EastEnders is certainly big on forgiveness.
Or now so jaundiced all foundered on just one fundamental belief: that nothing anyone does really matters.
It has so many characters whose moral compass is at best decidedly vague or highly flexible, it’s hard to tell what we’re meant to think of them.
Drama: Mel Owen asked Jack Branning to help her and son Hunter get away with murder in Tuesday's episode of EastEnders
Mitch for example is seemingly alright, and actually quite likeable – just because he has a super-cute kid now. It’s not a problem that last time the waster he stole £3000 from two pensioners, Ted and Patrick, who is surprisingly fine about it, implying the audience should be too.
Between them, Hayley, Kat and Alfie racked up a string of grievances/sins that included infidelity, defrauding the bereaved, driving a Vespa into an OAP, and kidnapping a baby. But again, they weren’t really bothered and deep down all love their kids and are diamond geezers etc.
Stuart Highway apparently shouldn’t be judged too harshly for anything he did to the Carters either, given Mick, Linda, Shirley, and Tina appear to have forgiven him so uniformly you’d think they’d been brainwashed by Derren Brown into forgetting it all.
Sharon Mitchell is not necessarily to blame for any unseemly/immoral conduct affecting her young lover Keanu, her husband Phil, or her stepdaughter Louise. In fact her tremulous speeches and close-ups suggest we should see her more as the victim.
Gritty: EastEnders is certainly big on forgiveness. Or now so jaundiced all foundered on just one fundamental belief: that nothing anyone does really matters
As for the storyline about Mel Owen and her son Hunter, it’s obviously not an issue (or a problem) whether that the punishment for bigamy should be death – in this case a teenage firing squad.
They weren’t exactly stricken with remorse about killing Mel’s bigamist boyfriend/fiancé/husband Ray Kelly. And they’d had no qualms about burying him in the woods (twice - the second time when he was actually dead after Hunter shot him).
Hunter had enjoyed killing his surrogate father Ray Kelly so much he’d been strutting around Albert Square’s with his gun down the back of his trousers desperate to use it again, like a pretty version of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (Dirty Hunter).
And we knew from years of seeing Mel in action that she’s a hard-nosed, conniving, cow (actually a compliment in Walford) and that her son a total psychopath (ditto).
She had ruthlessly tracked down and fitted up Ben Mitchell for example, when he nicked Aidan’s heist money.
Killer instinct: As for the storyline about Mel Owen and her son Hunter, it’s obviously not an issue (or a problem) whether that the punishment for bigamy should be death – in this case a teenage firing squad
Now though Mel’s speeches were so impassioned you began to feel
