ok, I know some people are still trying to make sense of this current storyline with Becky's return, so here's my foolish attempt to dissect what it's working towards and why we're seeing it unfold the way that we are.
Let's start with where we're heading. It's been clear to me for a while that this story is building up to Lisa (and Betsy) experiencing a paradigm shift (a fundamental change in how they see the world) - that means a reframing of how they see Becky, how they see themselves, and how they see all of their relationships. It means their world will be turned upside-down. We all want them to see the truth/realise what Becky is really doing. That's what this is.
(If you're on Twitter and thinking "hang on, some of this sounds familiar," yes I have already tweeted this lol.)
Ultimately it all comes back to this line from Lisa, back when she was in therapy (which we now know was setting up Becky's return):
"How well do we really know anyone?" Well, poor Lisa will eventually find out the answer to that question, and it won't be an answer she'll like.
Shout out to @feral-lesbian, the one other person I've seen also refer to the paradigm shift concept in all the discussions about this storyline. Here's what they said:
"Recovering from domestic abuse from family of all kinds can require a level of de-programming, where the person's view of the world has to be challenged enough for them to have a paradigm shift where they can fully a) question their experience and b) begin to think critically and independently of the person(s) who have been abusing them."
This reframing is not something that will (or can) happen quickly, and it is very natural for Lisa and Betsy to resist it. As far as they're concerned, the world they know (the reality that Becky has created for them) is the norm. Basically, think Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but like... the cave and the images projected onto its walls is Becky.
(Sidenote, @oneacreplot has shared a few infographics about emotional abuse and related them to this storyline - I recommend checking out her post here.)
So that's where we're going - how do we get there? Well, that's the part I'm less sure about. As feral-lesbian said above, Lisa (and Betsy) requires a certain level of de-programming/her view of the world has to be challenged enough to cause the paradigm shift. We've seen Carla assume that 'challenger' role, wherein she's begging Lisa to see past Becky's obvious lies, but it's not an easy role for her because she's emotionally invested in the outcome, and emotionally hurt by the way the situation is unfolding. That may even impact how Lisa perceives her attempts - because Carla is so impassioned, Lisa's going to see it as an emotional issue that Carla is [understandably] having with this whole situation, when in actual fact it's even bigger than that... it's structural. Also, while Carla can clearly see Becky twisting the truth in the present, I wonder if she has yet considered that this is also what Becky was like in the past - that it's not just a knee-jerk reaction to finding out Lisa and Betsy have moved on with Carla, but rather who she's always been with them. I don't think Carla realises yet just how deeply affected Lisa is by Becky's machinations, how they have shaped her.
I don't want to get into spoilers much because I know some people try to avoid those so I will try to word this as vaguely as possible: most of you will have seen the latest spoilers that suggest... Carla is not going to be available to Lisa in this 'challenger' role after the week after next (though for how long, we do not know). So who is going to be the person to challenge Lisa's sense of reality? Well, I fear that for a little while at least, things are going to get worse for Lisa before they get better (more on that later).
Now onto why we're seeing things unfold the way that we are. Something that everyone does seem to have accepted (thank you, Amy Cudden, for stating it outright) is that Becky is being manipulative. And we can see it's not just towards Lisa and Betsy but also towards Carla. The key, though, is that the manipulation works most acutely on those with a stronger emotional connection to Becky - in order of strongest to weakest emotional connection that's: Lisa, then Betsy (not that her emotional connection is weaker per se but it takes a different/less complicated form, and she hasn't known Becky for as long as Lisa has), then Carla.
which is why we are seeing them being successfully manipulated to varying degrees:
Lisa: has known Becky the longest (roughly 20 years as we understand it), Becky was her first serious relationship, they share a child, and Becky was the person to carry and give birth to that child. For Lisa, the manipulation runs deep because there are so many facets to her and Becky's connection that Becky can exploit.
Betsy: knew Becky for the first 14 years of her life and is her daughter so her naivety is off the charts (not a judgement) but at the same time she has gone through four very critical years in a human's development without Becky's interference, and she's no longer the child Becky knew her as.
Carla: has no shared past with/emotional connection to Becky so she's the most clear-eyed about her behaviour towards Lisa and Betsy but she herself can still be manipulated by her because she has insecurities that Becky is preying on.
