I'm usually harsh and cynical when I review EastEnders, basically because, as an original viewer, I'm a purist, and I've hated the downward direction the show has taken since the Millennium, and John Yorke's cack-handed attempt to re-write the show for the 21st Century.
He gave the show a lot of problems, with which it still struggles today. It inflicted the godawful Slaters on the viewing public, and as iconic to viewers as at least two of them were, their unit began the demarcation of the show into distinct family zones, many of whom never interacted with each other. It was the beginning of the loss of community spirit, and although the Slaters pervaded every aspect of Walford life - the market, the cafe, the launderette and the Vic - they never actively interacted with any of the established characters ... unless they were male.
The Slaters introduced the fallacious concept of the strong woman being the gobby mare type, as opposed to the truly strong women with backbone that we saw in the 80s and 90s - your Pats, your Paulines, your Peggys. Kathy Beale was a character who rarely raised her voice and walked away from the Mitchells with dignity, as did Sharon Watts, whom Yorke separated from the Mitchells (a demographic which fit her like a glove) and made her a so-called tragic heroine.
But Yorke gave us another phenomenon with the Slaters ... the sibling friend. Introduce a couple of siblings, or even a family and make them exclusive friends, a closed society of co-dependent siblings, with no friends from the outside world (unless they were attractive and of the opposite sex), who kept company totally with each other.
The Slater girls had no friends, except each other. There followed the Fox sisters, the Branning brothers, but the unit which took this concept to art form were the Mitchell Sisters.
Their storylines, and, in particular, Ronnie's psychopathic antics, dominated the show for a decade. In fact, Ronnie became the first character to kill two men in cold blood and attempt to kill a third, and who was still allowed to roam the streets of Walford unfettered. At times, she advertised this psychopathy openly ...
Do you know what I'm capable of?
She was a control freak, with more than a hint of sapphic, incestuous leanings toward her younger sister, whom she infantilised to the point that Roxy, an ageing slapper fast approaching Old Trouthood, still saw herself as the 18 year-old self-designated Queen of Ibiza. Ronnie allowed her to go only so far in relationships with men before she sabotaged them, and she actually had this childwoman believing that she couldn't exist outside Ronnie's sphere of influence, that left to her own devices, she would inevitably fuck up, and Ronnie would be forced to clear up the mess.
There were times that she recognised the malaise of Ronnie's control, and she sought to escape from this, but always, like a bad penny or a boomerang, she kept coming back. Ronnie's other obsession was Jack and the desire for a family.
Tonight saw the end of the Mitchell sisters. They're dead, as dead, in this season of Dickens, as Jacob Marley, and to paraphrase Dickens, there is no doubt about that.
They're dead. They died together, and let their be no risings from the grave. In the words of Sean O'Connor, it was time to rest Ronnie's character. Roxy, however, was an unnecessary sacrifice.
Sister Act.
Despite its heavy overlay of foreshadowing and doom-laden symbolism, I thought this episode was pitch-perfect. The direction was great, and the ending chilling and final. It left no one in any doubt that the Blisters are brown bread. There they lie at the end of the hotel's indoor pool, Jack nodding off with the children, Max channel-surfing in wait for Roxy. They'll be found in the morning, and it won't be a pretty sight.
Let that be a lesson to all: Believe the initial leaks, they're usually the true ones. I've no doubt that multiple endings were shot - the fact that one was made available to people with a Snapchat account was evidence of that; but the initial leaks we got about their departure storyline was about Roxy drowning in a swimming pool, and Ronnie diving in to save her, only to get tangled up in her own elaborate wedding dress, and drown, herself, were true.
The entire segment of the episode devoted to the Mitchell sisters (and there was another storyline being played out at the same time for another departing character), was true to their characters, and it tied up all but one loose end.
