And so, here we are again, folks, right back to the same old same old with Sean O'Connor, which is everything that makes this show rank (without the file) at the moment - Denise, Jack grieving, Denise, Max plotting, Denise, the Beale sitcom, Denise, Lauren, Lauren and Abi, Michelle being told that now that she cheated on one man with whom she'd lived for 20 years only to become sexually involved with and emotionally dependent on a manchild, the one thing she needs in her life is another man (this time a stalker), Denise, Kush coming of age, Jack grieving (some more), Denise, adults playing teenagers, bullying here, bullying there, bullying every fucking where.
This is Sean O'Connor's EastEnders.
Oops, sorry ... forgot that the die is cast for the omnipresent Denise to be a receptionist at the Council ... what could possibly go wrong?
Stinking Up the Screen. Oh, please! Spare us the overt efforts to make us feel sympathy and admiration for St Denise the Martyr. One thing stood out like a sore thumb tonight, and that was Sean O'Connor's pathetically overt efforts to make Denise and NuMichelle victims and, therefore, sympathetic.
Denise is Kim's new domestic goddess - she keeps the house clean and Pearl fed without throwing a temper tantrum. Even Vincent deems her a miracle worker, and even Denise deems Kim the comic dragon in yet another piss poor attempt at a sitcom scene.
It's not long,however, before Carmel tips Denise off about a temporary job going on reception at the Council Offices, which Denise poo-poohs in her customary, ungracious, ingrate manner. Why do people even try being friendly to this sniping bitch? Her almighty pride has been hurt by Kush dumping her, and it's hurt even moreso to find he's up and dating again, whilst at the same time, being offered a job by his mother.
This encounter so totally unhinges Denise that she dives into a welter of housework, only to find that Kim has printed off a Council job application worthy of Denise's one single GCSE (yet to be passed) and we've opened the door for Sean O'Connor to elevate her to the highest echelon on the Council and probably to rescue Walford from big, bad Max and Weyland.
I hate this show when one particular character or tranche of characters is pushed beyond belief. I hated John Yorke's Slater Show. I hated Louise Berridge's Adventures of Shannis; I hated Kirkwood's Branningville and DTC's Carterfest,and now I hate with a visceral passion Sean O'Connor turning EastEnders into a vehicle for an overrated actress and a character who lost relevance in 2010.
Bite me, DeniseBots, but here I have the freedom of saying what I will about this spent character who's bringing the show down through overkill.
She isn't even interesting.
Michelle ManHopper. What a difference a man makes for some women! Not just one particular man, but any man will do, even the stranger whose nose bled on the Tube, whom you helped and who turned up out of the blue one day with a fresh, new handkerchief he'd been carrying around just on the offchance he might see you again along his route.
Sharon has the answer to Michelle's work doldrums. We all know that Michelle's work doldrums have everything to do with Michelle, and what's more, Michelle knows this. She worked damned hard to get a uni degree, and she threw her teaching career and her marriage away because she got sexually involved with an underaged boy, someone who was legally a child. Because of that, she's now reduced to working as a shopgirl in a department store,on her feet all day and probably making little more than minimum wage.
She's stuck in a junior position like that whilst she's pushing fifty, and it's not nice.
The answer to her problems would be to knuckle down and do the best she can in that job,with a view to getting some sort of promotion along the way. Regain her self-esteem, re-invent herself. Instead, Sharon's answer to Michelle's dour mood is simple: She needs another man, someone on whom she can have a good, old-fashioned crush.
Since when did Michelle, like so many others, become man-dependent? She married Tim, but didn't take his surname, something which is mightily pretentious in the US, if you're anything lower than a doctor or a lawyer. Yet she lived in his house and took advantage of his income all those years. She went from that set-up, unbelievably, to becoming so emotionally involved with Prestonovich that she actually believed they had a future together.
Now that she's forbidden to contact Prestonovich, and Tim's dumped her, Sharon thinks it's time she moved onto yet another man. After all, in the 21st Century, what is a woman without a man? And Michelle, who seems to have lost her one remaining brain cell someplace over the Atlantic, the rest having been fried in the Florida sun, dopily complies with Sharon's suggestion, allowing herself a five-second flirtation with Mr Handkerchief on the Tube - he, who gives her a long stare as he leaves the train.
