EastEnders has easily become the show where everyone is unlikable. Or stupid. Or both. Dot acting like the diva, signing herself out of the hospital AMA; Sonia and Robbie acting like self-righteous prats, with Robbie being branded the unfunny fool along the way; the He-Man Emasculated Club of three holding a convention in the market, totally about nothing; the bullies actually getting what promises to be their last storyline away from both of the objects of their bullying and still coming across as totally awful; Sharon getting played by the Taylors; Sharon getting played by Michelle; Sharon showing more care, concern and interest in Michelle's lovelife than she does the well-being of her own stepdaughter, even to the point of showing spiteful jealousy about the way Phil dotes on Louise; Jay and Ben continuing down the Dumb and Dumber route; Steven playing both Lauren and Abi. The actual high point of the episode was the penny dropping for Jane about the identity of the buyer of the chippy, which - surprise surprise - happens to be Weyland & Co.
This show is a mess. John Yorke has his work cut out.
Let's Play Lauren. How many times has this storyline played out? Angie Watts? Pauline Fowler? In either case, it didn't end well, and neither will this one.
The biggest problem with this storyline is that, utlimately, Steven is supposed to be the baddie, Abi his useful idiot, whom he'll discard at the appropriate moment, and Lauren the victim.
Except this is the first time we've had a story of this magnitude where absolutely everyone was unsympathetic. The original time this storyline played out, with Angie and Den, the two main characters were so nuanced and so complex, you actually felt sympathy for Angie in doing what she did, in a desperate measure to keep her marriage intact. Yet, you felt for Den, who remained in the marriage for the sake of their child, whilst the marriage, itself, morphed into a toxic cancer of dysfunctionality. However, you felt for him in that he deserved a stab at happiness.
There are no such complicated attitudes toward this trio of entitled, but Steven is undoubtedly the most complex of the three. He has mental health issues, and he's had breakdowns in the past. When he first arrived in Walford ten years ago, when Ian had him sectioned after his kidnapping and his shooting of Jane, he confessed to Ian that he had been receiving counselling and had had a breakdown as a teenager in New Zealand. He certainly was a troubled kid when he left Walford at the age of thirteen. He'd been responsible for a spate of anonymous hate mail sent to various residents of the Square, including Mark Fowler.
He was a mess a decade ago; he couldn't decide whether he wanted revenge on Ian or wanted total acceptance. In fact, he strove to achieve the latter, even resorting to helping Lucy run away in the end, but all of that came at the end of a sustained campaign to convince the twins that their mother was still alive and to torment Ian in that same degree.
Also, he admitted to Ian this time around, that he'd had further counselling in New Zealand in this interim period, but he assured Ian that he was now fine. And then there's the little matter of his sexuality. A decade ago, Steven came out as gay. Most definitely and absolutely gay.
This time around, apart from a fleetingly momentary glance in Johnny Carter's direction, Steven has been absolutely het. Sure, Ben Mitchell slept with Lola and Abi, but he slept with a lot of men in between bouts. Steven isn't even bi-sexual; he's het. He must have prayed away the gay in New Zealand - or else, he's suppressing it, along with all his other anxieties.
Almost from his very arrival, we've seen what drives Steven. Steven feels himself a loner, that he belongs to no real dynamic. He is biologically a Wicks, but he and Simon never gelled. He was raised as and considers himself a Beale, but there's a lingering doubt about him in Ian's mind, so much so that he's actually articulated that he considers Steven a poor second to any of his other three natural children, including the murderer Bobby.
This time around, Steven has done everything right. He's dotted every "i" and crossed every "t". He's presented himself as the indispensible good son to Ian, hoping against all hope that Ian would rate him an improvement on what appears to be a feckless Peter. (Again, that Ian has shown absolutely no curiosity to get to the bottom of what happened in New Zealand between Steven, Lauren and Peter, is absolutely mind-boggling). Like Ian many years ago, he's taken on another man's child - his brother's - and wants to raise the boy as his own. He's also developed a relationship with his brother's girlfriend, and this is where his anxieties start.
All Steven ever wanted was to be accepted as part of the Beale family dynamic. He wanted Lauren to love and accept him and he wanted to establish a family dynamic of his own with her. Lauren refused to even consider him as Louis's father, even though Steven has bonded with the child, and the child probably recognises and considers Steven his father figure. As long as she did that, yet continued to remain with him, his hackles of insecurity were raised - hence, what - for Steven - became his quest to really have a family with Lauren. Reluctant to have another child and wanting to go to work full-time, she refused to consider a sibling for Louis, and this led to Steven's sabotaging condoms, in an effort to make Lauren pregnant.
