Wow, I really liked that episode, mainly because of the two big surprises we had, one of whom was extremely intriguing. For a revelatory episode, this was pretty low-key, but then I suppose that's another of Sean O'Connor's trademarks.
Don't get me wrong. The fact that this was one, marginally good episode doesn't mean I'm about to jump sides in a stream and start leveling praise exclusively, when this episode was something out of the normal humdrum of either nothing happening or too much repetitive stuff happening about so many unlikable or unredeemable characters.
There was a lot wrong with tonight's episode: Mick was still acting like a spoiled prick, his resentment against Linda growing hourly to the point that he defaces Linda's signature wallpaper, the wall of flamingos, which he mistakenly calls "parrots." He's forgetting, in a trice, how much the song "Pretty Flamingo" not only signified their relationship, but singularly identified Linda in his mind. I wonder if he knew that, as she was being raped upstairs by his brother, the jukebox in the pub was thundering out this song?
The bad Beale sitcom masquerading as a public service announcement for diabetes Type II, carried on, increasingly becoming archly gothic in its presentation. Ian is forced into visiting a diabetes support group/presentation, only to be confronted with his worst nightmares about the disease, in living colour, up close and personal. His initial snideness and condescension quickly melts into abject fear as he meets one bloke who's lost his leg to the disease, another who's lost his toes and a third who's lost his sight.
At the end of that spectacle, it's a wonder Ian doesn't want to really top himself.
And Jacqueline Jossa is still one of the weakest actresses ever to appear on the programme. The various producers who insist on continuing her employment should really stop trying to push her as a romantic lead. Let's count them ... David Witts, Jamie Lomas, Ben Hardy, Aaron Sidwell and now quirky Clark Kentish Eddy Eyre ... and she had absolutely no sexual chemistry with any of them. She's now been on EastEnders going into seven years, and she is still the most camera-conscious amateur on the programme. She's too conscious of the camera being on her to delve into the actual character she's playing and emote towards whoever is sharing a scene with her. She's too busy trying to be surreptitious about the camera getting its best angle on her. Then, there's the gurning, the funny voices and the arm-waving, none of which has gone away. Tonight she stuck chopsticks under her upper lip to enhance her gurn ability. It didn't work.
But all of the above was offset and outweighed by stuff that was genuinely good - the brilliant chemistry between Letitia Dean and Linda Henry that burst from the screen at Honey's housewarming party. These two are the new Peggy and Pat at their worst. You could easily see the pair of them getting drunk in an ice cream van, the way they giggled about Honey's "minky dreams" carpet, with Martin unintentionally bringing dog poo onto it,Sharon spilling wine and Shirley cutting her foot, with the beautiful line of the night:-
I knew something would happen without my boots on!
The surprise appearance of Lin Blakely, returning for this episode as Pam Coker, who was obviously the unheard voice on the end of Ben's mystery phone conversation. Whilst it was good to see Pam again - and country living certainly agrees with her - made me realise just how much the show misses her and Les. One of the highlights of the episode was the quiet conversation she had with Ben, reminiscing about Paul and how she urged him to carry on with his life and told him that one day he would find someone special, that Paul would have wanted him to find another love; as well as the real intention of her visit, to inform Billy that he had been made a fully-fledged partner in Les's business. Coker and Son is now Coker and Mitchell, and it's about time that the ultimate runt of the Mitchell litter comes into his own.
Simon Williams returned as the enigmatic chairman of Weyland & Co. It seems that Max is working at acquiring an extensive property portfolio in the area, having just acquired the building that used to house Donna's old flat and the flat where he briefly lived with Kirsty. All this made me think of the recent financial transactions which have been taking place on the Square. We know about the Vic - that was a high-profile acquisiton - but think about the others: Mr Popodopoulos sold the launderette; Ian sold the freehold of the demolished chippy, rather than re-build; Sharon and Phil were paid a fortune for the car lot; and now, he's bought the dowdy, 60s-style functional purpose-built flats' building on the Square, sold right after Donna gave up her tenancy.
But the biggest surprise, by far, was learning that Williams's character, for all he's being chauffeured around in a Bentley, isn't the Big Cheese of Weyland & Co. Instead, the real Big Cheese is Max's former cellmate in prison, where he's still languishing in Harry Grout-style luxury. He's the man behind whatever Max's revenge scheme is, because he seems to be the one who's largely financing it. This guy's got the greed and Max has the motive, which seems to be the fact that a large part of the community believed him capable of killing a young girl and dumping her body ... with that in mind, Max's last words of the night were chilling. He's capable of anything.
And that was what made the entire episode worth watching.
The Rock and the Hard Place. I get it that Lauren is the victim here, caught between a cold,calculating and manipulative man who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants, and another man with a history of mental instability, who desperately craves acceptance and affection.