Didja think he was in love? Michelle was affected enough to wax lyrical about him to Sharon, only to find that he was, at that very moment, standing outside the Mitchell abode, looking at pictures he'd surreptitiously taken of Michelle whilst on the train.
Michelle's got a stalker! Because if men aren't BabyMen or bullies or villains or unstable entities in EastEnders, they're creeps, and this is just another effort by Sean O'Connor to curry sympathy for Jenna Russell's poor re-cast. Michelle the statutory rapist becomes a victim, herself, of stalking.
Spare me.
Speaking of Bullies (Yawn) ... They're back. That awful gaggle of adults playing unsuccessfully at being adolescents. Worse than that, Sniggle and Snaggle are back. They've plastered Snaggle's face with some sort of weird white pancake make-up applied with a trowel to hide her forehead wrinkles and the lines around her eyes and mouth, and Sniggle is such an offensive racial stereotype, I'm surprised someone hasn't complained to the BBC about her depiction, besides the fact that she looks as if she's 30 years old and sounds like she smokes 40 a day. I'm waiting for her to burst into her signature sniggle and then collapse in a heap whooping up a phlegmatic smoker's cough.
Anyway, the moral of this story is: Never bully a bully. Travis, another man, who is in his mid-twenties, with a mature jawline to match, portraying a 16 year-old, puts the appalling Keegan in his place, displaying Keegan's overall ingnorance to everyone concerned, challenging him to sing the Stormzy lyrics to "Big for Your Boots" in an overt taunt about Keegan's aggressive behaviour being a front for cowardice.
Because Keegan seriously is a coward, but a mean and spiteful one. Remember when he insulted Rebecca and Shakil beat the shit out of him in Carmel's front room, how he ran away from that like a water rat? Travis's challenge prompted Shakil and the other boys at the bus stop to start taunting him with the the lyrics to the song, which seem way appropriate for the scurvy little prick that he is ...
You're getting way too big for your boots ...
Your face ain't big enough for my boot ...
How dare you twist up the truth ...
You ain't never too big for the boot ...
Strength lies in numbers, and the boys, prompted by Travis, seized upon Keegan's momentary show of weakness, smelled blood and taunted him to the extent that he ran away like the coward he is.
But that doesn't mean he isn't dangerous. The irony of the situation is that when this bus stop incident occurred, and Keegan ran away, Louise actually felt compassion for his situation. Later, at school, when she approaches him to apologise, he strikes again, and in the worst way. He "informs" her that Travis wasn't choosy in going out with her, because he was willing to take someone else's "seconds", something that he, Keegan, wouldn't do. When Louise is puzzled, he reminded her of the fact - actually a sorta kinda "alternative fact" because it was a lie - that she had slept with him at her party.
Not only that, but he proceeds to pass this information around as fact, aided and abetted, most probably by Sniggle and Snaggle. Well, at least, according to Sniggle and Snaggle, he's been passing this infomation around the school. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, but these two girls - who've obviously provided Keegan with information about Louise's birth mark - have her believing that he has.
Louise is clueless and naive, because the way these two falsely profess their loyalty to her, telling her just how much they've taken up for her against all of Keegan's slander, even though, they say, that they were witness to Louise's behaviour with him during her party, even being judgemental about Louise "losing her virginity" and not even knowing it.
And so the bullying begins again, this time with a new victim, and this time, in a way, more vicious and pernicious than what Rebecca suffered at their hands. Because Rebecca's treatment, unjustifiable as it was, came down to her, herself,making poor life choices. Louise has done nothing.
I assume this is the storyline which brings Phil home.
BranningVille Revisited:Max and Jack. Jack's kids are confused. Well, Ricky should be,because he's only 6 years old; but once again, Amy is 8 going on 5. Amy knows full well that Charlie is Matthew's father. She would surely remember his birth, and she was a member of Ronnie's wedding. I can understand Ricky thinking Jack was Matthew's father, but what the fuck kind of question was that from Amy, asking if Charlie were their father. Amy has known ever since she can remember that Jack is her father.
