Chrissie Watts. Zoe Slater. Sam Mitchell. The Queen Vic. A corpse lying but a few feet away. EastEnders are serving up a platter of nostalgia, but has history repeated itself almost exactly?

Even better than the sugar rush of a handful of Quality Street after stuffing your guts with turkey was the sight of Tracy-Ann Oberman, Kim Medcalf and Michelle Ryan reunited, twenty years after the devious trio revelled in the downfall of Dirty Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), before his violent attack on Chrissie forced Zoe to intervene, whacking the villain over the head with a dog-shaped metal door stop.

Zoe believed she’d killed him, though, unseen by her, Chrissie delivered another, final blow when Den rose from unconsciousness and they buried him in the Vic cellar. Zoe eventually learned that she hadn’t killed him, and after Sam spent some time in prison for the murder, justice eventually caught up to Chrissie and she wound up serving twenty years for the canine-assisted slaying.

We haven’t seen Chrissie, now a hardened, vicious, prison ‘top dog’, since her reunion in the slammer with Den’s daughter Sharon Watts (Letitia Dean) ended in a peace brokered between them, before she reunited with her long-presumed dead lover, Jake Moon (Joel Beckett) upon her release.

As a legendary soap bitch, the levels of Chrissie’s vitriol cannot begin to be accurately explained. She’s cold, conniving and utterly unscrupulous, so it should come as no surprise that she has been the mastermind behind Zoe’s stalking ordeal, using Jasmine Fisher (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness), Zoe’s long lost daughter, as her pawn.

Yesterdays episode saw Zoe find a card, supposedly from her son, promising a Christmas visit. In todays episode, Zoe’s mum, Kat Moon (Jessie Wallace) found her reading it and, with Anthony Trueman’s (Nicholas Bailey) lie that both his and Zoe’s children had died ringing in her ears, she prepared to break Zoe’s heart.

Chelsea Fox (Zaraah Abrahams), struggling with the burden of the secret, burst upstairs to tell Kat that Anthony had lied and to tell Zoe that both of her children had survived. Kat stormed downstairs and expelled Anthony (while tearing strips off of him) from the community Christmas dinner, sending him home for a furious showdown with his dad, Patrick Trueman (Rudolph Walker), who wounded him by suggesting that he wished Anthony had died instead of his other son, Paul (Gary Beadle).