I know it’s taken me ages to write about this, but I just had to talk about this.
This week, Curtis abruptly left the show to pursue detective work in Christchurch. Yes, that’s right. After two years of will-they-won’t-they between Curtis and Esther, our “payoff” was Curtis telling Esther to “go to hell” before disappearing forever. What??
I think what we were meant to gather from this was that she didn’t want to keep him from missing this career opportunity, and this was the only way to get him to do this detective course.
But now what? Esther languishes on the sidelines for a few months? Curtis is totally forgotten just like that? I’m guessing Jayden Daniels decided to quit the role, but they still could have figured out a much better way to handle it.
Granted, the most recent character exit storylines have been pretty abysmal: Finn abruptly leaving for Sudan after a month of buildup for a romance between him and Zoe, only for Zoe to sit on the sidelines for a couple of months before completely vanishing without a trace (where on earth is Zoe by the way?). Then we had Vinnie decide that he just has to move to Singapore for a “better life”. Who cares about what the woman he married wants, or that she’s still recovering from PTSD after a car smashed into her, right? Oh well, I guess we just “want different things.” Vinnie became unrecognisable towards the end, but this behaviour was even more out of character.
Then we had Frank abruptly decide that he actually does want to go back to being a serial criminal, and hire a hitman to kill Dylan before skipping town. No one really seemed to care much that he was gone, so that was interesting. Kylie was like “oh well, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it” before immediately jumping into bed with Dylan. I hope they have plans to bring in more new characters, because the cast is rapidly hollowing out right now. We gained Lincoln in August but we’ve lost Vinnie, Frank, Finn and now Curtis.
Get your shit together, show!