Karl's Nicked!

It was six months ago that Karl Munro burned down the Rovers Return, killing fire fighter Tony. A few days later, he killed Sunita in hospital and the game was on. When Dev was becoming obsessed, inching closer and closer to the truth, Karl pedalled furiously to try to keep calm and carry on. It seemed to work at the time when Dev had to back down for his own and his children's sakes though we, the viewers, knew he was only inches away from that last clue that would reveal Karl's dirty deeds.

That gives Karl breathing room but it wasn't to last. Enter a 14 year old lad with a guilty conscience. The house of cards slowly came down as Karl tried to keep Craig on an even keel. The poor kid! That was a lot for a child to carry, thinking he caused two people's deaths and it was enforced by Karl who was desperate for Craig to keep his mouth shut. He knew that Craig could place him at the scene of the crime, with keys he wasn't supposed to have as he used them to lock the back door of the pub behind him.

Jason never trusted Karl and after Karl admitted to torching the van and threatened Jason's life (with Dev overhearing from the other room), he put the pieces together and knew Karl had caused the fire but there was still no proof. Inch by agonizing inch, though, it all came together. Missing from photos from the Full Monty night, and then the realization that Craig had something to do with it. But then we had a few episodes where there were near misses, trying to talk to Craig and Craig avoiding it, even running away and who is the one that finds him? Karl!

Finally, Craig confessed and was whisked off to the police station while Dev headed to the chapel. The race is on, can Dev stop the wedding? Jason's on the way to the police with Craig, Dev is zooming to the registry office. It obviously isn't very far away because Dev got there in record time. The registrar declared them husband and wife and presumably, they signed the papers. It's a done deal.  So why didn't Dev say anything?! Was that a Judas "kiss" when he hugged Karl? Mice touch!

It took far too long at the police station to get someone to take statements, typical police procedure snarling things up. Why didn't Jason text Dev to get the name of the detective right from the start? Come to that, Dev should have told them when they left the shop. I do think that was dragged out too far but it's typical. Dev stalked around the edges of the party observing and waiting.  I didn't think Dev should have warned Karl at the Bistro, but he did.   Loved Dev creeping up silently behind Karl and cornering him in the pub.

Jimmi Harkishin played it spot on, not too over the top as he usually does. That quiet rage held him back. He laid it all out, Karl knew he couldn't hide and he confessed. There were no excuses that made any difference. Trash talking about Sunita was a big mistake even if it was true. Why did he think Dev would take that lying down?  Dev was going to out Karl to Stella so he can feel what it's like to lose what he loves but Dev ended up bleeding on the pub floor instead.

Oh I loved it that Stella caught Karl trying to leg it with the cash. He lost his rag when she tried to help Dev while we waited on tenterhooks for the police to untangle all the infernal red tape. She threw his ring away, annullment in the offing while he fought with her. Couldn't you tell how creeped out she was when she tried to placate him, stalling, and keeping him calm while he was holding her and stroking her, her making him think she was on his side, biding time until help comes.

She went a bit too far and he could see through her. Dev came to and dialed his phone... to Jason, who saved the day, just before Karl had a chance to flame up the pub again. That was a bit stupid, really, surely they could have put out a fire quickly enough but I suppose Stella was worried that Dev would come to further harm with the flames. I read somewhere else that Stella only had to blow out the flame of the lighter, it was right in front of her face, after all! But Karl dragged Stella back into the cellar, back to the scene of the crime, which was also odd. If I was her, I'd be down there chucking bottles at him like a mad thing.

Let's just pause a moment to add up Karl's charges. Arson, manslaughter, murder, assault (Grievous Bodily Harm judging from Dev's injury), and surely there must be something they can charge him with for terrorizing a child? He better not get one of those shifty solicitors that manage to charge Dev for assault and use Karl's attack on Dev as "self defence"!!

Come out! you're surrounded! For heaven's sake, he's not armed! Just go get him! Exciting stuff!

John Michie was so good. He really was the star in all of this through the whole storyline. It's too bad his talen makes Michelle Collins look even more stiff. It was painful watching her try to force that cardboard face into something resembling emotion and straining to push her whispery voice to a normal talking level when really, she should have been shouting and screaming at him!

Jason was a bit annoying, with all his shouting and angst but you could see where he was coming from. I really thought Beth was good, as well, heartsick, worried and guilty for her boy. She might be a gobby mare but she *is* a good mother.

Stella did persuade Karl to give himself up.  There wasn't much more he could do. Can you imagine the chaos of the police trying to storm the barricades, having to file down the cellar steps one at a time and crowd around between the crates and bottles, trying to apprehend Karl? I always wonder why they make the person they're cuffing lie down on the ground. There doesn't seem to be a point to it in most cases. Handcuffs can go on just as easily if  you're standing up if you aren't struggling which he wasn't. I guess in this case it was so that we could have he and Dev face down, face to face, Karl defeated and Dev quietly and justifiably triumphant.