What interested me about this leaving line, ultimately, was that Roxy, in the end, proved to be the stronger sister. For all her bleating on for weeks on end, for all her nagging and marginalisation of Roxy, Ronnie proved the weaker of the two, and had she not thrown that ginormous hissy fit, literally de-balling Jack by forcing him to choose between including Roxy in their marriage or not marrying her at all, she'd be alive and planning a move to Ongar today. If she'd just have let Roxy leave when she wanted to do so.
For Roxy, this was as much a last-ditch effort to extricate herself from being joined at the hip to her sister, as it was acknowledging that she'd forever be an albatross around her neck. She'd live nearby in Ongar, doing pretty much what she does now - snorting cocaine, partying hard with the locals, men who'd be increasingly younger, making a grand fuck-up of herself and being bailed out by Ronnie. There was talk of the two opening a trendy Ibiza-type bar in Ongar, which beggars belief that Ronnie could ever settle down in suburbia and raise three model children.
From the very beginning, there was a sense that things were being tidied up for the sisters' ultimate departure - there was the visit to James's grave, a reminder that today was Matthew Cotton's second birthday (and also the second anniversary of Ronnie's wedding to Charlie Cotton). This latter begs the only loose end left dangling by the occurrences of this episode.
Jack will be left with Amy and Ricky, both of whom are his children; but Matthew is not his child. Matthew has a living father, who hasn't given Jack permission for him to adopt him. He also has a great-grandmother resident on the Square, who happens to be Amy's and Ricky's step-grandmother. So what happens to Matthew now?
Then, there was the return of Ronnie's and Roxy's mother and brother, Glenda and the dire Danny Mitchell, which brought about many of the foreshadowing elements rife in the episode.
Things superstitious started with Auntie Sal (who is no relation at all to the Blisters), as ever a portent of doom, who pronounces nothing good to come of the fact that Jack and Ronnie had seen each other before the wedding on the day of the event itself. In fact, Sal double foreshadowed something, because when Stacey admitted that she and Martin had seen each other before their wedding on the same day, Sal pronounced dramatically,
No good will come of it.
(Hmmmm ... Max is back in town).
The entire crisis of Ronnie's wedding hinged on the fact that Ronnie had convinced Roxy to come to Ongar with them, but she was stallling on telling Jack of this plan, since Jack had so forcefully poo-poohed the original idea to do this. I suppose she was going to wait until after the wedding, and spring it on him as a fait accompli, which only goes to show whom Ronnie thought to be the driving force in that marriage.
It was Roxy who knew that doing this was wrong and who felt bad about it, knowing that Ronnie had yet to tell Jack and anticipating Jack's adverse reaction. She also felt that her presence in Ronnie's marriage would be bad for Ronnie, which was actually a turn-up for the books, as in the past - particularly, the most recent past - Roxy has rightfully acknowledged that Ronnie was, indeed, bad for her.
A year ago, Roxy left to be with Glenda, and her final words to Ronnie were,
You're my sister and I love you. It's just that you aren't very good for me.
This was Roxy fresh from an attempted rape and manhandling from Dean, and one year full circle, Roxy is brought back to Walford, again by her mother, to be part and parcel of Ronnie's wedding. One year ago, Roxy even likened Ronnie to Dean in her control-obsession.
Tonight, however, Roxy was in the right, imploring Ronnie to tell Jack about her plans to include Roxy in their move before the wedding, as she pointed out succinctly to Ronnie, she hadn't even married Jack yet and already their marriage would begin with a secret and a lie.
The second overt instance of foreshadowing came when Glenda, of all people, confronted Ronnie over her unwillingness to tell Jack about Roxy, berating her for beginning her marriage with a lie - because, as Glenda said, she should know: Hers and Archie's marriage was a tissue of lies. Ronnie's response was prophetic:-
The day I take marital advice from you will be my last day on earth.
The hints, symbols and foreshadowing came thick and fast from that point - Ronnie, seeing Archie's signet ring in her jewelry box, and flinging it into the rubbish bin (flinging off Archie's influence, but actually his obsessive and control streak would play out at the wedding), and the vintage Mustang, laid on by Phil being likened by Honey and Auntie Sal, as the sisters sat in the car, to Thelma and Louise - with Sal never failing to remark how that turned out.
