This show goes from bad to worse, and I don't think there's anything that can save it. Laura Poliakoff, genetic composition alone, is a writer head and shoulders above the rest on the show, but even she couldn't do anything with the shitstorm this show has become.
Consider tonight. There was the repetitive, mind-numbingly boring approach to Ian's health concerns, using the old EastEnders' chestnut of denial whenever a health issue storyline is raised, scene after scene of Ian/Carol/Phil/whoever gorging/working furiously/drinking in denial of whatever it is eating away at their bodies and their minds. In Ian's case, it's played out as a dorky family sitcom, another one of EastEnders' favourite motifs, since the days of Kate Harwood. It doesn't work, but, dear God, do they keep trying to push the cutesy, cutesy element. There was what was, arguably, the most disturbing storyline in tonight's episode, about the cold, calculating, willful humiliation of Rebecca Fowler, whose poor judgement in rushing into a sexual misadventure with one boy leads to her victimisation in a tale that's nothing less than abject and budding teenaged misogyny, which will bud into even more abject adult misogyny. There was the penny dropping for Shirley, or beginning to drop, regarding the role Whitney is playing in Mick's life in the absence of Linda ...
And it all played out as an insignificant backdrop to the all-pervading, all-encompassing, multi-storylined dominance of the Fox non-sisters, who are never absent from any episode. They have so many storylines on the go, Denise especially, There are so many storylines for her that I;ve lost count. Kirkwood and Newman used to people their episodes with assorted Brannings and their satellites. There were enough Brannings of all shapes, sizes, ages and colours to sustain weeks of episodes where we'd see nothing but some of their ilk. Now, with Denise and Kim, TPTB just keep throwing storylines at her, wondering which one will stick and give her relevance.
There's Denise the educated woman, with her nose in a book (I ain't stupid). Quite.
There's Denise the social warrior, battling to save a dysfunctional community coming apart at the seams, when previously, she didn't give a damn about this.
There's Denise, who witnessed Mick and Whitney exchange a passionate snog at the hospital the night of the bus crash. (This means that she will probably clue Shirley in on this so that Shirley's penny finally drops about Mick and Whitney),
There's Denise the victim of an unjust corporation for which she works, the entitled woman who thinks she should be able to say her piece about anything, even the entity who provides her with an income, ne'mind she's assaulted a child, pilfered goods from The Minute Mart and refused to serve customers.
There's Denise the Earth Mother, who gave her child up for adoption because she wanted him to enjoy a loving relationship with a two-parent family and who wanted to do this for herself in order that she could have some quality "me" time after a lifetime of raising thankless, ungrateful children - and a robber and a rapist along the way. This was countered by the ignorant, obtrusive, obnoxious Kim, who screeched continuously about Denise's child being "raised by strangers". It was a punch in the gut to every person who's adopted a child and every child who's ever been adopted.
Tonight the show packed the final sucker punch. Denise sees a mixed race couple outside Social Services office, with their baby. At first, I must admit, I thought this was Denise's baby and that she'd seen the couple who were adopting the child - another twist in the tale akin to Sonia inexplicably knowing where the fosterers of Rebecca (who subsequently adopted her) lived. As she leaves the meeting, where she's officially signed away all rights to her child and where Trish Barnes warned her that, having signed this document, it would be extremely difficult and complicated to try to get the child back, should she change her mind. (Hey, this is what Sunita from Coronation Street told Sonia, but - as we all know - Sonia managed to get her daughter back five years after the fact), Denise sees the same couple, fractious and quarrelling, trying to quell their crying baby as they struggled to put him into the infant's seat in the back of their car, whereas previously, they had been shown cuddling a sleeping infant and walking arm and arm into the building.
This final glimpse gives the po-faced, sneering Denise an epiphany. Ne'mind the letter from the adoptive parents to Denise, which Trish gave her, which was probably a very heartfelt thank you for providing them with a son they loved and cherished, Denise now worries that the child has been given to some terrible people, who'll make sure that he'll have a horrible childhood, and that's just the absolute sucker punch to adoptive parents and to adoptees.
EastEnders should be ashamed of themselves. Does this incredibly self-absorbed, egotistic woman not realise that Social Services are so persnickety in terms of adoption that they know more about the prospective parents in question than they know about themselves. The couple also has an adopted daughter, they would have been well-known and high up on the good scale of Social Services approved foster and adoptive parents.
