Photo courtesy of Channel 5.
It’s taken almost a year, but finally the Hamish murder plot line is all neatly tied up. I was on holiday while this storyline played out, so I got home and binge-watched the whole two weeks over the space of a couple of days, which was a pretty good way to watch it.
Hamish was bumped off in the Cannings’ spa back at the Bonfire Night party last year, and Tyler was soon under suspicion as the perpetrator because he’d whacked Hamish over the head with a garden gnome and everyone assumed that was what sent his long-lost dad head first into the spa to drown in full Guy Fawkes regalia. There was an ill-conceived attempt at an escape when Piper and Tyler went on the run, but eventually he was caught, put on trial and found guilty of his father’s murder.
Poor old Piper really does have some rotten luck. After Tyler’s imprisonment, she was broken-hearted, but eventually moved on with mysterious new gardener, Cassius. Unfortunately for her, we all now know that Cassius is Tyler’s half-brother, also Hamish’s son, and it was actually him who finished Hamish off, by forcing his unpleasant head into Sheila’s spa after Tyler had gnomed him. What are the odds of unknowingly falling in love with two half-brothers, one of whom killed their father and the other one who is wrongly serving time for it? She really does have a very specific type, doesn’t she?
My personal favourite aspect of the story is that Cassius dropped his monogrammed medallion (I mean, we all have one of those, don’t we?) in the garden when he drowned Hamish, and when he heard that the Sharma-Rebecchis were digging for Mrs Mangel’s buried treasure in their garden he had to hotfoot it back to the street and pretend to be a gardener, so that he had the opportunity to rifle through everyone’s flowerbeds for his medallion before they found it.
One small issue with Cassius’ gardener ruse was that he knew barely anything about gardening, so he hoped that by taking his top off a lot, he’d blind the Ramsay Street residents with his bronze pecs so much that they wouldn’t notice that he didn’t really know a hydrangea from a hollyhock. And it actually worked because even Sonya, who runs a nursery, overlooked the fact that he didn’t know what he was doing and gave him a job. Admittedly, she did seem to notice that he was useless at gardening, but in keeping with her usual casual attitude to running her business, she didn’t appear to care all that much.
Dipi and Shelia perving on Cassius. Photo: Channel 5/Digital Spy.
As usual with these long, drawn out storylines, the end was all a little bit anti-climactic, and the viewers knew the truth way before any of the characters, and were willing them all to hurry up and catch up – but you really have to admire the planning that must have gone into this storyline. Cassius made an appearance in the background at the bonfire party way before he was ever a regular on the street and Tyler’s release from prison was shot out of sequence when Travis Burns had a gap in his work schedule. Other storylines have been woven into this one throughout the past year, and it must have been quite a feat to work it all together. Props to the writers for keeping track of it.
With Bonfire Night on the horizon again, it makes me wonder whether they’re going to start another long game with a very distant pay off. Guy Fawkes costumes at the ready….
