Secrets, secrets, secrets, secrets. Someone who wanted to disclose one is prevented; someone who's sworn to secrecy, divulges. It was a watchable episode, but DTC and the dynamic (not) writing room need to stop playing to the peanut gallery and stop writing for remedial viewers. In short, stop making everything so contrived.
Alfie and Kat. The couple for whom everyone is rooting simply isn't allowed to have a happy ending.
Alfie-haters, please note this: Unless Shane Richie has said he wants to leave, that he never wants to return to the show and that he's never coming back; unless he has specifically said that Alfie should be killed off ... he ain't gonna die. So suck it up and live with it.
Why?
Because EastEnders has learned the hard way about killing off established characters - Pat, anyone? OK, Alfie is no Kat, but he can now be qualified as a long-standing character and one of the only two iconic characters this side of the Millennium. He's got a brain tumour, which may not even be malignant; and the irony of the Moons' whole consequence is that this is one time Alfie was going to tell Kat the truth about a dire situation, but Kat stops him in his tracks, having listened to interfering Pam - the wife of an undertaker, no less - and spontaneously bought one-way tickets to Spain.
Now consider this: Kat knew that it would be a good couple of weeks before the bank okayed their finance for the bar and villa in Spain, yet suddenly, she's all for leaving the next day. There's such a thing as impulse, and Alfie resigns himself to going with the flow. How, now, are they going to get a licence for the bar?
Having said that, a brain tumour may not be a fatal condition, and EastEnders has overdosed the audience on cancer this past year alone.
What was super contrived about this whole situation was that it was played out against a backdrop of Kat's excitement about moving to Spain with the kids and her positive outlook on life as it is now. So are we going to see the spin-off ending up in Ireland with a search for a long-lost son and a steadily declining Alfie? I'm calling it. He gets very ill in Ireland, he's referred to a young neurosurgeon who operates and saves his life. The guy turns out to be Kat's son.
You couldn't get more contrived than that, and that's the sort of DTC-ish thing that will happen, but whatever happens, Alfie will not die - only if the actor playing him says so; and then we'll have a return of Alfie and Kat to Walford, with even a protracted death scene in the Vic, because this would be the stuff of main programme main agenda. Having him die in the spin-off isn't worthy of the character - because no matter how much various haters gonna hate, Alfie was extremely popular at one time, and the only reason he isn't so now is down to the lazy-arsed, Alpha male-haters in the writing room, who have made practically every man standing on the Square weak, undisciplined, and shallow.
And whatever happens, if he dies off-screen, you know somewhere down the line he'll be resurrected. It's happened twice before. We're due a hattrick.
The Cindy Situation. Did you ever notice how Jane is at pains to hover (that's "hover", not "hoover") around the area where Lucy died? If she's not having sex on the spot, she's furiously cleaning the area. Today she had Beth stationed there, and Beth was crying and shrieking. Perhaps she saw Lucy's ghost.
It does seem as if the creepy Beales, sociopathic Jane the Queen, especially, are trying to use Cindy as the unpaid babysitter, taking advantage of her being around to care for the infant, whilst they pursue their own lives. As I see it, Cindy seems to be serious about her education. At least, she's honest about the fact that she's not cut out to be a mother yet. And of course, she's not stupid and is beginning to see the ramifications of allowing the Beales to adopt Beth. Deep down, she knows that Jane feels entitled to have a baby, and that Ian is viewing this as a second chance to redeem himself after Lucy's death - both of which are no reasons for these two to have a child of their own. Also - and this is significant - Jane thinks Bobby would benefit having Beth as a sibling. He has to learn to share.
(Bobby is eleven years older than Beth and a different gender. What could they possibly share, except that for the foreseeable future, Beth will be cooed and oohed over by Ian and Jane, and that cold-eyed, psychopathic, little twerp won't like that.) If DTC is determined to follow the path of We Have to Talk about Kevin, then Bobby will hurt, if not kill, Beth. Maybe this is what Cindy fears deep down and sub-consciously.
Mostly, however, I think she's just royally pissed off at the way Jane the Queen treats her like a cross between an unwanted stepchild and the bastard at a family reunion.
I actually liked the way she defied Jane's "request" and humped off out of the house in order to study - in the cafe, no less, where everyone seemed to be today.
Of course, she ran into Liam the Lug, whilst revising for her oral French exam, so we got a treat of very bad, and mostly incorrect, schoolgirl French - courtesy of Google Translate, no doubt.
