Hope you’re all having a good weekend! Minimal Ben on Friday and no Callum (three unexpected appearances in a row was too good to be true), but it is always nice to see either of them, for however long.
Screencaps for this episode can be found here.
Phil’s in the kitchen complaining about the mess (and the table does look a bit of a state) when Ben turns up, not one to miss the perfect opportunity to make a joke about Phil getting himself a cleaner – oh wait, he’s already had one. It sounds as though he’s a bit less horrified than he was the day before, and has moved into the teasing stage, jeering at his own punchline – except Phil’s not laughing. Ben concedes, telling Phil it’s his life and he can do what he wants. It’s definitely a bit of an attitude shift and Phil picks up on it, thinking it sounds suspiciously like what Callum said to him and asks if he’s been speaking to him. Ben doesn’t answer (possibly because he doesn’t want to admit out loud that he’s whipped) but his little hesitant face tells me that they have indeed been speaking about this subject and Callum told him to suck it up and accept that if Phil wants to see Kat, he should support that.
However, Ben’s not quite there yet, and instead tries to dismiss Phil’s new dalliance with Kat as him just feeling lonely at his age, on his own. Something even Phil finds funny, scoffing at the idea that he’s on his own – he wishes. I love that little grumpy acknowledgement from him that he’s outnumbered by a lot in that house and he’s pretending they all annoy him. Not sure that’s the case all the time (I bet he secretly enjoys having a full house), but right now with Ben taking the piss, it certainly is.
Ben suggests a dating app, which Phil is definitely not keen on – but Ben reasons that he might find someone more ‘suitable’ on there. He really isn’t keen on Kat, if he’s thinking a random person on an app might be better. The Slaters and the Mitchells have always had a strained history – you’ll of course remember when Stacey whacked Phil over the head in 2019 and Kat took the rap; and in fact one of their earliest clashes involved Ben himself, when he hit Little Mo’s son Freddie, Kat’s nephew, way back in 2006. So really there’s quite a lot of animosity between them as families. Plus, I guess the events of Christmas 2019 continue to be an issue for Ben, who took on a lot of emotional impact as a result of trying to stop Phil killing himself because he was so affected by Sharon’s betrayal. He’ll know Kat has cheated before, and maybe that’s a red flag for him. I mean, Phil’s a cheater too but ‘family’ and all that. He’d do anything not to risk being put in that situation again, and so I get him being wary. But he doesn’t really know Kat, they’ve never really crossed paths in a meaningful way; and I think his opinion is definitely based on a lot of preconceptions about Kat and the Slaters as a whole. We’re probably heading for a situation where Kat proves Ben wrong or he’s forced to reconsider his opinion that Phil and Kat aren’t suited. Or it’ll go the other way and Ben will get to go ‘I told you so.’ Guess we just have to see how it all pans out!
There won’t be a Week Ahead post this week because there really is absolutely nothing for us next week. No spoilers, no pictures, and not even any news. Our writers for next week are Richard Davidson for the first half and Pete Lawson for the second half – both very good writers for Ballum; perhaps we’ll get a mention of some kind, as that would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Only one random piece of news – and that is that WordPress have teamed up with Anchor to help people turn blog posts into podcasts, with auto-generated audio. Pretty cool! And I thought why not – so if you ever fancied listening to my rambles instead of reading them, you can do so here!
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