Sorry, it was pants. All about Mitchells, Mitchell satellites, two gurning girls and one now compromised into keeping yet another secret, Mitchells, Mitchells everywhere, and nowt about to drink, green-haird goths, simpering plot devices ...
Anyone for a game of bingo?
The Morally Bereft Mitchells. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a family the show could finally do without. People rant and rave about the Beales' continuing presence on the Square, after the cover-up of Bobby killing Lucy and Max getting sent to prison on a set-up; but the Beales are a walking horror show, and they know it. They're forever linked and bound together in that sad little house with the thoughts of what they've done on their minds.
Remember when Ian first re-decorated the house? How he brought down the wall separating the old dining room/living room and made Lou's old bedroom into what it originally was, a front room through lounge-diner. All of a sudden, the house took on a lighter look; but we need to remember what happened there on Good Friday two years ago. Now the wall is up, like a barrier against the world, Jane sleeps on the place where Lucy died, and they are all entombed there in the cramped, little space. Together. Jane, condemned to be the repository of all the Beale confessions, whether she wants to hear them or not; Ian, focusing entirely on Jane - neither his surviving children nor his mother matter now; Kathy, romping the beds with a man in a committed relationship instead of trying to re-connect with a younger son she left when he was a child; Steven, manipulating and manoeuvering, like Mephistopheles, with one dark ambition in mind, and Lauren, just traipsing along as if nothing in the world had happened or mattered. More about her later, it's the Mitchells who are amongst the morally rank at the moment.
At least, we hear Ian and Jane exclaim every now and then how they want to be "better people", although you wonder how they sleep at night, having sent Max to prison for something he didn't do and having thrown Bobby under the bus to save their own sorry fat arses.
With the Mitchells you get ... nothing.
Phil is ill, perhaps dying; and you wonder where this is going. Somewhere along the line, he'll get a new liver, which means someone will have to die to give it to him; a live liver transplant is rare, and is usually done when the recipient is a child who may have end-stage liver disease, usually caused by cancer.
We've seen little to note of Phil in recent months. He had that single scene when he read Peggy's letter and grieved alone at her passing and when he had that moment with Ben about the gun, but apart from that, we've only seen him shuffle about the house and grunt. There he was again tonight, in that bum-clinchingly awful initial scene from MitchellVille, with Courtney, Roxy and the woman Louise singing along to the radio as rank Sharon, all tanned and glowing from her showdown with Michelle (which looked as though it ended up with margheritas on a Gulf beach) smiling benignly, when suddenly Phil, playing a part from Grumpy Old Men, shuffled into the kitchen and turned the over-loud radio off.
I want to say something about Louise. She's supposed to be Ben's little sister. Ben's fifteen year-old little sister, to be precise; but not only have TPTB cast an actress on the cusp of turning twenty to play someone who should be on the cusp of going from childhood into adolescence, they've given her dialogue which no one under the age of eighteen would utter. This is worse than Tiffany Butcher or Simon Barlow or the awful April Dingle being precocious. This is an adult playing an adolescent and speaking like an adult, per se.
And because of this, Louise doesn't come across as Ben's little sister; it's almost as if she's Ben's girlfriend, given the body language between the two. It was a dark and stormy night, and Louise gets up and comes downstairs at 4AM, looking decidedly as fresh as a daisy, with no hair out of place to greet a drenched Ben returning from a night out lurking around. It was also the way she spoke to Les Coker. No fifteen year-old girl would speak to someone like Les that way. It was aggressively adult - I believe at one point she even called him "Les." This little shit barely knows this man, other than knowing he was the grandfather of Ben's boyfriend; she certainly had nothing to do with him, heretofore; but there she stands, calling him "Les" and asking to talk with "Pam," as if she's so entitled her shit wouldn't smell.
I'm afraid my brother's going to do something bad ... (gurn, gurn) ... because that scene, especially after Ben rocked up, consisted from then on of Ben and Les exchanging dialogue whilst Louise gurned in the background. You could see the concentration in the actress's face ...
(OMIGOD! I've got to cry ... should I try this expression (gurns) or that one (gurns again) ... Oh, geez, I can't make tears. I know! I'll just sniffle and people will think I'm crying!) The funny thing about that was when Harry Reid had to tenderly wipe her tears with his thumbs, whilst cupping her face ... it was bone dry.
