Tonight’s Casualty was the episode when Dr Stevie Nash (Elinor Lawless) discovered exactly what kind of man her boyfriend Marcus Fidel (Adam Sina) is, after he was attacked in his car by a woman who turned out to be a former victim of the abusive hospital manager.
A shocking scene even before the titles had rolled saw Marcus get in his car and someone in the back seat attempted to strangle him. He was saved by Stevie, who was nearby, and the woman who’d attacked Marcus was admitted to the department injured after Stevie slammed her into another car.
And Marcus looked absolutely horrified when he realised it was someone from his past.
The woman’s name was Eloise (Angela Terence), and the moment she woke up she tried to attack Marcus again, calling him a ‘devil’ and a ‘liar.’ He tried to pass this behaviour off, saying that Eloise had been stalking him and had left a dead cat outside another girlfriend’s door.
But to viewers who know that Marcus has been systematically trying to undermine Stevie’s confidence for weeks and has cut her off from real friends like Faith (Kirsty Mitchell) because he wants to control her, everything Eloise said was entirely believable. When she begged Faith to warn Stevie that she was in danger, Faith said she would.
When Eloise saw Jacob (Charles Venn), she realised he was someone who understands. This, of course, is because Jacob went through his own experience of being coercively controlled and abused by former girlfriend Tina (Adele James). As he started to keep an eye on the interactions between Marcus and Stevie, he became troubled.
He asked Stevie to go with him for a drink, and tried to address Marcus’s behaviour by talking about his own experience in ‘I have a friend’ sort of terms, but Stevie saw straight through this. ‘You’re subtle as a brick,’ she told him. ‘Marcus isn’t Tina.’
But the next day, as Marcus seethed about Stevie going for a drink with Jacob, he sent everyone on her phone contacts list an intimate picture of her that was meant to be private. Then he went straight into ‘you can rely on me’ mode by offering to help an ‘absolutely mortified’ Stevie reset all her passwords because obviously (according to him) it had been her own carelessness that had allowed someone to misuse the photo.
Jacob went to talk to Eloise, and what he heard made him seriously worried for Stevie. He begged Stevie to go and talk to her. She did so, and what Eloise told her about Marcus’s past behaviour sounded horribly familiar.
So Stevie did a bit of digging and looked on Marcus’s laptop. Among his photos was one where another person had been cropped out apart from an arm – wearing Eloise’s distinctive bracelet.
Her next move was a hark back to the Stevie we knew when she first arrived in Casualty and was hell-bent on revenge against Ethan Hardy (George Rainsford), whom she blamed for the death of her sister. She decided to drug Marcus, unlock his phone with his sleeping face and look for clues.
She discovered that he’d previously been engaged to Eloise – and he was the one who sent the photograph of Stevie to everyone she knows. She made screen grabs of everything, which Marcus later managed to delete.
When Eloise was brought in after a suicide attempt and died despite everyone’s best efforts, Stevie was distraught. She blamed herself for provoking Marcus into going to see Eloise, which is what had made the woman want to take her own life.
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