Welcome to this week’s Ramsay Street Round-Up! I’m a bit late getting this week’s round-up written, and the episodes of Neighbours I’m rounding up here already feel like they were on months ago, so please forgive me if I miss anything major.
Anthrax Drama
We were left over the weekend with the anthrax cliffhanger, with poor Remy in the house on her own with the suspect white powder, while everyone else got the heck out of there. Of course, despite the feud between the Varga-Murphys and the Rodwells, it’s pretty convenient having a cop on the street, so that’s where the Varga-Muphys turn, letting Andrew go into Hero Mode.
I’m not sure how much training Andrew’s had in relation to biological hazards, and I’m no expert myself, but even I know that holding your denim shirt over your mouth and nose is going to do absolutely nothing if there is a cloud of anthrax dancing merrily around the house. Still, this is exactly what Andrew does as he goes to talk to Remy.
Not content to let another Rodwell outdo her in the stupidity stakes, Wendy decides that the best way to atone for possibly putting the Varga-Murphys in this position in the first place, is for her to involve herself in it as well. Because if there’s one thing that’s better than two kids losing their mum, it’s three kids losing their mums, right Wendy? What is it with this woman? She always picks the stupidest option, and she always makes everything worse.
Despite Wendy’s determination to die and martyr herself, the powder turns out to be baking soda, so everything is OK in the end. With that very stressful situation over with, JJ decides that now is simply the perfect time to drop his truth bomb on both families and tell them that Andrew might be his dad.
Remy is thrown for a loop, and is absolutely furious with Cara for not telling her that JJ might not have been conceived via the sperm donor they’d picked, and justifiably so. I can totally understand someone having a desperate need to fall pregnant, but I’d expect most people to be a bit more discerning, and honest, when it came to the provenance of the vital ingredients.
Remy doesn’t know how to deal with the situation, and ends up spilling her guts to Susan, who’s got a little bit of related experience in the general areas of betrayal and dealing with other people’s biological kids. It could be worse, she could have gone to Paul, Erinsborough’s premier authority on spreading it around.
It Haz to Be
After it’s revealed that Eden stole everyone’s things from the vineyard, including Mackenzie’s wedding rings, Haz is determined to help get everything back. Incidentally, why on earth would you keep your late husband’s wedding ring in your handbag, which is an exceptionally easy thing to lose?
Anyway, Sadie remembers that she has a tracker in her wallet, so Holly and Haz use it to track Eden down. Holly immediately gets herself locked in a shed, while Haz rolls around on the grass with Eden for a bit, and comes up with an absolute shiner of a black eye. Luckily, they manage to retrieve Mackenzie’s bag, with her wedding rings “safely” stashed in a hole in the lining. I would actually argue that that is an utterly stupid place to keep them – one hole in the outside of your bag and bye-bye wedding rings. I do hope she’s found somewhere safer to put them now.
As Susan very amusingly points out, Holly was locked in the shed and saw none of Haz’s heroics, but she’s still been dazzled by his knight in shining armour act and has developed a very embarrassing crush on him. I say it’s embarrassing because since she decided that she likes him she’s been acting like a total desperate idiot in front of him.
At least there’s one less person in this messy love polygon now, as Haz’s pretty perfect girlfriend is revealed to be an ABSOLUTE MONSTER after she locks Trevor out of the house. Unforgivable. Ten years in the dungeon with no trial.
The Further Adventures of Detective Reece
Reece is carrying on with her very half-hearted attempts to find her sister, mostly because her dad’s assistant keeps looming up at her and woodenly threatening her with being summoned back to the States. Reece tracks down her sister’s old car, then hangs around in the school car park in order to accost the child who drives it now. It’s nice to see that safeguarding is going so well at Erinsborough High.
The whole car scenario is an entirely pointless cul-de-sac that only turns up an old card that Reece gave to her sister, but Reece still uses it to persuade Tess that she’s on the case. Paul, however, is sick of having Reece hanging around, so he does his best to stir things up by telling Tess that Reece is involved with Byron, a lowly porter, and also that he used to be an escort who is probably only after Reece’s money.
Now, Byron is a lot of things (he’s a bit dull, for instance), but a gold digger is not one of them. If he wanted a bit of Reece’s flashy lifestyle he wouldn’t be taking her to the beach to eat pies. Whatever it is he sees in Reece, it’s not her executive lifestyle. You don’t get pies in Business Class.
The Sharon Davies Line
The return of a heritage Neighbours character has caused me delight and consternation in equal parts. I have a friend, Jamie, who is very fond of the 1980s and early 1990s era of Neighbours – he bought me a Jim Robinson bauble which proudly adorns my Christmas tree every year, and we have read several pretty questionable Neighbours-themed books together, at the pace of one page per day. We’re currently reading Soap Star by Nicola Charles. We’re only on page 120 but I can already give you a definitive review of that particular book, and my review is this: Just don’t.
Anyway, Jamie invented a system by which we could rate how memorable an old Neighbours character is, and it is known as The Sharon Davies Line. As Jamie explains it:
“It’s the scientific name name given to the point at which a Neighbours character is considered too obscure to be reasonably recalled in detail by a regular viewer. So, Toadfish (say) would be miles above the SDL. Toby Mangel would be noticeably above it. Gerard Singer would be well below it. Etc.”
But now Neighbours have ruined our highly scientific system by bringing her back! Everyone will know who Sharon Davies is now, so the SDL no longer works. The AUDACITY.