Back to feral-lesbian's words a second, because there's another important paragraph here on this (seriously, just read the whole post - it's great):
"Manipulation doesn't need to be sophisticated, it just has to be something that hits a person's weak spot. There are people who are more susceptible to emotional abuse and manipulation because they lack other support systems in place - was Lisa with Becky, her first and only significant relationship, because she was happy, or because that was the first time she felt connection with someone? Was Becky her only connection and Family for 20 years? Was Lisa particularly vulnerable prior to meeting Becky, so she dismissed red flags early in the relationship so they became the norm?"
These are the kinds of questions we can hope to see answered during this storyline (regarding Lisa's background), answers which would go a long way to explaining why Lisa was so susceptible to Becky in the first place.
In the most recent scenes (10th November), Becky has actually made it even harder now for Lisa to break free from her twisted reality, because Becky swore on Betsy's life that she was telling the truth, whilst knowingly lying. That's... monumental. So in order for Lisa to accept that Becky is lying, she would have to reckon with the fact that Becky seemingly has no regard for their child. I mean, that's practically a whole paradigm shift in and of itself. In the latest scenes, we saw Carla raise this exact idea, and Lisa immediately shut it down:
That's the look and tone of voice of someone who is not remotely prepared yet to consider that possibility.
Shoutout to Twitter user @charitydingles for pointing this new dilemma out and expanding upon it here:
"[Lisa] is a woman who prioritises her child above absolutely everything in her life, can you imagine how fucking insane you would feel [in her shoes] if you found out her other mother, the only person on earth who's meant to feel the same as you, wasn't above using her as a pawn in her games?"
Absolutely nothing about that is easy. Multiple times over the last year and a half we have seen Lisa prioritise Betsy over her own happiness, something that not only does Becky not seem capable of (or at least we have not yet seen her demonstrate this ability) but which Lisa would also expect of her, as the other mother of their child. In fact, time and time again in just this storyline alone, we have seen Lisa prioritise Betsy (sometimes, you could argue, it was misguided if well-intentioned, e.g. deciding not to tell Betsy initially that Becky was still alive) over her own desires - Lisa has not been happy about Becky's return literally since she found out the [alleged] circumstances of Becky's "death" but she has let her stick around for Betsy's sake, even though she herself does not want her around (I recommend a rewatch of all of Lisa's scenes since September 12th in one go, which I did as prep for writing this - it's so apparent looking back at them in uninterrupted flow and with hindsight that Lisa is only ever making concessions to Becky with Betsy in mind, and Becky massively appeals to this side of her/leverages it right from the off. She even initially claims that she returned "for Betsy's 18th" and as I highlighted when analysing the visual language of one of their first scenes together, when Lisa first starts questioning the specifics of her story, Becky immediately deflects by sniffing Betsy's hoody and asking about her, trying to tug on Lisa's emotional heartstrings).
So, accepting that Becky is not the person Lisa believed(/hoped/wished?) she was is not going to happen overnight, nor indeed just over a few weeks. How on Earth could it?
Now, I do not want to single out any specific people because I don't believe in making people feel targeted, or want to cause a pile-on, but here is one of the complaints about this storyline that I have seen phrased in different ways on both Twitter and Tumblr over the past few weeks:
Lisa is being unintelligent/stupid/too easily fooled/needs to "make smarter choices" or "open her eyes"
I'd like to pull on the thread that is that first sentence in feral-lesbian's quote above - "Manipulation doesn't need to be sophisticated, it just has to be something that hits a person's weak spot".
sophisticated (of a machine, system, etc.) clever and complicated in the way that it works or is presented
Essentially, what Becky's doing doesn't need to be clever or complicated - and it's not. She's duplicitous and conniving but all she had to do was identify each of her targets' respective weakspots (their fears and insecurities) and pummel them there repeatedly (let's come back to that word in a moment).
What's happening is not about Lisa's intelligence (however you define that) being stripped away or 'forgotten' by the writers. Her closeness (of 20ish years) to Becky is clouding her judgment. This is entirely normal! It's not an oversight from the writers (if anything they are being observant); they are simply acknowledging and charting out the impact of manipulation and emotional abuse. To say that Lisa is being stupid for not seeing the truth is just cruel - and you can argue "she's just a fictional character, it's not that deep" but at the end of the day, the media we immerse ourselves in holds a mirror up to society, and emotional abuse is an actual issue faced by real people. Vicky Myers herself said "once we discussed [the storyline], it became clear why it had to happen. And I think that's massively important [emphasis mine] – why it's happening." And we all know that British soaps, including Coronation Street, like to use their platform to explore real world problems, to make people feel seen, to raise awareness, and encourage empathy. Of course what people say about Lisa isn't going to be harmful to Lisa (again, she's fictional) but victim blaming or dictating how one thinks a victim of emotional abuse should act is a harmful attitude to have and carry around in life.
