It was the night EastEnders has spent months waiting for – the last episode before next week’s shows celebrating its 30th anniversary culminating in the live special on Friday revealing – finally - the identity of Lucy Beale’s killer.

You’d have expected it to be the lull before the storm but dull it definitely wasn’t.

After drinking half a bottle of whisky on Monday, ending 18 months of sobriety, ravishing alcoholic Lauren Branning confided in Stacey that she knew who had killed Lucy and knew them well.

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Nick Rotton: EastEnders finally showed us the demise of one of its longest standing villains, Nasty Nick

‘You don’t know what I know,’ she stressed, explaining why she couldn’t just go to the police. ‘And it’s awful.’

Somehow we knew it would be.

Having discovered she was pregnant on Thursday, Lauren then completed a busy week by telling Peter their wedding was off and she was dumping him. It’s not impossible that she was still drunk.

Meanwhile in the Queen Vic, Danny Dyer and his muvver Shirley Carter made up, putting the fact that her son had raped his wife behind them, at Stan’s behest, his final wish, he said. ‘I’m dying. I’m being eaten alive with caaaaaancer.’

Poor Dot! Nick's mother Dot Cotton had an unexpected role in Nick's eventual demise

Finally, having just come back from the dead, Nick Cotton was gone again – permanently this time. We were treated to shocking scenes of Dot Cotton letting her precious, nasty, Nick pass away.

This was after Dot had scored him some heroin that turned out to be ‘bad gear’ – not a sentence any of us ever expected to read.

Viewers were left reeling, torn between seeing Nick suffering such a horrible demise and watching Dot abandoning her Christian principles, finally betray her son after all these years, and do something so unpleasant.

On the other hand, she always did resemble Count Dot-ula.

Apart from the drink, drugs, and death, it was pretty quiet.

Classic Dot: If there was ever a time for a cigarette...

Bad gear! Dot found heroin for her son and it turned out to be the end of him

Ben’s revolutionary new hearing aid barely got a look in and we were spared a repeat of Tuesday’s depravity in which a newly wed father of a two-week old baby had sex with his wife’s sister while she was in a coma fighting for her life (his wife that is, not the sister he had sex with – that would be a bit much even for EastEnders).

To cap it all, it was Friday the 13th in Walford - unlucky for some.

But then isn’t it always - unlucky for everyone?

Competition was fierce to see who could be the unluckiest with Lauren, Peter, Stacey, Roxy, Charlie, and Dot doing their damnedest – an unfortunate but appropriate phrase in the case of Albert Square’s church-going, chain-smoking, launderette manageress/saint.

Not a natural: Morally upstanding Dot was far from comfortable getting drugs for her son

Somehow though it was both inevitable and a shock when the series’ King of the Damned, Nasty Nick Cotton, upstaged them all.

Together, it represented EastEnders warming up - a mere aperitivo for the events ahead.

Here’s how things went from bad to worse for the five biggest victims of fate and life in Walford this week.

1. LAUREN BRANNING

Why Lauren suddenly not so much fell off the wagon as catapulted herself from it, drinking so much of her dad’s whisky that she passed out in the car lot portacabin, wasn’t clear.

It could have been the burden of solving the case that has confounded the country and Walford CID in particular, and knowing who had killed Lucy. Or, even worse that she was about to marry Peter and become part of the Beale family.

Off the wagon! Lauren was back on the drink in spectacular fashion

As for being pregnant, she wasn’t even the first to find out about the happy event, hearing the news after Kat and Stacey who turned up at Lauren’s front door with her pregnancy test.

‘Urgh you’ve got her wee all over your hands now !’ Kat cawed charmlessly.

To be honest, Lauren wasn’t that bovvered by being up the duff or lapsing.

‘I had one drink !’ she protested when Max argued she should go to an emergency counseling session.

The fact that Lauren’s idea of ‘one drink’ was half a pint of whisky suggested he had a point.

All over: Lauren ended things with Peter despite being pregnant

She was equally nonchalant about the prospect of having a ‘bay-bay.’

‘You know, there are bigger things than finding out you’re pregnant,’ she told Stacey, flouncing with a wounded pout – as she does most things.

‘Yeah course there is!’ Stacey carped. ‘What’s that then?’ The answer was of course her recent transformation into Albert Square’s version of Miss Marple.

‘I know who killed Lucy,’ she told Stace’, who, unlike the remarkably untroubled Lauren, immediately went through her repertoire of facial expressions: worried, very worried, and frankly aghast.

‘Lauren, if you know what happened to Lucy, you need to tell the police. Your best mate got her head smashed in!’ she reminded her diplomatically.

Knows too much: Lauren revealed that she knows who Lucy's killer is!

To Lauren’s horror, Stacey called the cops, inflicting the terrifying DI Samanffa Keeble on her, and us.

Lauren gave her DC Summerhayes’ file but, predictably, not the piece of paper that contained the crucial clue.

Instead, she wrote a cryptic message on a card to Jane and Ian congratulating them on getting married.

‘I know what happened to Lucy,’ she scrawled. Well maybe not that cryptic… As they say, it’s the thought that counts.

Drama drama: Meanwhile Jane set Denise straight about her marriage to Ian

2. CHARLIE AND ROXY

You will have to judge for yourselves whether it was wildly implausible that Charlie and Roxy would have had a wing-ding together

considering they spend so long bleating about how upset they are that Ronnie is in a coma.

‘No Charlie, we can’t !’ Roxy responded when her beloved (comatose) sister’s new husband kissed her. He correctly deduced, where Roxy is concerned, this meant ‘yes Charlie, we can !’