Yes, yes, yes, we've seen this all before, but we saw it in a new light tonight because there was a new element added ... Abi the bitch.
Abi the bitch isn't a new character; she's still the same old Abi that she's always been, and that means she's still the jealous, resentful, little kid she's always been. Lorna Fitzgerald still looks like a little girl and still sounds, snorts and giggles like Abi when she was ten years old. There was always two sides to Abi - she was always the pleasant, plodding Daddy's girl, who loved animals and dreamed of being a vet. But there always lurked a deep resentment of Lauren.
That resentment simmered away nicely underneath, all the while Tanya favoured Lauren and Max seemed to dote on Abi; but once both Max and Tanya had to focus on Lauren, when she was killing herself by drinking, then the dark side of Abi's character emerged.
In that three-minute conversation she had with Steven Beale tonight over the booze at the party told us more about Abi's opinion of and relationship to her sister than a decade of their interaction on the show. Not only is Abi jealous and resentful of Lauren as a person, she described Lauren's character to a tee - she's selfish to the core and only thinks about herself. Abi voices the mistrust that Steven's been feeling. She gives word to all of his doubts as authentic.
Yes, Lauren might really be working late (when we know she was asked to stay behind for really no reason at all and that phony reason morphed into an in-house sushi dinner with Josh), but Abi reminded him that Lauren wouldn't think twice about staying behind and partying with her friends, because Lauren always puts herself first.
We're meant to feel sorry for Lauren, I suppose, because she's stupid. At least, Josh recognises this stupidity. Quite recently, in the Russiagate Congressional hearings, the ex-director of the CIA made a remark that could really apply to Lauren. Talking about treason, he said that quite often the Russians would target an easy victim, ply them with money, compliments and foster a sense of self-importance so that by the time the so-called victim suddenly realised he was on a traitorous path, it was too late to turn back.
This is so with Lauren. Josh knows she's stupid, insipid and self-absorbed, and he plays on that. She needs a frock to wear to a company do ... here's the company credit card. The dress gets ruined at the cleaners (or so she believes, as we know Steven destroyed it) - here's the card, buy another. "Working late" with the boss? Let's send out for sushi; the company will pay. And over dinner, we see Josh not only play up to her narrow-minded foibles - the spiel about how he never liked sushi, but came to appreciate it whilst living for a couple of months in Tokyo was a cleverly-worded insinuation for her to experiment with something foreign to her nature, a veiled hint at his intentions; and when that didn't work, he manipulated the conversation to reveal that he hadn't always been so confident and successful. We got the shaggy dog story of a shy, young boy with a stutter so bad he had to see a therapist - tug on the heartstrings and a ride home.
He's roused her interest now, and it's only a matter of time before this escalates into something else; after all, with the company paying for her clothes and her after-hours' meals, it should soon be patently obvious to the most willfully ignorant of people that she really only is being paid to be the company whore, exclusive - for the moment - to Josh,but what happens to her when she serves her purpose?
The contrived scene of Josh depositing her safely home on the Square so subtly revealed to us just how much Lauren has turned to face the Sun King that is Josh. Almost as soon as they arrive, he drops her literally right in front of Abi and Steven, who are sharing some takeaway chips, close enough for Abi to see Josh and reckon him to be hot, and also close enough for Lauren not to have seen Steven as she emerged from the car, as he was directly in her line of vision.
But she didn't see him; and whilst she didn't see Steven, she most certainly did turn to get a backwards ganger at Josh.
I doubt Eddie Eyre is in the show for a long term. He's got his finger in too many other pots to devote himself entirely to this genre; and as Steven's a pressure cooker ready to explode, I anticipate all of this will end in tears. However, the most interesting aspect of this segment this evening was the development of Abi as the Max-like character to Lauren's self-assured and self-entitled Jack-like self.
The Man of Constant Sorrow. Jack increasingly reminds me of an old Southern song:-
Jack really is a man of constant sorrow, and more than anything tonight, we are made to see that all of this is really about Jack's unresolved issues of the past- and that totally concerns, not only Ronnie, but also his dead son, James. Jack was away when James was born, and the child in Ronnie's arms when he returned, wasn't really his son at all; so he never even saw the baby.
This is actually more about James, I think, than Ronnie, even though he was always almost as obsessed about her as she was about him in the quirkiest of ways. He made it obvious that the child he had with Ronnie took precedence over all his other children - Penny, in France, was largely neglected; he disdained Amy's mother, Roxy, and really didn't know or like Sam Mitchell. I think he views Matthew as a second chance. He refers to Matthew as being "his and Ronnie's son", when he's not. That's a delusion, and it's a transference of Jack's unresolved grief issues onto this child. Matthew is not James, and he is not Jack's son.