So when a couple of members of this community make one or two comments about how it's hard for victims of emotional abuse/manipulation to watch people continually victim blame Lisa in this storyline, I don't think it's fair to misrepresent said members' words/skew the points they're trying to make, or totally dismiss them. All that these members were asking was for people to be empathetic to and understanding of Lisa's situation. That is not an outlandish or unfair request.
Still, even if nobody had said anything, even if nobody was affected by insensitive comments, even when we run with the argument that we are free to critique a character regardless of how anyone else relates to or feels about that character, I would still ask why anyone's instinct is to victim blame rather than empathise with said character when we know they are acting the way they are because they're a victim of abuse? Furthermore, looking at it logically from a narrative and characterisation perspective, every way in which Lisa has acted in this storyline can be explained either by the fact that she is a victim of manipulation, or by her pre-established personality traits (many of which, we're continuing to realise, are likely an ingrained, subconscious response to historical abuse) - or both! So, given we already know her personality traits (which includes her character flaws), and we can plainly see the fact she's being manipulated, this is how we should expect her to be reacting in this scenario. She's not being written out of character, but rather as a character she is being stunted by Becky's manipulation increasingly providing her with fewer and fewer options and possibilities to think straight, or act according to her own wishes. That's intentional writing.
And the writers wouldn't be starting this storyline if they didn't intend to finish it, so in Lisa's own words:
Now, back to "repeatedly". For the past month at least, I've seen people complain that we're seeing "the same thing happen over and over again" and while I don't think this is an entirely accurate description (there have also been plot developments, and changes in the character dynamics during this period) I think at a certain point it needs to be recognised that Lisa, Becky, and Betsy falling into the same patterns of behaviour that repeat again and again is also very intentional from the writers.
@buffonias summed it up nicely on Twitter (bold emphasis is mine):
"the moment betsy and lisa realise how evil becky is has to come from a certain amount of repetition beforehand in order for it to really hit as a viewer ... especially because we need to see they’re stuck in a cycle"
Manipulation is not just a one-and-done event. It can be built up over time gradually. We can very easily infer that it's how Becky treated her family in the past but because we have never seen their past family dynamic prior to her "death", the writers are now giving us an opportunity in the present to see how it builds up. And it's draining. It's wearing the characters down, potentially to the point where they will entirely stop questioning their reality. And, unfortunately, Becky will probably be successful in trapping Lisa (and Betsy, potentially) in her version of reality for a limited period of time - if we look at it in terms of narrative structure, it's that 'darkest before the dawn' moment before the climax, where it seems like all hope is lost and the villain is about to win. Of course, being a soap, the narrative structure here is looser because it goes on indefinitely but we can still be confident in assuming that in this story, things still have to get a little bit worse before they can get better. It's a narrative structure we are all familiar with.
So I totally agree that for us as an audience to really feel the full impact of Betsy and Lisa realising what Becky really is, we first have to see the full-scale (re)construction of the lie she has them living in. Would that moment, when Lisa or Betsy experience their respective paradigm shifts, feel as potent if we didn't see the layer upon layer of manipulation being laid upon them first? If we didn't even get a chance to recognise just how dire their situation is? Of course it's horrible to see - but that doesn't mean it doesn't serve a purpose (and honestly this is my response to a lot of the complaints I'm seeing).
The beauty of a long-running soap is it can make the most of the gift of time - time to let a story breathe, to build up the small details, to lay the foundations, to not have to rush something that also in real life does not happen quickly. This is a soap that right now is making the most of that attribute (and let's face it, it hasn't always done so). I've said it plenty of times before but I'll say it again: if this storyline was rushed, we would all be crying out that it's unrealistic. It would be an insult to Lisa as a character, and it would be an insult to our intelligence as viewers.
On the topic of time, there's another element I want to talk about: Becky not giving Lisa time or space - and in fact invading her time and space. This is an intentional tactic from her, and it's a big part of the reason why Lisa is acting the way that she is.