I would think that a fair amount of confusion, at least for Matthew, would stem from the fact that all three have the surname "Mitchell" in some way, whereas Jack's surname is Branning. He's also given them false hope about being able to talk with Matthew any time they want, so he's spent the weekend trying to contact Charlie on Charlie's now-defunct phone.
He's not coping with the kids acting out, both at home and at school. There's no time to clean or cook or even talk with a concerned teacher, when he learns that Amy has been acting out in school. Max's suggestion, whispered subtly in Jack's ear, is that Jack needs a nanny.
In what was probably the best scene of the night, incongrously, we had Kush and Jack encounter each other in the park, where Kush has gone to think his future over and Jack has gone to brood and look at parents with toddlers.
Kush immediately hones in on the fact that Jack is suffering from the 6th-month anniversary of Ronnie's death, and identifies the fact that he obsessed so much over Matthew because he was really Jack's last link with Ronnie. Kush then told of his own plight losing his first wife Safirah - how after six months of allowing him to grieve, people around him slowly started edging toward talking about anything but acknowledging Kush's grief. In the end, years after his wife's death - years? I thought he'd only lost his first wife just over a year before he met Shabnam, but since EastEnders is so inconsistent these days, I suppose Jesse O'Mahoney thought no one would notice- when Kush learned that her best friend was moving out of the area, he begged her to stay as she was his last link with his dead wife.
No mention, on Kush's part, of remorselessly using his dead wife as a pick-up line for uncommitted, prurient and promiscuous sex, resulting in Kush actually becoming something of a sexual predator, hiimself, honing in on emotionally vulnerable young women for sex.
However, what he said resonated with Jack, who - heretofore - had never actually interacted with Kush or even gave any intimation of knowing him, marvelled at the fact that Kush was actually a very deep person ...
And this gets Kush thinking. Later, with Stacey and Martin in the pub, he confesses that he'd cancelled his date that night, and he acknowledged that he was a 31 year-old man who was still dependent on his mother for sustenance. Does that mean he recognises that his attraction to Denise was also on the Oedipal side as well. This aspect of Branningville was Kush's epiphany that he really needed to grow up.
In the meantime, Charlie contacts Jack to say that Matthew needed a period of adjustment in his new surroundings,and so he wouldn't be contacting Jack anymore. This is a clean break, and whilst I know Max is behind this, it actually is exactly what this little boy needs- less confusion.
Branningville: Lauren, Abi and Steven. Memo to EastEnders: Please stop making the Beales, specifically Ian and Jane, a family sitcom. It wasn't funny listening to the slimline Adam Woodyatt daydream about fattening food. It's not funny. It never was funny, and it won't ever be funny - because everyone remembers Jane dumping Lucy's body in the boot of her car and subsequently dragging her over the Common to leave her there, or Ian hiding this evidence and bullying Cindy Williams remorselessly.
This is all about Lauren, who's had her abortion but who hasn't told Steven. It's also about Abi, functioning both as the conscience of the piece and the shit-stirrer. She's rightly adamant that Lauren should tell Steven, basically because she's now involved in the lie by telling Steven that Lauren was seen at Walford General because she was with Abi, who had an appointment.
However, Abi feels strongly for Steven's plight. He's always supportive of Lauren, works for her and cares for her child. Abi knows how selfish Lauren is and rightly tells Lauren that Steven has a right to know what she's done.
Actually, this segment was a pretty astute character study of both Branning girls. Abi is lonely. She's approaching 21, a milestone birthday, and yet she gets no support, or acknowledgement of this from anyone. Her father barely passed her by without noticing her, and Lauren is up her own backside with her own problems and obsessing about work.However much she says she wants a family with Steven, Abi knows she's talking rubbish. She's all about herself.
When she spends the day with Steven, making birthday invitations as well as a Father's Day card for Max, she wonders if Louis will send Steven such a card, although she knows that Lauren probably hasn't even realised this. When she gets Steven to admit that he wants a family, and she admits she wants the same, he derides her as being only a kid and barely out of school.She's not - she's 21.
