Your post was spot on! As brill as Emma has been, this Charity storyline this week just felt off kilter. It dragged for ages and then suddenly the whole trial is over in two days? And Aaron and Rhona both had multiple people testify for them but Charity had no one, is this to further her loneliness this week? It just feels so weird. And what's the point to Bex? Lachlan's in custody, not denying his crimes, so she can't return and be the one to take him down. It feels too disjointed just now.
Yes, I would never want to take away from Emma’s performance because she’s been amazing the whole time. But this whole storyline has been a bit of a mess and that’s such a shame because I was really looking forward to it and it started off well. And by that I mean the lead up to it with Tracy was good and the initial reveal and then…as soon as Vanessa tried to report it, it went downhill. I’m not even anti Vanity or anything, although I agree that they didn’t put enough emphasis on the fact that her actions were wrong. It’s just that so much of this story has been so isolated to the two of them in a room having the same scene over and over again.
And I really feel like it was a mistake to use Vanessa so heavily to push the plot forward time and time again. They used Harriet briefly but even that involved Vanessa acting out of order to little or no consequence too. And I don’t think she needed to be put in that position when they could have spread the plot forwarding actions around so that Vanessa could play just the support role more.
I also feel like they didn’t open it up to other characters enough in general. I feel like the secrets were kept too long, which made it drag. And then people didn’t have enough of a reaction to those secrets being revealed, partially because they had their own plots to get back to. I’m not saying Aaron’s abuse story was perfect or anything, but I quite liked the fact that we saw how it affected Chas and Cain and Robert and a little bit Zak and the rest of the Dingles. It made sense that they would be so involved. With Charity, when she told everyone initially after she confronted Bails and it was in the paper, no one properly reacted. She and Chas never sat down and talked about it. Cain, who finally got the scenes he should have this week, never reacted really before now. Debbie, who was involved in the first mention of Bails barely had anything to say in reaction to it. It was all so strange and disjointed and isolated.
I feel like they could have used Chas to push Charity towards Ryan instead of it being Vanessa every time. That would have made sense to me, as she got to reconnect with Aaron after abandoning him. Not to mention what she is currently going through with Grace. It would have made a ton of sense for her to be like ‘you need to get to know your child. he didn’t die like mine is going to.’ But they didn’t use any of that.
And of course as an Aaron fan, I would have killed for a scene where he talked to Charity because I think he would have understood somewhat about her need to not be a victim since he was much the same. And I still think it would have been interesting for them to use the idea of the Robert/Vanessa friendship to have him talk to her about supporting someone through such an ordeal.
I don’t know, it just felt like they didn’t use all of the past histories of the characters at all and they should have. And it was like they tried to rectify some of that this week but it was all too fast and shoehorned in there that it felt a bit ‘meh’ even though, like I said, I really liked those Cain scenes, both the one with Charity and the one with Debbie. It just felt like too little too late.
And I don’t understand why the trial was only two days. I mean, he was even sentenced the same day. That felt wrong. It’s like they just wanted that bit over and done with as fast as possible. I get that somewhat because it seems like they really do want to tell a story about the aftermath and how Charity learns to cope with it all after dredging it all up, show that getting justice really doesn’t make those feelings go away. And it seems like they want to put more emphasis on that than they did with Aaron but it still just feels like a lot of weird pacing to me. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes.
and I wholeheartedly agree about Lachlan/Rebecca. The word disjointed feels appropriate. It somewhat feels like they want to find her to corroborate his story because she was in the car with him during the crash, but it still just doesn’t feel necessary. Especially since she is supposed to have brain damage and not remember that bit. It just feels like a mess.