Everything leading from this has contributed to his downfall, including Lauren's abortion (her right) and her growing closeness to Josh,another person who comes across as not being very nice.
His growing perception of Lauren's developing relationship with Josh has been fed as well by a very jealous Abi, who has lived her life thinking Lauren usually gets what she wants. Abi feeds Steven's insecurities, basically be telling him what really are home truths about Lauren's character - that she's selfish and self-obsessed (true), that she has no consideration for others (often true) and that she will do anything to get what she wants, tiring of people and throwing them by the wayside.
His relationship with Abi is almost a sick psychological co-dependency. Abi feeds his growing frustrations about Lauren. He's angered by Lauren's behaviour, and vents his frustration by aggressive angry sex with Abi, which she welcomes. Abi, herself, increasingly isolated by her immediate family, is a festering vat of jealousy. She's unwanted and regularly taunted by her housemates, two of whom are ex-boyfriends, and the only time she seems genuinely happy is when she's with Dot. She's still naive enough to think that Steven's angry sex is actually love and/or affection, when it's actually consensual rape. Steven keeps resorting to having sex with Abi as a vent for his frustrations but also to keep her onside and to stop her from telling Lauren about them. It's control,and whilst he doesn't have control over Lauren, he feels as if he does control Abi - hence, his tissue of lies about leaving Lauren when she's at her lowest point and taking up with Abi. As bloody if.
Until that point, Abi thought his brain tumour plot was a load of old codswallop, reminding him that there would be no way he could sustain such a deception; but Steven convinces her, on a promise, that -working together - they could play Lauren and stitch her like the proverbial kipper. This results in Abi foraging an inoperable brain scan tumour from a dog, no less, and we're faced with the climactic scene of Lauren in tears over Steven's "condition" when she's really crying over a dog's brain. It actually reminded me of the scene from Brookside where Jackie Corkhill poured her heart out in grief beside her son's coffin, not knowing that it was actually filled with dirt. The parallels between these two shows at the moment are astounding, and not in a good way.
Steven's love for Lauren is an obsession. Even after he hears her speak of a near-sexual encounter with Josh, which she declined, even after hearing that she's only with Steven because he's good with Louis, Steven clings to hope. He's actually clinging to that hope after his initial talk with Abi tonight, when she told him that he needed to come clean with Lauren about this deception and face whatever will happen, that she didn't deserve this. But after watching her on his spy camera and watching her confess to Josh that she really did have feelings for Josh and wanted to be with him, but owed this devotion to Steve, the obsession turned to an obsession of a different sort, and Steven is out for revenge.
The gist of this storyline is that all the characters are unlikable. From the get go, Lauren has treated Steven like her personal assistant-cum-nanny for Louis. She's known she hasn't loved him for the longest time and could have called time on the relationship at any moment. In fact, it was she who was initially looking to play away from home, because she went seeking Josh after their initial encounter. She openly let him know that she was interested, and he responded.
He, himself, is also a creep. I don't believe he's broken with his fiancée any more than Steven has a brain tumour. One of the first remarks he made to Lauren was that he always got what he wanted. I think he's a player, yet a more sophisticated player than Steven will ever be, and I think this is the reason Max is pushing Lauren to remain with Steven.
So do I feel this is a jumbled storyline, cack-handedly written with an unsympathetic victim? Yes, but all the characters are equally as revolting - except that Steven has a reason for his behaviour.
The rest of the episode was bits and bobs, and here they are as observations:-
1. Dot Returning Home. The inference was that this was, indeed, the first time Dot had gotten dressed and actually got out of her bed into a chair. Is Dot a superhuman? She has a broken wrist and a pin in her hip. She most definitely will need physiotherapy and at this point, she wouldn't even be able to walk with a Zimmer frame, much less a hastily acquired cane which she brought home. I find it hard to believe that any hospital would have sanctioned even allowing her to sign herself out against medical advice, but even worse than that was the way Sonia treated her in the hospital.
Sonia is supposed to be a trained professiona - indeed, a geriatric nurse - and the last thing she should know from her training is that you never discuss the patient (or indeed, anyone) in the third person whilst they are present. It's highly unprofessional. and it's rude - but then "rudeness" seems to be one of Sonia's two defining characteristics, the other being extreme self-righteousness.
I'm increasingly wondering what prompted Sonia's return to Walford. I don't think she quit her job, I think she was sacked. As Carol often said, Sonia only wanted to organise and control other people's lives whenever she lost control of her own.