There's something incongruous about a woman dressed as a child, meaning to be a child and coming across as totally adult in every way. Because the episode was so bad, the best scene was, arguably, Les trying to talk sense into Ben. The entire backdrop of Paul's death has devolved into yet another Guy Ritchie parody of Ben and Jay wanting to wreak revenge on the person who killed Paul. Yes, we know it was a homophobic hate crime; Ben doesn't need to keep reiterating that; but at the end of the day, for all of the couple of months Ben was with Paul, I don't think he knew him very well.
No one was closer to Paul than Les, and Les nailed it when he said that Paul wouldn't want this sort of revenge to happen, that he was a person who hated violence; and at the end of the day, this wouldn't bring him back. Killing his killer achieves nothing. One of two things will happen - either Ben will be killed or he'll end up in jail. As hard as it is to believe, the Mitchells aren't above the law, although this piss-ant programme would have us believe otherwise - especially when you have a serving police officer shrug her shoulders at Ian's confession that they knew about Bobby being Lucy's killer for longer than she knew, and reckon he'd suffered enough and didn't need prison.
Yeah, sure.
For all of Les's persuasion and common sense, all it took was Jay being hyper and egging Ben on, having found the address where the culprits were hunkering down, to gee him up into killing mode again.
Hero to zero? Courtney, when she backed this agenda and came out with some rubbish, trite and shit-infested statement like ...
We'll do it our way, it's about the family ... or some such tosh. What the fuck does she know about family? She had a cloistered existence away from the Mitchell toxin with Grant in Portugal, before someone re-wrote that backstory to promote Grant as someone irrevocably broken in morality, in spirituality and someone to whom his daughter plays adult. Courtney doesn't know these people. She's seen Ben a total of a couple of times in her life and Jay once, when Phil took them and Shirley to visit Grant (a visit TPTB wrote out of existence, because when Grant came back to see Peggy, Shirley didn't have a snowball's idea of hell who he was). The impression given the last time around was that Courtney had her act together. The relatives in Walford - whom she hadn't contacted at all during the time she was, ostensibly, at university someplace in London - it's clear she only drops in on now and then - the last time to see to where her father had taken himself away. Now she's doing it large - the next generation of Mitchells, posing, giving it some elbow, talking about offing this one and that one - Ben, Courtney, the woman Louise, and Jay - please, can we stop with this "bruv" thing, it doesn't sound natural, FFS. Lock, stock and a drooping barrel. The Brat Pack.
And off they trot to get some killing done.
The last thing this show needs is more killers, and the last thing it needs is two fly guys dispensing justice. Harry Reid, whom I genuinely like, does quiet rage or grief to perfection; but Les was right, Ben needs to re-connect with either, or both, of his parents, and it was more than a bit entitled of him to think his grief was better or more relevant that that of Les and Pam, who'd raised Paul from a baby. I'm glad Les pointed that out. Ben needed putting in his place.
So let them go off and stalk these homophobic and violent estate agents. Maybe Phil will get his liver. Rumour has it that Jamie Borthwick has been putting it about that Ben and Jay are the new Mitchell brothers. I hope he's doing that with Sean O'Connor's blessing. In actual fact, O'Connor could wipe Jay out of existence tomorrow, and I wouldn't miss him. So shoot me.
One final thing - Jay referenced his father's death eight years ago today, and spoke as though the people who killed him got away from the police. They didn't. The police arrested them, and I wouldn't think they'd be out of prison now.
And cop this about the Mitchells: As morally bereft as the Beales are, at least they know what they've done. Phil and Sharon have had no epiphany, nothing at all - especially where Max is concerned. Phil orchestrated his "guilty" verdict for a petty vendetta against Max, Sharon rationalised that maybe it was "for the best" that Max went to prison -sorry, best for whom? Then when Ian receives his note of warning from Max, she poo-poohs any relevance to this. Who are these people?
The Impending Mitchell Baby. Blink and you'd miss it, but the guy trying to get into what looked like the launderette is the bloke who delivers the mystery letter to Dot.
The whole backdrop of Denise's "revelation" was played out against the salsa lesson and against Dot's endeavours to play matchmaker between Patrick and Claudette. Really, Claudette questioned Patrick's initial suspicion about her locking Babe in the freezer.