So Jack does what he usually does when he feels victimised - first, he locks himself away and blames everybody under the sun for his problems. This time, it's Dot, whom he's accused of siding with Charlie, when she actually has done no such thing. If anything, she's betrayed her own flesh and blood by arguing with Charlie and pleading with him, virtually, to give up his rightful claim to be Matthew's father, which is totally unfair and unjust to Charlie, who's done nothing to merit this treatment.
Then, the second thing Jack does is what he always does when severely provoked: he thinks about cutting and running, after finding the children's passports in the drawer.
That actual scene got me thinking: Jack is Amy's biological father, as he is Ricky's; but none of these children bear Jack's surname. Amy is still Amy Mitchell. Richard has always been Richard Mitchell. In fact, he was named after the man Sam thought was his father, Ricky Butcher. And Matthew, who isn't Jack's son, is Matthew Mitchell-Cotton. Won't a bevy of kids traveling with a man who bears a different surname arouse some sort of suspicion. And another thing ... Amy annoys me. She annoys me because this kid is almost 9 years old; at least, she will be 9 in November. Up until recently, even when she first joined the show as talking Amy, she was always presented Suras being precociously smart-arsed. Now, all of a sudden - and this isn't dating from Roxy's death, but started sometime in the last year when she was living with Ronnie and Jack - she talks, acts and behaves like a five year-old. First of all, there was her uncomprehending the concept of death, when she'd already experienced Peggy dying and her pet rabbit overdosing on her mother's cocaine; Ricky might have been ignorant of the concept of death, but Amy wouldn't have been - besides, Ricky really is only six years old.
Then there have been the countless scenes of Jack in bed, surrounded by the kids, reading them fairy stories. Again, Matthew would appreciate stories of this sort, but Amy, two years off secondary school, would be into something a bit more sophisticated, as well as being a bit beyond being read fairy stories.
Tonight,annoying Amy stumbled into the kitchen, clutching the sort of stuffed toy only a very young child would have, only to ask in that cringeworthy, little, whining voice:-
Dud-dayyyyyyyy ... is Maffew gonna be taken aw-wayyyyy from us?
I don't know why this should even surprise me. The show is atrocious in writing for children, and they used to do the exact same thing with Tiffany Butcher - which probably was why she was so annoying, amongst other things.
Surprise Surprise I: Pam. Well, we now know the identity of Ben's mystery caller. Pam Coker came to Honey's and Billy's housewarming party. First Sean O'Connor sacks her, then he brings her back for one episode, the gist of which was her handing over the reins of the business to Billy. But not only seeing Pam again - one episode before Sean O'Connor foists upon us a Pam of his own creation - only succeeded in reminding me how much the show actually misses Lin Blakely.
In point of fact, the entire housewarming segment was a hoot. First of all, please continue with the Shirley-Sharon friendship. It's miles better than Shirley-Denise or Sharon-Michelle or even Sharon-Linda. These two are the natural successors to frenemies Peggy and Pat. Their names even have similar alliteration: Peggy and Pat; Sharon and Shirley.
They were great, giggling together about Honey's Minky Dreams carpet and its mutilation throughout the evening, beginning with Martin inadvertantly treading dog poo onto its surface and culminating with Sharon breaking a bottle of wine and Shirley cutting her foot and bleeding on the carpet, much to Honey's chagrin.
But it was the little vignettes amongst the hubbub of this party that mattered and impresssed the most - Martin and Stacey grabbing a quiet moment to reflect upon their new baby and Pam having a lovely conversation with Ben.
I know that there are all kinds of rumours surrounding the Fowler baby, but I really hope this pregnancy goes well and that we have a healthy baby. We've had a stillbirth, but I have the awful feeling that this is going to be a redux of Natasha Butcher, where Ricky and Bianca were presented with the awful spectre of having to have a late-term abortion when they learned that the baby was severely disabled. I just get the feeling that something along these lines is going to be revealed in the upcoming scan, that there is going to be some sort of congenital defect revealed which will result in them having to agree to a termination. I know what O'Connor has said about this extremel popular couple, two of the few genuinely likable characters left in the show; it's a soap.
But wouldn't it be nice if we could just have a really normal, uneventful pregnancy and the result is a legacy baby who would unite an iconic, original family with arguably the most important character to emerge from Millennial EastEnders?
One of the reasons I miss Pam so much was revealed simply in Ben's relaxing, smiling face during their conversation tonight. Ben is her last link to Paul, and equally, she's his last link to him. There will always be a bond, but Pam - whose family business has been comforting the bereaved - recognises that Ben is young and needs to move on from Paul. She gives him an open invitation to visit her and Les, either with Jay in tow or without him, or even with a new partner, which Paul would have wished for Ben. It was also really poignant to hear her speak of her loss, how raw it still is and how much both of them miss Paul. This conversation was cathartic for both of them, and you wonder about Jack's unresolved grief, and perhaps the reason for that is because, deep down, he knows that he can't reminisce about Ronnie in this way ... because she was so rotten.