What's interesting is Abi's obvious disdain and jealousy for and of Lauren. Yet she's flummoxed by Lauren's praise for her help in the abortion situation. Abi just wants to be accepted and loved by someone.She misses the attention she had from Max and from Tanya to a certain extent when she was a child. Now, she's floundering alone in bitterness and jealousy. Watch the 21st celebrations. That's when Steven will find out.
This is Sean O'Connor's EastEnders.
Oops, sorry ... forgot that the die is cast for the omnipresent Denise to be a receptionist at the Council ... what could possibly go wrong?
Stinking Up the Screen. Oh, please! Spare us the overt efforts to make us feel sympathy and admiration for St Denise the Martyr. One thing stood out like a sore thumb tonight, and that was Sean O'Connor's pathetically overt efforts to make Denise and NuMichelle victims and, therefore, sympathetic.
Denise is Kim's new domestic goddess - she keeps the house clean and Pearl fed without throwing a temper tantrum. Even Vincent deems her a miracle worker, and even Denise deems Kim the comic dragon in yet another piss poor attempt at a sitcom scene.
It's not long,however, before Carmel tips Denise off about a temporary job going on reception at the Council Offices, which Denise poo-poohs in her customary, ungracious, ingrate manner. Why do people even try being friendly to this sniping bitch? Her almighty pride has been hurt by Kush dumping her, and it's hurt even moreso to find he's up and dating again, whilst at the same time, being offered a job by his mother.
This encounter so totally unhinges Denise that she dives into a welter of housework, only to find that Kim has printed off a Council job application worthy of Denise's one single GCSE (yet to be passed) and we've opened the door for Sean O'Connor to elevate her to the highest echelon on the Council and probably to rescue Walford from big, bad Max and Weyland.
I hate this show when one particular character or tranche of characters is pushed beyond belief. I hated John Yorke's Slater Show. I hated Louise Berridge's Adventures of Shannis; I hated Kirkwood's Branningville and DTC's Carterfest,and now I hate with a visceral passion Sean O'Connor turning EastEnders into a vehicle for an overrated actress and a character who lost relevance in 2010.
Bite me, DeniseBots, but here I have the freedom of saying what I will about this spent character who's bringing the show down through overkill.
She isn't even interesting.
Michelle ManHopper. What a difference a man makes for some women! Not just one particular man, but any man will do, even the stranger whose nose bled on the Tube, whom you helped and who turned up out of the blue one day with a fresh, new handkerchief he'd been carrying around just on the offchance he might see you again along his route.
Sharon has the answer to Michelle's work doldrums. We all know that Michelle's work doldrums have everything to do with Michelle, and what's more, Michelle knows this. She worked damned hard to get a uni degree, and she threw her teaching career and her marriage away because she got sexually involved with an underaged boy, someone who was legally a child. Because of that, she's now reduced to working as a shopgirl in a department store,on her feet all day and probably making little more than minimum wage.
She's stuck in a junior position like that whilst she's pushing fifty, and it's not nice.
The answer to her problems would be to knuckle down and do the best she can in that job,with a view to getting some sort of promotion along the way. Regain her self-esteem, re-invent herself. Instead, Sharon's answer to Michelle's dour mood is simple: She needs another man, someone on whom she can have a good, old-fashioned crush.
Since when did Michelle, like so many others, become man-dependent? She married Tim, but didn't take his surname, something which is mightily pretentious in the US, if you're anything lower than a doctor or a lawyer. Yet she lived in his house and took advantage of his income all those years. She went from that set-up, unbelievably, to becoming so emotionally involved with Prestonovich that she actually believed they had a future together.
Now that she's forbidden to contact Prestonovich, and Tim's dumped her, Sharon thinks it's time she moved onto yet another man. After all, in the 21st Century, what is a woman without a man? And Michelle, who seems to have lost her one remaining brain cell someplace over the Atlantic, the rest having been fried in the Florida sun, dopily complies with Sharon's suggestion, allowing herself a five-second flirtation with Mr Handkerchief on the Tube - he, who gives her a long stare as he leaves the train.
Didja think he was in love? Michelle was affected enough to wax lyrical about him to Sharon, only to find that he was, at that very moment, standing outside the Mitchell abode, looking at pictures he'd surreptitiously taken of Michelle whilst on the train.
