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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James from London" data-source="post: 410073" data-attributes="member: 22">I think what's so striking is that everything that defines Heather as a character -- her calm, her poise, even her career -- are all eroded, but gradually* rather than in an overtly dramatic way. ("I don't even know if I still have a job," she says towards the end, almost as an afterthought). She slowly becomes this fearful, hunched, suspicious, haunted figure and that's the version of the character who leaves the close forever. There's no final, head-held-high glimpse of the old Heather and no guarantee that she will ever be that person again.*There's a small but very telling moment where she surreptitiously sniffs a carton of milk while making Annabelle a cup of coffee to check it hasn't gone off. That's how far the graceful, elegant Heather has fallen!I vaguely remember some criticism at the time about the farfetchedness of Nick being a junkie in the first place, and of his ability to conceal it for so long. It perhaps seems more plausible now than it did then, but that doesn't really matter to me. It's about the believability of the characters. Once that's in place, you can put them in almost any situation, no matter how extreme, and it becomes about their reaction to it. The comparison that springs to mind is Ben Gibson's activist past coming back to haunt him on Knots. I know most people hate that story, but it totally works for me because everything about the character works for me. Same applies to Heather -- and Nick, really.  As ultimately unknowable as he is, he feels fascinatingly real.From a C21st perspective, we're familiar with the concept of gaslighting and the kind of manipulative, controlling behaviour in relationships that qualifies as emotional abuse. There are elements of that in Nick's conduct towards Heather, in the way he lies to her and makes her doubt herself, but messing with her head isn't an end in itself. She isn't his obsession; heroin is. So what does he want/need her for exactly — to enable his addiction (both financially and by creating a smokescreen of respectability) or help him overcome it (the love of a good woman etc)? Did he marry her genuinely hoping for a happy ever after or was she just a refuge from the mess he'd gotten himself into, only for her to become part of that self same mess and so something else to escape? I guess the answer is: all the above.I love — if you can love something that gives you a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach — the abruptness of Heather's departure. The Knots exit it brought to my mind was Laura's (the wordless goodbye to Barry/Greg, then driving away in tears), but whereas Laura, and Richard before her, had put careful thought into their departures, Heather just kind of stumbles blindly out of the show. She's still in shock. There's no emotional catharsis for her or us: nothing's resolved. That's what makes it so haunting.I remember reading that, like Doreen's departure the following year, all of Heather's scenes in her final episode were filmed in chronological order, which rarely happens. Because it's all on location, they would have had to wait until it was dark to film her last scene. So it's almost as if it were happening in real time.I find the connection between Heather and Barry really powerful, especially in that last episode. She’s so distant, refusing to let him in emotionally, yet there’s a strange intimacy between them. I noticed she keeps touching him on the arm, even as she fails to meet his gaze. There's so much unspoken between them, but I'm not sure what it is. I'm not sure even they know what it is.In way, the Nick/Heather story feels like a continuation of the Barry/Jane one. One could view those final scenes between Heather and Barry, where she challenges his assertion that cutting an addict adrift is the right thing to do, as the long-awaited emotional pay-off for what took place the previous Christmas. It retroactively gives those scenes more meaning, a bit like how New Dallas finally resolving the mystery of Pam's disappearance gave more substance to the original storyline.After Heather's gone, it's Barry we're left with in the close looking through her old window. It feels like she's become one more ghost he's haunted by, along with Jane, Nick and maybe even Petra, who, as you pointed out, is the other widow he suddenly found himself burdened with, in the very house he's now looking through the window of. I guess that's the thing about a soap: when it works well, it all feels like one great big story.I totally bought it. Barry's reason for being around is to look after his mother so it makes sense he'd stick close to home. And I suppose this is one of those times where Brookside uses a more traditional soap trope to its advantage. For the purposes of this storyline, Heather is hemmed in by the confines of the close the way an Enders or Corrie character would be by the square or the street. Barry feels like her only option. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she should seek guidance from some external organisation, in the same way that Sheila nodded politely when the Rape Crisis Centre was mentioned, but didn't (as far as we know) make any attempt to contact them. To go outside the close for help would risk weakening the claustrophobic intensity of these two storylines. (I vaguely recall this was one of the reasons Alan Bleasdale gave for disliking Brookside so much, that it needlessly isolated its characters from the wider world in times of crisis, preferring to revel in their misery. But that's a dim and distant memory which I could have got  completely wrong.)One recalls Heather and Barry's shared history on the show: all those lighthearted instances of one-sided flirting where she invariably got the upper hand before sending him away with a flea in his ear. Now the tables are turned and it's she who needs him. As brilliant as Amanda Burton and Alan Rothwell are, I think Paul Usher's performance as Barry is this storyline's secret weapon. It's Barry who,  based on his relationship with Jane, sets out the premise of this particular drug addiction storyline, which is that anyone who loves a junkie and/or tries to pull them out of their addiction is in very real danger of being pulled in by them instead. We accept this premise because we believe in Barry's off screen history with  Jane, even though the show and the character don't go into any great detail about that history, which means it's all down to the strength of his performance, which feels real and intense but never showy or "actorly".Heather's exit feels cruelly uncompromising but absolutely right.  This isn't Laura saying goodbye to Karen over the phone on Knots. It's not even Marie saying ta-ra to Sheila. It's not that Heather's friendships with Annabelle and Sheila weren't genuine, but despite their occasional heart to hearts, they were "only" ever neighbours.Running parallel to Heather grappling with Nick's heroin addiction on Brookside '86, I've been watching Dot do the same with her Nick's heroin addiction on Enders '91. Whereas Heather throws Nick out, Dot goes the opposite route and keeps Nick under lock and key in his bedroom, forcing him to go cold turkey. Both approaches end in death: Nick's own on Brookie, while  Enders' Nick manages to escape his prison, shimmy down a drainpipe and get into a skirmish with Vic landlord Eddie Royle whom he then stabs to death. We don't know Nick's the killer straightaway as the murder is played as a whodunnit, leading to an unexpected one-episode-only appearance by the first Lucy Collins as a no-nonsense detective. You can see her here 13-14 mins in if you're curious:[MEDIA=dailymotion]x8qj40g[/MEDIA]Sheila's line to Barry about how the rape was in some ways even harder on Bobby than it was on her is really interesting. My Enders re-watch has now reached the point in '92 where Kathy's rapist crawls out of the woodwork, and she says pretty much the same thing about her (now ex) husband Pete: "I think he’s probably the one who’s been hurt the most out of this whole thing."I wonder if the production company got some sort of cheap offer to film in Barbados, like a tourist board promotional thing, and then fitted the storyline around it.I don't find the newly wacky, slightly eccentric Tommy McArdle very interesting. Even Barry becomes a far less compelling character in their more lighthearted scenes.  Of course, that immediately changes as soon as they set foot inside the Grants' house and Sheila starts screaming, "They've stopped the trial! They've stopped the trial!"Ha!Before events take a turn for the tragic, Harry reacts to the news of the baby the way he reacts to everything else: by being miserly and boastful and self-involved. However, because it's do with family, the stakes are higher than when he's just having another trivial spat with Ralph and so it's a lot more involving.If the video camera "storyline" (if you could even call it that) had happened on Neighbours, it would have led to an enjoyably silly incident involving Des or Clive or Scott or some other lovable idiot accidentally filming a mortified Mrs Mangle in her dressing gown. (In fact, I'd be surprised if that didn't happen).  If it had occurred on Enders, it would have been about an inadvertent recording of some illicit affair, which would have then gone unseen until such a time as it could cause the maximum emotional carnage, most likely Christmas Day. (In fact, that did happen in 2007, to gut-wrenchingly devastating effect). Here, however, it doesn't really do anything at all except fill up a couple of scenes. I guess the nearest it comes to serving any dramatic purpose is when Heather helps Paul into the house with the camera when he first brings it home, thereby creating an opportunity for her to learn about the cheque Annabelle cashed for Nick.The missing food/food poisoning thing was really fun. A bit like Doreen's clothes party or even the proposed halfway house, It's a chance to involve all the neighbours in one story in a way that manages to be soapy, funny and specific to the characters. Plus, having the comedy of Anna's food poisoning scare rub up against the death of Harry's grandchild when she misunderstands the reason why he's gone to hospital worked very well.Yeah, it all feels effortlessly great. It's interesting how sometimes Billy and Doreen take it in turns to fall apart while the other one puts them back together, while at other times they're kind of united in despair. Tracy's really funny -- she's as far as you can get from the industrious Karen -- but you never feel like the programme's making fun of her, even when her brother and father are. In Heather's last ep, the emotional coldness of that story was contrasted beautifully with a very tender but understated scene between Billy and Tracy where he managed to convey how much he feels for her without actually saying the words.</blockquote>

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