One final thing of note with the party scene, even though she was nowhere to be seen, Denise was not forgotten. O'Connor had to get in a line of mention, having someone wonder why she wasn't at Honey's party, considering that she and Honey were friends.
Sorry, but Honey and Denise were never friends. They were work colleagues. Denise kept her nose in books and pilfered food,whilst Honey did the heavy work. I'm actually more surprised that Kim didn't horn in on the proceedings tonight, as she can sniff out a free drink anywhere. Maybe the prospect of actually having to bring a gift put her off. I daresay, had Denise attended,she'd have gobbled all the food on offer.
Even when there's no ubiquitous scene for Denise, she has to get a mention. We're never allowed to forget Denise.
Surprise Surprise II: Not Simon Williams. So we get our second sighting of the mysterious Chairman of Weyland & Co, waiting for Max in his custom Bentley parked ostentatiously on the Square.
From their conversation, it seems that one of Max's prime functions has been to scout out and buy properties to add to Weyland & Co's growing development portfolio. Insipid Lauren is being used similarly by Josh, based on her supposed knowledge of having grown up in the area.
However, all isn't as it seems. Because Simon Williams isn't really the big cheese of the operation, and now we get to learn how Max came into contact with these people.
The real boss of the piece was Max's cellmate, the mysterious man he visits in prison. Obviously, this man, probably imprisoned for some white collar crime like money-laundering, channels his greed to Max's simmering resentment of the way the community (there's that word again) has treated him. The mystery man questions Max's resolve, but Max assures him. The residents of Albert Square readily believed Max capable of cold-bloodedly killing a young girl and dumping her body, so Max has convinced himself, and his mentor, that he's capable of anything.
Almost six months ago, we saw Simon Williams's character. Will it be Christmas before we see the latest mystery man again and find out who he is? Is he Lola's mother? Is he Sharon's father? Is he Mark Fowler? (After all, we never saw Mark die?)
Cracking a Walnut with a Sledgehammer. Simply, how to drive home a point. Ian's sitcom has become a draining, repetitive public service announcement to reinforce the dangers of Diabetes Type II.
This served nothing except to scare the shit out of Ian, attending a support group to disdainfully consider several men of his age and bigger girth waiting for the meeting to begin, only to find out that one lost his leg to the disease, the other lost two toes, and the chatty younger man with whom Jane was talking, ignored the warning signs and lost his sight.
Ian was scared, yet resentful, before. Now he's abjectly frightened, and Jane is shitting herself as well.
Nothing new here, except to assume the audience are idiots.
Prick Carter. For someone who's spent weeks sitting by someone else's hospital bed in Bulgaria, Mick sure has a nice tan.
Shame about the attitude though. He's hitting the bottle, sulking and wallowing in self-pity and anger. He's resentful of the fact that Shirley has taken herself off to Honey's party, when she probably left the Vic just to get away from her putrid, babyfied son.
He's simply nasty to everyone, but there's a special hatred reserved for Linda, which makes me suddenly realise that Mick really never loved Linda at all. Oh, he loved her, as long as she predictably thought his thoughts and deferred to his status of the Sun King with the Sun lodged firmly up his hairy backside. He even acknowledged that she, at one time, was the stronger of the two.
Now, he's whining and moaning about Linda killing his dream.
Competing with that is the total and abject callowness and stupidity of Whitney and Johnny, both of whom are tiptoeing on eggshells around him. Both of them, Johnny in particular, are beginning to resent Linda going to take care of her suffering parent and seem to think Linda should be hanging around to catch Mick's ire, rather than the pair of them enduring the rough side of Mick's tongue and his self-pity.
So what do they do? What the Carters always do - throw a party to cheer up Linda. They hatch a plan to lure her back for a celebration of her fortieth and they seem to think that Mick would be cheered up by planning and putting the whole thing together.
Wrong.
Linda is at the top of Mick's shit list, so much so that he demolishes her signature wall of flamingo wallpaper. All it took was Linda making a crisis point decision, something Mick would never be able to do at all, to make Mick turn on her; and thinking about it, maybe Mick realises now, just who in that family really has the balls. Faced with mounting financial problems and the possibility of their business being shut down, Linda took the decision to take a risk. She acted under pressure, for better or worse, and Shirley did also, rather than wait for weeks until Mick returned, only to have him prowl about the place, scowling and coming up with nothing to ease their woes. He'd have had the dog put to sleep and sent her collar to Lee as a reminder that this was all his fault.