A Walford wedding would be as such without the hitch, and Ronnie's hitch was that she simply couldn't marry Jack without her sister being included in the marital set-up and coming with them to Ongar - thus proving that, in the long line of co-dependent relationships rife in Walford history, the worst one was the Mitchell Sisters.
Forget Den and Angie, Max and Tanya, Sharon and whatever Mitchell of the moment, Mick and Linda. Ronnie and Roxy, two sisters, were, without a doubt, two people who couldn't function without one another. Well, no ... ultimately, we see that it was Ronnie who couldn't function without Roxy. Roxy would have gone, driven off into the sunset and Old Troutdom, snorting her way to some sort of death, inevitably, poolside and in the company of a much, much younger man.
But Ronnie actually forced Jack to choose (or rather, she very cleverly manipulated herself into the victim situation, where she accused Jack of forcing her to choose.) In the end, she got what she wanted, which is what she always did, and no matter how much Jack joked about "buying one and getting one free", this is exactly what that situation would have entailed. Don't forget that Amy is Jack's daughter, but she's also Roxy's as well.
Sean O'Connor seems to like voice-overs and musical interludes, using Marc Cohn's wedding song as Ronnie's eventual music and playing this over their vows. And then there was the disco scene, and a hint of what could have been and now would never be, with Scott Marsden and Jake Wood plying their Strictly training on the dancefloor, we saw Roxy slip the key to her hotel room into Max's pocket.
Then there were the final words that Glenda spoke to her daughter, telling her that she loved her.
This is the real tragedy about killing off Roxy's character - in her final episodes, there was such a budding friendship with Donna, and the chemistry Rita Simons exuded with Jake Wood in Friday's episode and, again, tonight - the two fuck-ups of their respective families, the ones to whom mud sticks, getting together, getting it on and finding something in each other.Bar a return of Charlie Brooks as Janine, there's no one else with whom I'd rather see Max in a relationship at the moment - no pithy return of Tanya for the umpteenth time, no attempt to pair him with the (as yet) charmless Michelle.
I watched this entire episode on edge, not knowing what their eventual fate would be, and hoping against hope that, for Ronnie at least, this would be the final end, with not return made possible, a death we see and identify. There were, however, some red herrings - like when Roxy was going to speed off in the Mustang - I envisioned Ronnie jumping in beside her and them driving to their deaths in a crash; or the scene when they sat on the roof, drinking champagne on the rooftop and Ronnie had the wobble, but they were teasers.
In fact, their deaths and the immediate events leading up to it, also reinforced the notion that Ronnie was more engaged with Roxy than she was with Jack. Even before that, there was a scene on the dance floor where Ronnie passes Roxy and makes a passionate moue of an air kiss and another example when she passes her and sticks her tongue out in a licking motiong that was almost lascivious.
It's Ronnie's wedding night, and the fact that she would rather put necking a bottle of champagne with her sister before being with her husband, scooting him off to read fairy tales to the children, whilst she and Roxy quaff champers from the bottle and talk of plans for taking over Ongar, had only one significance, and it's something I've said all along: That Ronnie was in love with and obsessed with Roxy, that Jack was the respectable decoy, but Roxy was the one she loved - and Roxy was, indeed, the stronger of the two. Roxy was all ready to have a night of passion with Max and attempted to send Ronnie away, but in the end, she didn't, to her own tragic end.
The ending was chilling, especially since it was played out, rather graphically, against the voice-over of Jack reading Cinderella to Amy and Ricky, and considering that this was supposed to take 20 minutes, the entire affair played out in that time. Cinderella being the story of a magic which lasted for the heroine only until midnight, when reality hit home. By midnight, in what seemed to be a relatively quick drowning scene for both, especially Roxy, who seemed to be at the bottom of the pool, almost immediately Ronnie started to take off her wedding gown, both the Blisters were dead.