Karl Munro - Evil Villain or Misunderstood Fool

"Evil personified", "evil scum", "super villain", those are some of the phrases I've seen describing Karl Munro in blog comments and various Corrie discussions and forums the last few days and weeks since both the fire and his alleged murder of Sunita. But is he truly evil?  In the tradition of most Corrie villains, he's desperate to hold on to the one he loves and has taken desperate measures to do it.

I'm not defending him, oh no. He left Sunita at the bottom of the cellar stairs at the start of the fire. And that was more calculating than an impulsive or panic move. It was still based on self-preservation. If he'd pulled her out, she'd have recovered and told that he started the fire. He didn't set the fire intending on killing anyone but alas, a fire fighter died and two little kids were deprived of their mother.


Most of the Corrie villains who murder people do so out of the aforementioned desperation. They may even plan to kill someone but usually feel pushed to the wall and can see no other way out lest their other nefarious deeds be uncovered or they are after revenge.

Alan Bradley pummeled Rita when she uncovered his fraud. He didn't intend on killing her in Blackpool, he wanted to take her back to Weatherfield to prove that he hadn't done her in!  John Stape wasn't evil. He was an idiot who kept getting into situations that he couldn't get himself out of.

Tony Gordon had more of an evil edge. He was a control freak and when he couldn't have Carla's heart, his jealousy prompted him to take Liam out of the picture permanently. But when he discovered that Maria was pregnant with Liam's baby, he showed a flash of remorse. Still, it didn't stop him trying to kill Jed Stone and later, Carla herself and, when Carla knocked out the hit man he'd sent, he let her think she'd killed him. More control, you see. She was going to expose him as Liam's murderer to Maria whom he'd fallen for, after a fashion. She was able to give him the family he craved and he was determined that Carla was not going to take it away from him. He nearly killed Roy Cropper who haunted him as his conscience but saved him and turned himself in only to break out of prison, kidnap Carla and Hayley and later blow up the factory and die in a blaze of "glory". Tony Gordon certainly was mad by that point.

We've had the mad nanny, Carmel, who became obsessed with the hapless Martin Platt. We had Don Brennan who set Mike Baldwin's factory on fire, kidnapped Alma and nearly bashed Mike's skull in before driving a car into the viaduct. But there again, Don's mind was overtaken by madness and revenge. I still don't consider these people "evil".  Kirsty Soames was not evil. She was controlling and troubled and had learned to survive the only way she had learned from her father, with aggression.

There was Richard Hillman as well. He tried to convince Audrey she was losing her mind and tried to kill her by fire.  He left Duggie Fergusson at the bottom of a stairwell when he'd fallen over the railings during a struggle. He went to his flat and robbed Duggie's safe but Duggie was dead when he returned. He killed his ex-wife because she was going to expose his double dealings. That was an impulse action. He nearly killed Emily Bishop twice so he could get her hands on her house. She'd entered into a scheme where he'd front her the cash value of the house and then inherit it after her death but he ran into serious financial difficulties and tried to hurry things along. Maxine Peacock's death was "collateral damage" as she'd walked into the house just as he had struck Emily so he had to bash her as well. Richard did feel guilt and remorse but was desperate to keep his new family and when the walls closed in on him and he couldn't see any other way out, he tried to take his family into the bottom of the canal.

Tracy Barlow could be considered Evil in many ways. She doesn't feel much remorse no matter who she hurts and is devious when she's attempting revenge. She's also shallow, selfish and not that bright. There are some redeeming features. She does love her daughter and her parents and loved Blanche as well even if she can be a bit mean and rude to them. She claimed to love Steve though I never believed it. She doesn't know how to truly love and be loved by a man. She'd be near the top of the Evil list in second place. 

To me, "evil" is someone that is cold, calculating and feels no remorse or guilt and usually on the edge of insanity. They have absolutely no redeeming qualities.  This is clearly not what we're seeing from Karl. The closest baddies  to that definition that we've seen on Coronation Street since I've been watching is not Alan Bradley, Richard Hillman and not even Tony Gordon though he's a pretty close second place. It's Maya Sharma  who certainly had that out-of-her-mind edge and Frank Foster who was as ruthless as a ruthless thing.

Mad Maya lived for risk and excitement. She attached herself to Dev and when she lost him, she took revenge on Sunita slowly. She pretended to be Sunita and married 7 men as an immigration fraud scheme as well as bigamy and managed to get Sunita arrested on her wedding day. She later kidnapped both Dev and Sunita, blew up all of Dev's shops (knowing there would be families living in the flats above) and then nearly succeeded in doing the same to Dev and Sunita and when that didn't work, tried to run them down in her car where she'd been sitting watching the shop burn with them inside. No remorse. No guilt. Just seething insanity. *That's* evil if you ask me!

