I’m going to start this week by drawing some parallels between Neighbours and my favourite sporting team the Minnesota Timberwolves in the NBA.
The Timberwolves are a terrible team and its win loss record over the last two seasons is the fourth worst in the history of the NBA. That sucks when it’s your favourite team, but as a fan, it’s almost impossible to start supporting another team in the same competition. Instead, people stop paying attention and the team is left with only die hard fans. This photo is from a game in Feb 2011.
The Timberwolves have been mismanaged at times and they don’t really have the best talent.
This off-season the Wolves have made some significant steps to improve for the next season, including firing its coach and spending a small fortune hiring one of the best coaches ever in the history of the NBA. It makes it worth my while to continue to be a fan of the Wolves and I can’t wait to see how next season pans out (Note: There may not be an NBA season due to unresolved labour issues).
The parallel I am drawing is that Neighbours totally and utterly sucks at the moment. I realised this whilst reading Dinnerdog’s recap last week, when not one current storyline makes sense the show has gone beyond a joke – it’s actually quite unenjoyable to watch.
I don’t have the statistics on viewers, but if we go to the most popular Neighbours youtube channel, limewirechao, it is quickly obvious that Home & Away gets three times as many views per episode. Home & A-fucking-way. Seriously. Three times.
Two weeks ago I was over at a mate’s place with four of my friends watching Neighbours. All of us have watched for the past 15 years, but the episode was so painfully bat shit boring that we turned it off and watched Home & Away. It’s the first time I’ve watched Home & Away since the early nineties and it’s clearly a far superior show. There, I said it.
The Neighbours product has become so bad that only die hard fans are left. I used to enjoy the show because everyone watched it back in my teens. Then fewer and fewer people watched it but I persisted because I found it fun to mock the show (hence this website), but now, now the show isn’t even enjoyable to mock. It’s just a boring idiotic pile of shit.
Where the Timberwolves have an exciting future, the spoilers for Neighbours inspire far less confidence.
Well that’s the venting over, time for the recap. I’m going to use the “storyline headers” format to mix it up a bit.
Chris has his first storyline since coming out of the closet
And that storyline is about him being gay, which was all but inevitable really. He quit the garage because a customer made a homophobic slur and Lucas didn’t stick up for him.
When Andrew finds out that Chris has quit his traineeship he is concerned that his fix-up-cars-and-sell-them scheme is in jeopardy.
“I can’t believe you’re going to just shaft me like this.”
Now that Chris has the his time in the limelight he quickly defers to tried and tested Neighbours formula:
- Don’t tell anyone why you are upset; and
- Be surly.
- Repeat all week.
Unfortunately for Lucas it turns out that Chris is HUGELY important to the garage. Lucas is unable to move a tool cabinet or meet his clients demands, but he does manage to move the tool cabinet with minimal fuss later in the scene, so yeah, well done on overcoming that challenge.
Surely Chris, as a school student, could only be working about five hours a week, so perhaps this is all to demonstrate that Lucas is genuinely incompetent.
But not funny.
Chris goes back to the garage.
Chris Sophie has his her first storyline since coming out of the closet having a crush on Zeke
because now she has a crush on Noah. Noah is trying to drum up interest in joining his “collective,” which is apparently a technical term for people to jam with, albeit far less catchy.
“We’re collectiving…Oh…I want to collect with you.”
Sophie overhears Noah talking about his collective, in particular, Noah mentions that he needs a bass player because “the bass is the heart of the song.” I was about to write something about how Noah clearly likes men, but after a bit of research maybe he is right.
Inspired, Sophie decides to trade her guitar for a bass guitar. But she clashes with Kate after she is nabbed wagging school and travelling to the city to collect the bass. She gets grounded and, breaking Neighbours gender barriers, acts surly.
The super-mega shopping centre
Twice. That’s how many times the shopping centre has been referred to as “faceless” so far.
This is the face that represents the developers.
Paul talks to Kyle about tactics to stop the development. He has apparently put an application to heritage list the site, which will delay development by at least four months. I hope, desperately, that is not an indication of how long this storyline will last.
At a community meeting, the band of small business owners get together lead by Paul to stop this development. Dinnerdog has pointed out why Kyle’s objection is ridiculous in the last recap. Paul’s objection is equally ridiculous.
“It’s about multi-nationals, with deep pockets and no amount of sugar coating will change that.”
Surprisingly that quote was in relation to the developers, not Paul’s international chain of hotels.
The sound a shell makes when you hold it to your ear
is also the sound of Tash’s mother dying. Not much happens in this storyline this week. Summer does some investigative research at the Erinsborough News and finds out that her maiden name was Jovanovich, which is obviously Serbian because of the world famous namesake, professional soccer player, Milan Jovanovich, as Andrew kindly points out.
In case you were wondering
Michael did make it to the beach.
Recap - Neighbours 