HOTTEST NEWS TODAY!!! EastEnders confirms dark Mark Fowler twist in BBC iPlayer twist that ties him to major crime story
This article contains EastEnders spoilers for the episode dated Monday, January 26 which hasn’t yet aired on BBC1 but is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
I wrote a piece last week on the back of fans pleading that the return of Mark Fowler Jnr not involve a gangster plot.
Sorry, Meg, I truly am, but it turns out that Stephen Aaron-Sipple’s version of Mark is truly a baby Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp) and is up to his neck in organised crime.
Mark is looking to suck the long time mob boss of Walford, Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden) back into the underworld as he desperately tries to prove he’s not the grass in his bosses organisation, by locating said grass.
The grass in question? The one who’s actually spilling the gangster tea to the police? None other than Ravi Gulati (Aaron Thiara), of course.
After reuniting with his sister, Vicki Fowler (Alice Haig), Phil and Sam Mitchell (Kim Medcalf) demanded to know what was really going on. With both well-versed in all things dodgy, it didn’t take them long to pry from Mark that he’s a drug dealer and hired muscle, and that his bashed-up face is a result of his bosses thinking that he’s a grass. He needs Phil’s help to locate the grass, clear his name and hand him over to the powers-that-be over at ‘Drugs’r’Us’.
Phil has left all of that stuff behind, though. He turned in his gun and balaclava a long time ago and is dedicated to looking after Nigel Bates (Paul Bradley), planning to secretly whisk him off to Portugal that very night. Even Nigel’s wife, Julie (Karen Henthorn), coming home early doesn’t deter him from his plans.
After catching up with Vicki and lamping Ross Marshall (Alex Walkinshaw) for failing to protect his sister from demonic incel child Joel Marshall (Max Murray), Mark receives a picture of Vicki from unseen-scary-gangster-man and, again, pleads with Phil for help. Receiving another ‘no’, Mark decides to tell Julie of Phil’s plan, effectively destroying it and ensuring that Phil remains in Walford.
Elsewhere, drug lord-turned-informant, Ravi, is trying to encourage his beloved son, Davinder ‘Nugget’ Gulati (Juhaim Rasul Choudhury) to make small steps to reclaiming his confidence in leaving the flat, after Nicola Mitchell’s (Laura Doddington) revenge plot saw him pummel Nugget into a bloody pulp while hallucinating visions of his evil (and quite dead) dad, Nish Panesar (Navin Chowdhry).
Roping in Denzel Daynes (Jaden Ladega), Ravi gives the boys fifty quid toward a lads day out. Buoyed when Nugget agrees to go out, Ravi’s quickly distracted when his snitch phone starts buzzing and he’s given another job.
Back at the Mitchell’s, Phil is devastated when Julie and Nigel move out. Seeing his opportunity, Mark again implores ‘uncle Phil’ to help him out of the potentially fatal spot he’s found himself in. With nothing but time now his Portugal plan has been scuppered, Phil agrees to speak to some dodgy contacts and attempt to find out where the leak is.
Mark reveals that the reason he’s back on Albert Square is because he’s been leaking false information to various drug networks to see what makes it back to the police. His investigation has lead him to Walford and as the camera cuts to a none-the-wiser Ravi, Mark darkly declares that the grass is a dead man.
With Mark Jnr very much alive in the flash-forward episode, clearly his boss, for one reason or another, decides not to put a horses head in his bed/push him off a pier in concrete shoes/however else mob bosses execute informants.
But will Ravi be so lucky?