Photo courtesy of Channel 5.
We finally learned what Finn’s evil plan entailed in Neighbours (the week of 9th to the 13th July), and it was as gloriously bonkers as I’d hoped.
Finn took advantage of Dipi’s scavenger hunt to frame Elly by running Xanthe over in Elly’s car, having previously managed to get Bea to dress like Elly and be seen on CCTV footage in the area, making Elly’s alibi look decidedly shaky. I mean, if you were going to make up an alibi, I’m not sure why you’d settle on “I was marking school assignments while getting battered on red wine,” but I guess people just figured that Elly chose a lie that sounded convincing. Everyone knows she’s partial to a glass of wine, or six.
After running Xanthe down and abandoning Elly’s car, Finn convinced Bea to take off with him to get married to his wheelchair-bound alter-ego ‘Patrick’. On the way, Bea started to have doubts, and it was at this point he went full villain. I particularly enjoyed the moment where he revealed he wasn’t disabled at all, by running at Bea in the most menacing manner since the evil robot in Terminator 2.
Finn runs over Xanthe. Photo: Channel 5/Digital Spy
In true Neighbours style, Susan and Elly took off on an ill-advised road trip to find Bea (and of course they managed to find her – Australia is only a tiny little country, after all), and it was there that they finally realised that Patrick was Finn, just in time for him to lock all three of them in a handily placed container unit.
Meanwhile back in Erinsborough, Mishti, who normally cannot help herself from investigating the tiniest little sniff of anything suspicious, was basically putting her fingers in her ears and singing “lalalalala” every time Mark tried to tell her that something dodgy was going on. Normally she is falling over herself to arrest her family, friends and neighbours, but this time it seemed she just couldn’t be bothered, so Mark had to reconnect with his old detective roots and do Mishti’s job for her. Not only did he manage to inexplicably find the spy camera hidden in the box of tea just by opening the lid, but he also stumbled across the clothes that Finn had made Bea wear to incriminate Elly. With very little help from Mishti, who presumably was still sitting at her desk drinking coffee, Mark figured out where Susan’s phone was and set off with Karl to find them, obviously forgetting how well it went last time Karl went off into the bush to locate Susan.
Xanthe remembered that Finn was the one behind the wheel of the car that hit her, and she did it at the precise moment when there was a police officer and a witness who’d also seen Finn in the room with her, so that was nicely timed. Mishti finally stopped drinking coffee at this point and decided to do a bit of police work, passing on information to Mark while he and Karl were out searching.
Xanthe is rushed to hospital. Photo: Channel 5/Digital Spy
Of course, Mark and Karl happened to pull their car over in exactly the same spot where Elly and Susan had been the previous day (remember, Australia really is tiny) and they heard Susan and Elly banging on the walls of the container. Presumably by Monday they will have found them and let them all out, unless Karl has another funny turn and falls down a hill again.
This storyline has been building up to a climax for weeks and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it all play out – I do love a camp soap villain with a crazy plan, and as revenge plots go, this one was particularly mad. But where is Finn now? And what else does he have up his evil sleeve? Will he do any more super menacing running? Hopefully all these questions will be answered this week…
