Whew! That was quite a week! You’ve honestly got to love a show that can do a tear-jerking memorial, a deep fake scandal, and someone pooing on someone else’s front lawn all in the space of four episodes.
Felix’s Fallout
In the wake of Andrew getting squished by some scaffolding during his brother’s botched robbery, the poo (not Karl’s) hits the fan in a big way. Felix has done a runner, but his loose cannon of a bogan girlfriend sets him up, and when he goes to meet her he’s arrested. It’s at this point that Andrew shuffles along to the police station to tell Felix he’s absolutely done with him, and honestly, I can’t blame him. Felix used Andrew to get out of prison knowing full well he was going to immediately go back to crimeing, which was always going to look absolutely splendid for his brother, the cop. Wendy gives him a quick serve as well, also well-deserved.
Incidentally, it tickled me that Sadie and Wendy got the tiniest little “welcome home” balloons for Andrew when he got out of hospital. Did they think it was inappropriate to get big ones because his brother was going to prison?
JJ now knows that Felix is his dad, and the poor kid obviously has questions. He begs his mums to let him go and see Felix one last time, but Remi makes the decision to go and see Felix instead and asks him not to have any contact with JJ. As much as I respect the right of any kid to have contact with their biological parent if they want to, I kind of think she’s right to do this at the moment, as JJ has shown himself to be a very mixed-up, poor judge of character, with terrible impulse control. Perhaps he should leave exploring his paternity until he’s a bit older.
I have a horrible feeling that Remi preventing contact with JJ is something that will come back to bite her, as he’s not going to handle it well if (when) he finds out what she did.
Honestly, I need Cara and Remi to enroll JJ on some sort of common sense training course because the kid’s decision-making is absolutely out of control.
Krista is Doing it Tough
Poor Krista holds a memorial service for baby Hope, which Paul conducts for her, complete with some breathtakingly tuneless singing of This Little Light of Mine.
The whole thing is very sad, and everyone rallies around Krista to help her through the memorial, but then she gets left alone at home to stare longingly at Byron’s painkillers in the fridge. I’m sorry, but I think if my housemate was a recovering addict who’d just gone through such an unbearable trauma, I might think about keeping my painkillers somewhere she wouldn’t be faced with seeing them multiple times a day. If they need to be in the fridge, and honestly I’m not sure why they do, can’t they be put inside a container out of sight? Or even better, stored in a different fridge? Pretty sure Jane also has one.
One of the little things I’m enjoying with the Krista storyline is that she still has a little pregnancy bump and hasn’t just instantly become thin again. I like the effort they’ve gone to to portray things more realistically with this plot.
What I don’t enjoy is that Paul comes out of it looking pretty good again, although he was a little bit too pleased with himself for my liking.
“It was a very moving service”, says the man who conducted the service. It was only you because Susan was not there, so get over yourself.
Chelsea Has Outstayed Her Welcome
UGH. Why is this absolute hag still here? Can someone call her an Uber?
Paul is quite distracted with conducting baby Hope’s memorial service and sniffing around Terese, so this leaves Chelsea free to intercept the IT guy Paul has hired to investigate how Krista got locked inside the sauna. If Paul finds out it was Chelsea who locked her in, it’s curtains for her – not only will she be booted out on her ear without getting her talons on Paul’s money, but she may also face criminal charges.
At first, the IT man, who looks like Aldi-brand Tim Collins, seems to be a bit of an icon. He gets Chelsea to buy him a pricey lunch as a bribe and then tells her he has the proof that she locked the door and he intends to give it to Paul anyway. Chelsea decides she has no choice but to attempt to seduce him in order to get him to stay quiet and give her the report so she can doctor it, and IT Man goes right down in my estimations when he gets wholly on board with this idea. Booooooooo, IT Man.
It’s not an entirely successful week for Chelsea though, as Paul unceremoniously kicks her out of the penthouse now Leo and Abigail are back, which I think Leo is not so secretly pleased about. I need Chelsea to be found out and given her marching orders soon because I am so absolutely sick of her.
Dr Karl Poos in a Garden
As a bit of light relief in what was quite a serious week, we have a typical Neighbours storyline that results in nothing but a silly punchline. I love these nonsense stories, and this was a pretty good one.
Karl is obsessed with doing a glow-up ahead of being the poster boy for the retirement village, so he’s on a really depressing-sounding healthy diet and is going off out on his bike all the time. Melanie has decided to join him on this journey, so this leaves the two of them cycling through suburbia while Karl’s guts start to make the same noise as my coffee machine.
At first, he thinks he just needs to fart, but is worried that he’s going to follow through, so they do a U-turn and head for home. Karl doesn’t make it though, and has to strip out of his cycling gear in order to get his bib shorts down to do a massive poo in someone’s front garden.
It made me laugh a lot, particularly since I had a not-so-extreme version of this myself last summer. I was in the middle of nowhere on my bike and I desperately needed a wee. I hadn’t seen anyone for MILES, so I ducked into a field and dropped my shorts to wee behind a hedge, at which exact moment a very tall tractor drove along the road and a light aircraft flew over. Perfect. Thank god it was only a wee. Poor Dr. Karl…
Faking It
The deepfake scandal reaches somewhat of a climax as Mackenzie starts to get more and more suspicious of Haz. Several people have noticed that he’s being tense and snappy, although I will exclude Melanie from this because being startled when a neighbour just waltzes into your house without knocking on the door is a PERFECTLY NORMAL REACTION. I need all the idiots in Ramsay Street to explore the concepts of doors and locks. Please, for the love of god.
Anyway, after Holly’s savings get wiped out in another hack, Haz gets caught in the act of trying to anonymously return the cash to her, which sparks Mackenzie’s suspicion even further. Eventually, she snoops on his laptop and, because none of them have ever heard of passwords either it seems. She finds all the deepfake material saved there: Jane’s video, Aaron’s phone call, the video of Haz trashing the coffee shop – all of it.
Haz reluctantly spills the beans, and it turns out he used to be an IT whizz, and used his skills to rip people off and spread lies for profit, but eventually, he realised he was being an absolute wet wipe and quit. This is one of the reasons he never has anything to do with his family because they’ve all disowned him. Fair enough.
Haz claims that all these deepfakes are in order to get revenge on him for destroying the whole scamming operation when he left, but that he can handle it himself without the police.
Mackenzie is obviously shocked and wants to go straight to Andrew. She’s normally such a sensible, dependable type, but she really lets herself down here by agreeing to give Haz a week to sort it all out. Quite what she thinks he’s going to do, I don’t know. She should throw Haz and his high-waisted Rupert the Bear trousers directly under the bus and find herself a less morally dubious boyfriend if you ask me.
I’ve never been that blown away by Haz as a character and I went massively off him over the way he treated Holly, but I’m honestly wondering where the writers could possibly go after this with Haz. He’s 100% in the wrong over the whole deepfake affair, and I can’t see a way for them to rehabilitate him. I think it’s time for him to go wherever it is that Trevor has disappeared to.
