It’s heartbreaking but it works because it mirrors reality. As someone who has intimately dealt with the effects of knife crime in my community, that hollowed our feeling it leaves you with is is pretty much spot on. When it’s someone you know, even at a tangent, it’s not something you just get over. When it’s someone young, someone who has their whole life ahead of them, the violence is exposed for how heinous it truly is.

I had a cousin who got murdered 2 years ago now. He got stabbed trying to stop an argument. He was about 5 years older than Shakil was in this storyline, and he left behind 2 kids.

So I see the blood on the pavement in the square and I remembered how my cousin’s sisters were crying and kissing the dried bloodstains in the street the day after they peeled his body off the pavement.

I see Carmel getting to see her son’s body and I remember the police stopping my family from getting to see my cousin because, I quote, “he’s evidence now.”

And I hear Linda say “poor boy, lying alone hurt, alone in the dark,” and I remember my cousin. Because after he was stabbed, the cowards who did it, left him there to bleed out alone.

My cousin is dead now, his kids are fatherless, and my family is still feeling the effects of this, years later. And it will never stop.

People do just die from these injuries. It’s quick and it’s easy and it changes everything. It’s sad that this story is so common.

I really hope that they take the chance to explore this properly in the show.

Eventually you move forward but you never forget. And parent who loses their child... they are never quite the same ever again.

The only thing I wish they’d done better was to stop padding the story with the fucking Slaters. Completely undermined the atmosphere and the importance of the story they were building.