How could you think I would do such a thing? (Easy, considering the fact that Patrick was on hand to hear what actually happened to Claudette's husband, I find it difficult to believe that Patrick would even want to be within a five-mile radius of Claudette).
Considering that Denise went all through the episode looking bilious - well, looking more bilious than she normally looks - we all knew the reason behind the fainting spell. Was it Kim or the odious Carmel who first suspected the menopause? Sorry, haven't we been here before? Kathy suspected the menopause when she was pregnant with Ben. Zainab suspected the menopause when she was pregnant with Kamil.
What we got, eventually, was Carmel wittering on and on about herself, whilst Denise gazes at the internet search page in mounting, sleepy-eyed horror as it dawns on her that she's pregnant.
Yet another Mitchell storyline, and one that's entirely superfluous, that accomplishes nothing and that does nothing for the character of Denise. If she chooses to have this child, we'll have the Jeremy Kylian situation of the patriarch Phil, surrounded by his wife, whose late husband's death had something to do with Phil; his ex-wife, and the mother of his son; his ex-girlfriend, who's still in love with him; and now this. Maybe Phil could become Mormon or follow Islam - doesn't Islam allow one four wives?
If the writers and producers had any integrity, they'd use this as a positive story about abortion. When Libby showed up pregnant and announcing she intended to get an abortion, her reasons were that she had accidentally fallen pregnant by a man whom she didn't love and who didn't love her, a man who wasn't the least invested in or interested in this child. She felt this wasn't fair for the child. As much as Denise bullied her, Libby stood firm. Now Denise is in a similar situation - pregnant by a man she dislikes, who doesn't even remember his brief association with her. She's also in a budding relationship with the son of her so-called best friend. A pregnancy like this could seriously put the mockers on that relationship ... unless ... unless she allows Kush to believe she's pregnant with his child.
Those are two scenarios. The third is she takes the baby and runs, like everyone else who's ever had a Mitchell child, and if this is the only storyline they have to offer someone like Denise, then maybe it's time to call time on this character.
The Brat Pack. Okay, so pussy Mark Fowler, adopted son of a man with no surname, meets his secret sister Courtney Mitchell. Did the earth move? Is everyone wetting their knickers in anticipation of what is usually the oldest contrived soap situation in the world? It was pretty much a damp squib tonight. It had all the sexual charisma of smelly socks.
You have to wonder what the hell Courtney and Boy Wonder are doing hanging out with what they would essentially class as "little kids" - meaning Rebecca, the woman Louise and the mumbling moron known as Shakil. Sure, they're supposedly off to the Notting Hill Carnival, but a nineteen year-old and twenty year-old wouldn't want to be encumbered with underaged kids. Fowler seems to be bonding with and seriously hanging out with Shakil, who's only concern is popping his cherry and Rebecca's at the same time. All this talk of condoms and losing his virginity, as well as the ubiquitous booze at his birthday party, which Fowler is happy to supply.
Hmmm ... at the risk of having all sorts of shit rain down on me, I have to say it. There's something creepy about an older boy/man - an adult, hanging out with a bunch of underaged kids, planning on providing an idiot with booze for his party, amongst other things. This man should be seeking the company of Abi Branning or Johnny Carter, but he isn't. Maybe they wouldn't be as impressed at someone who's supposed to be an American who sounds like he's from the leafy, stockbroker belt of Surrey, someone who attended a fantasy British school on the Florida panhandle which included gridiron football as part of its curriculum.
Oh, wait ... he's a university quarterback. The university autumn term has already started, and Fowler, if he is, indeed, everything he says he is, would have started his uni year a good two weeks ago, simply because of the fact that gridiron practice for university football (which is a training ground for the NFL) would have begun then, and his holiday would, effectively, be over. But then, those spindly arms could never chuck a football 100 yards down a field.
As for the insidious Louise-Shakil-Rebecca situation, it's not just sad, it's pathetic. Shakil is just using Rebecca as fodder for his sexual initiation, and yes, in his own way, he's pressuring her into something for which she's not ready. He's a pukewad.