Michelle's got a stalker! Because if men aren't BabyMen or bullies or villains or unstable entities in EastEnders, they're creeps, and this is just another effort by Sean O'Connor to curry sympathy for Jenna Russell's poor re-cast. Michelle the statutory rapist becomes a victim, herself, of stalking.
Spare me.
Speaking of Bullies (Yawn) ... They're back. That awful gaggle of adults playing unsuccessfully at being adolescents. Worse than that, Sniggle and Snaggle are back. They've plastered Snaggle's face with some sort of weird white pancake make-up applied with a trowel to hide her forehead wrinkles and the lines around her eyes and mouth, and Sniggle is such an offensive racial stereotype, I'm surprised someone hasn't complained to the BBC about her depiction, besides the fact that she looks as if she's 30 years old and sounds like she smokes 40 a day. I'm waiting for her to burst into her signature sniggle and then collapse in a heap whooping up a phlegmatic smoker's cough.
Anyway, the moral of this story is: Never bully a bully. Travis, another man, who is in his mid-twenties, with a mature jawline to match, portraying a 16 year-old, puts the appalling Keegan in his place, displaying Keegan's overall ingnorance to everyone concerned, challenging him to sing the Stormzy lyrics to "Big for Your Boots" in an overt taunt about Keegan's aggressive behaviour being a front for cowardice.
Because Keegan seriously is a coward, but a mean and spiteful one. Remember when he insulted Rebecca and Shakil beat the shit out of him in Carmel's front room, how he ran away from that like a water rat? Travis's challenge prompted Shakil and the other boys at the bus stop to start taunting him with the the lyrics to the song, which seem way appropriate for the scurvy little prick that he is ...
You're getting way too big for your boots ...
Your face ain't big enough for my boot ...
How dare you twist up the truth ...
You ain't never too big for the boot ...
Strength lies in numbers, and the boys, prompted by Travis, seized upon Keegan's momentary show of weakness, smelled blood and taunted him to the extent that he ran away like the coward he is.
But that doesn't mean he isn't dangerous. The irony of the situation is that when this bus stop incident occurred, and Keegan ran away, Louise actually felt compassion for his situation. Later, at school, when she approaches him to apologise, he strikes again, and in the worst way. He "informs" her that Travis wasn't choosy in going out with her, because he was willing to take someone else's "seconds", something that he, Keegan, wouldn't do. When Louise is puzzled, he reminded her of the fact - actually a sorta kinda "alternative fact" because it was a lie - that she had slept with him at her party.
Not only that, but he proceeds to pass this information around as fact, aided and abetted, most probably by Sniggle and Snaggle. Well, at least, according to Sniggle and Snaggle, he's been passing this infomation around the school. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, but these two girls - who've obviously provided Keegan with information about Louise's birth mark - have her believing that he has.
Louise is clueless and naive, because the way these two falsely profess their loyalty to her, telling her just how much they've taken up for her against all of Keegan's slander, even though, they say, that they were witness to Louise's behaviour with him during her party, even being judgemental about Louise "losing her virginity" and not even knowing it.
And so the bullying begins again, this time with a new victim, and this time, in a way, more vicious and pernicious than what Rebecca suffered at their hands. Because Rebecca's treatment, unjustifiable as it was, came down to her, herself,making poor life choices. Louise has done nothing.
I assume this is the storyline which brings Phil home.
BranningVille Revisited:Max and Jack. Jack's kids are confused. Well, Ricky should be,because he's only 6 years old; but once again, Amy is 8 going on 5. Amy knows full well that Charlie is Matthew's father. She would surely remember his birth, and she was a member of Ronnie's wedding. I can understand Ricky thinking Jack was Matthew's father, but what the fuck kind of question was that from Amy, asking if Charlie were their father. Amy has known ever since she can remember that Jack is her father.
I would think that a fair amount of confusion, at least for Matthew, would stem from the fact that all three have the surname "Mitchell" in some way, whereas Jack's surname is Branning. He's also given them false hope about being able to talk with Matthew any time they want, so he's spent the weekend trying to contact Charlie on Charlie's now-defunct phone.