Then there's Denise, the self-pitying, self-absorbed, self-pitier, who reaches for the bottle every time something significant doesn't go her way. Lucas won't sleep with her? She gets drunk and bonds with Shirley over common reminiscences of Kevin. Libby wants an abortion, depriving Denise of a grandchild, who would, no doubt, be a fully paid-up member, worshipping at the altar of Denise? She gets drunk and sleeps with Phil Mitchell, resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. Today, when Shirley starts moaning about Mick preferring to meet with a bank manager in the company of the younger, more nubile Whitney rather than the tough, rough-edged Shirley (his mother and business partner) and Carmel starts whining about Kush and Shakil not listening, both wailing about the trials and tribulations of motherhood, Denise starts reaching for the bottle, and before the end of the afternoon, she and Shirley are three sheets to the wind and then some.
Kim's on the trail of finding out who the baby's father is, and so we'll probably have Sharon's marriage torn asunder by the Fox sisters' eventual efforts to radge Phil Mitchell up about this. There'll be a big Mitchell raging bull and Phil will wrest the baby from the arms of that poor couple, who are largely irrelevant because, after all, they're "strangers", and you can't have blood kin being raised by strangers.
In all of this sordid situation, Denise has never once given thought to the fact that Phil Mitchell had a wife. In fact, the night she disclosed the paternity of her child to Shirley, she sat at a table in the Vic where Sharon was expressing an unfounded hope of perhaps having Phil's baby before menopause set in, and yet, Denise was more concerned about hurting Shirley's feelings for having slept with Phil that once rather than thinking about how this situation would hurt Phil's wife.
SOC's obsession with putting Denise front and centre has done this character no good at all. Even today, with Patrick and Carmel going to all that trouble of fixing a nice lunch for her, and she treated them all with contempt and that po-faced sneer which always looks as though she's smelling a big stink. Well, she's the Big Stink at the moment. Because familiarity breeds contempt - as we found out when EastEnders became The Branning Show under Kirkwood, when it became The Carter Show under DTC, when it became the Stacey and Ronnie Show under Santer, and so it's becoming now that SOC has made this The Denise Show.
Maybe the next EP will show Diane Parish something nice and shiny ... an ax.
Rebecca. This is actually quite disturbing, and the character of Keegan has some serious issues against women. He's the sort of sick little psychopath who would actually be likely to rape a woman at some point in life. At the moment, he seems intent on targeting women to humiliate, bait and psychologically torture.
What's disturbing is watching both Shakil and Louise, Shakil especially, come so far in Rebecca's defence, only to tamp down their efforts and revert inside their respective shells of fear in the face of their contemporaries. Shakil, at least, made the effort of showing Rebecca the video that had been making the rounds, the revenge porn. He knows it has to be stopped, and he counselled going to the head teacher with this. He was stupid enough not to realise that the head would need to determine who started circulation of this video.
Rebecca thought Shakil was behind this, but it didn't take long to suss that Keegan had done it, and it was, indeed, pathetic to see Shakil meekly follow the demanding Keegan out the door of the school and later, not offer up any sort of word of defence on her behalf when she called Keegan out for what he was - there's definitely a problem there with his mother or some woman. Rebecca hit him where it hurt the most, but she'll only be the one to suffer from this. It was appalling to see Shakil sit by and say nothing in her defence, and if he thought enough with his belaboured single brain cell, he'd realise that he had nothing to fear from Keegan.
Keegan's vendettas are exclusively against women - Louise, Denise, Rebecca - the one time he was confronted by a male, Kush, he ran. And he ran when Denise smacked him. I'd be willing to bet the teacher whom he assaulted at his former school was a woman also. Shakil could stop that little scrote dead in his tracks simply by walking away from his effronteries.
As for Louise, she's surely a disgrace to the Mitchells. Would Roxy Mitchell stand by and smile apologetically whilst the disgustingly cartoonish Sniggle and Snaggle make seriously cruel barbs to Rebecca's face? What has she got to lose to these girls? They laughed in her face at Keegan's catfishing of her. She owes them nothing, because they don't really like her at all, they just use her for their own convenience.
Instead of grassing Keegan or even telling Stacey and Martin what's happened, she cries in her room, and she'll probably unburden herself, sexually, again with the equally cruel and manipulative Preston. She really should trust her parents, because her friends don't cut the mustard and her aunt has literally betrayed her.
This storyline can't end quick enough for me, because then perhaps we can get rid of the Russian operative pretending to be American - perhaps he's a teenaged spy - and the part-time non-residents who are stinking up the Square as much as Denise.
Third-Rate Romance Low-Rent Rendezvous. Mick continues to treat Whitney as his wife, in everything but sexual relations. He credits her with saving the Pancake Day race and turning a tidy profit in the pub, and she preens. She's so full of herself, she thinks she can make banter with Shirley about Shirley's dodgy ways harming Mick, prompting Shirley to bristle.