Cindy is, however, right about one thing. In all this kerfuffle and with Ian's and Jane's passive-aggressive bullying and manipulating her into allowing them to adopt Beth, no one's ever listened to her concerns. Overnight, she will go from being the child's reluctant mother to being a sister. She will see her every day. For Jane, this child compliments a femininity robbed her by the dead Lucy in her days as a wild child. For Ian, this is a second chance in redeeming himself as a parent. Cindy wanted the child adopted so she could resume life as what she is - a kid growing up. That doesn't mean looking at your child daily and pretending that she isn't your own.
She's said that time and again, but no one - not Jane, not Ian and certainly not Liam the Lug (whose solution to the problem was for him and Cindy to raise Beth together) - has listened to the girl.
Until tonight, when she connected with Carol. What was the most surprising thing of all was Carol's advice - that maybe Cindy and Beth would benefit from Beth being adopted by another couple, not the Beales.
I suppose Carol can say that as this child has nothing to do with her, and it's not one of Carol's own children. If you recall, she all but disowned Sonia when Sonia made the decision to have Rebecca adopted. Carol was a different person from Cindy. She relished being a mum (and relished the control she had over her brood a well), but she understands Cindy's dilemma.
At least she listened.
Dean and Shabnam and Kush and Stacey. Shabnam and Kush are another couple who go in circles endlessly, and tonight Stacey inadvertantlu put both her feet in her mouth and opened up a huge can of worms for Shabnam.
Shabnam is shit-scared now - of Dean, but also of Kush and Masood finding out her secret; and that's mostly a cultural thing, so she's not about to listen to Stacey's advice that she tell Kush, because he'd find out anyway (he did, as Stacey told him) and he loved her.
Somehow Dean's sussed that Stacey knows more about Shabnam's baby than Shabnam's telling him, and he confronts her.by forcing her down the alleyway and roughly demanding answers. This is where Stacey has her first major slip-up.
She's not your anything!
That was her answer to his demands to know about "his daughter." She spoke in the present tense, before she thought on her feet and reverted to Shabnam's story that the child was dead. Speaking thus was all Dean needed to know to suss that he had a child, and that she was out there someplace.
The entire vignette surrounding Stacey was pointing discernably toward the summer of illicit love that the latest trailer has promised us. From the lingering handshake exchanged between Kush and Stacey, after the bet that Kush and Shabnam would be together by the end of the day, to the very end and the drink-fueled kiss between the two, which came as a result of Kush coming to Stacey's rescue after Dean had pushed her down the alleyway.
It was all there, and throughout the final scene, Stacey knew exactly what she shouldn't be doing - giving into her attraction to her best mate's boyfriend, and then she does something she knows she shouldn't do as well: she betrays Shabnam's trust and tells Kush that Shabnam has a child she abandoned. Of course, she does this with all the best intentions, to assure Kush how much Shabnam loves him and how afraid she is about what had happened in the past.
But she does that after the fact and she does it all the same.
Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même.
And Now ... the Carters. This was the father-and-son reunion, tainted with the discovery that Shirley has, yet another grandchild.
Notice how the Carters have totally taken over the Fox-Trueman house. It's as if they own the place now, with Buster camped out on the table enjoying his breakfast. However, Buster is becoming more likeable, especially as a peacemaker.I do think what Mick told him the other day about Dean resonated with him, and I do think he's suspicious of Dean.
All very well and good Buster paving the way for Shirley to reconcile with Mick (another circular storyline), but she really needs to apologise to Linda. Mick's son is also Linda's son, and she's the mother of the child who was raped by Dean. Poor Linda. She's a rape victim, who's been shunted aside now as her husband and her vile mother-in-law, who's done nothing but vilify her, bond over her newest child.
And Nancy's singing a different tune about engaging Buster in the family dynamic. However, all that's for nought with Dean's bombshell about having a daughter alive and well and seven years old.
The Moral of the Story. Every story tonight dealt with secret children or children becoming secrets - from Kat's storyline, which involves Alfie's secret medical condition and the beginning of her search for her secret child; Cindy, hoping to ferret her child away from the creepy Beales so that she can keep their dirty little secret about Bobby; and Shabnam's secret about to blow.
Of course, there's one big secret child story yet to blow big on the show. We caught a whiff of it on Tuesday.
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