He's not coping with the kids acting out, both at home and at school. There's no time to clean or cook or even talk with a concerned teacher, when he learns that Amy has been acting out in school. Max's suggestion, whispered subtly in Jack's ear, is that Jack needs a nanny.
In what was probably the best scene of the night, incongrously, we had Kush and Jack encounter each other in the park, where Kush has gone to think his future over and Jack has gone to brood and look at parents with toddlers.
Kush immediately hones in on the fact that Jack is suffering from the 6th-month anniversary of Ronnie's death, and identifies the fact that he obsessed so much over Matthew because he was really Jack's last link with Ronnie. Kush then told of his own plight losing his first wife Safirah - how after six months of allowing him to grieve, people around him slowly started edging toward talking about anything but acknowledging Kush's grief. In the end, years after his wife's death - years? I thought he'd only lost his first wife just over a year before he met Shabnam, but since EastEnders is so inconsistent these days, I suppose Jesse O'Mahoney thought no one would notice- when Kush learned that her best friend was moving out of the area, he begged her to stay as she was his last link with his dead wife.
No mention, on Kush's part, of remorselessly using his dead wife as a pick-up line for uncommitted, prurient and promiscuous sex, resulting in Kush actually becoming something of a sexual predator, hiimself, honing in on emotionally vulnerable young women for sex.
However, what he said resonated with Jack, who - heretofore - had never actually interacted with Kush or even gave any intimation of knowing him, marvelled at the fact that Kush was actually a very deep person ...
And this gets Kush thinking. Later, with Stacey and Martin in the pub, he confesses that he'd cancelled his date that night, and he acknowledged that he was a 31 year-old man who was still dependent on his mother for sustenance. Does that mean he recognises that his attraction to Denise was also on the Oedipal side as well. This aspect of Branningville was Kush's epiphany that he really needed to grow up.
In the meantime, Charlie contacts Jack to say that Matthew needed a period of adjustment in his new surroundings,and so he wouldn't be contacting Jack anymore. This is a clean break, and whilst I know Max is behind this, it actually is exactly what this little boy needs- less confusion.
Branningville: Lauren, Abi and Steven. Memo to EastEnders: Please stop making the Beales, specifically Ian and Jane, a family sitcom. It wasn't funny listening to the slimline Adam Woodyatt daydream about fattening food. It's not funny. It never was funny, and it won't ever be funny - because everyone remembers Jane dumping Lucy's body in the boot of her car and subsequently dragging her over the Common to leave her there, or Ian hiding this evidence and bullying Cindy Williams remorselessly.
This is all about Lauren, who's had her abortion but who hasn't told Steven. It's also about Abi, functioning both as the conscience of the piece and the shit-stirrer. She's rightly adamant that Lauren should tell Steven, basically because she's now involved in the lie by telling Steven that Lauren was seen at Walford General because she was with Abi, who had an appointment.
However, Abi feels strongly for Steven's plight. He's always supportive of Lauren, works for her and cares for her child. Abi knows how selfish Lauren is and rightly tells Lauren that Steven has a right to know what she's done.
Actually, this segment was a pretty astute character study of both Branning girls. Abi is lonely. She's approaching 21, a milestone birthday, and yet she gets no support, or acknowledgement of this from anyone. Her father barely passed her by without noticing her, and Lauren is up her own backside with her own problems and obsessing about work.However much she says she wants a family with Steven, Abi knows she's talking rubbish. She's all about herself.
When she spends the day with Steven, making birthday invitations as well as a Father's Day card for Max, she wonders if Louis will send Steven such a card, although she knows that Lauren probably hasn't even realised this. When she gets Steven to admit that he wants a family, and she admits she wants the same, he derides her as being only a kid and barely out of school.She's not - she's 21.
What's interesting is Abi's obvious disdain and jealousy for and of Lauren. Yet she's flummoxed by Lauren's praise for her help in the abortion situation. Abi just wants to be accepted and loved by someone.She misses the attention she had from Max and from Tanya to a certain extent when she was a child. Now, she's floundering alone in bitterness and jealousy. Watch the 21st celebrations. That's when Steven will find out.
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