Emmerdale’s Matty Barton (Ash Palmisciano) is an innocent man, but he’s an innocent man who is currently facing a prison sentence thanks to Samson Dingle (Sam Hall) and his horrible friend Josh (Osian Morgan). And in Monday (June 10)’s episode Samson ignored Matty’s pleas for him to tell the truth and took action to make the situation much, much worse.
When Josh and Samson started causing trouble at the Hide, Matty was fairly confident he was handling the situation. Josh had been harassing Amy (Natalie Ann Jamieson) – which he repeatedly described as ‘flirting’ – and Matty stood up for his wife and threw the troublesome boys out.
Then Josh started targeting abuse at Matty and specifically aiming transphobic insults at him and came back into the Hide. When he demanded the money from the till, Matty tried to throw him out again, at which point Josh pushed Samson at Matty, telling him to get the money. Matty was holding a knife from a plate he was clearing and Samson accidentally got stabbed.
As Samson was taken away in an ambulance with a stab wound to his side that turned out not to be very serious, the police arrested Matty. He insisted to the police that he hadn’t done anything wrong, but Josh and Samson were sticking to their story that he’d lunged at them with the knife.
Matty was released on bail and at the start of this episode his family were trying to keep him positive as he panicked about how hard prison life would be for him, particularly as a transgender man. Moira (Natalie J. Robb) sent Cain (Jeff Hordley) round to Wishing Well to have a word with Samson.
Lydia (Karen Blick) and Sam (James Hooton) had formed a defensive shield around their son and wouldn’t listen to Cain’s protests that Samson and Josh were lying and Matty was innocent. They sent Samson upstairs, but he listened as Cain explained how bad things would be for Matty if he was sent to prison. Samson looked guilty, and when Cain spotted him and told him it wasn’t too late to tell the truth, it seemed that had sunk in.
Unable to sit at home and do nothing, Matty later decided he had to have a go at convincing Samson to tell the truth and set off for Wishing Well. His heartfelt plea also seemed to have made Samson think, and as soon as he’d gone Samson called the police.
Anyone thinking Samson was about to do the right thing should have cast their minds back to last year when he was fully prepared to steal his baby Esther’s trust fund, set up for her by Noah Dingle. And even before that, when he told social services that Esther’s mum Amelia (Daisy Campbell) was an unfit mother, basically so Esther could be taken into care and he wouldn’t have to cope with her being in the village.
Any chance that he might have grown up and become a nicer person since then evaporated when PC Swirling (Andy Moore) arrived to arrest Matty for breaching his bail – after Samson told the police that Matty had been pressuring him to change his statement.
Samson was in the village with Lydia and Sam when they saw Matty being taken away in tears. He begged Samson once more to tell the truth. ‘Samson, what have you done?’ he said. ‘I can’t go to prison!’
Cain and Sam glared at each other as the Dingle family is now divided between those who support Matty and those who believe Samson – who at least managed to look a tiny bit sorry for what he’d done.
With Matty’s future looking bleak, will Samson eventually do the right thing?