They're dead. Gone. With oodles of pictures to remind their loved ones of their final day, including a picture with "their favourite cousin", Phil, a man who considered one a liability and the other the runt of the litter, second only to Billy.
This is the end of an era, another meme which kept being repeated throughout the storyline,and the beginning of another, as they said. But let's not have any rising from watery graves. This show has seen one too many returns from the dead.
It's over. Ronnie and Roxy are gone.
Other Secrets and Lies. Who would have thought something so simple as Mick borrowing Lee's phone would have led to Lee's confession? I was a bit annoyed by what promoted it - Mick being annoyed and concerned to find a card for The Samaritans in Lee's phone case. When he found out the truth behind this, initially, he was annoyed that Lee chose to open up to a complete stranger, rather than laden his family with such a matter.
This angered me, because when Lee was diagnosed with depression, the doctor specifically gave him a script for medication and referred him for counselling, something, I suppose, he never acted upon; but during this time, neither his family nor his girlfriend sought information about his condition and what it entailed. Did they not realise that his counselling sessions would involve opening up to strangers, because sometimes someone not connected with the problems affecting a person can offer insight and help?
Obviously not.
Mick, at least, was savvy enough to realise that Lee wasn't distraught over just his job - although he has no inkling about what has gone on there, and bullying at work can be as horrendous as bullying at school - and "a few bills." And Lee finally confesses about his part in the burglary of the pub.
Mick says the first thing that comes into his head, when Lee confesses that he was on the brink of committing suicide because of the guilt he felt - that it's a pity Lee didn't, because it would have been better for the family. He later relents, but says he won't forgive Lee.
Sorry, but didn't he forgive Shirley for burning down Elaine's pub?
This is the second time that an episode segment with Lee has ended, focusing on him, with a police siren sounding in the background. After tonight's dual death, I don't think he'll commit suicide. I do think he'll confess to the police and go to prison ... and return after sometime, portrayed by a different actor.
Excellent episode.
He gave the show a lot of problems, with which it still struggles today. It inflicted the godawful Slaters on the viewing public, and as iconic to viewers as at least two of them were, their unit began the demarcation of the show into distinct family zones, many of whom never interacted with each other. It was the beginning of the loss of community spirit, and although the Slaters pervaded every aspect of Walford life - the market, the cafe, the launderette and the Vic - they never actively interacted with any of the established characters ... unless they were male.
The Slaters introduced the fallacious concept of the strong woman being the gobby mare type, as opposed to the truly strong women with backbone that we saw in the 80s and 90s - your Pats, your Paulines, your Peggys. Kathy Beale was a character who rarely raised her voice and walked away from the Mitchells with dignity, as did Sharon Watts, whom Yorke separated from the Mitchells (a demographic which fit her like a glove) and made her a so-called tragic heroine.
But Yorke gave us another phenomenon with the Slaters ... the sibling friend. Introduce a couple of siblings, or even a family and make them exclusive friends, a closed society of co-dependent siblings, with no friends from the outside world (unless they were attractive and of the opposite sex), who kept company totally with each other.
The Slater girls had no friends, except each other. There followed the Fox sisters, the Branning brothers, but the unit which took this concept to art form were the Mitchell Sisters.
Their storylines, and, in particular, Ronnie's psychopathic antics, dominated the show for a decade. In fact, Ronnie became the first character to kill two men in cold blood and attempt to kill a third, and who was still allowed to roam the streets of Walford unfettered. At times, she advertised this psychopathy openly ...
Do you know what I'm capable of?
She was a control freak, with more than a hint of sapphic, incestuous leanings toward her younger sister, whom she infantilised to the point that Roxy, an ageing slapper fast approaching Old Trouthood, still saw herself as the 18 year-old self-designated Queen of Ibiza. Ronnie allowed her to go only so far in relationships with men before she sabotaged them, and she actually had this childwoman believing that she couldn't exist outside Ronnie's sphere of influence, that left to her own devices, she would inevitably fuck up, and Ronnie would be forced to clear up the mess.