Mick blames everyone else for problems he brings upon himself, and now, because of him as much as anyone else, he's brought his hatred and resentment of Linda bubbling over on the surface.
He really is despicable.
Don't get me wrong. The fact that this was one, marginally good episode doesn't mean I'm about to jump sides in a stream and start leveling praise exclusively, when this episode was something out of the normal humdrum of either nothing happening or too much repetitive stuff happening about so many unlikable or unredeemable characters.
There was a lot wrong with tonight's episode: Mick was still acting like a spoiled prick, his resentment against Linda growing hourly to the point that he defaces Linda's signature wallpaper, the wall of flamingos, which he mistakenly calls "parrots." He's forgetting, in a trice, how much the song "Pretty Flamingo" not only signified their relationship, but singularly identified Linda in his mind. I wonder if he knew that, as she was being raped upstairs by his brother, the jukebox in the pub was thundering out this song?
The bad Beale sitcom masquerading as a public service announcement for diabetes Type II, carried on, increasingly becoming archly gothic in its presentation. Ian is forced into visiting a diabetes support group/presentation, only to be confronted with his worst nightmares about the disease, in living colour, up close and personal. His initial snideness and condescension quickly melts into abject fear as he meets one bloke who's lost his leg to the disease, another who's lost his toes and a third who's lost his sight.
At the end of that spectacle, it's a wonder Ian doesn't want to really top himself.
And Jacqueline Jossa is still one of the weakest actresses ever to appear on the programme. The various producers who insist on continuing her employment should really stop trying to push her as a romantic lead. Let's count them ... David Witts, Jamie Lomas, Ben Hardy, Aaron Sidwell and now quirky Clark Kentish Eddy Eyre ... and she had absolutely no sexual chemistry with any of them. She's now been on EastEnders going into seven years, and she is still the most camera-conscious amateur on the programme. She's too conscious of the camera being on her to delve into the actual character she's playing and emote towards whoever is sharing a scene with her. She's too busy trying to be surreptitious about the camera getting its best angle on her. Then, there's the gurning, the funny voices and the arm-waving, none of which has gone away. Tonight she stuck chopsticks under her upper lip to enhance her gurn ability. It didn't work.
But all of the above was offset and outweighed by stuff that was genuinely good - the brilliant chemistry between Letitia Dean and Linda Henry that burst from the screen at Honey's housewarming party. These two are the new Peggy and Pat at their worst. You could easily see the pair of them getting drunk in an ice cream van, the way they giggled about Honey's "minky dreams" carpet, with Martin unintentionally bringing dog poo onto it,Sharon spilling wine and Shirley cutting her foot, with the beautiful line of the night:-
I knew something would happen without my boots on!
The surprise appearance of Lin Blakely, returning for this episode as Pam Coker, who was obviously the unheard voice on the end of Ben's mystery phone conversation. Whilst it was good to see Pam again - and country living certainly agrees with her - made me realise just how much the show misses her and Les. One of the highlights of the episode was the quiet conversation she had with Ben, reminiscing about Paul and how she urged him to carry on with his life and told him that one day he would find someone special, that Paul would have wanted him to find another love; as well as the real intention of her visit, to inform Billy that he had been made a fully-fledged partner in Les's business. Coker and Son is now Coker and Mitchell, and it's about time that the ultimate runt of the Mitchell litter comes into his own.
Simon Williams returned as the enigmatic chairman of Weyland & Co. It seems that Max is working at acquiring an extensive property portfolio in the area, having just acquired the building that used to house Donna's old flat and the flat where he briefly lived with Kirsty. All this made me think of the recent financial transactions which have been taking place on the Square. We know about the Vic - that was a high-profile acquisiton - but think about the others: Mr Popodopoulos sold the launderette; Ian sold the freehold of the demolished chippy, rather than re-build; Sharon and Phil were paid a fortune for the car lot; and now, he's bought the dowdy, 60s-style functional purpose-built flats' building on the Square, sold right after Donna gave up her tenancy.
But the biggest surprise, by far, was learning that Williams's character, for all he's being chauffeured around in a Bentley, isn't the Big Cheese of Weyland & Co. Instead, the real Big Cheese is Max's former cellmate in prison, where he's still languishing in Harry Grout-style luxury. He's the man behind whatever Max's revenge scheme is, because he seems to be the one who's largely financing it. This guy's got the greed and Max has the motive, which seems to be the fact that a large part of the community believed him capable of killing a young girl and dumping her body ... with that in mind, Max's last words of the night were chilling. He's capable of anything.
And that was what made the entire episode worth watching.
The Rock and the Hard Place. I get it that Lauren is the victim here, caught between a cold,calculating and manipulative man who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants, and another man with a history of mental instability, who desperately craves acceptance and affection.
Yes, yes, yes, we've seen this all before, but we saw it in a new light tonight because there was a new element added ... Abi the bitch.