The scales begin to drop from Shirley's eyes, however, when Mick agrees to talk with a bank official about a possible loan, and decides that Shirley shouldn't be there with him - Shirley, his mother, who owns a stake in the business and who's name is above the door. Instead, he wants Whitney by his side - as he jokes, someone with a warm personality, a winning smile, basically someone younger and prettier. Will the bank official think she's Linda, as the hospital authorities thought she was Mick's wife the night she was injured?
It's only when Shirley's boozed up that she snarks to Mick that Whitney, technically, isn't part of the Carter family anymore. Lee will always be part of the tribe, even in absentia, but Whitney has no legal attachment to this family. She has no child by Lee, and in her drunkenness, Shirley begins to question why this girl is still there, living upstairs in a weird arrangement with Mick and Johnny, who's too busy being used as a babysitter to Sylvie or involved in his uni work to notice, yet, what's about to go on under his nose.
Mick tries to give some lame excuse about him being part of Linda's family because Elaine virtually brought him up after he impregnated Linda, and there's the difference. Mick is the father of Elaine's grandchildren. He is Linda's life partner and now her husband. He would always be a part of Elaine's family. Here is Whitney, who was part and parcel of the orchestration which brought Lee to a psychological low, sitting pretty and acting like the pub's landlady, and the eldest son is reduced to some sad exile, to "thrive" as his petty father projected.
Shirley's pretty suss. It's not going to take her long before she realises what's happening. Mick is a prick, and Whitney deserves a mightly slap from Linda.
The Beale Machine. A pretty perceptive health issue storyline addressed in Tuesday's episode is reduced to pithy sitcom tonight. Why does EastEnders make every character confronted with a health issue go into stark denial - Carol refusing to admit she has cancer and working like a skivvy, Tanya going on the razz and stopping chemotherapy, Ian, taking stock that he'll have to see his GP, now eyes a packet of donuts, scoffs them all and writes a will, where he leaves all his tat to his friends and relatives, figuring that Jane will sort out all the assets and businesses.
She still thinks Ian just needs a check-up and a diet and exercise plan. She doesn't realise that he's been texted to see his doctor immediately because something is wrong that needs to be addressed - because Ian is lying to her. As everyone does in this sort of storyline.
Consider tonight. There was the repetitive, mind-numbingly boring approach to Ian's health concerns, using the old EastEnders' chestnut of denial whenever a health issue storyline is raised, scene after scene of Ian/Carol/Phil/whoever gorging/working furiously/drinking in denial of whatever it is eating away at their bodies and their minds. In Ian's case, it's played out as a dorky family sitcom, another one of EastEnders' favourite motifs, since the days of Kate Harwood. It doesn't work, but, dear God, do they keep trying to push the cutesy, cutesy element. There was what was, arguably, the most disturbing storyline in tonight's episode, about the cold, calculating, willful humiliation of Rebecca Fowler, whose poor judgement in rushing into a sexual misadventure with one boy leads to her victimisation in a tale that's nothing less than abject and budding teenaged misogyny, which will bud into even more abject adult misogyny. There was the penny dropping for Shirley, or beginning to drop, regarding the role Whitney is playing in Mick's life in the absence of Linda ...
And it all played out as an insignificant backdrop to the all-pervading, all-encompassing, multi-storylined dominance of the Fox non-sisters, who are never absent from any episode. They have so many storylines on the go, Denise especially, There are so many storylines for her that I;ve lost count. Kirkwood and Newman used to people their episodes with assorted Brannings and their satellites. There were enough Brannings of all shapes, sizes, ages and colours to sustain weeks of episodes where we'd see nothing but some of their ilk. Now, with Denise and Kim, TPTB just keep throwing storylines at her, wondering which one will stick and give her relevance.
There's Denise the educated woman, with her nose in a book (I ain't stupid). Quite.
There's Denise the social warrior, battling to save a dysfunctional community coming apart at the seams, when previously, she didn't give a damn about this.
There's Denise, who witnessed Mick and Whitney exchange a passionate snog at the hospital the night of the bus crash. (This means that she will probably clue Shirley in on this so that Shirley's penny finally drops about Mick and Whitney),
There's Denise the victim of an unjust corporation for which she works, the entitled woman who thinks she should be able to say her piece about anything, even the entity who provides her with an income, ne'mind she's assaulted a child, pilfered goods from The Minute Mart and refused to serve customers.
