After a quieter time on screen, EastEnders legend Sharon finally returned to the forefront of the soap this fortnight as she was attacked in her own bar - sparking what is expected to be a big new storyline for her and Phil.
In our latest soaps column Soap Spy, Daniel Martin shares his thoughts on Sharon's latest stint on the Square, her new story and what's to come.
When EastEnders boss Dominic Treadwell-Collins was happily rebooting the show at the end of last year, he threw out some intriguing teasers. A big Beale story, which would turn out to be their riff on Twin Peaks Broadchurch. Another was a Walford take on Breaking Bad involving Ronnie Mitchell. "What makes a villain?" he asked. "Not a soap bitch, but a villain!"
Could it be that that was just classic misdirection? We've seen Ronnie, never the soundest of mind, turn into Albert Square's Lady Macbeth, doing in That Carl and creatively disposing of his body in a crushed car. She's also appeared every few weeks doing other questionable things and getting a kick out of embodying the spirit of a father who sexually abused her, intimidating people into dating her sister while at the same time being nice to Dot. Everybody has to be nice to Dot.
Yet this week in another surprise twist, we've seen the ice queen lose it almost completely, emoting to Phil about her new life of gangsterism, revealing that she's pregnant and has a gun like some kind of Yummy Mummy take on Tank Girl. But then we saw her leave Walford to sort herself out, hopefully not to stay with Aunt Peg who would continue not to realise it's precisely her "Remember your a Mitchell!" bleating which has messed her entire family up in the first place.
Ronnie probably won't be gone for long. But the twist in the tale came when the Mitchell household's lackadaisical attitude to leaving firearms round the place led Sharon to find the gun and decide to keep it in her own bedside drawer. No good can come of this? Don't be so sure.
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Sharon Watts (none of this 'Rickman', thank you very much) is one of EastEnders' original brat pack, and the very definition of soap royalty. An iconic tragedy queen guaranteed to leave a trail of chaos, bad decision making and smudged mascara in her wake.
Letitia Dean surely knows she has a job for life. But since Sharon last made the inexplicable decision to return to the place that only ruins her life further every time she goes back, and with soap's most annoying child in tow, she's been an unfortunate shadow of a once-great character.
If you're going to bring legends back, you should at least give them something to do. Sharon's only real storyline was a tedious painkiller addiction. EastEnders should never try tackling drugs ever again, since nothing can ever hope to match the magnificence that was Cracky Phil.
But like with the rest of the show, recently we've seen green shoots of recovery. They've decided to piss in the pot rather than get off it by just getting Sharon together with Phil already, given her a fun frenemy in Linda Carter, her very own gay to mentor in Johnny, and a hipster bar that serves cocktails in jam jars and is decorated with awesome decapitated Barbie dolls.
Now, things seem to be hotting up again. With Phil feeling emasculated by the fact that his partner, born and raised in pubs and bars, is better at running them than he is, he did what any self-respecting oaf would do and hired some immigrant thugs to rush the place up, inadvertently landing her with a ruptured spleen.
Now, shaken by the attack, Sharon has decided to get tooled up. Perhaps now the daughter of Den Watts, embedded in Walford's premiere crime dynasty, is blossoming into fulfilling her destiny as an awesome gangster's moll who's friends with the gays. Here is a Breaking Bad storyline I can get behind.
All they need to do now is pack Denny off to boarding school and all will be right with the world once more.