Abi the bitch isn't a new character; she's still the same old Abi that she's always been, and that means she's still the jealous, resentful, little kid she's always been. Lorna Fitzgerald still looks like a little girl and still sounds, snorts and giggles like Abi when she was ten years old. There was always two sides to Abi - she was always the pleasant, plodding Daddy's girl, who loved animals and dreamed of being a vet. But there always lurked a deep resentment of Lauren.
That resentment simmered away nicely underneath, all the while Tanya favoured Lauren and Max seemed to dote on Abi; but once both Max and Tanya had to focus on Lauren, when she was killing herself by drinking, then the dark side of Abi's character emerged.
In that three-minute conversation she had with Steven Beale tonight over the booze at the party told us more about Abi's opinion of and relationship to her sister than a decade of their interaction on the show. Not only is Abi jealous and resentful of Lauren as a person, she described Lauren's character to a tee - she's selfish to the core and only thinks about herself. Abi voices the mistrust that Steven's been feeling. She gives word to all of his doubts as authentic.
Yes, Lauren might really be working late (when we know she was asked to stay behind for really no reason at all and that phony reason morphed into an in-house sushi dinner with Josh), but Abi reminded him that Lauren wouldn't think twice about staying behind and partying with her friends, because Lauren always puts herself first.
We're meant to feel sorry for Lauren, I suppose, because she's stupid. At least, Josh recognises this stupidity. Quite recently, in the Russiagate Congressional hearings, the ex-director of the CIA made a remark that could really apply to Lauren. Talking about treason, he said that quite often the Russians would target an easy victim, ply them with money, compliments and foster a sense of self-importance so that by the time the so-called victim suddenly realised he was on a traitorous path, it was too late to turn back.
This is so with Lauren. Josh knows she's stupid, insipid and self-absorbed, and he plays on that. She needs a frock to wear to a company do ... here's the company credit card. The dress gets ruined at the cleaners (or so she believes, as we know Steven destroyed it) - here's the card, buy another. "Working late" with the boss? Let's send out for sushi; the company will pay. And over dinner, we see Josh not only play up to her narrow-minded foibles - the spiel about how he never liked sushi, but came to appreciate it whilst living for a couple of months in Tokyo was a cleverly-worded insinuation for her to experiment with something foreign to her nature, a veiled hint at his intentions; and when that didn't work, he manipulated the conversation to reveal that he hadn't always been so confident and successful. We got the shaggy dog story of a shy, young boy with a stutter so bad he had to see a therapist - tug on the heartstrings and a ride home.
He's roused her interest now, and it's only a matter of time before this escalates into something else; after all, with the company paying for her clothes and her after-hours' meals, it should soon be patently obvious to the most willfully ignorant of people that she really only is being paid to be the company whore, exclusive - for the moment - to Josh,but what happens to her when she serves her purpose?
The contrived scene of Josh depositing her safely home on the Square so subtly revealed to us just how much Lauren has turned to face the Sun King that is Josh. Almost as soon as they arrive, he drops her literally right in front of Abi and Steven, who are sharing some takeaway chips, close enough for Abi to see Josh and reckon him to be hot, and also close enough for Lauren not to have seen Steven as she emerged from the car, as he was directly in her line of vision.
But she didn't see him; and whilst she didn't see Steven, she most certainly did turn to get a backwards ganger at Josh.
I doubt Eddie Eyre is in the show for a long term. He's got his finger in too many other pots to devote himself entirely to this genre; and as Steven's a pressure cooker ready to explode, I anticipate all of this will end in tears. However, the most interesting aspect of this segment this evening was the development of Abi as the Max-like character to Lauren's self-assured and self-entitled Jack-like self.
The Man of Constant Sorrow. Jack increasingly reminds me of an old Southern song:-
Jack really is a man of constant sorrow, and more than anything tonight, we are made to see that all of this is really about Jack's unresolved issues of the past- and that totally concerns, not only Ronnie, but also his dead son, James. Jack was away when James was born, and the child in Ronnie's arms when he returned, wasn't really his son at all; so he never even saw the baby.
This is actually more about James, I think, than Ronnie, even though he was always almost as obsessed about her as she was about him in the quirkiest of ways. He made it obvious that the child he had with Ronnie took precedence over all his other children - Penny, in France, was largely neglected; he disdained Amy's mother, Roxy, and really didn't know or like Sam Mitchell. I think he views Matthew as a second chance. He refers to Matthew as being "his and Ronnie's son", when he's not. That's a delusion, and it's a transference of Jack's unresolved grief issues onto this child. Matthew is not James, and he is not Jack's son.
