise, which tallies with the story Denise told at Christmas 2013, that Kim had met a man in a kebab shop and gone off on a cruise with him. However, in the flashback episode we saw almost two weeks ago, when Vincent met Ronnie, which would have been Good Friday, he told her he was "newly single" again. Yet he wasn't. And was Kim alone on the cruise ship all this time? Did Vincent return to her long enough to get her up the duff?
What kind of a marriage was that? Anyway, he's got one of his henchmen keeping an eye on the situation and Kim. The other women can't fathom how Vincent would have found out where Kim and Pearl were on the strength of a picture texted to him from Kim's phone, but Kim would, more than likely, have told Vincent about Denise and Walford, and - coincidence of all coincidences - Vincent had some sort of connection there via Ronnie and Phil. He'd have known anyway that she'd have made a beeline for home. Kim really isn't that subtle.
Three of the four women in the pub made it evident that this was the night to shit on Linda. Shirley's snide comment ~oh, here we go ~ when Linda made an attempt to bond with Kim over the fact that she'd had a premature baby as well, was uncalled for. There was the symbolism of Shirley, a loud-mouthed and antagonistic Kat and Kim hovered around a pub table with Linda perched above on a barstool - obviously, meaning that she held herself above them. Not a mention was made of the rape by any of the three, yet Linda was looked at as if she were a demon for being unaware of Kat's dirty girl history.
Kat and Linda have had nothing to do with each other since the Carters' arrival. Kat was fishing for sympathy whilst emanating nothing but bitterness. Kim admits that she's selfish, that she likes partying and has little patience. As long as either of these women have a Denise or a Stacey or an Alfie on whom to lumber their kids, they'll carry on doing what they're doing. Kat's kidding no one when she says she's a good mother. Without Alfie, she simply isn't. She's thrown caution to the wind and gone off on a bender of drink and self-pity. When Alfie walks away from her, it enrages her even more, because she doesn't have a whipping boy on whom to heap misery.
Shirley offered little but the odd one-liner and nary an apology to Linda.
The "moment" that passed between Linda and Kat was somewhat of a retcon on Kat's part. I recall Kat telling Zoe about the day Zoe was born. Kat wasn't allowed to hold Zoe. I distinctly remember Kat telling Zoe that, that she wasn't allowed to hold her - Viv's words being "Best not" - although she was allowed to name the baby. All that gumpf about holding Zoe in her arms and seeing her gaze up at her and realising "this was my little girl" was not the way it was presented in 2002. It wasn't some sort of pep talk designed to gee Linda up in her doubts about her child, Kat wouldn't do that, especially since she admitted to Kim after leaving that she still hated Linda and that the hug counted for nothing.
It was a totally weak duff-duff too, Kat stumbling home in her marital aid boots, looking every inch the streetwalker, eliciting no sympathy, was totally off. We've gone one mile too far in the Dirty Girl saga, and that one brilliant episode which Newman pulled out of the hat, written by Simon Ashdown, about the epiphany that Whitney and Kat had, was all put to nowt tonight.
Absolutely mediocre episode. More than mediocre, it was bordering on poor.
No comments:
Post a Comment