Hate to say I told you so

Posted on November 13, 2011 by LadyB 1 Comment

“For crying out loud open your eyes for once! Silas is guilty as sin. As I have been telling you all this time” – Just in case they forgot for five minutes

I have to confess that I haven’t always been Lynsey’s biggest fan. A year ago I would have said that her only function was to be the Token Soapland Medical Professional, the one nurse or doctor that turns up whenever any character is ill/injured/giving birth and seems to be an expert in every field of medicine known to humanity. I thought she was a younger and slightly less interesting Susanne Ashworth. Her most exciting storyline was an unconvincing romance with Gilly, and we all know how well that turned out (for all those who don’t – badly).

But once she had discovered that Silas had an even more sinister hobby than chess and was subsquently branded the village loon, Lynsey became waaay more interesting. She lost her friends, her job and her home but refused to back down, and told anyone who would stand still for five minutes that lovely old Silas was a secret-psycho-stalker who would kill them all for being cheap slags. Watching Silas slowly mentally torture her to the point where she was a gibbering wreck, and even the kindest people thought she was mentally unstable was brilliant, because we all knew that sooner or later, Lynsey would be proved right.

Things started looking up for Lynsey once she got Doug onside. He might not be the sharpest tool in the box and not overly helpful while trying to puzzle out cryptic clues (that, as it turned out, didn’t have an answer) but at least she would have something nice to look at. And occasionally snuggle. It would make battling any serial killer worthwhile. (Anyone else wondering what Doug does for a living these days? Judging from what he’s been wearing recently, I’m guessing Knitting Pattern Model.)

On Fright Night Lynsey showed us she was made of sterner stuff, and once again gave Silas a decent whack around the noggin. This time she smashed a vase over his head, but Silas is near-indestructable, like the Terminator. She did her best to raise the alarm, but in true slasher-movie style no one could hear her scream. Heidi ‘s poor choices proved not to be limited to husbands and teen boytoys, and her unlucky choice of Halloween costume proved to be fatal.

Strangely Lynsey is the only person to think that the practice of keeping your dead wife’s ashes in the back of the wardrobe is weeeeird. Thankfully her hunch turned out to be right, and smashing Grandma Blissett’s urn revealed that Silas had taken to hiding his murder trophy collection in with the ashes. Considering how often he used to take them out and fondle them, the whole thing seems a bit unhygenic as well as morbid.
“What have you done to her?!” he wailed, as if he hadn’t been the one who put her in the urn in the first place.

They’ve been calling her an attention seeking nutjob for months, and so it was quite surprising when Silas superfans Texas and Nancy actually showed up when Lynsey called them out to see Silas get arrested. Even after he told them that he quite often accidentally kills the wrong person and meant to off Texas last year, she and Nancy still found it hard to believe, that, yes, Lynsey had been right on the money the whole time. When Cheryl turned up and chose to look on the bright side about Brendan’s possible imminent release and the belated successful capture of the real serial killer Lynsey took her opportunity to get a little bit of her own back.

“You all have blood on your hands” she told them scathingly, vindicated, and not feeling very forgiving. I would be saying I Told You So every day for the next ten years.

After chucking out an apologetic Cheryl – in a neat reversal of the time Cheryl chucked her out on the street for telling the truth – Lynsey finally thought she was safe in her own home (no longer prey to Silas who seemed to be able to walk through walls), but her ordeal wasn’t over. Her nemesis, now in custody with a new evil hairdo and openly sinister demeanour, had more games for her to fail at spectacularly (well, chess).

“Have you missed me?” Silas purred, while Lynsey’s look clearly said: fuck no.

Silas seemed unshakable, inscrutable, and Lynsey looked like she hadn’t slept for a week – things looked bad for Mercy and her bump. But in an uncharacteristic moment of genius, Lynsey managed to turn the tables on Silas, and provoked him into letting slip an actual useful clue to the whereabouts of the Dog’s under-pond dungeon. All she had to do was sully the memory of his recently deceased daughter by invoking a memory that makes us all shudder in horror – her affair with Gaz (‘snotty nosed glass collector’ -not quite up to Maddie’s ‘rat in a track suit’, but a good effort). It was unpleasant enough for us and we weren’t even related to her, hardly surprising that Silas lost his rag.

I like to think that, in the end, Lynsey won. Though the fact that she only managed to save former love rival Mercy and Carl-or-Riley Jr might make it a bit of a hollow victory. Maybe Doug will stick around. That would definitely make me feel better.