So Jack does what he usually does when he feels victimised - first, he locks himself away and blames everybody under the sun for his problems. This time, it's Dot, whom he's accused of siding with Charlie, when she actually has done no such thing. If anything, she's betrayed her own flesh and blood by arguing with Charlie and pleading with him, virtually, to give up his rightful claim to be Matthew's father, which is totally unfair and unjust to Charlie, who's done nothing to merit this treatment.
Then, the second thing Jack does is what he always does when severely provoked: he thinks about cutting and running, after finding the children's passports in the drawer.
That actual scene got me thinking: Jack is Amy's biological father, as he is Ricky's; but none of these children bear Jack's surname. Amy is still Amy Mitchell. Richard has always been Richard Mitchell. In fact, he was named after the man Sam thought was his father, Ricky Butcher. And Matthew, who isn't Jack's son, is Matthew Mitchell-Cotton. Won't a bevy of kids traveling with a man who bears a different surname arouse some sort of suspicion. And another thing ... Amy annoys me. She annoys me because this kid is almost 9 years old; at least, she will be 9 in November. Up until recently, even when she first joined the show as talking Amy, she was always presented Suras being precociously smart-arsed. Now, all of a sudden - and this isn't dating from Roxy's death, but started sometime in the last year when she was living with Ronnie and Jack - she talks, acts and behaves like a five year-old. First of all, there was her uncomprehending the concept of death, when she'd already experienced Peggy dying and her pet rabbit overdosing on her mother's cocaine; Ricky might have been ignorant of the concept of death, but Amy wouldn't have been - besides, Ricky really is only six years old.
Then there have been the countless scenes of Jack in bed, surrounded by the kids, reading them fairy stories. Again, Matthew would appreciate stories of this sort, but Amy, two years off secondary school, would be into something a bit more sophisticated, as well as being a bit beyond being read fairy stories.
Tonight,annoying Amy stumbled into the kitchen, clutching the sort of stuffed toy only a very young child would have, only to ask in that cringeworthy, little, whining voice:-
Dud-dayyyyyyyy ... is Maffew gonna be taken aw-wayyyyy from us?
I don't know why this should even surprise me. The show is atrocious in writing for children, and they used to do the exact same thing with Tiffany Butcher - which probably was why she was so annoying, amongst other things.
Surprise Surprise I: Pam. Well, we now know the identity of Ben's mystery caller. Pam Coker came to Honey's and Billy's housewarming party. First Sean O'Connor sacks her, then he brings her back for one episode, the gist of which was her handing over the reins of the business to Billy. But not only seeing Pam again - one episode before Sean O'Connor foists upon us a Pam of his own creation - only succeeded in reminding me how much the show actually misses Lin Blakely.
In point of fact, the entire housewarming segment was a hoot. First of all, please continue with the Shirley-Sharon friendship. It's miles better than Shirley-Denise or Sharon-Michelle or even Sharon-Linda. These two are the natural successors to frenemies Peggy and Pat. Their names even have similar alliteration: Peggy and Pat; Sharon and Shirley.
They were great, giggling together about Honey's Minky Dreams carpet and its mutilation throughout the evening, beginning with Martin inadvertantly treading dog poo onto its surface and culminating with Sharon breaking a bottle of wine and Shirley cutting her foot and bleeding on the carpet, much to Honey's chagrin.
But it was the little vignettes amongst the hubbub of this party that mattered and impresssed the most - Martin and Stacey grabbing a quiet moment to reflect upon their new baby and Pam having a lovely conversation with Ben.
I know that there are all kinds of rumours surrounding the Fowler baby, but I really hope this pregnancy goes well and that we have a healthy baby. We've had a stillbirth, but I have the awful feeling that this is going to be a redux of Natasha Butcher, where Ricky and Bianca were presented with the awful spectre of having to have a late-term abortion when they learned that the baby was severely disabled. I just get the feeling that something along these lines is going to be revealed in the upcoming scan, that there is going to be some sort of congenital defect revealed which will result in them having to agree to a termination. I know what O'Connor has said about this extremel popular couple, two of the few genuinely likable characters left in the show; it's a soap.
But wouldn't it be nice if we could just have a really normal, uneventful pregnancy and the result is a legacy baby who would unite an iconic, original family with arguably the most important character to emerge from Millennial EastEnders?
One of the reasons I miss Pam so much was revealed simply in Ben's relaxing, smiling face during their conversation tonight. Ben is her last link to Paul, and equally, she's his last link to him. There will always be a bond, but Pam - whose family business has been comforting the bereaved - recognises that Ben is young and needs to move on from Paul. She gives him an open invitation to visit her and Les, either with Jay in tow or without him, or even with a new partner, which Paul would have wished for Ben. It was also really poignant to hear her speak of her loss, how raw it still is and how much both of them miss Paul. This conversation was cathartic for both of them, and you wonder about Jack's unresolved grief, and perhaps the reason for that is because, deep down, he knows that he can't reminisce about Ronnie in this way ... because she was so rotten.