There's Denise the Earth Mother, who gave her child up for adoption because she wanted him to enjoy a loving relationship with a two-parent family and who wanted to do this for herself in order that she could have some quality "me" time after a lifetime of raising thankless, ungrateful children - and a robber and a rapist along the way. This was countered by the ignorant, obtrusive, obnoxious Kim, who screeched continuously about Denise's child being "raised by strangers". It was a punch in the gut to every person who's adopted a child and every child who's ever been adopted.
Tonight the show packed the final sucker punch. Denise sees a mixed race couple outside Social Services office, with their baby. At first, I must admit, I thought this was Denise's baby and that she'd seen the couple who were adopting the child - another twist in the tale akin to Sonia inexplicably knowing where the fosterers of Rebecca (who subsequently adopted her) lived. As she leaves the meeting, where she's officially signed away all rights to her child and where Trish Barnes warned her that, having signed this document, it would be extremely difficult and complicated to try to get the child back, should she change her mind. (Hey, this is what Sunita from Coronation Street told Sonia, but - as we all know - Sonia managed to get her daughter back five years after the fact), Denise sees the same couple, fractious and quarrelling, trying to quell their crying baby as they struggled to put him into the infant's seat in the back of their car, whereas previously, they had been shown cuddling a sleeping infant and walking arm and arm into the building.
This final glimpse gives the po-faced, sneering Denise an epiphany. Ne'mind the letter from the adoptive parents to Denise, which Trish gave her, which was probably a very heartfelt thank you for providing them with a son they loved and cherished, Denise now worries that the child has been given to some terrible people, who'll make sure that he'll have a horrible childhood, and that's just the absolute sucker punch to adoptive parents and to adoptees.
EastEnders should be ashamed of themselves. Does this incredibly self-absorbed, egotistic woman not realise that Social Services are so persnickety in terms of adoption that they know more about the prospective parents in question than they know about themselves. The couple also has an adopted daughter, they would have been well-known and high up on the good scale of Social Services approved foster and adoptive parents.
Then there's Denise, the self-pitying, self-absorbed, self-pitier, who reaches for the bottle every time something significant doesn't go her way. Lucas won't sleep with her? She gets drunk and bonds with Shirley over common reminiscences of Kevin. Libby wants an abortion, depriving Denise of a grandchild, who would, no doubt, be a fully paid-up member, worshipping at the altar of Denise? She gets drunk and sleeps with Phil Mitchell, resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. Today, when Shirley starts moaning about Mick preferring to meet with a bank manager in the company of the younger, more nubile Whitney rather than the tough, rough-edged Shirley (his mother and business partner) and Carmel starts whining about Kush and Shakil not listening, both wailing about the trials and tribulations of motherhood, Denise starts reaching for the bottle, and before the end of the afternoon, she and Shirley are three sheets to the wind and then some.
Kim's on the trail of finding out who the baby's father is, and so we'll probably have Sharon's marriage torn asunder by the Fox sisters' eventual efforts to radge Phil Mitchell up about this. There'll be a big Mitchell raging bull and Phil will wrest the baby from the arms of that poor couple, who are largely irrelevant because, after all, they're "strangers", and you can't have blood kin being raised by strangers.
In all of this sordid situation, Denise has never once given thought to the fact that Phil Mitchell had a wife. In fact, the night she disclosed the paternity of her child to Shirley, she sat at a table in the Vic where Sharon was expressing an unfounded hope of perhaps having Phil's baby before menopause set in, and yet, Denise was more concerned about hurting Shirley's feelings for having slept with Phil that once rather than thinking about how this situation would hurt Phil's wife.
SOC's obsession with putting Denise front and centre has done this character no good at all. Even today, with Patrick and Carmel going to all that trouble of fixing a nice lunch for her, and she treated them all with contempt and that po-faced sneer which always looks as though she's smelling a big stink. Well, she's the Big Stink at the moment. Because familiarity breeds contempt - as we found out when EastEnders became The Branning Show under Kirkwood, when it became The Carter Show under DTC, when it became the Stacey and Ronnie Show under Santer, and so it's becoming now that SOC has made this The Denise Show.
Maybe the next EP will show Diane Parish something nice and shiny ... an ax.
Rebecca. This is actually quite disturbing, and the character of Keegan has some serious issues against women. He's the sort of sick little psychopath who would actually be likely to rape a woman at some point in life. At the moment, he seems intent on targeting women to humiliate, bait and psychologically torture.