They managed to last two whole days before someone found out they had slept together, or before they told someone themselves as they did when they failed to notice Dot was standing there listening. Careless.

'There’s a really big chance that Ronnie will never wake up,’ Roxy explained in their defence. ‘If she doesn’t wake up, either that’s it or she’ll be disabled. So I think that’s reason enough to make one mistake...’

By this, Roxy meant she was so traumatized about what had happened to Ronnie, she had slept with her husband. In other words, it was basically Ronnie’s fault.

Dark turn: Things got very gloomy for EastEnders veteran Dot

3. DOT COTTON

Anyone watching who hadn’t seen EastEnders for a while would be somewhat bewildered about what had happened to Dot.

Buying smack, lying brazenly to Fatboy’s face about it, harbouring the man who had hospitalized the mother of her great grandson, bringing him food parcels consisting of cigarettes and heroin.

No, it wasn’t a great week for the woman who is renowned as the most principled person in the Square – if not the only one.

She wasn’t seen running the launderette once, which left you wondering how the other residents were coping, given that none of them owns a washing machine.

Why? Dot was desperate to know how she could have created such an evil son

As for her famous Christian ethos, that had gone awry, defeated once again by the over-riding emotions of being a muvver endlessly defending her son.

‘Confess your sins’, Dot urged. Something about Nick’s reply suggested her pleas were not working.

‘So Ronnie’s going to be vegetable,’ he cackled. ‘I hope she rots.’

Nick didn’t bother with soft-soaping his Ma into doing his bidding, namely getting him some smack.

‘All I’m asking for is one fix!’ he wailed.

Cruel: Nick was quick to blame his mother for how he turned out - not the drugs

In fact she bought so many wraps, it’s no wonder Nick overdosed when she eventually delivered them, having retrieved them after she had thrown them away in disgust – from the bin in the kitchen.

It looked as if Nick had pegged it on Thursday night when Dot found him lying motionless before he spluttered back to life.

‘Bad gear,’ he diagnosed.

‘I wish Doctor Legg was here,’ wailed Dot, speaking for us all. Nick made a quick recovery though and was soon well enough to start boasting that, besides Eddie Royal, he had killed Reg Cox – the first of EastEnders’ litany of victims in its debut episode 30 years ago.

All the secrets: Nick revealed to Dot just how many locals he's killed

‘I killed him, stole all his medals, flogged ‘em and bought some gear,’ he recalled. Happy days!

‘They said it was natural causes!’ Dot insisted, horrified. ‘He had an ‘art attack.’

‘I roughed him up good and proper. And he snuffed it!’ Nick grinned with relish.

She went through the times he drew a knife on her and told her he’d found God to con her out of all her money for drugs.

‘You are evil. Satan sent a serpent into my heart. What did I did to deserve it?’

‘You got yourself laid!’ he roared, finally provoking her into doing what anyone from East London would do, and giving him a slap.

Pure evil: 'Satan sent a serpent into my heart,' Dot said

4. NICK COTTON

You couldn’t really say Nick’s return lived up to expectation – ours or his.

He successfully extorted £100, 000 out of Ronnie Mitchell, only to see it slip through his fingers when the woman from Father Ted set fire to it.

Then he botched tampering with an enemy’s equipment (as it were) and not for the first time. (To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, cutting a car’s brakes once may be regarded as misfortune, twice looks like carelessness.)

Now he was also somehow back on the smack, even though he was living in not-very-splendid isolation.

No more Nick: Begging for forgiveness at the end, Dot refused to console her cold-hearted son

He spent his days alone in the Dickensian derelict house in the Square, unnoticed by all the other residents, next door to Dot’s, growling and shivering in the cobwebs and shadows like a cross between Bill Sykes and Miss Haversham.

It was here he had contracted what seemed to be pneumonia, cholera, or possibly the plague – sweating, wheezing and coughing ostentatiously.

Despite this, he managed to enjoy himself torturing Dot, saying she was responsible for his ‘evil ways’ because of her failings as a muvver.

‘What did I ever have as a kid?! Just a load of rules!’ he scoffed which, to be honest, didn’t exactly qualify as abuse. ‘You turned me into a killer.’

‘What turned you into a killer was the ‘eroin,’ she drawled, increasingly defeated.

Say goodbye: Dot closed her dead son's eyes

Now, ironically, it was killing him. Nick was so ill his over-acting reached life-threatening proportions. Eventually, even he implored her to call an ambulance.

‘Please Ma ! Something’s wrong. It wasn’t pure!’

It’s Walford, not Colombia.

Finally, poor Dot admitted she had spent years ignoring she had ‘created a monster.’

‘I ain’t called the ambulance,’ she revealed. ‘I prayed instead - to let Jesus decide whether you’d get better or whether the world was a better place without you.’

Hearing this probably confirmed to Nick he was a goner and prompted him to drag his death scene out still further, lying there like a grubby version of Lord Nelson doing his ‘kiss me Hardy’ speech.

‘Come closer,’ he groaned. ‘I’m sorry Ma - for everything I ever put you through. Forgive me.’

Parting kiss: Despite everything Dot gave her horrible son a kiss after he died

Those days were finally over though. She couldn’t forgive him, telling him: ‘confess to Jesus. He’ll forgive you.’

Maybe.

There was one more moan, a final croak, and then Nick just… croaked. Impervious to his passing, or the impending threat of being charged for supplying the drugs that killed him, Dot leaned down, closed his eyes, and kissed him.

‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she cooed, a gesture that made Dot more sinister than Lucy Beale’s killer could ever be, whoever it is.