I'm glad Dot asserted herself and threw a hissy fit about the way Sonia and Robbie had consigned her to the smallest room in her house, even taking it upon themselves to sell her dining room table because there was no room for it. How insolent! The table wasn't theirs to sell, and Sonia's silly remark about Dot never liking the table or even using it. She did, indeed,use it on special occasions, the last one to mind was the Christmas Jack and Amy spent with her when he teturned from France.
It was good that she put Sonia and Robbie in their respective places, taking over the larger front room as her bed-sitting room and consigning them to the reduced parameters of the old dining room.
I don't like Sonia, and I find Robbie pathetic.
2. The Emasculated Men's Club. Martin and Kush are the new Bianca and Kat, the way they behave on the market. They're like a couple of schoolboys - a trio, no less, the way they bait Robbie. Donna is Vincent's sister. Why couldn't he pay her pitch fees? She wasn't above asking him to father a baby for her, but she can't hit him for three weeks' pitch fees?
This incidence just served to show how Oedipal and ball-less Kush is, depending on Denise to take the lead in telling Carmel that she isn't welcome on their holiday. Carmel is Kush's mother. At the moment, Kush is torn between two mothers - one who gave him birth and the other with whom he sleeps. That entire trio of men lined up along the market stall - Martin, Kush and Vincent - are all portrayed as three hapless men in thrall to women the show want to project as stronger and more sensible than the men they supposedly love.
3. The Bullies' Last Hurrah. These women do a naff job pretending to be girls, and it's positively sick that the pair of them want to ruin the prom because they're basically jealous of the two girls they targeted in bullying. Of course, they enlist the aid of Keegan to help them in their endeavour. They've been excluded from school, yet you wonder why their parents haven't ensured that they were kept at home and away from each other.
I hope that at the end of Prom Week, this is the last time we see these two.
4. Deplorable Sharon. SOC must really hate Sharon and the Mitchells. In this episode, Sharon actually allowed herself to get played by Karen Taylor. When Sharon accosted her about Keegan barging his way into her house - or rather, being tricked by Dennis into entering - Karen countered by accusing Sharon's son of assaulting her daughter.
Really, he didn't. He tossed an egg down, intending to hit Keegan, and instead, hit Bernadette. It was an accident, but the Taylors know how to play the system and how to present themselves as victims, and Sharon bought into that.
Later, we see her sniping at Michelle about the incident and also griping about Louise, in general - how willful she is, how she's got Phil wrapped around her finger. I was kinda glad that Michelle reminded her tactfully that Sharon's relationship with Den was similar. But what was dismaying even further was watching Sharon literally toss aside concern for both her children and concentrate exclusively on Michelle's love life.
5. The Penny Dropped for Jane. Jane seemed overly concerned that Ian had sold the chippy to Weyland & Co, especially when she realised that this was the firm for which Max and Lauren worked, and Ted suspects that Dot's pussy might belong to him. Oo-er, missus!
This show is a mess. John Yorke has his work cut out.
Let's Play Lauren. How many times has this storyline played out? Angie Watts? Pauline Fowler? In either case, it didn't end well, and neither will this one.
The biggest problem with this storyline is that, utlimately, Steven is supposed to be the baddie, Abi his useful idiot, whom he'll discard at the appropriate moment, and Lauren the victim.
Except this is the first time we've had a story of this magnitude where absolutely everyone was unsympathetic. The original time this storyline played out, with Angie and Den, the two main characters were so nuanced and so complex, you actually felt sympathy for Angie in doing what she did, in a desperate measure to keep her marriage intact. Yet, you felt for Den, who remained in the marriage for the sake of their child, whilst the marriage, itself, morphed into a toxic cancer of dysfunctionality. However, you felt for him in that he deserved a stab at happiness.
There are no such complicated attitudes toward this trio of entitled, but Steven is undoubtedly the most complex of the three. He has mental health issues, and he's had breakdowns in the past. When he first arrived in Walford ten years ago, when Ian had him sectioned after his kidnapping and his shooting of Jane, he confessed to Ian that he had been receiving counselling and had had a breakdown as a teenager in New Zealand. He certainly was a troubled kid when he left Walford at the age of thirteen. He'd been responsible for a spate of anonymous hate mail sent to various residents of the Square, including Mark Fowler.
He was a mess a decade ago; he couldn't decide whether he wanted revenge on Ian or wanted total acceptance. In fact, he strove to achieve the latter, even resorting to helping Lucy run away in the end, but all of that came at the end of a sustained campaign to convince the twins that their mother was still alive and to torment Ian in that same degree.
Also, he admitted to Ian this time around, that he'd had further counselling in New Zealand in this interim period, but he assured Ian that he was now fine. And then there's the little matter of his sexuality. A decade ago, Steven came out as gay. Most definitely and absolutely gay.