And the only other genuinely good situation tonight was Rebecca turning to Stacey, first as someone who could resolve her problem of fixing a hair dying who went wrong, and ultimately, as a stepmother to help her in a dilemma. Rebecca's been trying for days to approach Sonia about this problem, and always her efforts have been interrupted by Tina and her own brand of selfishness. It was incredibly honest of Rebecca to admit to Stacey tonight that she only went the goth route because Star became a goth - and that experiment for Star had ended by the time she got involve with Jay - that she only decided to try a new look because Louise had bullied her into thinking that Shakil didn't like her current look.
It's Stacey who points out to her that perhaps Louise is jealous, something - I think - that's been pointed out to her before. It was nice of Stacey to take her shopping and then to the salon to deal with her hair, and in amongst all of that, Rebecca asked Stacey about her sexual history. Stacey admitted that she started having sex at fifteen, basically because everyone else seemed to be doing it or saying that they were doing it, but she often wishes she'd waited until she could have had her first time with someone who meant something to her. Rebecca is too good for Man Bun.
Clueless. Ian's got no money. Steven's a thief, who's now worried at the scope of how little money the restaurant is making, and Lauren has money to buy a new all-singing all-dancing laptop. Where does she get the money? More importantly, how the hell is this person who BARELY got GCSEs and got no A-Levels, a web designer? This has to be the biggest joke since Mark Fowler's accent.
There's this company called Elysium ...
Do you get the impression that she actually doesn't know what she's doing? She has no experience and no clientele, so Belinda's easy enough to con money from. Did I hear right or did she get Belinda to pay a deposit up front because Steven asked her? This girl is a walking advertisement for self-entitled shallowness. She still hasn't got a clue why her father has disowned her, and now she's been let in on another secret - that Steven was behind the theft of the kitchen goods in Beales, and it was Steven who sent Kyle on a cooking course worth thousands of pounds as a bribe to keep him from telling Ian about Steven.
There's been a lot of angst prevalent in the Beale household lately - we've seen it from Jane and Ian (deservedly so), we've seen it from Kathy; we've seen what we now know as dark manipulation by Steven ... but Lauren just breezes along, oblivious to anything that isn't centred around her, using Ian as a free babysitter to pursue this pipe dream of becoming a web designer, if she even knows what that is.
The big question is ... will she keep this monumental secret? She will. As long as she's got a roof over her head, free childcare and someone to cook and wait on her, she'll be fine. I reckon she deserves a hefty smack from Max.
Awful episode. Simply awful.
Anyone for a game of bingo?
The Morally Bereft Mitchells. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a family the show could finally do without. People rant and rave about the Beales' continuing presence on the Square, after the cover-up of Bobby killing Lucy and Max getting sent to prison on a set-up; but the Beales are a walking horror show, and they know it. They're forever linked and bound together in that sad little house with the thoughts of what they've done on their minds.
Remember when Ian first re-decorated the house? How he brought down the wall separating the old dining room/living room and made Lou's old bedroom into what it originally was, a front room through lounge-diner. All of a sudden, the house took on a lighter look; but we need to remember what happened there on Good Friday two years ago. Now the wall is up, like a barrier against the world, Jane sleeps on the place where Lucy died, and they are all entombed there in the cramped, little space. Together. Jane, condemned to be the repository of all the Beale confessions, whether she wants to hear them or not; Ian, focusing entirely on Jane - neither his surviving children nor his mother matter now; Kathy, romping the beds with a man in a committed relationship instead of trying to re-connect with a younger son she left when he was a child; Steven, manipulating and manoeuvering, like Mephistopheles, with one dark ambition in mind, and Lauren, just traipsing along as if nothing in the world had happened or mattered. More about her later, it's the Mitchells who are amongst the morally rank at the moment.
At least, we hear Ian and Jane exclaim every now and then how they want to be "better people", although you wonder how they sleep at night, having sent Max to prison for something he didn't do and having thrown Bobby under the bus to save their own sorry fat arses.
With the Mitchells you get ... nothing.
Phil is ill, perhaps dying; and you wonder where this is going. Somewhere along the line, he'll get a new liver, which means someone will have to die to give it to him; a live liver transplant is rare, and is usually done when the recipient is a child who may have end-stage liver disease, usually caused by cancer.
