Phew, that was quite a week! We always know we’re in for something special when we get a whole week without the proper titles, and this didn’t disappoint.
Holly is AWOL
Mackenzie finds out that Keith (Heath) is cheating on Holly and has another run-in with him, where he threatens her for a second time. Mackenzie tries to warn Holly, but Holly just feels like Mackenzie is judging her, so she decides to go away with Keith. I’ll be honest, I’m still not really completely across what it is that Keith and Tess are actually doing and why it involves Keith being at a cattle station, but at this point I’m just going to accept that it does and move on.
Holly’s behaviour has been worrying everyone lately, and the anxiety goes through the roof when it becomes obvious she’s lied about her whereabouts and isn’t where she said she’d be. She’s told Karl and Susan that she’s going away for the weekend with someone from housekeeping, but they soon realise this isn’t true. They’re even more worried when Mackenzie tells them of Holly’s fling with Keith.
Holly is the most basic of bitches, and of course she can’t go anywhere without posting it on her Instagram, so Haz decides to try to Hack Holly’s phone to find out where she is (it’s so handy having a hacker on the street). They soon find out she’s in the middle of nowhere.
Holly Takes a Bath
Holly is completely unaware that Keith is a criminal, so she’s just excited to be on a weekend away in the outback. I know Holly has done her fair share of travel, but I didn’t think an abandoned shack in the desert was her kind of vibe, although she seems to be loving it.
Her and Keith hop into a rusty old bath outside, the logistics of which boggle my mind considering it isn’t connected to plumbing of any description, and Holly declares that it’s heaven. Then Keith gets up and shows us all his bum – we always seem to get a bum in these special weeks of Neighbours. It’s all going swimmingly for Holly until Keith starts acting weird, so she snoops through his bag and finds all of his dastardly plans written in a little notebook. It’s now that she finally realises that he’s not who she thought he was, and that she might be in some sort of danger.
Where Are Toadie and Mel?
Meanwhile, Toadie hits rock bottom after losing it with Terese at Rhonda’s office. Mel finds him sitting on the grass by Sonya’s tree, having inexplicably taken his shoes off, and she takes him for a coffee and a chance to decompress. They run into Mackenzie, who tells them that Keith threatened her. Toadie is incredibly protective of Mackenzie, and decides to go and confront him. Seeing that he has a slightly maniacal look on his face, Mel decides to go to with him to try to keep him from getting into trouble.
They wander into Tess’s mansion, because even visitors to Erinsborough don’t seem to be able to lock a door, and start snooping around. They find a whole host of dodgy documents, like fake passports in Keith and Tess’s names, but before they can do anything they’re caught in the act by Tess’s hardman Justin.
Tess Does a Runner
Paul is still pretending that he doesn’t know that Tess is up to something, trying to get her to show her hand enough for him to figure out what she’s doing. Despite Leo suggesting weeks ago that they should phone Reece to find out what’s happening, they still haven’t, so Paul decides he’s going to go snooping at Tess’s house as well. He sees her leave in a hurry.
Leo breathes a huge sigh of relief when someone finally listens to him, and Krista calls Reece. She discovers there’s no plan to sell any part of the business, and so her and Leo start looking into Tess’s business deals more closely. They soon realise that Tess has been stealing funds from the company. If only there had been an easy way to find all this out before, eh Leo?
The police are called to Tess’s house now they know she’s up to something illegal, and while they’re searching, they find dried blood on the wall and also Melanie’s pig pendant.
Leo manages to put it together that the place where Holly has disappeared to is also the location of one of Tess’s business ventures, and this is when everyone comes to the conclusion that Toadie and Melanie’s disappearance is connected with Tess and Keith’s fraud, and this means that Holly is possibly in danger.
IT ALL KICKS OFF
This is where it all kicks into another gear, and I might have got some things in the wrong order here, because there was a lot going on, and I was trying to eat fajitas at the same time.
The local police are seemingly travelling on snailback and have no access to any quicker transport, because Tess, Mackenzie and Haz all manage to get to the area before any law enforcement do. Mackenzie and Haz have gone to find Holly, and they’re keeping Andrew informed of what is happening. Andrew must wonder why he ever bothers trying to help anyone because they all ignore everything he says, and so, despite being told to hang back and wait for the police, Mackenzie and Haz go barrelling into the outback to find Holly.
Toadie and Melanie are here to, having been tied very loosely with really thin rope to some sort of rickety old furnace, which looks like it would crumble to pieces with a single shove. Despite this, they’ve apparently been unable to escape, and Keith comes along to shout threats at them and generally act like a lunatic.
This spurs Toadie and Mel into action, and they manage to cut through the incredibly thin rope and escape. We now have a very confusing series of events where Keith (with a gun), Holly, Mel, Toadie, Mackenzie and Haz are all running around the outback like headless chickens. Keith has a gun, and there are crocodiles swimming about in the nearby river.
Toadie goes to look for the train line because he thinks that he can wait for a train and signal for help. Does anyone want to tell Toadie what a train’s stopping distance is? Even if they see him, they’re not going to be able to stop and ask him what the situation is. I was getting really mad that they all kept splitting up – that is the way you get picked off one by one in horror films, my dudes.
Keith has turned on Holly, and in trying to escape him, she climbs up a grain silo, clearly having never been forced to watch those safety films from the 1970s and 80s about the dangers of them. Keith follows her and chucks her in, where she starts to sink slowly into the grain. Mel hears her shouting and comes to rescue her just in the nick of time.
We keep seeing the crocodiles, and at first I thought Toadie was going to get eaten by one, and then Holly, but in the end it’s Keith who gets chomped to bits. While Haz is trying to comfort a screaming Holly, as they both watch in horror as Keith gets his comeuppance crocodile-style, Melanie finds Mackenzie unconscious and with a gunshot wound. At some point, Tess is discovered in Keith’s car boot as well, although I can’t really remember exactly when that happened.
Toadie Has a Lie Down
Toadie is still searching for the train line, and he’s clearly suffering from the heat and dehydration. He lies down and his life starts flashing before his eyes, but after the weird wife-based depression he’s been suffering from it’s only his weddings he sees. Has anyone ever died from a fatal wedding montage before on Neighbours? That would be a first. This is when the camera pans out and we see that the place he’s decided to have a nice lie down is on the train tracks. Again, do we need to have a word to him about the stopping distance of trains? I’m pretty sure there was a safety film about that as well.
So there we have it. Who’s going to survive? Toadie looks like he’s probably a goner – if the dehydration doesn’t get him a train will. Mackenzie doesn’t look so hot either, so unless the emergency services get a move on, there could be more than one person not making it back to Ramsay Street alive. I’ve never been this excited for Monday to roll around again!
A Few Random Notes
As usual, here are a few random notes I took while watching Neighbours this week:
- How’s taking your shoes off going to help, Toad?
- Jesus, Keith was really clenching when he stood up in the bath.
- CROCODILE! I LOVE CROCODILES!
- Thank god for Mel’s weird pig fetish.
- Does Toadie think that hunching slightly as he runs will make him invisible?
- IS TOADIE GOING TO GET EATEN BY A CROCODILE?!?!
- Oh, no he isn’t.
- IS HOLLY GOING TO EATEN BY A CROCODILE?!?!
- Nope. She is not.
- IS SOMEONE GOING TO GET EATEN BY A CROCODILE?!?!?
- HEATH IS!