This time around, apart from a fleetingly momentary glance in Johnny Carter's direction, Steven has been absolutely het. Sure, Ben Mitchell slept with Lola and Abi, but he slept with a lot of men in between bouts. Steven isn't even bi-sexual; he's het. He must have prayed away the gay in New Zealand - or else, he's suppressing it, along with all his other anxieties.
Almost from his very arrival, we've seen what drives Steven. Steven feels himself a loner, that he belongs to no real dynamic. He is biologically a Wicks, but he and Simon never gelled. He was raised as and considers himself a Beale, but there's a lingering doubt about him in Ian's mind, so much so that he's actually articulated that he considers Steven a poor second to any of his other three natural children, including the murderer Bobby.
This time around, Steven has done everything right. He's dotted every "i" and crossed every "t". He's presented himself as the indispensible good son to Ian, hoping against all hope that Ian would rate him an improvement on what appears to be a feckless Peter. (Again, that Ian has shown absolutely no curiosity to get to the bottom of what happened in New Zealand between Steven, Lauren and Peter, is absolutely mind-boggling). Like Ian many years ago, he's taken on another man's child - his brother's - and wants to raise the boy as his own. He's also developed a relationship with his brother's girlfriend, and this is where his anxieties start.
All Steven ever wanted was to be accepted as part of the Beale family dynamic. He wanted Lauren to love and accept him and he wanted to establish a family dynamic of his own with her. Lauren refused to even consider him as Louis's father, even though Steven has bonded with the child, and the child probably recognises and considers Steven his father figure. As long as she did that, yet continued to remain with him, his hackles of insecurity were raised - hence, what - for Steven - became his quest to really have a family with Lauren. Reluctant to have another child and wanting to go to work full-time, she refused to consider a sibling for Louis, and this led to Steven's sabotaging condoms, in an effort to make Lauren pregnant.
Everything leading from this has contributed to his downfall, including Lauren's abortion (her right) and her growing closeness to Josh,another person who comes across as not being very nice.
His growing perception of Lauren's developing relationship with Josh has been fed as well by a very jealous Abi, who has lived her life thinking Lauren usually gets what she wants. Abi feeds Steven's insecurities, basically be telling him what really are home truths about Lauren's character - that she's selfish and self-obsessed (true), that she has no consideration for others (often true) and that she will do anything to get what she wants, tiring of people and throwing them by the wayside.
His relationship with Abi is almost a sick psychological co-dependency. Abi feeds his growing frustrations about Lauren. He's angered by Lauren's behaviour, and vents his frustration by aggressive angry sex with Abi, which she welcomes. Abi, herself, increasingly isolated by her immediate family, is a festering vat of jealousy. She's unwanted and regularly taunted by her housemates, two of whom are ex-boyfriends, and the only time she seems genuinely happy is when she's with Dot. She's still naive enough to think that Steven's angry sex is actually love and/or affection, when it's actually consensual rape. Steven keeps resorting to having sex with Abi as a vent for his frustrations but also to keep her onside and to stop her from telling Lauren about them. It's control,and whilst he doesn't have control over Lauren, he feels as if he does control Abi - hence, his tissue of lies about leaving Lauren when she's at her lowest point and taking up with Abi. As bloody if.
Until that point, Abi thought his brain tumour plot was a load of old codswallop, reminding him that there would be no way he could sustain such a deception; but Steven convinces her, on a promise, that -working together - they could play Lauren and stitch her like the proverbial kipper. This results in Abi foraging an inoperable brain scan tumour from a dog, no less, and we're faced with the climactic scene of Lauren in tears over Steven's "condition" when she's really crying over a dog's brain. It actually reminded me of the scene from Brookside where Jackie Corkhill poured her heart out in grief beside her son's coffin, not knowing that it was actually filled with dirt. The parallels between these two shows at the moment are astounding, and not in a good way.
Steven's love for Lauren is an obsession. Even after he hears her speak of a near-sexual encounter with Josh, which she declined, even after hearing that she's only with Steven because he's good with Louis, Steven clings to hope. He's actually clinging to that hope after his initial talk with Abi tonight, when she told him that he needed to come clean with Lauren about this deception and face whatever will happen, that she didn't deserve this. But after watching her on his spy camera and watching her confess to Josh that she really did have feelings for Josh and wanted to be with him, but owed this devotion to Steve, the obsession turned to an obsession of a different sort, and Steven is out for revenge.
The gist of this storyline is that all the characters are unlikable. From the get go, Lauren has treated Steven like her personal assistant-cum-nanny for Louis. She's known she hasn't loved him for the longest time and could have called time on the relationship at any moment. In fact, it was she who was initially looking to play away from home, because she went seeking Josh after their initial encounter. She openly let him know that she was interested, and he responded.