We've seen little to note of Phil in recent months. He had that single scene when he read Peggy's letter and grieved alone at her passing and when he had that moment with Ben about the gun, but apart from that, we've only seen him shuffle about the house and grunt. There he was again tonight, in that bum-clinchingly awful initial scene from MitchellVille, with Courtney, Roxy and the woman Louise singing along to the radio as rank Sharon, all tanned and glowing from her showdown with Michelle (which looked as though it ended up with margheritas on a Gulf beach) smiling benignly, when suddenly Phil, playing a part from Grumpy Old Men, shuffled into the kitchen and turned the over-loud radio off.
I want to say something about Louise. She's supposed to be Ben's little sister. Ben's fifteen year-old little sister, to be precise; but not only have TPTB cast an actress on the cusp of turning twenty to play someone who should be on the cusp of going from childhood into adolescence, they've given her dialogue which no one under the age of eighteen would utter. This is worse than Tiffany Butcher or Simon Barlow or the awful April Dingle being precocious. This is an adult playing an adolescent and speaking like an adult, per se.
And because of this, Louise doesn't come across as Ben's little sister; it's almost as if she's Ben's girlfriend, given the body language between the two. It was a dark and stormy night, and Louise gets up and comes downstairs at 4AM, looking decidedly as fresh as a daisy, with no hair out of place to greet a drenched Ben returning from a night out lurking around. It was also the way she spoke to Les Coker. No fifteen year-old girl would speak to someone like Les that way. It was aggressively adult - I believe at one point she even called him "Les." This little shit barely knows this man, other than knowing he was the grandfather of Ben's boyfriend; she certainly had nothing to do with him, heretofore; but there she stands, calling him "Les" and asking to talk with "Pam," as if she's so entitled her shit wouldn't smell.
I'm afraid my brother's going to do something bad ... (gurn, gurn) ... because that scene, especially after Ben rocked up, consisted from then on of Ben and Les exchanging dialogue whilst Louise gurned in the background. You could see the concentration in the actress's face ...
(OMIGOD! I've got to cry ... should I try this expression (gurns) or that one (gurns again) ... Oh, geez, I can't make tears. I know! I'll just sniffle and people will think I'm crying!) The funny thing about that was when Harry Reid had to tenderly wipe her tears with his thumbs, whilst cupping her face ... it was bone dry.
There's something incongruous about a woman dressed as a child, meaning to be a child and coming across as totally adult in every way. Because the episode was so bad, the best scene was, arguably, Les trying to talk sense into Ben. The entire backdrop of Paul's death has devolved into yet another Guy Ritchie parody of Ben and Jay wanting to wreak revenge on the person who killed Paul. Yes, we know it was a homophobic hate crime; Ben doesn't need to keep reiterating that; but at the end of the day, for all of the couple of months Ben was with Paul, I don't think he knew him very well.
No one was closer to Paul than Les, and Les nailed it when he said that Paul wouldn't want this sort of revenge to happen, that he was a person who hated violence; and at the end of the day, this wouldn't bring him back. Killing his killer achieves nothing. One of two things will happen - either Ben will be killed or he'll end up in jail. As hard as it is to believe, the Mitchells aren't above the law, although this piss-ant programme would have us believe otherwise - especially when you have a serving police officer shrug her shoulders at Ian's confession that they knew about Bobby being Lucy's killer for longer than she knew, and reckon he'd suffered enough and didn't need prison.
Yeah, sure.
For all of Les's persuasion and common sense, all it took was Jay being hyper and egging Ben on, having found the address where the culprits were hunkering down, to gee him up into killing mode again.
Hero to zero? Courtney, when she backed this agenda and came out with some rubbish, trite and shit-infested statement like ...
We'll do it our way, it's about the family ... or some such tosh. What the fuck does she know about family? She had a cloistered existence away from the Mitchell toxin with Grant in Portugal, before someone re-wrote that backstory to promote Grant as someone irrevocably broken in morality, in spirituality and someone to whom his daughter plays adult. Courtney doesn't know these people. She's seen Ben a total of a couple of times in her life and Jay once, when Phil took them and Shirley to visit Grant (a visit TPTB wrote out of existence, because when Grant came back to see Peggy, Shirley didn't have a snowball's idea of hell who he was). The impression given the last time around was that Courtney had her act together. The relatives in Walford - whom she hadn't contacted at all during the time she was, ostensibly, at university someplace in London - it's clear she only drops in on now and then - the last time to see to where her father had taken himself away. Now she's doing it large - the next generation of Mitchells, posing, giving it some elbow, talking about offing this one and that one - Ben, Courtney, the woman Louise, and Jay - please, can we stop with this "bruv" thing, it doesn't sound natural, FFS. Lock, stock and a drooping barrel. The Brat Pack.