There were times that she recognised the malaise of Ronnie's control, and she sought to escape from this, but always, like a bad penny or a boomerang, she kept coming back. Ronnie's other obsession was Jack and the desire for a family.
Tonight saw the end of the Mitchell sisters. They're dead, as dead, in this season of Dickens, as Jacob Marley, and to paraphrase Dickens, there is no doubt about that.
They're dead. They died together, and let their be no risings from the grave. In the words of Sean O'Connor, it was time to rest Ronnie's character. Roxy, however, was an unnecessary sacrifice.
Sister Act.
Despite its heavy overlay of foreshadowing and doom-laden symbolism, I thought this episode was pitch-perfect. The direction was great, and the ending chilling and final. It left no one in any doubt that the Blisters are brown bread. There they lie at the end of the hotel's indoor pool, Jack nodding off with the children, Max channel-surfing in wait for Roxy. They'll be found in the morning, and it won't be a pretty sight.
Let that be a lesson to all: Believe the initial leaks, they're usually the true ones. I've no doubt that multiple endings were shot - the fact that one was made available to people with a Snapchat account was evidence of that; but the initial leaks we got about their departure storyline was about Roxy drowning in a swimming pool, and Ronnie diving in to save her, only to get tangled up in her own elaborate wedding dress, and drown, herself, were true.
The entire segment of the episode devoted to the Mitchell sisters (and there was another storyline being played out at the same time for another departing character), was true to their characters, and it tied up all but one loose end.
What interested me about this leaving line, ultimately, was that Roxy, in the end, proved to be the stronger sister. For all her bleating on for weeks on end, for all her nagging and marginalisation of Roxy, Ronnie proved the weaker of the two, and had she not thrown that ginormous hissy fit, literally de-balling Jack by forcing him to choose between including Roxy in their marriage or not marrying her at all, she'd be alive and planning a move to Ongar today. If she'd just have let Roxy leave when she wanted to do so.
For Roxy, this was as much a last-ditch effort to extricate herself from being joined at the hip to her sister, as it was acknowledging that she'd forever be an albatross around her neck. She'd live nearby in Ongar, doing pretty much what she does now - snorting cocaine, partying hard with the locals, men who'd be increasingly younger, making a grand fuck-up of herself and being bailed out by Ronnie. There was talk of the two opening a trendy Ibiza-type bar in Ongar, which beggars belief that Ronnie could ever settle down in suburbia and raise three model children.
From the very beginning, there was a sense that things were being tidied up for the sisters' ultimate departure - there was the visit to James's grave, a reminder that today was Matthew Cotton's second birthday (and also the second anniversary of Ronnie's wedding to Charlie Cotton). This latter begs the only loose end left dangling by the occurrences of this episode.
Jack will be left with Amy and Ricky, both of whom are his children; but Matthew is not his child. Matthew has a living father, who hasn't given Jack permission for him to adopt him. He also has a great-grandmother resident on the Square, who happens to be Amy's and Ricky's step-grandmother. So what happens to Matthew now?
Then, there was the return of Ronnie's and Roxy's mother and brother, Glenda and the dire Danny Mitchell, which brought about many of the foreshadowing elements rife in the episode.
Things superstitious started with Auntie Sal (who is no relation at all to the Blisters), as ever a portent of doom, who pronounces nothing good to come of the fact that Jack and Ronnie had seen each other before the wedding on the day of the event itself. In fact, Sal double foreshadowed something, because when Stacey admitted that she and Martin had seen each other before their wedding on the same day, Sal pronounced dramatically,
No good will come of it.
(Hmmmm ... Max is back in town).