One final thing of note with the party scene, even though she was nowhere to be seen, Denise was not forgotten. O'Connor had to get in a line of mention, having someone wonder why she wasn't at Honey's party, considering that she and Honey were friends.
Sorry, but Honey and Denise were never friends. They were work colleagues. Denise kept her nose in books and pilfered food,whilst Honey did the heavy work. I'm actually more surprised that Kim didn't horn in on the proceedings tonight, as she can sniff out a free drink anywhere. Maybe the prospect of actually having to bring a gift put her off. I daresay, had Denise attended,she'd have gobbled all the food on offer.
Even when there's no ubiquitous scene for Denise, she has to get a mention. We're never allowed to forget Denise.
Surprise Surprise II: Not Simon Williams. So we get our second sighting of the mysterious Chairman of Weyland & Co, waiting for Max in his custom Bentley parked ostentatiously on the Square.
From their conversation, it seems that one of Max's prime functions has been to scout out and buy properties to add to Weyland & Co's growing development portfolio. Insipid Lauren is being used similarly by Josh, based on her supposed knowledge of having grown up in the area.
However, all isn't as it seems. Because Simon Williams isn't really the big cheese of the operation, and now we get to learn how Max came into contact with these people.
The real boss of the piece was Max's cellmate, the mysterious man he visits in prison. Obviously, this man, probably imprisoned for some white collar crime like money-laundering, channels his greed to Max's simmering resentment of the way the community (there's that word again) has treated him. The mystery man questions Max's resolve, but Max assures him. The residents of Albert Square readily believed Max capable of cold-bloodedly killing a young girl and dumping her body, so Max has convinced himself, and his mentor, that he's capable of anything.
Almost six months ago, we saw Simon Williams's character. Will it be Christmas before we see the latest mystery man again and find out who he is? Is he Lola's mother? Is he Sharon's father? Is he Mark Fowler? (After all, we never saw Mark die?)
Cracking a Walnut with a Sledgehammer. Simply, how to drive home a point. Ian's sitcom has become a draining, repetitive public service announcement to reinforce the dangers of Diabetes Type II.
This served nothing except to scare the shit out of Ian, attending a support group to disdainfully consider several men of his age and bigger girth waiting for the meeting to begin, only to find out that one lost his leg to the disease, the other lost two toes, and the chatty younger man with whom Jane was talking, ignored the warning signs and lost his sight.
Ian was scared, yet resentful, before. Now he's abjectly frightened, and Jane is shitting herself as well.
Nothing new here, except to assume the audience are idiots.
Prick Carter. For someone who's spent weeks sitting by someone else's hospital bed in Bulgaria, Mick sure has a nice tan.
Shame about the attitude though. He's hitting the bottle, sulking and wallowing in self-pity and anger. He's resentful of the fact that Shirley has taken herself off to Honey's party, when she probably left the Vic just to get away from her putrid, babyfied son.
He's simply nasty to everyone, but there's a special hatred reserved for Linda, which makes me suddenly realise that Mick really never loved Linda at all. Oh, he loved her, as long as she predictably thought his thoughts and deferred to his status of the Sun King with the Sun lodged firmly up his hairy backside. He even acknowledged that she, at one time, was the stronger of the two.
Now, he's whining and moaning about Linda killing his dream.
Competing with that is the total and abject callowness and stupidity of Whitney and Johnny, both of whom are tiptoeing on eggshells around him. Both of them, Johnny in particular, are beginning to resent Linda going to take care of her suffering parent and seem to think Linda should be hanging around to catch Mick's ire, rather than the pair of them enduring the rough side of Mick's tongue and his self-pity.
So what do they do? What the Carters always do - throw a party to cheer up Linda. They hatch a plan to lure her back for a celebration of her fortieth and they seem to think that Mick would be cheered up by planning and putting the whole thing together.
Wrong.
Linda is at the top of Mick's shit list, so much so that he demolishes her signature wall of flamingo wallpaper. All it took was Linda making a crisis point decision, something Mick would never be able to do at all, to make Mick turn on her; and thinking about it, maybe Mick realises now, just who in that family really has the balls. Faced with mounting financial problems and the possibility of their business being shut down, Linda took the decision to take a risk. She acted under pressure, for better or worse, and Shirley did also, rather than wait for weeks until Mick returned, only to have him prowl about the place, scowling and coming up with nothing to ease their woes. He'd have had the dog put to sleep and sent her collar to Lee as a reminder that this was all his fault.
Mick blames everyone else for problems he brings upon himself, and now, because of him as much as anyone else, he's brought his hatred and resentment of Linda bubbling over on the surface.
He really is despicable.
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