He, himself, is also a creep. I don't believe he's broken with his fiancée any more than Steven has a brain tumour. One of the first remarks he made to Lauren was that he always got what he wanted. I think he's a player, yet a more sophisticated player than Steven will ever be, and I think this is the reason Max is pushing Lauren to remain with Steven.
So do I feel this is a jumbled storyline, cack-handedly written with an unsympathetic victim? Yes, but all the characters are equally as revolting - except that Steven has a reason for his behaviour.
The rest of the episode was bits and bobs, and here they are as observations:-
1. Dot Returning Home. The inference was that this was, indeed, the first time Dot had gotten dressed and actually got out of her bed into a chair. Is Dot a superhuman? She has a broken wrist and a pin in her hip. She most definitely will need physiotherapy and at this point, she wouldn't even be able to walk with a Zimmer frame, much less a hastily acquired cane which she brought home. I find it hard to believe that any hospital would have sanctioned even allowing her to sign herself out against medical advice, but even worse than that was the way Sonia treated her in the hospital.
Sonia is supposed to be a trained professiona - indeed, a geriatric nurse - and the last thing she should know from her training is that you never discuss the patient (or indeed, anyone) in the third person whilst they are present. It's highly unprofessional. and it's rude - but then "rudeness" seems to be one of Sonia's two defining characteristics, the other being extreme self-righteousness.
I'm increasingly wondering what prompted Sonia's return to Walford. I don't think she quit her job, I think she was sacked. As Carol often said, Sonia only wanted to organise and control other people's lives whenever she lost control of her own.
I'm glad Dot asserted herself and threw a hissy fit about the way Sonia and Robbie had consigned her to the smallest room in her house, even taking it upon themselves to sell her dining room table because there was no room for it. How insolent! The table wasn't theirs to sell, and Sonia's silly remark about Dot never liking the table or even using it. She did, indeed,use it on special occasions, the last one to mind was the Christmas Jack and Amy spent with her when he teturned from France.
It was good that she put Sonia and Robbie in their respective places, taking over the larger front room as her bed-sitting room and consigning them to the reduced parameters of the old dining room.
I don't like Sonia, and I find Robbie pathetic.
2. The Emasculated Men's Club. Martin and Kush are the new Bianca and Kat, the way they behave on the market. They're like a couple of schoolboys - a trio, no less, the way they bait Robbie. Donna is Vincent's sister. Why couldn't he pay her pitch fees? She wasn't above asking him to father a baby for her, but she can't hit him for three weeks' pitch fees?
This incidence just served to show how Oedipal and ball-less Kush is, depending on Denise to take the lead in telling Carmel that she isn't welcome on their holiday. Carmel is Kush's mother. At the moment, Kush is torn between two mothers - one who gave him birth and the other with whom he sleeps. That entire trio of men lined up along the market stall - Martin, Kush and Vincent - are all portrayed as three hapless men in thrall to women the show want to project as stronger and more sensible than the men they supposedly love.
3. The Bullies' Last Hurrah. These women do a naff job pretending to be girls, and it's positively sick that the pair of them want to ruin the prom because they're basically jealous of the two girls they targeted in bullying. Of course, they enlist the aid of Keegan to help them in their endeavour. They've been excluded from school, yet you wonder why their parents haven't ensured that they were kept at home and away from each other.
I hope that at the end of Prom Week, this is the last time we see these two.
4. Deplorable Sharon. SOC must really hate Sharon and the Mitchells. In this episode, Sharon actually allowed herself to get played by Karen Taylor. When Sharon accosted her about Keegan barging his way into her house - or rather, being tricked by Dennis into entering - Karen countered by accusing Sharon's son of assaulting her daughter.
Really, he didn't. He tossed an egg down, intending to hit Keegan, and instead, hit Bernadette. It was an accident, but the Taylors know how to play the system and how to present themselves as victims, and Sharon bought into that.
Later, we see her sniping at Michelle about the incident and also griping about Louise, in general - how willful she is, how she's got Phil wrapped around her finger. I was kinda glad that Michelle reminded her tactfully that Sharon's relationship with Den was similar. But what was dismaying even further was watching Sharon literally toss aside concern for both her children and concentrate exclusively on Michelle's love life.
5. The Penny Dropped for Jane. Jane seemed overly concerned that Ian had sold the chippy to Weyland & Co, especially when she realised that this was the firm for which Max and Lauren worked, and Ted suspects that Dot's pussy might belong to him. Oo-er, missus!
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