30 May-3 June

(It’s not quite a resumption of regular updates, but it’s a start!)

The past is a peculiar thing in EastEnders. Nine times out of ten, it’s ignored or forgotten about; glossed over by the characters as they go about their day-to-day lives, because if they allowed themselves to dwell on everything that had happened to them since setting foot in Albert Square, they would never bring themselves to leave their warm cocoon of a duvet in the morning and face the bleak reality of life in a soap opera.

More importantly, remembering the past would make social interaction in Soapland all but impossible. Family gatherings would be a nightmare beyond belief.

“Jack? How are you? I thought I’d invite all of Jim’s family round for lunch on Sunday, if you’re free? So that’ll be you, and your wife – how’s she doing, by the way, since kidnapping that baby? – and I suppose we ought to invite her sister, since she is the mother of one of your many children…which means we should probably invite her boyfriend too, even if he is the biological father of the baby you thought was yours… But don’t worry, it won’t be awkward! Because I’ll also invite your brother Max, the one who you beat to a pulp a couple of weeks ago, you remember, you nearly ran off to France with his wife…and Carol as well, of course, though it’s a shame none of her children are around these days, with Bianca in prison and Billie dead…wasn’t Billie responsible for you ending up with a bullet in the brain and totally paralysed (but not really), by the way? What’s that? You can’t make it? Oh, what a shame…”

“Hey Janine, thought I’d let you know I’m moving to Dubai for a bit. Don’t worry about the kids, their Grandma Carol will be looking after them – that’s right, the woman so messed-up by grief a couple of months ago she had a torrid affair with her son’s best friend – but I just wanted to make sure you’d be okay. You know, what with that whole thing a few months back where you stabbed yourself in the gut after trying to poison your own husband, and never had any sort of medical help or psychiatric follow-up. You’re okay with all that now, right? Just checking.”

“Morning Max! Would you mind picking up Oscar from nursery for me? By the way, did you realise it’s the three-year anniversary of the time I tried to bury you alive today? How time flies! Sorry about that and everything.”
“That’s all right, Tan, I did spend six months shagging my dead son’s girlfriend after all – and bloody loved it to be honest, would have kept right on doing it if she hadn’t turned me down! I’ll get Lauren to pick up Oscar. Hey, while we’re reminiscing, remember that time she tried to kill me? How we laughed, eh?”

The past in EastEnders is not just a foreign country, it’s the country you visited on the worst holiday of your life; the one where your luggage got lost, the hotel turned out to be a building site, you all got food poisoning, your boyfriend got into a fight and you had to bail him out of a foreign jail, you got thrown off the flight home for being drunk and disorderly, and then you returned home to find your dog had died. It’s best left forgotten.

But a strange wind seemed to be sweeping through Albert Square this week, making people acknowledge and even remember the past in small doses. Yusef, remembering briefly he’s supposed to be a GP between all that swanning round the Square smirking at Masood, actually completed a medical reference for Phil with the information that he’s a recovering crack addict and alcoholic with a history of heart problems. Phil’s outrage was understandable. This wasn’t the Walford way! Phil’s heart attack was a whole four months ago, that minor addiction to a Class A drug a good five months before that. This simply wasn’t playing fair. Clearly, the only sane solution was to find a baseball bat and kidnap the good doctor.

Similarly, Kat’s initial refusal to forgive Roxy for bringing her son’s kidnapper back to the Square seemed churlish in the extreme. That was three whole weeks ago! It’s a month and a half since Kat got her baby back and the status quo was restored, in what universe would that not be considered ample time to get over it? Reality? But this isn’t Reality, this is EastEnders! Had Kat forgotten the rules of running the Queen Vic? No lifetime ban from the pub has ever lasted more than a week and a half. (Janine’s weekly bans often barely make it past the weekend.) Luckily, the moment of madness quickly passed and Kat managed to plaster a fake smile on her face in time to serve drinks to the sister of Tommy’s kidnapper and Tommy’s biological father. The nation breathed a sigh of relief. It was touch and go there for a second. If the residents of Walford started bearing grudges against the people who had done them wrong, no one would ever talk to each other at all.

Elsewhere on the Square, Syed was also breaking the rules of Albert Square by remembering – not just once, but on three separate occasions – that he was still technically married to Amira and would need to get round to divorcing her at some point. This was groundbreaking stuff. Divorces are only mentioned on-screen in EastEnders if both characters are still around for tense scenes where divorce papers are served at the worst possible moment. Once you leave Walford, one assumes a divorce just sort of happens automatically, what with the fact that you’ve been erased out of existence and will never be mentioned by your family or formerly-close friends ever again. Syed has a wife? Next you’ll be telling me he has a sister who used to live in the Square, was very close to both her parents, got lost somewhere in Pakistan and has never been mentioned since, failing to return for either of her brothers’ weddings or the birth of her new sibling… But wait, Shabnam got mentioned as well this week in a ‘reminiscing about the past’ scene between Syed and Zainab. What exactly is going on here?

And The Past – yes, those capital letters are deliberate – was the inspiration for our big plot of the week, when Masood kidnapped Yusef, took him to an abandoned warehouse, tied him to a wheely office chair (“Wheeee!” the audience cried as it spun across the floor…), and threatened him in a half-hearted sort of way. The whole thing was an excuse for the two of them to settle down for a bit of a gossip about the good old days in Pakistan, when Masood ‘stole’ his wife and Yusef’s family attempted to set her on fire. These events apparently left Yusef a bit twisted and obsessed with revenge on Masood, despite the 30-odd years and a new wife and daughter in between. I don’t know whether these events were also responsible for making Yusef a smooth, charming, charismatic, enigmatic, manipulative bastard, but if they were…bravo, Khan family, bravo. He’s the best villain EastEnders has seen in many a year. Whatever Masood does, Yusef is ahead of him at every turn. (Admittedly, you don’t need a lot of intelligence to outwit a man who’s just taken advice from Phil Mitchell – because kidnapping someone and driving them to a random abandoned warehouse has worked out for you so well in the past, right Phil?) It takes an severely unhinged man to cover his own face in bruises and pour petrol all over his nice suit, but my god Yusef did it with style.

I had forgotten, of course. The Past is not entirely forgotten about in EastEnders; it’s just only remembered when needed for plot purposes of the revenge variety. It would severely hamper everyday living on the Square, but when needed, The Past is a very useful tool come award time, allowing the actors to polish up their show reels and the audience to indulge in some good old-fashioned entertaining soap drama. Well played, EastEnders, well played.

Tags: amira, billie, carol, dot, jack, janine, kat, lauren, masood, max, michael, phil, ricky, ronnie, roxy, shabnam, syed, tanya, the unwritten rules of albert square, yusef