And off they trot to get some killing done.
The last thing this show needs is more killers, and the last thing it needs is two fly guys dispensing justice. Harry Reid, whom I genuinely like, does quiet rage or grief to perfection; but Les was right, Ben needs to re-connect with either, or both, of his parents, and it was more than a bit entitled of him to think his grief was better or more relevant that that of Les and Pam, who'd raised Paul from a baby. I'm glad Les pointed that out. Ben needed putting in his place.
So let them go off and stalk these homophobic and violent estate agents. Maybe Phil will get his liver. Rumour has it that Jamie Borthwick has been putting it about that Ben and Jay are the new Mitchell brothers. I hope he's doing that with Sean O'Connor's blessing. In actual fact, O'Connor could wipe Jay out of existence tomorrow, and I wouldn't miss him. So shoot me.
One final thing - Jay referenced his father's death eight years ago today, and spoke as though the people who killed him got away from the police. They didn't. The police arrested them, and I wouldn't think they'd be out of prison now.
And cop this about the Mitchells: As morally bereft as the Beales are, at least they know what they've done. Phil and Sharon have had no epiphany, nothing at all - especially where Max is concerned. Phil orchestrated his "guilty" verdict for a petty vendetta against Max, Sharon rationalised that maybe it was "for the best" that Max went to prison -sorry, best for whom? Then when Ian receives his note of warning from Max, she poo-poohs any relevance to this. Who are these people?
The Impending Mitchell Baby. Blink and you'd miss it, but the guy trying to get into what looked like the launderette is the bloke who delivers the mystery letter to Dot.
The whole backdrop of Denise's "revelation" was played out against the salsa lesson and against Dot's endeavours to play matchmaker between Patrick and Claudette. Really, Claudette questioned Patrick's initial suspicion about her locking Babe in the freezer.
How could you think I would do such a thing? (Easy, considering the fact that Patrick was on hand to hear what actually happened to Claudette's husband, I find it difficult to believe that Patrick would even want to be within a five-mile radius of Claudette).
Considering that Denise went all through the episode looking bilious - well, looking more bilious than she normally looks - we all knew the reason behind the fainting spell. Was it Kim or the odious Carmel who first suspected the menopause? Sorry, haven't we been here before? Kathy suspected the menopause when she was pregnant with Ben. Zainab suspected the menopause when she was pregnant with Kamil.
What we got, eventually, was Carmel wittering on and on about herself, whilst Denise gazes at the internet search page in mounting, sleepy-eyed horror as it dawns on her that she's pregnant.
Yet another Mitchell storyline, and one that's entirely superfluous, that accomplishes nothing and that does nothing for the character of Denise. If she chooses to have this child, we'll have the Jeremy Kylian situation of the patriarch Phil, surrounded by his wife, whose late husband's death had something to do with Phil; his ex-wife, and the mother of his son; his ex-girlfriend, who's still in love with him; and now this. Maybe Phil could become Mormon or follow Islam - doesn't Islam allow one four wives?
If the writers and producers had any integrity, they'd use this as a positive story about abortion. When Libby showed up pregnant and announcing she intended to get an abortion, her reasons were that she had accidentally fallen pregnant by a man whom she didn't love and who didn't love her, a man who wasn't the least invested in or interested in this child. She felt this wasn't fair for the child. As much as Denise bullied her, Libby stood firm. Now Denise is in a similar situation - pregnant by a man she dislikes, who doesn't even remember his brief association with her. She's also in a budding relationship with the son of her so-called best friend. A pregnancy like this could seriously put the mockers on that relationship ... unless ... unless she allows Kush to believe she's pregnant with his child.
Those are two scenarios. The third is she takes the baby and runs, like everyone else who's ever had a Mitchell child, and if this is the only storyline they have to offer someone like Denise, then maybe it's time to call time on this character.
The Brat Pack. Okay, so pussy Mark Fowler, adopted son of a man with no surname, meets his secret sister Courtney Mitchell. Did the earth move? Is everyone wetting their knickers in anticipation of what is usually the oldest contrived soap situation in the world? It was pretty much a damp squib tonight. It had all the sexual charisma of smelly socks.
