Amazingly our one week of summer appears to have become two weeks of summer here in the UK, so I can absolutely understand if people have been far too busy stocking up on vitamin D to be up to date with watching Neighbours.
I am currently unemployed due to the company I work for going into liquidation, so I suddenly find myself with plenty of time to watch episodes and take down my salty notes about what everyone’s up to in Erinsborough. I finally feel like a daytime soap’s target audience after all these years…
So here are my thoughts on the past week’s antics.
Darcy is a Lying Liar
It’s pretty obvious to almost everyone except for senile old ladies – and Susan – that Darcy is up to no good. Under the guise of helping Amanda out, Darcy accesses her banking information and realises she’s worth more than he thought, so he has his eyes firmly on trying to con her out of her money and prevent it from going to her family in the event of anything happening to her.
When Karl and Susan raise some concerns about how chummy Darcy has become with Amanda, Darcy gets very defensive and says he wishes that everyone would give him a second chance the way Dee did when he contacted her to make amends. Karl does his own sleuthing, via Toadie, and finds out that Dee hasn’t heard from Darcy in years, which means Darcy lied straight to their faces. Despite this, Susan is still going into bat for Darcy because apparently she’s learned nothing about just blindly trusting men with criminal pasts who say they’ve turned over a new leaf.
I think there always needs to be at least one resident bad guy on Ramsay Street, and since Paul has been disappointingly well behaved recently, Darcy is having to do all the heavy lifting at the moment. I just wish he’d condition his hair, or brush it or something.
Wendy at War
After Wendy got the offer of a teaching job in Murrayville, she’s been putting pressure on Andrew to relocate, which he isn’t keen to do. They have numerous arguments on the subject, with Andrew telling Wendy he doesn’t want to go, and her just yelling at him that he’s not willing to have a conversation about it.
I’m not Wendy’s biggest fan at the best of times, but she’s being very unreasonable about this. I don’t see how she can say they’re not having a conversation about it, when they’ve had numerous conversations about it, during which Andrew has outlined all of his reasons for not wanting to move. I think what she’s actually mad about is that Andrew still disagrees with her about what’s best for the family, but not bending to the other person’s agenda is not the same as not having a conversation.
I can see why Wendy might make the argument that her career has always come second to Andrew’s, and that she’d like him to put hers first for once, but Andrew is the family’s main bread winner, and he’s in a steady, established job, while hers is still just a possibility. Plus, Wendy doesn’t seem to be considering Sadie in all this either, Andrew has a very good point that Sadie is still in a fragile state, and forcing her to choose between going with her parents or staying with her boyfriend and friends isn’t exactly what she needs right now.
Wendy makes everything ten times worse by hacking into Andrew’s police computer and getting information about a job posting in Murrayville on his behalf, which gets back to the officers at the station. Andrew is rightly furious, and I’m sure Wendy has probably breached some sort of law with her unauthorised access of the police computer system. I know Erinsborough has never even heard of safeguarding or GDPR but what on earth was she thinking?
Andrew Playing Away From Home?
Wendy’s rage continues when she joins Andrew’s latest self-defence class. Wendy sees Sandra doing her best to get Andrew’s attention and she kicks off in front of everyone. Is Sandra being a bit out of pocket by trying to engineer a situation where Andrew has to touch her, after he’s told her he’s married? Yes. But does that give Wendy the right to humiliate Andrew in front of everyone and air their dirty laundry in public? Absolutely not. She’s out of control.
Wendy takes a casual job at the coffee shop until she can secure a teaching post, and Sandra comes in as a customer. Nicolette starts snooping and she sees that Sandra is messaging someone on a dating app, and that someone has tattoos that look very much like Andrew’s. Nicolette of course tells Wendy about it, and she’s devastated.
My theory here is that Sandra was doing this with the hope that Nicolette would see and go running off to tell Wendy. I think Sandra has made Andrew’s profile herself and is just trying to get him away from Wendy by causing trouble between them. But even if Andrew is innocent in this, if Wendy carries on being as unhinged as she is at the moment, it won’t be long before he does go looking elsewhere.
Jeffrey the IT Guy is Back With a Bombshell
Baby Thomas is unwell and has to be rushed to hospital. What I thought was going to happen here was that Thomas would need some sort of donation from one of his parents, and we would discover that Paul is not actually his biological father. What happens instead is that Jeffrey the IT guy rocks up and informs Chelsea that he hacked into the DNA testing company’s website and switched the results. Now he and Chelsea both know that Paul isn’t Thomas’ dad, but Paul is still in the dark.
So now Chelsea has a dilemma – does she pay Jeffrey off so she can carry on with the charade that Paul is Thomas’ father, or does she come clean to Paul and lose her chance of financial stability? She seems resolved to tell Paul the truth, but then she wavers when Jeffrey comes to her house dressed like a full-on movie bad guy.
I know Chelsea genuinely didn’t know Paul wasn’t the father, but she does now, and if she keeps up the pretense with Paul then she is more evil than I ever thought she was. What is happening to me? Am I actually feeling sorry for Paul? It’s a very peculiar feeling.
Trevor Stars in the Anticlimax of the Week
This week’s most anticlimactic storyline was almost Nell’s criminal charges being dropped off screen and all that nasty business suddenly being done and dusted after weeks of drama, but then came along Trevor’s possible exit storyline. I can only think that the writers realised that the original condition of Trevor staying on the show was that he was going to join Haz and Mackenzie in Paris at a later date, and that they should probably address why he was still here, because there was absolutely no other point to this whole thing.
Haz contacts Byron and says that it’s time for Trevor to head to Paris. Byron is upset to be losing the big fluffball, but starts to make preparations. The housemates all try for one singular afternoon to get Trevor to feel content inside a crate, and when he doesn’t take to it immediately, Haz does an about-turn and decides Trevor will be happier staying where he is.
I’m sorry, what? I don’t even have a dog, but even I know that crate training can take weeks, if not months, before a dog feels at home in one. If Haz really wanted Trevor to be able to travel, they should have been working on crate training as soon as he and Mackenzie left. The good news is that Trevor is staying, the bad news is that the writers should really have been able to figure out a better way to write that in.
A Few Random Notes
As usual, here are a few random notes I took while watching Neighbours this week:
- Hahahaha! Max, Holly and Taye sucking up to Leo and Krista only for them to give their honeymoon voucher to Aaron is brilliant.
- Andrew is FUMING with Wendy. I love it.
- Krista is a bigger woman than me to go and talk to Chelsea. I would not have it in me.
- “Everyone makes mistakes” says Paul to Chelsea. OK, but not everyone deliberately kills a baby.
- Why has it still not occurred to Sadie that she can go to a pool party with a T-shirt on?
- Aaron lurking behind Cara and telling her not to eat anything vaguely unhealthy is gross.
- NOOOO, TREVOR CANNOT LEAVE.