The entire crisis of Ronnie's wedding hinged on the fact that Ronnie had convinced Roxy to come to Ongar with them, but she was stallling on telling Jack of this plan, since Jack had so forcefully poo-poohed the original idea to do this. I suppose she was going to wait until after the wedding, and spring it on him as a fait accompli, which only goes to show whom Ronnie thought to be the driving force in that marriage.
It was Roxy who knew that doing this was wrong and who felt bad about it, knowing that Ronnie had yet to tell Jack and anticipating Jack's adverse reaction. She also felt that her presence in Ronnie's marriage would be bad for Ronnie, which was actually a turn-up for the books, as in the past - particularly, the most recent past - Roxy has rightfully acknowledged that Ronnie was, indeed, bad for her.
A year ago, Roxy left to be with Glenda, and her final words to Ronnie were,
You're my sister and I love you. It's just that you aren't very good for me.
This was Roxy fresh from an attempted rape and manhandling from Dean, and one year full circle, Roxy is brought back to Walford, again by her mother, to be part and parcel of Ronnie's wedding. One year ago, Roxy even likened Ronnie to Dean in her control-obsession.
Tonight, however, Roxy was in the right, imploring Ronnie to tell Jack about her plans to include Roxy in their move before the wedding, as she pointed out succinctly to Ronnie, she hadn't even married Jack yet and already their marriage would begin with a secret and a lie.
The second overt instance of foreshadowing came when Glenda, of all people, confronted Ronnie over her unwillingness to tell Jack about Roxy, berating her for beginning her marriage with a lie - because, as Glenda said, she should know: Hers and Archie's marriage was a tissue of lies. Ronnie's response was prophetic:-
The day I take marital advice from you will be my last day on earth.
The hints, symbols and foreshadowing came thick and fast from that point - Ronnie, seeing Archie's signet ring in her jewelry box, and flinging it into the rubbish bin (flinging off Archie's influence, but actually his obsessive and control streak would play out at the wedding), and the vintage Mustang, laid on by Phil being likened by Honey and Auntie Sal, as the sisters sat in the car, to Thelma and Louise - with Sal never failing to remark how that turned out.
A Walford wedding would be as such without the hitch, and Ronnie's hitch was that she simply couldn't marry Jack without her sister being included in the marital set-up and coming with them to Ongar - thus proving that, in the long line of co-dependent relationships rife in Walford history, the worst one was the Mitchell Sisters.
Forget Den and Angie, Max and Tanya, Sharon and whatever Mitchell of the moment, Mick and Linda. Ronnie and Roxy, two sisters, were, without a doubt, two people who couldn't function without one another. Well, no ... ultimately, we see that it was Ronnie who couldn't function without Roxy. Roxy would have gone, driven off into the sunset and Old Troutdom, snorting her way to some sort of death, inevitably, poolside and in the company of a much, much younger man.
But Ronnie actually forced Jack to choose (or rather, she very cleverly manipulated herself into the victim situation, where she accused Jack of forcing her to choose.) In the end, she got what she wanted, which is what she always did, and no matter how much Jack joked about "buying one and getting one free", this is exactly what that situation would have entailed. Don't forget that Amy is Jack's daughter, but she's also Roxy's as well.
Sean O'Connor seems to like voice-overs and musical interludes, using Marc Cohn's wedding song as Ronnie's eventual music and playing this over their vows. And then there was the disco scene, and a hint of what could have been and now would never be, with Scott Marsden and Jake Wood plying their Strictly training on the dancefloor, we saw Roxy slip the key to her hotel room into Max's pocket.
Then there were the final words that Glenda spoke to her daughter, telling her that she loved her.
This is the real tragedy about killing off Roxy's character - in her final episodes, there was such a budding friendship with Donna, and the chemistry Rita Simons exuded with Jake Wood in Friday's episode and, again, tonight - the two fuck-ups of their respective families, the ones to whom mud sticks, getting together, getting it on and finding something in each other.Bar a return of Charlie Brooks as Janine, there's no one else with whom I'd rather see Max in a relationship at the moment - no pithy return of Tanya for the umpteenth time, no attempt to pair him with the (as yet) charmless Michelle.
