Eastenders Genre and Narrative Conventions.

EastEnders is a British television soap opera, first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC One on 19 February 1985. It has conventions of a soap opera because the Characters are the same every week with new story's or story's are carried on now and again we  get either brand new characters or characters from the past. The episodes are always filled with suspense and drama and each argument that ends in a hurtful phrase is given most attention by the camera.

This week we had Ronnie return a character that used to be on the show but was sent to prison after kidnapping a neighbors baby and replacing it with her own stillborn.
This was actually a very much talked about case as many people got very upset by the nature of it. However this week she returned to the area in which she kidnapped the baby and the whole episode was set around her comeback and dealing with her sister who is now engaged to the victim.

In the setup there was a lot of conversations about Ronnie and close ups of peoples reactions to her return most importantly her sister and the victim sharing a intimate argument about her all these scenes helped develop the mood before we actually saw Ronnie which was very effective.

When we did see Ronnie in the development it showed us her reaction to other peoples reactions of her and a argument between her and the victim. This scene is actually hard to determine who's the protagonist and who's the antagonist because Ronnie doesn't seem evil in any way and she's doing no harm by seeing her sister, also Alfie (the victim) is only reacting as a normal person would so in this development its more close to binary opposition between two characters.


The resolution in this is quite a good one the victim offers the sister whom he's engaged to an ultimatum he asks her to choose Ronnie or him, and despite her love for her sister she chooses Alfie and the programme ends with the rather suspenseful three beats.