Chewing gum, when chewed over, stretched and stretched some more, eventually loses its flavour.
Farmer Wants a Wife 2024 is quickly becoming the chewing gum of Australian television.
Episode 15 (yes, 15) is filled with enough chewing and stretching to make an American baseball coach proud.
The producers of Days of Our Lives would be cringing at how drawn out this is getting.
But like a dairy farmer in debt (that robotic milking machine was meant to fix everything, wasn’t it?), Channel Seven is going to milk this cow for all it’s worth.
It’s a wonder the stock squad hasn’t come knocking, what with all the theft going on. Each girl seems to ask their respective farmer if they could “steal you away for a bit”.
It’s time for the last one-on-one dates picked by the blokes’ families and friends, and after some nice silhouette shots of a healthy crop of giant rat’s tail grass, it’s down to business.
There are also the final farm farewells.
Far from fancy footing for four forlorn farmers, the final farm farewells fan fond feelings from feisty females, forever forgoing fanning frivolous frivolity from former festivities.
Phew.
Farmer Bert
First to Bert, and there’s work to be done. So much so, he’s pulling the pin on the whole escapade.
He’s probably also missing his pineapples. They are a lot less prickly to deal with than pesky emotions.
“I don’t have the emotional time that people are deserving of,” Bert-without-Ernie says.
Sam Farmytage’s voice-over to footage of the girls at the dinner table says: “It’s getting late. Bert hasn’t arrived for dinner and the ladies are getting anxious.”
He could quite possibly have been buried by the dislodged pineapple crowns that tumble down upon him earlier while on the planter.
He talks to each of his ladies individually and lets them know it’s not them, it’s him.
Brooke’s reply? “Right, well, yeah.”
Hopefully she goes on to sell that abstract painting from an earlier episode to a museum for big money. Or to the Big Pineapple on the Sunshine Coast.
“The experience is going to end for us,” is how Bert delivers the news, like the end of a show ride.
Karli will probably just go back to looking for a Prince Harry look-a-like.
In footage of an intimate hug between the two of them, she asks: “Is it the end end?”
He cryptically replies: “For now, yep.”
Suddenly it’s become a Marvel movie where a brief post-credit (or post-cuddle in this case) scene teases that something more may be coming. Please, no; for the love of all things pure, no.
Bert does deliver the poignant line: “The farm never stops taking.”
It’s probably one of the few lines in the show farmers will, sadly, resonate with.
There are tears in Bert’s eyes as he sums it all up. But there, deep beyond those tired and dust-filled mirrors to his soul there is a longing, a need, a yearning to find his true love.
This is a man who is dreaming of his spear guns.
Farmer Todd
Farmer Todd raises eyebrows with cattlemen across the country when he puts his mammoth black hat down brim-first on a counter.
That’s no way to preserve the shape of a hat.
He has a date with Jacinta where they go kayaking down a turbid looking creek.
After their paddle along Typhoid Brook, they head back to a camp set up in a shed, by the looks.
Todd-o-rama chops carrots with a castrating knife, cooks dinner and then uses his mouth to show Jacinta how a snail cleans the inside of a fish tank.
She says she has butterflies in her tummy.
That could be Todd’s cooking coming back to haunt her, or possibly the early onset of dysentery contracted from their trip down Schistosomiasis Canal.
Next thing, she’s in her strawberry jimmy-jams and it’s nigh-night time.
At the final dinner, our Ellen pulls… sorry, steals, El Toddo away for a quick chat.
Like plenty else in the series, their talk ends up on the cutting room floor.
They don’t even relay what the chat was about. Then poor Ellen is shown the door to a waiting Isuzu MU-X.
Farmer Joe
This season could quite possibly be retitled: Farmer Joe Wants a Wife Plus Some Supporting Cast Members Fill In Time Between Shots of Joe.
Keely asks if their date will involve ropes. What was she expecting? Calf roping? Hostage training? An old time lynching? (That’s probably a bit far there, sorry.)
No ropes, just mountain bike riding in Darth Vader-style helmets, which have to be removed so they can prove to each other their braces as teenagers really did work.
The idea of the mountain biking is to show how tough and resilient Keely is. That would have been really well shown if she’d done a big stacker down the side of the hill, but alas, no.
Joe (who bears a strange resemblance to the late rugby league referee, Barry “The Grasshopper” Gomersall) admits he has never had anyone say they see him as the father of their children before.
Really? That’s usually a conversation opener at most country servos.
They must have gotten rosemary from the lamb roast stuck in their teeth as they keenly help each other remove it.
“We’re jumping off into the future here,” All-Go-Joe says, like he’s on Quantum Leap.
After Joe and Keely arrive back from their date, Sarah responds to their talk of how nice it was with: “That’s good. I’m glad.”
She’s a terrible liar.
Time for some wool scouring. Well, 15 seconds of wool scouring for the cameras.
Sarah and Joe go for a chat. “I’m good,” Sarah lies again before running away in tears.
“I don’t know what’s going on really,” Joe admits.
At the Triple-F dinner, Claire asks to steal Joe away.
Then, from the realms of the bizarre, a tray of oysters appears for them to share.
As if they were trying to push start a Datsun 120Y when someone pulls the handbrake on, Joe says: “I do feel like we lost our momentum.”
Claire agrees. So much for the mystery oysters.
So Joe gets an easy out by Claire saying sayonara.
“Sometimes a puzzle piece just doesn’t quite fit, unfortunately,” Joe says.
Ravensburger fans howl in outrage at their screens.
Farmer Dustin
A chopper takes Dustin and Belle up for a look around the joint.
Belle is lost in the romance of it all while Slim Dustin takes the opportunity to see where he could improve his livestock watering points.
Or perhaps even contemplate what watering points are, by the look of the Mad Max-style landscape.
Thankfully they have those helicopter headsets so they can’t lay into some tongue tango.
Cheese and wine is Belle’s love language apparently. That’s probably not scientifically proven.
While tasting some wine, Belle asks Dustin what flavours he’s detecting.
“Fermented grapes,” comes his reply in one of the rare, genuinely funny lines in the show. Well played, sir.
They talk about farm life. Someone should probably tell her it’s not all fairy lights, wine and sitting by a fire of treated pine.
Actually, no need to let her know that.
Despite the last solo date, Dust-a-move decides Belle isn’t the one for him.
Perhaps she didn’t appreciate his wine gag.
The Connection Counter this episode went to… well, who really cares any more at this point?
Farmer Wants a Wife is on Channel Seven. Farmers Watching Farmers Wanting Wives is a special Voice of Real Australia newsletter from Julia “Sunset” Wythes, Hayley “Picnics” Warden and Ashley “Throw Cushions in the Ute Tray” Walmsley, bringing you all the daily drama of the reality TV show.