It’s been one of those weeks on Neighbours where so many characters are acting like they have damp sponge cake for brains, that I found it quite stressful to watch. I’m going to be mean to several Erinsborough residents, and I think I’m going to find it very cathartic. Let’s dive in.
Vera Brings Chaos
Vera is the new landlady at the shared house, and she’s making great use of the pool. Every time the housemates look out of the window, there’s Vera floating around on her bright pink inflatable with a cocktail in her hand. Iconic.
They begin to try different strategies to get rid of her – telling her she’s in breach of the tenancy agreement doesn’t work, nor does Haz attempting to tire her out with water aerobics. They decide a charm offensive might do the trick, but the person who will be the best at this, Byron, doesn’t want to do it, so Mackenzie tries instead. Vera pushes her to her limit and she ends up being incredibly blunt, sending Vera sulking off with her inflatable flamingo under her arm, but not before she tells them she’s going to put their rent up considerably.
While having to spend any time at all with Vera seems like it would be incredibly unpleasant, I kind of love her and I hope we see more of her now.
Vic Clashes With Leo
Vic is pushing hard for Nicolette and Byron to agree to him putting in an offer on the vineyard on their behalf. They’re both incredibly excited about the prospect, especially Nicolette, who declares, “I’ve always loved that vineyard!” Presumably, she’s forgetting the time she collapsed there and almost lost her baby, but OK…
The Stone siblings are very clear to Vic that Leo is a friend and they don’t want to do him dirty with this deal, but Vic goes ahead and gives Leo an incredibly low offer anyway, and Leo is furious.
Leo’s always been portrayed as a pretty smart businessman up to this point, he is Paul’s son after all, but he is being so utterly boneheaded about his current business crisis. He wouldn’t let Krista buy the house she lives in from him because that would have been “charity”; he won’t accept any money from his gazillionaire father; he rejects the idea of rebranding his products to get away from the poison scandal; he reacts to Krista’s idea of some positive PR as if it’s absolutely groundbreaking; and now he’s mad that Vic doesn’t want to pay over the odds for a failing business after he’s shown him the figures that show just how bad said business is doing.
Is Leo suffering from some sort of brain infection, or what?
Melanie Hires a Random Knife Expert
Talking of stupid people, Melanie is back and I’m simply thrilled. She immediately does something incredibly dim by hiring some random bloke off the beach to come and work with her for one day and then bringing him all the way back to Erinsborough with her. Her reason for hiring him is because he gives her a tip about what sort of knife to use to chop a pineapple. Firstly, if she doesn’t know how to chop a pineapple by now, then she has no business running a juice van. Secondly, hiring a strange man on the basis of his KNIFE KNOWLEDGE is the biggest and reddest flag in the history of flags.
Of course, this new guy, Logan, immediately displays very suspicious behaviour. He knows David but is keeping this fact to himself, and he straight away starts sniffing around Aaron and making excuses to be near him. He even snoops at all the family photos when he persuades Melanie to take him over to Aaron’s house. This is not what Aaron needs right now when he’s only just starting to turn a corner after David’s death. Nice one, Melanie.
JJ Makes Yet Another Poor Decision
And now it’s time for JJ to make his massive weekly mistake. Here is a kid who is basically on kiddie parole for getting mixed up in the theft from the building site, so he should be trying to remain on his absolute best behaviour.
The spate of thefts from the retirement village continues, and JJ uses his only thought of the month to figure out that Nell’s friend Jasmine is behind them. She’s flashing her new clothes and the brand happens to be the exact same one that appears on one of the theft victims’ bank statements.
The sensible thing would be to go to the police, but JJ has a totally smooth brain so thoughts just slide right off it, and he instead decides to dob Jasmine into her sister and get her to help persuade Jasmine to give the stolen items and the master key to him. He then goes about distributing the stolen items back to their owners, which involves him walking around the retirement complex carrying the master key and a big bag of stolen items. He could only have made himself look more like a thief if he’d donned a striped suit and put the stolen goods in a sack that said “SWAG” on it.
Predictably, he gets caught, and everyone assumes he’s the thief, because WHY WOULDN’T THEY? Luckily for him, Nell still likes him enough to intervene, and she persuades Jasmine to turn herself in to the police, thus exonerating JJ.
This kid is INFURIATING.
Detective Hoyland Investigates
Holly is determined to get to the bottom of the poisoning case in order to try to undo the damage done to Leo’s business, which she feels responsible for. She’s no Poirot though (although I bet she wears incredibly uncomfortable shoes like he does), and rather than doing proper investigations she just keeps throwing accusations around willy-nilly.
Probably more by luck than judgment, this time she happens to land on the right suspect – the creepy doctor from the hospital. She gets wind of some HR-related issues with him and uses Karl’s pass to sneak into the records room to have a squiz at his file, getting caught by Remi in the process.
Despite everyone telling her to stop trying to be a detective, she pretends to be working for the podcast and interviews the creepy doctor. After some pretty smart questions from Holly, he drops the super charming facade and goes very incel on her, which makes her even more convinced she’s on to something. He’s due to appear at a function at the community centre, so Holly follows him there and witnesses him trying to inject some watermelon with something. She ruins her own cover and he spots her, and now she’s in big trouble because we all know what he’s capable of. It’s quite the cliffhanger!
A FEW RANDOM NOTES
As usual, here are a few of my random notes from this week:
- I’m living for the image of Harold in high-waisted jeans.
- Hilary is handing out iced vovos, apparently, whatever the flipping heck they are.
- JJ only has one brain cell left so he’s really frightened to use it.
- “I’m scared if I say anything I’m going to sound too Wendy”. Yeah, she should be frightened.