When I wrote about the practical reasons behind why Becky keeps visiting no.6, I followed my post up with a few additional thoughts. I had seen a few people asking, if Lisa really had to talk to Becky sometimes, why wasn't she going to Becky's flat instead of having all these discussions at no.6? (Which some people were recognising as an invasion of Carla's space but not also recognising as an invasion of Lisa's space). This question rather overlooked the fact that a) these discussions were ones we needed to see on-screen (and as established, there is no set for Becky's flat), and b) Lisa was never actually inviting Becky to her and Carla's house - Becky was showing up uninvited (or, on the odd occasion, Carla summoned her). Here's what I wrote at the time:
if there was a set for [Becky's] home for Lisa and her to have domestic scenes and 1-on-1 discussions at, would it not reflect more poorly on Lisa if she kept going there and leaving Carla alone at home? And more importantly would it not massively alter this entire dynamic if Lisa were the one proactively going to Becky? If Becky were the more passive one? The whole point is we're seeing Lisa get no time to process this entire scenario or how she feels about any of it because Becky is constantly bombarding her with visits and demands, and manipulating her (and Betsy) into being more receptive of her presence. The only way to achieve this is to have her come into their space.
I wrote this back in early October, when we had a smaller picture of what was really going on here. Now it seems even more pertinent. This entire dynamic is dependent on Becky being the forceful, disruptive force, manipulating Lisa and Betsy into accepting her presence when she wants them to, not when they're ready to. Since the 12th September episode when Becky finally properly revealed herself to Lisa (and Lisa immediately shared this revelation with Carla, much to Becky's chagrin) up to now, Lisa has appeared in 17 episodes, and in 16 of those episodes, Becky has ended up in her house (the only one where she didn't, she was meeting with Betsy in the precinct and trying to drip poison about Carla into her ear). This is incredibly annoying, of course! But again, it's very much happening for a reason.
If, on almost every single day that she has been back, Becky is barging into Lisa and Carla's home with some new demand or plea for Lisa to have to deal with, then at which point has Lisa had time to process any of this situation? The answer of course is that she hasn't. We know our little blondie feels everything but is slow to identify what she's feeling, and usually reticent to confront/accept many of those feelings. And Becky will absolutely know that too. Her aim is basically to bamboozle Lisa - to hit her [emotionally], hard and fast, and over and over again. She literally admitted to this tactic in the Rovers bathroom on Halloween!
Becky: "That song hit ya, didn't it?"
Lisa: [Crying] "Like a steam train."
Becky: "I thought it might."
Becky's also being totally inconsistent, adding to Lisa's confusion. First she says she's back for Betsy, then she says she's back because she saw Lisa was newly engaged. She claims she's in danger when it's convenient for her to do so, but is completely flippant about the supposed threat whenever somebody else raises it ("Jesus came back from the dead; he still got out and about"). She says she's going back to Spain - but not yet, soon, not yet, soon. It's all tactical. She is running rings around Lisa, constantly moving the goalposts, never settling on one dilemma for too long before she creates a new one for Lisa to have to deal with. Whenever Lisa sets a boundary, Becky swerves around it. And throughout it all, she is constantly invading Lisa's home, and occasionally invading her immediate personal space too. Not just with the unwanted kiss at Halloween but there was also the first time she reached for Lisa's hands, and Lisa pulled away, and the first time Becky tried to hug Lisa, and Lisa stopped her.
Lisa needs time for her emotions to percolate before she can understand them or begin to accept them, and thus Becky is purposefully making sure she doesn't have that time - so Lisa just feels constantly bewildered and caught out.
This is why I can't subscribe to the idea that Lisa has emotionally cheated on Carla in this storyline. To emotionally cheat, she not only has to be more emotionally open with Becky than she is with Carla - which has absolutely not been the case - but also actually aware of any feelings in the first place. Until that day when she and Becky hugged on the sofa, I don't think Lisa had even been able to acknowledge or decipher any emotions regarding Becky beyond anger, frustration, and hurt, and relief that she wasn't dead. As she tells Roy, "I suppose it was easy to pretend at first, y'know, what with the shock and the hurt, and dealing with everything." It was only when she was faced with Roy catching her and Becky hugging, that she found herself realising what the situation probably looked like from an outside perspective, and therefore was forced to question what it was from her own interior perspective. And yet, when Roy prompted her to search her feelings, while she finally accepted that she still has love for Becky, she ultimately concluded that Carla is the person she is in love with, and unequivocally wants to be with - a hundred times! I think the only thing Lisa has been sure of this entire time is her love for Carla (and, ironically, it's the thing that Carla has been unsure of for much of this time, because of her pre-established and deeply ingrained insecurities).
And I believe, because Lisa has been so clear through this entire storyline that Carla is the one she wants to be with - even when she finally realised that she still has some kind of love for Becky - and because Becky has been trying to bulldoze her way back into Lisa's heart but it's all been one-sided, that this is clearly not intended to be a love triangle. Soap journos might try to spin it that way for clicks/to sell magazines, but that's not what we're actually seeing play out, and it's not why the writers are telling this story.