You have to wonder what the hell Courtney and Boy Wonder are doing hanging out with what they would essentially class as "little kids" - meaning Rebecca, the woman Louise and the mumbling moron known as Shakil. Sure, they're supposedly off to the Notting Hill Carnival, but a nineteen year-old and twenty year-old wouldn't want to be encumbered with underaged kids. Fowler seems to be bonding with and seriously hanging out with Shakil, who's only concern is popping his cherry and Rebecca's at the same time. All this talk of condoms and losing his virginity, as well as the ubiquitous booze at his birthday party, which Fowler is happy to supply.
Hmmm ... at the risk of having all sorts of shit rain down on me, I have to say it. There's something creepy about an older boy/man - an adult, hanging out with a bunch of underaged kids, planning on providing an idiot with booze for his party, amongst other things. This man should be seeking the company of Abi Branning or Johnny Carter, but he isn't. Maybe they wouldn't be as impressed at someone who's supposed to be an American who sounds like he's from the leafy, stockbroker belt of Surrey, someone who attended a fantasy British school on the Florida panhandle which included gridiron football as part of its curriculum.
Oh, wait ... he's a university quarterback. The university autumn term has already started, and Fowler, if he is, indeed, everything he says he is, would have started his uni year a good two weeks ago, simply because of the fact that gridiron practice for university football (which is a training ground for the NFL) would have begun then, and his holiday would, effectively, be over. But then, those spindly arms could never chuck a football 100 yards down a field.
As for the insidious Louise-Shakil-Rebecca situation, it's not just sad, it's pathetic. Shakil is just using Rebecca as fodder for his sexual initiation, and yes, in his own way, he's pressuring her into something for which she's not ready. He's a pukewad.
And the only other genuinely good situation tonight was Rebecca turning to Stacey, first as someone who could resolve her problem of fixing a hair dying who went wrong, and ultimately, as a stepmother to help her in a dilemma. Rebecca's been trying for days to approach Sonia about this problem, and always her efforts have been interrupted by Tina and her own brand of selfishness. It was incredibly honest of Rebecca to admit to Stacey tonight that she only went the goth route because Star became a goth - and that experiment for Star had ended by the time she got involve with Jay - that she only decided to try a new look because Louise had bullied her into thinking that Shakil didn't like her current look.
It's Stacey who points out to her that perhaps Louise is jealous, something - I think - that's been pointed out to her before. It was nice of Stacey to take her shopping and then to the salon to deal with her hair, and in amongst all of that, Rebecca asked Stacey about her sexual history. Stacey admitted that she started having sex at fifteen, basically because everyone else seemed to be doing it or saying that they were doing it, but she often wishes she'd waited until she could have had her first time with someone who meant something to her. Rebecca is too good for Man Bun.
Clueless. Ian's got no money. Steven's a thief, who's now worried at the scope of how little money the restaurant is making, and Lauren has money to buy a new all-singing all-dancing laptop. Where does she get the money? More importantly, how the hell is this person who BARELY got GCSEs and got no A-Levels, a web designer? This has to be the biggest joke since Mark Fowler's accent.
There's this company called Elysium ...
Do you get the impression that she actually doesn't know what she's doing? She has no experience and no clientele, so Belinda's easy enough to con money from. Did I hear right or did she get Belinda to pay a deposit up front because Steven asked her? This girl is a walking advertisement for self-entitled shallowness. She still hasn't got a clue why her father has disowned her, and now she's been let in on another secret - that Steven was behind the theft of the kitchen goods in Beales, and it was Steven who sent Kyle on a cooking course worth thousands of pounds as a bribe to keep him from telling Ian about Steven.
There's been a lot of angst prevalent in the Beale household lately - we've seen it from Jane and Ian (deservedly so), we've seen it from Kathy; we've seen what we now know as dark manipulation by Steven ... but Lauren just breezes along, oblivious to anything that isn't centred around her, using Ian as a free babysitter to pursue this pipe dream of becoming a web designer, if she even knows what that is.
The big question is ... will she keep this monumental secret? She will. As long as she's got a roof over her head, free childcare and someone to cook and wait on her, she'll be fine. I reckon she deserves a hefty smack from Max.
Awful episode. Simply awful.
Delighted that you are back =)) I missed your reviews =)
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