Sitting on the edge of my seat watching television with all the lights on because I’m actually getting goosebumps isn’t something that happens to me too often.
Then again, watching three people stand in remote bushland digging into a shallow grave and actually hoping they find a body that proves one of them is a killer is pretty rare too.
But that’s exactly what I did with Wentworth tonight, as Will (Robbie Magasiva), took Vera (Kate Atkinson) and Jake (Bernard Curry) back to the quiet spot where he buried Joan “The Freak” Ferguson (Pamela Rabe) alive at the end of last season.
With the moon cutting through the bushes, he slowly dug down to the crate, with both of us hoping Ferguson’s body was inside and that he had killed her as he’d planned.
So. Much. Suspense.
As bad as being a murderer would feel, the alternative – that the grave was empty and The Freak was free – would be worse.
Finally, he cracked into the box and with the smell of a corpse rushing out all three (four, if you include me) looked down to see a decomposing body in a prison uniform and finally they knew: The Freak was dead.
It was a huge moment for all of us and proof that this series has managed to drag me in like no other Australian drama right now.
Will discovers the body.
Digging up The Freak is just the latest in a long season that’s kept me on edge with weekly shocks I genuinely didn’t see coming.
Some of the (many) highlights were Rita (Leah Purcell) turning out to be an undercover cop, guard Will (Robbie Magasiva) hooking up with Marie (Susie Porter), Liz (Celia Ireland) diagnosed with dementia and of course the biggest: Sonia (Sigrid Thornton) taking a deadly swan-dive off the roof.
Any of those would have been enough for a lot of dramas to hang an entire series off, but nope, with Wentworth they were just the entrée.
And this week, I got the main course.
Yes, there was a body inside the box! Finally, we all got to breathe a sigh of relief knowing The Freak, one of Australian television’s most iconic and most hated villains is dead. Gone. Kaput.
Or is she?
In typical Wentworth fashion, we got one answer and a whole stack of new questions.
With the stench of the grave overpowering, did Will take a good enough look to see if it really was Ferguson in the grave? Who was hidden in the bushes taking a photo of the grave robbers at work? And what’s going to happen to the three guards who are now all part of a crime that could send them behind bars for life?
Which is what makes the trip to the grave a television moment that’ll be hard to beat this year.
It’s probably going to get a lot scarier from here on in and I’m reliably informed I should probably count on leaving the lights on as the series rushes headlong toward the season end.
And that’s just fine with me.
