Ave Maria!

It's great to have Maria back, isn't it?  I've missed her, and her lovely shiny hair.  She's such a good advert for the salon, unlike Audrey, who's probably going to stick with that 1986 ultra-do until she's buried, no matter what damage all that Elnett does to the ozone layer.

Sadly, Maria's back to demonstrate her notoriously bad taste in men.  Her instinct for sniffing out a violent psychopath continues to be uncanny, as she rubs up against Chris's admittedly impressive abs with undisguised glee.  A man like that is catnip to Maria; he's good looking, charming, and mentally unstable.  No wonder David took it so hard when she rejected him - he's got all the personality defects, and she still won't throw him a bone.

Perhaps this is all a reaction against her first fiance, Tyrone Nice-but-Dim.  Maria came into the show as the nation's least convincing kennel maid.  If there's one thing to be said about girls who spend their days wiping up poodle faeces, it's that they don't have much time to maintain their lovely shiny hair.  I'm betting there were a couple of scraggy collies who went hungry of an evening so she could go round the back and condition.

After years of being involved with Tyrone, a man whose basic loveliness can't disguise the fact that he's a Flump in human form, Maria finally broke free of his podgy arms to sleep with Toyah Battersby's boyfriend.  In an early example of her innate stupidity (she does share a gene pool with Kirk, after all) Maria failed to work out how to use a condom and/or the morning after pill, and became pregnant.  The heartbreak was too much for Toyah, and she ran off to Holby to become a doctor, leaving Maria to get an abortion.

She took this setback on the chin and shacked up with Nicky Platt (Adam Rickitt version).  Despite them sharing a passion for lovely, shiny hair, he was too dumb even for her, and not even the delights of Canada could distract her from the battles over the VO5.  She returned to Weatherfield to resume work at the salon, ramming curlers into Emily Bishop and loudly bemoaning her love life.

Passion intervened when Maria took up with Charlie Stubbs, a man who was part granite, part Mr Toad's Wild Ride.  He was her landlord, and Maria didn't question the fact that her tenancy agreement included a clause entitling him to the occasional knee trembler up against the water heater.  Again: she's not very bright.  The intervention of demon harpy Tracy Barlow - plus Charlie's attempt to drown David Platt - made Maria think perhaps she'd made a mistake, and she moved onto Liam Connor.

Who can blame her?  He was tall, handsome, available.  The fact that he'd actively concealed the death of an asylum seeking machinist to cover up dodgy working practices at Underworld was probably a plus in her book.  Nothing could stop Maria from ensnaring her man: not his recoil of horror when she forced a puppy on him, not his quivers of repulsion when she dragged him off for weekends away, not even the glaring erection he got every time Carla wandered past.  Even Liam waking from a coma and calling out for his sister in law rather than her didn't put Maria off; she loves it when a man treats her like filth and simply uses her as arm candy.

Once again, her failure to grasp the basic principles of contraception in the 21st century lead to her getting knocked up by Liam, just before he was hit by a car.  Maria was distraught, and spent roughly the next fourteen years wailing and sobbing in scenes which were slightly less interesting than Norris complaining about his corns.  Things got so bad Maria's lovely, shiny hair got a bit dirty round the edges.

With such a horrible situation upon her, she had to find a way out, and the answer came to her in a flash as she squeezed out a baby on Formby Sands; why not shack up with her husband's murderer?  Of course she didn't know he was a killer at the time, even though she'd spent months ranting and raving and writing MURDERER over the shutters at Underworld in Dulux.  When Tony explained that she was mistaken and he'd not killed anyone, she totally believed him, and immediately threw Liam's possessions into the Oxfam Clothes Bank so he'd have room in her wardrobe.

Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Tony really was a nutcase after all, though the truth didn't really hit Maria until he'd more or less sat her down with a projector and a PowerPoint presentation to explain the hows and whys.  Horrified, Maria fled to stay with her in-laws; another sign of her increasing mental instability was the fact that she willingly volunteered to spend time with Helen Connor, Ireland's version of the Medusa.

Ireland's nice enough, but it's a country of only six million people, and they're pretty spread out.  If Maria was ever going to hook up with another loony with nice arms but a very short fuse, she'd have to return to Weatherfield, and she did so just in time to be kidnapped by Tony Gordon.  The experience was so pleasant and untraumatic for her, she moved back permanently shortly afterwards.

Now we have the new, confident Maria; she has baby Liam to look after, so she'll obviously not do anything to harm his precious little head.  Apart from go for a drink with a man who was last seen being possessed by Satan and trying to eject Billie Piper into space in Doctor Who.  He's got nice biceps, though, who cares, eh?  He can spend his weekends clubbing Cheryl into a coma, but so long as he buys Maria a bunch of flowers from Dev's every other month and tells her he's changed, she'll be all over him.  Maria will be happy with any borderline sociopath so long as he keeps her supplied in L'Oreal.  She has lovely, shiny hair to maintain, and long may she continue.