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Why EastEnders cot death story sucks
Jan. 7th, 2011 08:04 pmLike, I suspect, a lot of former EastEnders viewers, I switched off because of the current cot death / baby swap story. Actually, I did so as soon as it became obvious that this was going to happen: Ronnie (Veronica Branning, played by Samantha Womack) carried her dead baby around the square and eventually into the Vic (the Queen Victoria pub) and found her way to the cot where Tommy, Kat Moon's new baby boy (conveniently the same sex and born the same day as Ronnie's baby) was gurgling away. Then we get the dum, dum, dum dum dum da-da-dum and the programme ends, and at that point I knew what was going to happen.
One of the most common arguments is that when a mother suffers a cot death, the last thing she wants is someone else's baby; she just wants her own, alive. I've no experience (I'm male and not a parent) but Ronnie didn't just go straight to Kat and Alfie's, but rather knocked on at least two doors to try and ask for help first. What made me switch off at this point wasn't the offensiveness but the tiresomeness of seeing yet another character in the soap dig herself into a hole, as pretty much everyone in that programme seems to do again and again and again. Up until this, Ronnie had been one of the characters with her head just about screwed on right, and it's the latest in a long line of decent characters being turned into either monsters or flakes.
Take Ben, who was formerly irritating but innocent, and seems to have turned nasty after several months in a detention centre for attacking Jordan (after being egged on by daddy Phil to "be a man"), or Adam, the guy in the wheelchair who had seemed nice, then started pressuring Lucy Beale for sex while supposedly dating Libby Fox (who got written out presumably before they could turn her nasty as well). They do not seem to want us to become attached to any of the characters, which perhaps makes sense as they're only fiction ... but it makes it that much more difficult to maintain an attachment to the show itself.
One of the most common arguments is that when a mother suffers a cot death, the last thing she wants is someone else's baby; she just wants her own, alive. I've no experience (I'm male and not a parent) but Ronnie didn't just go straight to Kat and Alfie's, but rather knocked on at least two doors to try and ask for help first. What made me switch off at this point wasn't the offensiveness but the tiresomeness of seeing yet another character in the soap dig herself into a hole, as pretty much everyone in that programme seems to do again and again and again. Up until this, Ronnie had been one of the characters with her head just about screwed on right, and it's the latest in a long line of decent characters being turned into either monsters or flakes.
Take Ben, who was formerly irritating but innocent, and seems to have turned nasty after several months in a detention centre for attacking Jordan (after being egged on by daddy Phil to "be a man"), or Adam, the guy in the wheelchair who had seemed nice, then started pressuring Lucy Beale for sex while supposedly dating Libby Fox (who got written out presumably before they could turn her nasty as well). They do not seem to want us to become attached to any of the characters, which perhaps makes sense as they're only fiction ... but it makes it that much more difficult to maintain an attachment to the show itself.