Related to this, @swainrooney wrote a nice little post recently that addressed the communication issues Lisa's been having with Carla through this situation. Here's some relevant parts:
This is not a story of rekindled love, but of blurred boundaries and unprocessed history. ... Lisa’s inability to draw a firm line with Becky isn’t about romantic longing — it’s about the collision between two versions of herself. The old Lisa, the one Becky knew, built her world around loyalty and shared history. That version died the moment Becky did. The new Lisa — the one forged through grief, guilt, and the need to protect Betsy — operates from survival. So when Becky returns, she awakens both versions at once. The boundaries collapse because Lisa’s emotional wiring can’t separate her past self from her present one.
"Lisa’s inability to draw a firm line with Becky isn’t about romantic longing — it’s about the collision between two versions of herself." Becky thought if she can confuse and overwhelm Lisa enough, hit her with a steam train of emotional reminders about their shared past together, then she could reawaken Lisa's love for her, and that it would be enough - that Lisa would choose her. That didn't work. So now Becky has to change tactics. My guess is she will try to isolate Lisa again and more permanently - after all, she wants to take her away to Spain. We already saw Becky make the most of Carla being in Ireland, and of Betsy being in jail. And we've now seen Lisa starting to become isolated even with Carla and Betsy both physically present, in the 10th November episode - Betsy is now being weaponised so that she and Lisa are massively at odds, because for the first time in this storyline, Lisa did not put Betsy first. Instead, she backed Carla up in Carla's wishes to kick the supposedly endangered Becky out of their house, despite knowing it would devastate Betsy (which was why it was so hard for her to do), and she did it because she knew, due to Carla's ultimatum, that she would probably lose Carla right then if she had not. But we can see that her and Carla's relationship isn't secure right now - it looks like all it would require is one or two more hits for it to fall apart.
Because Becky is manipulating Betsy, Lisa's stuck between a rock and a hard place; she can no longer keep both Betsy and Carla happy, and she risks losing them both. We don't know how things are to pan out between her and Betsy in upcoming episodes, but we do have some idea of what to expect between her and Carla later this month... It's all part of Becky's plan to make the situation so untenable for Carla, that she walks away. Carla, the one who is challenging the false reality that Becky has blinded Lisa with - for her to walk away would isolate Lisa further, and make her even more vulnerable. That's not Carla's fault but it's the tragic truth.
To wrap up I want to quote one of the first sentences in feral-lesbian's post: "Something I find lacking in a lot of the responses that are ... "Disappointed" in Lisa is both space for the limitations of a show that isn't about just one storyline, and also a lack of empathy or desire to understand "why" Lisa is behaving like this."
Well, I think I've explained in a fair bit of detail why Lisa is behaving in this way. So let's acknowledge that point about making space for the limitations of a show that isn't about just one storyline. In fact I'd like to break it down to simply making space for the limitations of a show (or specifically a soap). I think some of the complaints are coming from unrealistic expectations of what this soap can feasibly or would normally offer, or are disingenuously criticising this storyline for something that is not unique to it but rather a common feature of the format.
You are not going to get every significant line of dialogue commented on and acknowledged by other characters. That's simply an unrealistic and frankly naïve thing to ask of a script. (For what it's worth, I encourage everyone to check out actual produced screenplays or TV scripts to familiarise yourself with their features and how the finished product can differ so greatly from what's written. If you'd like me to help you find some, I'd be more than happy to do so - I used to do this for work all the time.) You're not going to get "in-between" scenes explaining how the characters have moved on from one emotional state to another between episodes - you have to read between the lines, observe the clues (like I did in this post), and also just think about what you observe in real life (sometimes we have a crappy day and then we go to sleep and when we wake up, we feel better). At some point we're just going to have to accept that Becky's villainy is a little cartoonish (come on, that's really not uncommon for a soap, or indeed this soap). People are going to have to get over her costuming (there's clearly a reason for it, even if we're not yet privy to that). We have to accept the limitations/limited availability of sets, as I've previously written. We have to accept that there will be plot holes in this police corruption/gangs stuff, which as I've mentioned before is simply a plot device in Lisa's story. And most of all, I think some people need to accept that just because they aren't enjoying how things are playing out, or things aren't playing out how they expected, that doesn't mean it hasn't been thought out by the writers, and it doesn't automatically make this storyline shit.
Hopefully I've helped put into some perspective why we're seeing it play out this way. And shout-out to everyone I quoted for their lil nuggets of wisdom that helped me build this case.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading ✌️❤️
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