Devil Woman (with speculation)

(This post was originally posted by Scott Willison on the Coronation Street Blog in January 2013. No spoilers, but speculation included)


What is wrong with Carla Connor?  I'm being serious.  It seems that whenever she gets a boyfriend or husband, he immediately turns out to be mad, a sexual pervert, or a mad sexual pervert.  Even when they seemed quite nice before.  Is it her lipstick?  Is it filled with psychotropic drugs, like Poison Ivy? 

I admit, I'm heterosexually challenged.  But from where I'm sitting Carla seems like a hell of a catch.  She's gorgeous.  She's funny.  She's clever.  She's got her own factory and a fondness for necking red wine.  Where is the downside?  Frankly, I'd be tempted to have a quick bunk up with her, and my entire gamut of sexually experience with "the ladies" is a snog with tongues as a 19th birthday experiment with one of my girl friends.  (I wasn't converted).

First, she's married to Paul, and he spends his spare afternoons romping with hookers in the Weatherfield Travelodge.  He ended up ramming a prostitute into the back of his car and then smashing it into the side of a truck in Salford Quays.  Then she fell for Liam, who instead married a Girl's World doll that had somehow gained sentience, also known as Maria.  He ended up being mown down by a car arranged by her next husband, Mad-Eye Moody himself, Tony Gordon, because apparently being in love with Carla drives you insane.  After he was blown up, she picked herself up, dusted herself down, and got engaged to a psychopath who turned out to be a rapist on the side.  Frank was so awful his own mother killed him.  Plus there was Trevor the Binman who, in line with our "one kiss from Carla and you go mad" theme, subsequently hooked up with Janice Battersby.

And now there's Peter Barlow, who's appealing enough if you like doughy tattoo'd former alcoholics with a string of failed marriages and having Ken for a father-in-law, but who was married to Carla for less than an hour before he was snogging Tina on top of the vol au vents at the reception.  Next to the voluptuous, fascinating Carla, Tina looks like someone's stapled a pair of Lizzie Duke earrings to a chew toy, and only a fool would pay her even the slightest bit of attention.  Yet there Peter is, kicking Simon's Lego to one side so he can diddle her on the living room rug. 

There's a difference between the classic Street "wronged woman", a la Elsie Tanner, and Carla.  Elsie picked the bad fellas in the first place because she wanted a bit of company and love.  She had more in common with Eileen than the feisty sexual tornado that is la Connor.  Carla just seems to pick perfectly affable, decent chaps, then sends them careening over the cliff edge of sanity and into the fragrant garden of loony.  When the marriage to Peter finally fails - as of course it will, possibly over Tina's bloodied corpse - I can't imagine which affable hero Carla will turn into a psychopath next.  Little Max?  Tom Hanks?  Pope Francis?  Surely no man is safe.



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