I watched this entire episode on edge, not knowing what their eventual fate would be, and hoping against hope that, for Ronnie at least, this would be the final end, with not return made possible, a death we see and identify. There were, however, some red herrings - like when Roxy was going to speed off in the Mustang - I envisioned Ronnie jumping in beside her and them driving to their deaths in a crash; or the scene when they sat on the roof, drinking champagne on the rooftop and Ronnie had the wobble, but they were teasers.
In fact, their deaths and the immediate events leading up to it, also reinforced the notion that Ronnie was more engaged with Roxy than she was with Jack. Even before that, there was a scene on the dance floor where Ronnie passes Roxy and makes a passionate moue of an air kiss and another example when she passes her and sticks her tongue out in a licking motiong that was almost lascivious.
It's Ronnie's wedding night, and the fact that she would rather put necking a bottle of champagne with her sister before being with her husband, scooting him off to read fairy tales to the children, whilst she and Roxy quaff champers from the bottle and talk of plans for taking over Ongar, had only one significance, and it's something I've said all along: That Ronnie was in love with and obsessed with Roxy, that Jack was the respectable decoy, but Roxy was the one she loved - and Roxy was, indeed, the stronger of the two. Roxy was all ready to have a night of passion with Max and attempted to send Ronnie away, but in the end, she didn't, to her own tragic end.
The ending was chilling, especially since it was played out, rather graphically, against the voice-over of Jack reading Cinderella to Amy and Ricky, and considering that this was supposed to take 20 minutes, the entire affair played out in that time. Cinderella being the story of a magic which lasted for the heroine only until midnight, when reality hit home. By midnight, in what seemed to be a relatively quick drowning scene for both, especially Roxy, who seemed to be at the bottom of the pool, almost immediately Ronnie started to take off her wedding gown, both the Blisters were dead.
They're dead. Gone. With oodles of pictures to remind their loved ones of their final day, including a picture with "their favourite cousin", Phil, a man who considered one a liability and the other the runt of the litter, second only to Billy.
This is the end of an era, another meme which kept being repeated throughout the storyline,and the beginning of another, as they said. But let's not have any rising from watery graves. This show has seen one too many returns from the dead.
It's over. Ronnie and Roxy are gone.
Other Secrets and Lies. Who would have thought something so simple as Mick borrowing Lee's phone would have led to Lee's confession? I was a bit annoyed by what promoted it - Mick being annoyed and concerned to find a card for The Samaritans in Lee's phone case. When he found out the truth behind this, initially, he was annoyed that Lee chose to open up to a complete stranger, rather than laden his family with such a matter.
This angered me, because when Lee was diagnosed with depression, the doctor specifically gave him a script for medication and referred him for counselling, something, I suppose, he never acted upon; but during this time, neither his family nor his girlfriend sought information about his condition and what it entailed. Did they not realise that his counselling sessions would involve opening up to strangers, because sometimes someone not connected with the problems affecting a person can offer insight and help?
Obviously not.
Mick, at least, was savvy enough to realise that Lee wasn't distraught over just his job - although he has no inkling about what has gone on there, and bullying at work can be as horrendous as bullying at school - and "a few bills." And Lee finally confesses about his part in the burglary of the pub.
Mick says the first thing that comes into his head, when Lee confesses that he was on the brink of committing suicide because of the guilt he felt - that it's a pity Lee didn't, because it would have been better for the family. He later relents, but says he won't forgive Lee.
Sorry, but didn't he forgive Shirley for burning down Elaine's pub?
This is the second time that an episode segment with Lee has ended, focusing on him, with a police siren sounding in the background. After tonight's dual death, I don't think he'll commit suicide. I do think he'll confess to the police and go to prison ... and return after sometime, portrayed by a different actor.
Excellent episode.
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