Paradise Lost

Dreams seemingly attained: Paradise found. Awakening to reality: Paradise lost. Three scenes this week showed this, in very different ways with different levels of drama.

Tyrone loses

Tuesday, Tyrone going to see Kevin, telling him that it was taking too much of a toll to keep fighting him, keep hating him. It was doing more damage to him, Tyrone, than Kevin was worth. Let’s get along as work partners. But I’ll never be your mate. Wise words from Tyrone.

He’d had more than he ever imagined possible: a home, wife, child, his own business co-owned with his best mate. That mate, Kevin, destroyed Tyrone’s paradise. Now Tyrone has the guilt of his anger almost causing Kevin’s death. You can be justified in despising someone for their actions, but you will pay just as high a price as they will. The disappointment and rancour hurts you as much as their actions have.

Becky’s children

Then Friday, Becky seeing her dream walk away. Max, taken back into care, while social workers sort out the mess caused by Kylie putting a For Sale sign on a child and Becky and Steve meeting her price.

Becky has had to deal with Tracy pretending to be a responsible parent of Steve’s child. She’s had to deal with Steve believing Tracy and being worried about being a good father. She has had to deal with Steve making it clear that Amy is his child, not Becky’s, and that Max, whatever he is to Steve, is Becky’s concern. She’s had Tracy threatening to take Amy away, and is trying to cope with her own grief over that as well as Steve’s. While Steve continued to push her away: ‘like it matters to you’ type statements.

But she’s still got Max, until Steve takes a gamble on getting Child Services involved. Tell the truth, he thinks, then no one can blackmail anyone. Good in theory, but David decides to do the same thing. None of them win, especially not Max. He’s uprooted again and sent to a foster home. I only hope it’s the same one he was in before. Poor little child, poor Becky.

An English teacher

The unraveling of John Stape. Fiz finding out what he’s been doing and where Ches has been. The rescue after John takes off from the Hoyles’ basement. The camera work was great, showing him scurrying down the ginnel to his back door. Maria screams, police arrive. John is gone. Out the back, Maria says.

The final moments when Fiz sends Ches home to Katy and carefully locks and bolts the door. You know then that John is in the house.

But where? I never thought of the attic, and don’t know how he got from the back yard upstairs. But my blood ran cold when the camera moved upward from Fiz sleeping in her bed to John, above in the attic, reading Milton’s Paradise Lost.

All of this happened because he wanted to teach again. All he ever wanted to do was be an English teacher. (Also see my A defence of John Stape.)