Gabby Thomas walks back into Emmerdale tonight expecting familiarity, comfort and perhaps a touch of post-holiday normality. Instead, she’s about to collide

head-first with a revelation so explosive it threatens to rip open old wounds the village has spent years trying to stitch closed.  Home Farm has changed —

and no one thought to warn her. After weeks away in Portugal visiting her mum, Bernice Blackstock, Gabby returns armed with gifts, stories and the assumption that life,

however messy, would at least be recognisable. She knows she has missed drama; this is Emmerdale, after all. But nothing could prepare her for the sight that greets her the moment she steps into Kim Tate’s kitchen.

Sitting there, as casually as if he’d never left, is Graham Foster.

Very much alive.

“You’re dead.”

The shock hits in a heartbeat. Gabby freezes. The carefully chosen Portuguese tea set slips from her hands and smashes across the floor, porcelain shattering in perfect harmony with her sense of reality.

“You’re dead,” she blurts out — not as a question, but as a fact she has lived with for years.

Because everyone has.

Graham’s supposed murder back in 2020 detonated the village. Allegations flew, friendships fractured, and innocent people saw their lives torn apart. Some were interrogated, others ostracised. Marlon even lost his freedom for a time as suspicion swallowed logic.

And now the man at the centre of it all is calmly occupying Kim Tate’s kitchen like a ghost who’s forgotten he’s meant to haunt.

The return Gabby never expected

For Gabby, the moment is particularly cruel. She has already endured enormous upheaval in recent years — grief, betrayal, motherhood, the constant pressure of living under the Tate shadow. Stability at Home Farm is always fragile, but resurrection?

That’s new.

What cuts deepest is that everyone else has had time — however brief — to begin processing Graham’s return. Gabby is the last to know, ambushed in her own home, forced to absorb years of emotional whiplash in seconds.

And she isn’t alone.

Lydia Dingle, also back at the mansion after time away, witnesses the scene unfold and shares Gabby’s horror. If this is a prank, it’s a cruel one. If it’s real, it rewrites history.

Kim’s silence speaks volumes

Hovering over everything is Kim Tate herself — formidable, controlled, impossible to read. How long has she known? Why wasn’t Gabby told? And what does Graham’s presence mean for the delicate power structure at Home Farm?

Kim has weathered a brutal few months, spiralling over Christmas while her family became entangled in the Ray Walters case. Her world has been anything but calm. Yet even by Tate standards, harbouring a man believed dead is seismic.

Gabby cannot ignore the suspicion creeping in: who else is being protected, and at what cost?

Enough of the whispers

For Graham, the stunned faces confirm what he has slowly begun to realise. Quietly re-entering village life, one awkward encounter at a time, is torture. Every meeting demands the same explanations, the same disbelief, the same anger.

Tonight, he decides the drip feed ends.

If Emmerdale wants answers, he’ll give them — publicly.

And there is only one place that can happen.

All roads lead to the Woolpack

When Graham and Joe step into the Woolpack together, the temperature drops. Conversations falter. Glasses pause mid-air. Word spreads in seconds: the dead man is drinking at the bar.

Charity Dingle, Ryan, Billy Fletcher — they all turn to stare, each carrying their own history with the man who was supposed to be gone forever.

For Billy, it is unbearable. He found Graham’s body. He has lived with that image, processed that trauma, tried to move forward. Now the impossible stands a few feet away asking, in effect, to be believed all over again.

Disbelief quickly curdles into fury.

How dare he?

A village betrayed

Graham’s “death” did more than create grief. It manufactured consequences that reshaped lives. Accusations stuck. Trust evaporated. People suffered.

If he is alive, then what were they mourning? And who allowed the lie to breathe for so long?

Tonight’s episode forces the village to confront a horrifying possibility: that their pain might have been avoidable, manipulated, perhaps even engineered.

Gabby at the centre of the storm

Back at Home Farm, Gabby reels.

Her return was meant to be a reset — a chance to reconnect with family after time away, to gather strength for whatever chaos might come next. Instead, she has been thrust into the epicentre of the biggest shock in recent memory.

And beneath the outrage lies something quieter but just as powerful: hurt.

She trusted these people. She loves them. Yet they let her walk through the door unprepared.

Very sad news indeed

Because resurrection stories rarely end in celebration. They end in reckoning.

For every relieved smile, there is someone retraumatised. For every explanation, another question rises. Graham may have his reasons, but the village has scars — and scars do not vanish just because the dead return.

What happens now?

As Graham begins to outline where he has been and why he stayed away, reactions range from sceptical to savage. Some want justice. Others want distance. A few simply want the nightmare to end.

But one thing is certain: Emmerdale will never see him the same way again.

And neither will Gabby.

Her homecoming has turned into a collision with the past, a brutal reminder that in this village, history is never buried deeply enough.

Tonight, the dead walk, secrets breathe, and Home Farm trembles.

Welcome back, Gabby.