#zen zone

There's a pub - where Robert and I first lived together, where we had both of our wedding receptions

A garage - where we had our first time and said our wedding vows for our first wedding and started our big reunion at, where I came up with a whole speech of reasons why I love him

And making the gift public, it’s all about questioning whether it’s back to the old greedy Robert rather than looking beyond the surface of it all. Robert couldn’t be bought by Joe so why would it matter now? There’s more that is going on and hopefully that will become more obvious sooner rather than dragging it out.

Chrissie gives him a watch that's flashy and represents money and status and all that 2015 Robert felt like he'd worked for and earned but it's also kind of an empty gesture.

Aaron gives him back his own watch that he kept when they broke up and got their wedding dates engraved on the back and sees it as a symbol that Robert never really lost him and it becomes this meaningful thing between them.

I don't know, it's always felt really clear to me that this is just the other half of that story. It's not "oh let's suddenly show that Robert is a liar and didn't mean anything he said to Aaron and he suddenly has this prison husband who he's also in love with and ooh is he really torn and oh...money" haha.

To me, Kev and John are so much the physical manifestations of everything that Robert and Aaron were missing in each other while they were apart and therefore also sort of the physical manifestations of the trauma of those six years that they have to deal with before they can get back together and they're the catalysts to kick that off. And as others have pointed out, they're also sort of physical manifestations of all of their soulmate's worst qualities without the real true love behind them that allow them to work.

I mean they may not always hit the mark with these stories and god knows I hated so much of the John stuff but the John story now retroactively makes so much more sense because he literally was meant to be Fauxbert. Like that was the whole point. And it didn't make sense at all to me until we got to Kev and I could see what they were doing and it is weirdly genius.

But I think we saw today how much Robert and Kev don't really work outside of prison, even apart from Aaron. And Aaron and John were obviously always doomed to fail even apart from the Robert of it all. But that is also because they have each other back in their lives now and can finally work through all of that baggage. It's just that John and Kev are representations of that baggage.

Aaron being with John was a lot tied up in the fact that these years apart had been awful for Aaron. Robert gave him up so he could keep living his life and having his family for support. But his family wasn't always that great at support. Certainly, they really struggled after Robert went to prison with Aaron's grief over it all. And then Liv started drinking. Chas had her affair with Al and pushed him away. And then he lost Liv, he lost Ben, who was his first attempt to move on. His was depressed and angry at the world and he was desperate for what he had with Robert, someone to love and love him back and be that support for him and in walks John who was, on the surface, all of the things he was missing. He was a Sugden and he was that support to him, even through extremes like Anthony. And he stuck around. And so he ignored the red flags and wanted to make that work and wanted to see him as the better version of Robert even though it was very clear in the end that A) he wasn't and B) Aaron still just wanted the real Robert, who loved him for him and not to feed his ego.

But that trauma of the divorce and Robert cutting him off and leaving him to this six years of misery (the misery not actually Robert's fault) but all of that is sort of how and why he ended up with John and he needs to deal with all of that before he can have this fresh start with Robert and that's exactly what he's ignoring right now.

And then you have Robert and we don't have all of the prison details so this is harder. But he'd cut everyone off and he needed that protection and also that connection and support and seemingly, he found it in Kev. And he was out and proud in the real world because Aaron made that okay for him and he couldn't turn that off in prison and he got targeted for it and Kev seemingly made it safer for him to be himself in there. But now they're in the real world and we can see how dysfunctional it is and I think Robert can too, but sort of like Aaron ignoring John's red flags, Robert is under the mistake impression that he can manage all of this and somehow make it all work, which of course will not work. And Robert's never been burying his feelings for Aaron the way Aaron did with his Robert feelings, so he's well aware that he wants Aaron and that's creating so many of his problems right now because he also feels like he has to stay with Kev for still somewhat ambiguous reasons at the moment.

And so for Robert, Kev is obviously the embodiment of all of his prison trauma of the last six years and he needs to deal with that and reconcile with it and be open with Aaron about it before he can have that fresh start with Aaron that he so desperately wants.