Frank Foster would be up at the top of the list as well, sharing the honours with Maya. He was cold and calculating. He was ruthless. He was a rapist who knew it but had no remorse. He had no visible guilt. His mother thought him a monster though she didn't intend on killing him.  He was definitely Evil in my reckoning.

Karl? Evil? He's just a sad, pathetic fool who's lost everything due to his own stupidity. He can't take responsibility for that so he blames everyone else. He's jealous and smug. He does most definitely feel guilty about Toni's death and I think Sunita's as well though that was done as a desperate measure. The guilt is going to eat away at him over time. Will it end in another of those soap cliche moments where his crimes catch up with him? Will Stella threaten to shop him to the police so Karl feels he has no choice but to try to kill them both? "If I can't have you, nobody will".

The ominous words he uttered in the fire, "At least we'll die together", suddenly become a lot more foreboding.

Speculation gone wrong

I was wrong. I freely admit it. On the whole, I'm pretty good at predicting how soap stories will unwind. But of course, I don't always get it right and I didn't this time.

While I did know that Tyrone would not be convicted, (soap law and all that) I had thought that Kirsty's mother would be instrumental in her being found out. I had seen papparazzi pics of them outside the courtroom and later, we saw Kirsty admit the truth to her mother. AHA! But no. It didn't unfold quite that way.


While Alison did show up at the trial and her appearance did throw Kirsty off, she didn't turn Kirsty in and Kirsty kept up the pretense and committed perjury. That alone will get her banged up even without wrongful charges against Tyrone. Kirsty herself was the one that hoisted herself by her own petard when she lost her temper at Julie and Julie realized that Tyrone's defenders were right. It was a brilliant twist and it was the best way to show that everyone was backing the wrong horse. What I was further surprised at is that Julie's testimony was not considered admissable.

Luckily, Kirsty showed up and dramatically confessed. I thought that might happen but I thought Julie's testimony would be the turning point with that as a wrap up, on the stand perhaps. It was a great twist. Even though I persue spoilers rabidly, this was not leaked and I still appreciate surprises like this. I'm kind of glad I didn't know! Chaos ensues and everyone is screaming and hurling accusations.

I hope the apologies that come to Tyrone and Fiz for this are profuse and unending. Tyrone probably won't have to buy a pint for himself for a year at least. I was going to say "in the pub" but obviously, it'll have to be the Flying Horse of the Weathy Arms for the time being, the Bistro notwithstanding.

My next prediction? Well, we all know Karl started the fire in the pub and really, he's not evil, just obsessed with Stella and getting his old life back. All this guilt is going to eat at him and he'll break down eventually. There will be an act of desperation and he'll either get caught at it or he'll confess. Right now he's covering his tracks and everyone now believes Sunita started the fire. Even Dev is having doubts. I'm not surprised. We've already seen everyone on the Street believe the worst of Tyrone and pretty much anyone else that's ever been arrested. I'll give the Price clan a break because they haven't known Sunita for years.

He'll have to go to jail, of course, because I don't think he'll die and it'll leave the door open for his return. I do like actor John Michie. He was wasted in the Sunita affair storyline mainly because it totally trashed Sunita's character. No fault to either of the actors however. They do what they've been scripted to do. Now he's really playing it well. You can see all the emotions Karl is feeling all the while trying to desperately hang on to Stella's growing regard.

My last prediction is how the truth about Kylie's affair with Nick will come out. Sally knows the truth. I have a feeling that Sophie could overhear she and Gail discussing it and decides it's her Christian duty to tell David. Maybe she might not know about Nick specifically. Sally is often one to let her tongue get away with her too, though, in moments of stress.

I've been watching various soaps for so long that you can spot the signs and you know the drill. Bad guys pay. Happy couples aren't usually allowed to stay happy for long. Most weddings and funerals don't go smoothly. The wrong person is always arrested and jailed. The guilty or the ultimate victim is either an actor that's leaving or someone unimportant to the show. Or both. A one night stand with the wrong person will end in pregnancy. Most babies are born in unusual circumstances (storm, remote location, at home, in a taxi!). The list goes on. It's fun to predict, and speculate, isn't it?

Anyway, that aside, now Tyrone has to rebuild his life and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here. He'll have to go back to work at the garage now because Kevin will be off our screen for the foreseeable future. He and Tommy will be running things while Fiz and Tyrone settle into a new life together with the babies. Hope is in a day care/creche so probably Ruby will go there as well. Maybe they'll even get married. Fans have been clamouring for these two to get back together for years and it's finally happened!

Will it be happy ever after for them? Is it ever, on a soap?

