Five Things We Learned In Corrie This Week

Parenting is not for everyone.  I'm going to say something Controversial Yet Brave now: Abi shouldn't keep that baby.  This is not a wanted child.  It's the product of a one night stand with someone who isn't her partner.  She didn't know she was pregnant and couldn't therefore properly consider whether to keep the baby.  She is on and off the drugs and drink.  She's a wreck.  Give up the baby and let him go to someone who can care for him and love him.  She's had three kids already, and two of them were taken off her and passed on to people who could look after them properly.  Seb, meanwhile, only became a model citizen once he started falling under the influence of the likes of Anna Windass and Eileen Grimshaw (remember when he beat up the father of Faye's baby so badly he ended up in a Young Offender's Institute?).  Take the baby into care and hand it over to a loving family who will look after him for his whole life and then, when he's older, he can come back to Abi and chat to her and she can explain why she wasn't in a fit state to care for him.

Obviously this won't happen because women in soap operas are baby obsessed.  It doesn't matter that Abi has been asked to leave number 13 so has nowhere to live, has separated from her husband of only a few months, and is going to have difficulty holding down a job with him, not to mention the whole drug addiction thing.  No, in the world of Corrie the very best thing for Alfie would be staying with this train wreck of a humanoid, so prepare yourself for a lot of unsympathetic social workers and poor Sally Carman being forced to cry eight times an episode.

WAKE UP!  Apparently Sam is staying awake until 1am reading about chess.  He's the only one who isn't being sent to sleep by this whole storyline.  Anyone else tuning out completely when that board appears?  I tried to concentrate hard this week, but Roy and Sam discussing the origins of the Industrial Revolution in Manchester caused me to slip into a coma, and I had to go back and watch the whole thing again.  The second time I turned off the sound so their droning voices didn't push me over the edge, and that was how I learned that Roy Cropper is a big old cheat.  In the game, Roy moved his knight as you can see in the picture above, and then Sam moved a pawn.

He moved the pawn from its home square and we'll have to assume it's not been moved before because he moved it forward two spaces.  Roy's response was to move... his pawn?

Roy moved his pawn diagonally, into the vacant space behind Sam's pawn, and declared checkmate.  No wonder Sam was so surprised that he'd lost; he was probably operating under the rules of chess that say pawns can only move diagonally when they take an opponent's piece.  That's how Roy has been trouncing the little boy, pulling off illegal moves over and over then claiming it's "Vladimirov's Thunderbolt" or something.  He's a filthy disgusting cheat and should be publicly humiliated.  Either that or Jude Riordan was meant to move that pawn forward only one space but did two by mistake so Roy couldn't take the piece but he did the move anyway because they were filming very quickly and they thought that nobody would be sad and boring enough to pause the show and look at the actual game.  More fool you, Corrie directors; I am that sad and boring.

Yeah Leanne, me too.

Edited 14/3/2022 to add: much cleverer people than me have pointed out in the comments that this is a legitimate move called en passant, so you can basically ignore this whole section.  In my defence this was explained in dialogue and when Sam and Roy were talking my brain was playing a monkey clashing cymbals like Homer Simpson because God knows that was more interesting.  I'd like to apologise for misleading you, constant readers, and I'd also like to apologise to Mr Royston Cropper for ever doubting his honesty.  I will be flagellating myself as punishment for the rest of the evening.

Tie up the loose ends.  Two years ago this week the pandemic was really starting to ravage the UK.  I know it seems like longer than that but nope, only two years.  It did, of course, cause havoc on Corrie, causing the show to shut down and entire plotlines to be rejigged and rewritten.  In the shuffle, it's inevitable that there were casualties, and this week the writers tried to make things up to some of the people involved.  They brought back Kimberley Hart-Simpson as Nicky, presumably as an apology for the weird and rapid way she was written out of the show.  It was hard to have a character play Daniel's new lover when nobody could get within two metres of one another so she got some handy cash and disappeared into the night.  Now she's back as a teaching assistant at Wethy High; yes, that place is now employing former prostitutes in the classroom.  It really is a den of iniquity.  She was surprisingly cheery and happy to see Daniel, but that's probably because she realised Daisy was the one now being forced into his cardigan-based sex games so she was safe.

Elsewhere Laura, after two years of general indifference, suddenly remembered that Rick was still missing and looked for a private detective to find him.  Where is Rick's corpse - do we know?  There was a lot of shenanigans with his watch and some metal detecting, but because they couldn't actually film on location at the time, it was all done via people running around outside the Kabin with spades in their hand.  The implication then was that Gary had his body in the back of the van, but we never saw him rebury the body, so where did it go?  Unless I've simply forgotten, which is entirely possible - there was rather a lot going on at the time.  Laura seems to be asking lots of uncomfortable questions so I'm wondering if they're finally going to make good on my original theory that Gary was going to murder her and she'll suddenly "take a turn for the worse" when he shoves a pillow over her face.

Ronnie also returned to our screens this week, a character whose introduction was completely wrecked when another lockdown meant Lorna Laidlaw couldn't appear onscreen - a bit of a problem when there's a whole storyline about her possibly having his baby.  It resolved itself quickly and badly with some stuff about a camper van that was promptly forgotten, but now he's back, trying to persuade his brother to flip a house with him.  Obviously Ed turned him down because he was far too busy - presumably with that house he bought last year that Grace blackmailed him into giving her for nothing.  Now she's gone Ed must be spending all his time and effort doing it up to sell on... right?

Share and share alike.  Daisy took action to protect the Rovers' patrons from date rape drugs by getting in a load of anti-spiking lids for people's drinks.  Daniel approved, and so did Amy when she appeared in the pub, so Daisy gave her a load to take home.

Enthused by her idea, Daisy walked down the street and handed over a load of the lids to Debbie at the bistro, explaining how great they were, then wondered whether to head for the Flying Horse to give them a batch too.

Meanwhile Jennie is doing the pub accounts and wondering why she spent money on a thousand anti-spiking lids but only seems to have eight left.

Love only goes so far.  Maria continued with her political campaigning, because apparently we're persisting with that, and unveiled her publicity campaign.  It was remarkable how many people thought her slogan should be something to do with hair - it's almost as if the rest of her Street sees her as nothing more than a nice haircut and a pair of scissors and nothing more. 

Gary brought the posters round and, interestingly, it seems that Maria is running under the name "Maria Connor" rather than her married name.  I imagine she sat Gary down at some point and said, "look, I love you babes, but Maria Windass is a really stupid name, so I'm not changing it."  If only Carla Barlow had done the same thing.

There was a great deal of talk about blancmange this week which made the author consider getting some because he's not had it in years.  Then I remembered I've not had it in years because it's horrible.  Tell me I'm wrong on Twitter @merseytart.

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