What's disturbing is watching both Shakil and Louise, Shakil especially, come so far in Rebecca's defence, only to tamp down their efforts and revert inside their respective shells of fear in the face of their contemporaries. Shakil, at least, made the effort of showing Rebecca the video that had been making the rounds, the revenge porn. He knows it has to be stopped, and he counselled going to the head teacher with this. He was stupid enough not to realise that the head would need to determine who started circulation of this video.
Rebecca thought Shakil was behind this, but it didn't take long to suss that Keegan had done it, and it was, indeed, pathetic to see Shakil meekly follow the demanding Keegan out the door of the school and later, not offer up any sort of word of defence on her behalf when she called Keegan out for what he was - there's definitely a problem there with his mother or some woman. Rebecca hit him where it hurt the most, but she'll only be the one to suffer from this. It was appalling to see Shakil sit by and say nothing in her defence, and if he thought enough with his belaboured single brain cell, he'd realise that he had nothing to fear from Keegan.
Keegan's vendettas are exclusively against women - Louise, Denise, Rebecca - the one time he was confronted by a male, Kush, he ran. And he ran when Denise smacked him. I'd be willing to bet the teacher whom he assaulted at his former school was a woman also. Shakil could stop that little scrote dead in his tracks simply by walking away from his effronteries.
As for Louise, she's surely a disgrace to the Mitchells. Would Roxy Mitchell stand by and smile apologetically whilst the disgustingly cartoonish Sniggle and Snaggle make seriously cruel barbs to Rebecca's face? What has she got to lose to these girls? They laughed in her face at Keegan's catfishing of her. She owes them nothing, because they don't really like her at all, they just use her for their own convenience.
Instead of grassing Keegan or even telling Stacey and Martin what's happened, she cries in her room, and she'll probably unburden herself, sexually, again with the equally cruel and manipulative Preston. She really should trust her parents, because her friends don't cut the mustard and her aunt has literally betrayed her.
This storyline can't end quick enough for me, because then perhaps we can get rid of the Russian operative pretending to be American - perhaps he's a teenaged spy - and the part-time non-residents who are stinking up the Square as much as Denise.
Third-Rate Romance Low-Rent Rendezvous. Mick continues to treat Whitney as his wife, in everything but sexual relations. He credits her with saving the Pancake Day race and turning a tidy profit in the pub, and she preens. She's so full of herself, she thinks she can make banter with Shirley about Shirley's dodgy ways harming Mick, prompting Shirley to bristle.
The scales begin to drop from Shirley's eyes, however, when Mick agrees to talk with a bank official about a possible loan, and decides that Shirley shouldn't be there with him - Shirley, his mother, who owns a stake in the business and who's name is above the door. Instead, he wants Whitney by his side - as he jokes, someone with a warm personality, a winning smile, basically someone younger and prettier. Will the bank official think she's Linda, as the hospital authorities thought she was Mick's wife the night she was injured?
It's only when Shirley's boozed up that she snarks to Mick that Whitney, technically, isn't part of the Carter family anymore. Lee will always be part of the tribe, even in absentia, but Whitney has no legal attachment to this family. She has no child by Lee, and in her drunkenness, Shirley begins to question why this girl is still there, living upstairs in a weird arrangement with Mick and Johnny, who's too busy being used as a babysitter to Sylvie or involved in his uni work to notice, yet, what's about to go on under his nose.
Mick tries to give some lame excuse about him being part of Linda's family because Elaine virtually brought him up after he impregnated Linda, and there's the difference. Mick is the father of Elaine's grandchildren. He is Linda's life partner and now her husband. He would always be a part of Elaine's family. Here is Whitney, who was part and parcel of the orchestration which brought Lee to a psychological low, sitting pretty and acting like the pub's landlady, and the eldest son is reduced to some sad exile, to "thrive" as his petty father projected.
Shirley's pretty suss. It's not going to take her long before she realises what's happening. Mick is a prick, and Whitney deserves a mightly slap from Linda.
The Beale Machine. A pretty perceptive health issue storyline addressed in Tuesday's episode is reduced to pithy sitcom tonight. Why does EastEnders make every character confronted with a health issue go into stark denial - Carol refusing to admit she has cancer and working like a skivvy, Tanya going on the razz and stopping chemotherapy, Ian, taking stock that he'll have to see his GP, now eyes a packet of donuts, scoffs them all and writes a will, where he leaves all his tat to his friends and relatives, figuring that Jane will sort out all the assets and businesses.
She still thinks Ian just needs a check-up and a diet and exercise plan. She doesn't realise that he's been texted to see his doctor immediately because something is wrong that needs to be addressed - because Ian is lying to her. As everyone does in this sort of storyline.
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