Hollyoaks Launches Whodunnit Mystery With New Year’s Eve Flashforward

Hollyoaks — having already experienced immense success with storylines that disrupt the space-time continuum — has decided to ring in the New Year with a similar conceit. And, as an added bonus, the special episode will launch a new, tantalizing mystery.

Hollyoaks New Year’s Eve

With the residents of the eponymous village still wondering, “Who Shot Mercedes?” it may seem odd that the soap is set to launch a new head-scratching conundrum but according to show-runner Bryan Kirkwood, “It bookends our next big important storyline which is about County Lines drug dealers and how they invade a community and a school like Hollyoaks High.”

The set up is ambitious. As explained by Kirkwood, the special episode — which first airs December 27 on digital channel E4 — will flash forward exactly 12 months into the future (New Year’s Eve 2020) and find the characters, “in screaming, agonizing jeopardy…”

Of the hints concerning Holidays To Come, the ones involving teenagers Tom Cunningham and Charlie Dean seem the most unsettling. A knife used by the former in 2019 to slice his birthday cake will be placed into an evidence bag the following year.

As for the latter, his unattended game controller is highlighted along with shouts from his mother Nancy demanding to know what he has done as a pair of policemen stand behind her.

As mentioned previously, this is hardly Hollyoaks’ inaugural visit to the “timey wimey” rodeo. A storyline concerning revelers inside The Dog in the Pond public house being taken hostage by a madman who eventually caused the establishment to explode was played out in a non-linear fashion.

And in December of 2009, an episode jumped six months into the future allowing the audience to glimpse a much-anticipated wedding ceremony and gasp in horror at the revelation that the groom would meet a very sick end thanks to an unseen, trigger-happy figure.

Hollyoaks airs in its home country of Great Britain every weeknight at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 4. A special “First Look” of the next day’s episode follows at 7:00 p.m. on digital station E4.