An Affair to Remember

Pretty much all the feedback on the Karlita (Karl and Sunita) affair is negative. 'Out of character', and 'sleazy' are the kindest things we've heard. It's certainly not been played like a coy 'nudge, nugdge, wink, wink' type affair we've seen in the past or even a fairly straightforward one but with a lower mark on the sleaze scale. Perhaps that's because many of the past affairs involved characters that we liked, characters that had a certain charm and chemistry. This one has none of that. And according to the poll in this post, it's even out-sleazed the Molvin  (Molly and Kevin) affair which, in my books, had reached a new low at that point.

Sunita was always loyal and kind and honest. If she felt hard done by or taken for granted, she'd have confronted Dev, not thrown up her hands and chased after the first man that gave her a cheeky grin. Karl is a newish character and we haven't really seen him in a sympathetic light since he's been here. He's a gambler, he's a bit of a schemer and most definitely feckless. We did hear that he'd cheated on Stella in the past so this is, at least, not a personality transplant for him.

For the past couple of months we've been peering at the screen through our fingers whenever Sunita and Karl have played tonsil hockey with their tongues or plugging our ears and singing "la la la I can't hear you" when one makes blatantly sexual comments to the other like when Sunita suggested she wouldn't wear underwear beneath her Jubilee cossie. How many of you out there were as creeped out about that one as I was? I might have expected that out of Beth or Tracy but not Sunita.

Now we're at the point of the affair where Dev is suspicious. He found the wad of cash that Sunita is keeping for Karl, the gambling win that Karl is hiding from Stella and though he leaped to the wrong conclusion about that, he's putting a lot of other pieces of the puzzle in the right places. All this time she wants to herself, all these friends coming out of the woodwork needing to talk to her including an overnight with one of them. He's sure she's having an affair.

Anyone that's had a cheating spouse has seen all of this before. Once you're suspicious, you watch, listen and try to catch them in a lie. The cheater's reactions are varied but they all try to do a merry dance to try to keep you from finding out the truth. Smoke and mirrors. Fancy footwork. Or, as we in Canada might say with reference to (ice) hockey, stick handling. But those of us watching who've been there recognize the bluff for what it is and it's not pretty. As awful as this storyline is, I have to say from the point of view of a once wronged spouse, it's painfully realistic.

Dev confronted Sunita with his suspicions and she started down that cliched route. First, she pretended not to know what he was talking about. She denied. She put it all down to his overactive imagination. Then, she broke her own phone so as not to have to call or take a call from Karl, pretending it was "Laura". She accused Dev of bullying her. You could tell she was backed into a corner but there was still a way out. Right out the door and into Stella's back room which was obviously the worst place she could be, considering she's doing Stella's fella but she grabbed the first hand hold she could, like someone dangling off a cliff. Doesn't matter that the roots are shallow and she could very easily plummet down onto the rocky shores below.

Even if Dev backs down and Sunita goes home, even if the affair ends with a whimper and they think they're in the clear, it's going to come out. These things always do. Will Sunita go quietly? Will either Dev or Sunita end up in the corner shop flat? Will Stella weld shut the lock on her handbag, the one in which she's already got Karl's 'family jewels' firmly situated. Will there be blood and carnage on the street or forgiveness?

The "Icks" Factor

Sunita and Karl's affair is stomach turning. It's so bad that there isn't even really a good shortcut name for it. Sarl? Kunita? No, not nearly as snappy as Molvin (Molly and Kevin) or Pilene (Paul and Eileen).

This affair makes our skin crawl. It's tawdry and cheap.  The worst thing about it for me is that it's so out of character for her. The personality transplant fairy has a lot to answer for on this one. Sunita used to be a bit of a flirt sometimes but she was always loyal and loving and it seemed like she would never cheat on Dev. Leave him, yes, but cheat? I wouldn't have said so.

I would have guessed Dev would be more likely to cheat. He's arrogant,  he lives his life firmly by the double standard. He's got a womanizing past. He believes that whatever the man in a relationship wants, he gets, but the little woman should be traditional, a wife, a mother, a skivvy in the shop, that sort of thing.

But Sunita? Ducking and diving, cheating under Dev's nose, or over it in the shop flat. Cheating with the husband of the woman she's working for? Chasing Karl shamelessly, out for a good time, not even feeling guilty about it. Even allowing him to grope her in the middle of the bar where anyone could have seen or in the back room snogging his face off when they could have been discovered. Tina's lying in a coma and Sunita can hardly wait for her to recover and get back to work so she can get into Karl's pants.

It doesn't even seem to be about danger. It seems to be about getting her own back on Dev for taking her for granted. SO not the Sunita we knew.

It's probably the second worst affair I've ever witnessed on Corrie. Nothing could beat Molvin (Molly and Kevin) but it comes pretty damn close as does the Paul and Eileen (Pilene?) affair, both of which were also pretty Icky. So with that in mind, which of these three affairs is the most cringeworthy? I'll leave the poll open until the end of the month and post the results with the monthly State of the Street wrap up.