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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spells &amp; Karma" data-source="post: 198956" data-attributes="member: 23">Episodes 207-212The net is well and truly drawing in on the Samuels brothers. With investigations, difficult questions, petitions, confrontations. Any “…tion” you’d care to name, really. As well as threats and fake outs. Their enemies are varied, widespread and growing. And all are, to understate things, rather cross with them. But at least they have each other, for the moment.Take Jeff. By now he’s long established as Steven’s arch nemesis. We know he’ll go all-out to win. This has resulted in a doping scandal when he supplied Craig “Piglet” Barnett - Bob’s son - with his prescription painkillers to overcome a training injury then tried to cover up. He’s been dismissed from his duties and reinstated twice over recently. And Carly’s started a well-supported petition to oust him for a final time.Compounding Jeff’s unpopularity are the actions of his brother Gary. The series has attempted to explore Gary’s id, ego and superego. The overall result is not so much Freudian as Lucy van Peltian. But endearingly so. First, Philip attempts to discover the root cause of Gary’s nastiness.As written, trained doctor Phil’s attitude towards grief seems somewhat unhelpful (what’s the next step? Tell him to pull himself together?). This feeling is tripled when delivered by John Morris who seemed to skip acting class the day they did enunciation and emphasis.Then we get to the Scooby Doo part, when Philip and Stacey visit the scene of his parents’ car accident and try to put the pieces together. Then they do some sleuthing and discover Floss and Nev were the first to get to the car. They are duly interviewed:And so, it’s CSI: Summer Bay when Philip attempts to recreate the conditions on the day of the elder Samuels’ deaths, and tests a theory by hiding a plastic spider under Stacey’s sun visor as they round the clifftop road to where the sun is low in the sky. Phil deduces that if this had played out with a driver, rather than a passenger, it could have fatal consequences.<img src="https://i.vgy.me/TIIHUy.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />They confront him. with this information:This is where I get frustrated. I think it unlikely that Gary - the master manipulator who has guarded his secret so zealously all these years - would simply give them what they wanted. And it’s implausible that Phil and Stacey would immediately then use that to blackmail him into doing their bidding. What’s more, they followed up this by deciding to leak the story to the local rag anyway. Neither character is well-acted, so I was fairly indifferent towards them up to this point. For them to be written as either lacking in empathy or just plain arch makes them inaccessible as characters for me. Theirs is not even an ugly, challenging, interesting kind of negativity. It’s just tedious and feels very plot-convenient.There’s some arch stuff where Gary pipped them to the post and reported it to the paper himself. Incidentally, how Mark Fowler Mk I is this picture:<img src="https://i.vgy.me/f06kuw.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Something else that seems to have been overlooked is Jeff’s response to finding out his brother was behind his parents’ deaths. The main reason it had become a big secret, since Gary was worried about hurting Jeff. Yet we don’t really know how Jeff feels about it. We see him reading the article, watched by Gary, but it seems to be old news to him. As though he doesn’t particularly care. Which felt anti-climactic.Gary at least appeared to be partially affected by Stacey and Phil’s behaviour. But it was brief, and turned out to be another example of the writing being plot-driven and characters responding differently as the plot requires:You’d think Tom - a man with a good degree of life experience, a foster parent for over a decade and a pretty sharp cookie to boot - would find Gary’s message at least a little concerning. Instead, he simply passes it on so that Stacey can react to it.But wait, there are yet more twists. Stacey and Philip find Gary at the edge of the cliff. Where he spills his guts:<img src="https://i.vgy.me/BvxwL7.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />And then he jumps from the cliff. Only to land a few metres down on a ledge, from where he mocks them. It’s all part of the game.<img src="https://i.vgy.me/xbZD8G.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />There follows a late night meeting at the Macklin Office where Stacey, Phil, Carly, Bobby, Frank, Lance and Martin mind map Gary’s entire arc on - I kid you not - a flip chart.<img src="https://i.vgy.me/0OPSId.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Mostly, the scene is there to establish that everyone in Summer Bay is hacked off with Gary. Shades of A House Divided. If that episode had a scene where the Cartel took time out made a diagram of JR’s shadiest deals.Even Pippa is on the warpath with Gary:There's some cartoony stuff in which Gary attends the gathering to taunt them with not being able to touch him, then the story reaches a conclusion of sorts with a fun whodunnit standard: the one-sided conversation. Gary takes a run to the edge of a peninsula where he stops to do some warm ups, and then sees… someone… approaching off camera.<img src="https://i.vgy.me/6KaCvm.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /><img src="https://i.vgy.me/phWD5B.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />Cut to Gary plummeting from a ledgeless cliff, witnessed by the very solid Alf. So it must be serious.<img src="https://i.vgy.me/CHkUp9.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />continued...</blockquote>

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