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Winners and Losers, Seven, 8.30pm
The season-five finale is all about endings and new beginnings as Gabe (Nick Russell) springs a surprise wedding on Jenny (Melissa Bergland), proposing with a bastardised version of the song Sunny. Will all that love put the smile back on the face of Sophie (Melanie Vallejo) and Luke (Nathin Butler) or will she wing off to Kenya? Will Frances (Virginia Gay) melt enough to let love in? Are we witnessing the final moments of a fine romance? Stay tuned, as Seven says the drama will return.
Restoration Australia, ABC, 8.30pm
I don’t know about Jo and Marcus, the couple who take on the massive task of restoring the 1850s Gippsland house built by a butler-made-good, but I was looking forward to every visit from host Sibella Court. With her lovely smile and blonde ponytail and landed-gentry style, she’s like a Pippa or Tamsyn stepped straight from the pages of Town and Country. This week, she mucks in to try her hand at wet plastering, a dying craft that threatens to take Jo and Marcus with them when a job they expected to take six weeks stretches to more than a year.
Holland’s Hope, SBS2 9.30pm
This Dutch series starts like a dark comedy, with forensic psychiatrist Fokke Augustinius (Marcel Hensema) losing his job (he quits), his house (his pothead son burns it down), his father (dead), and his marriage (his wife falls for the yoga teacher) within the first 15 minutes. From there it only gets darker, though gallows humour is never far away. Fokke is a sad sack who has stopped talking to his wife (Kim van Kooten) and seems capable of bonding only with his criminally insane clients. His father’s death drags him and his family back to his childhood home, a stately farmhouse in Friesland called Holland’s Hope. That just happens to be the name of a strain of cannabis and it’s what Fokke’s father was growing out there beyond the rows of corn. Fokke wants nothing to do with it, but when he accidentally kills a member of the gang in charge of growing, harvesting and selling the stuff – €30 million worth, twice a year – he finds himself dragged into the game. Fokke is a character clearly indebted to Walter White, with his knowledge of the criminal mind the ace he holds to Walt’s chemistry background. Think Breaking Grumpy rather than Bad and you’re about there.
Karl Quinn
PAY TV
Pawn Stars Australia, A&E, 7.30pm
Where would you go if you wanted to sell a rare, three-wheeled 1959 Messerschmitt car? Why, to the local pawn shop, of course! And here you were thinking that pawn shops were just for ratty old guitars, DVDs and power tools. For shame! Whether Sydney pawnbroker Aaron Senes is prepared to meet the substantial asking price is another matter, but we do learn some interesting things about the little car – such as the fact that it was designed for legless German war veterans. Other interesting items that come into the shops tonight include a plastic, drink-dispensing bust of Bob Hawke, and an old, opal-inlaid brooch commemorating the Gallipoli landings. Not too shabby.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Waterworld (1995) 7Mate, 8.30pm
A post-apocalyptic action adventure set in a futuristic world where sea levels have seemingly covered all the land masses, Waterworld is a mildly entertaining, if ludicrously overblown, aquatic remake of George Miller’s Mad Max II, right down to the tiny fortified outpost that serves as a bastion of civilisation against the marauding forces outside. Costner didn’t have the pulp malevolence or leanness of a young Mel Gibson, so there’s little chance that anything is at stake emotionally. The story is always going to end as you can foresee, once his character, sea-bound loner the Mariner, has to take care of a mysterious little girl, Enola Gay (Tina Majorino), and her guardian, Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn), who are being hunted by Deacon (Dennis Hopper) and his band of brigands for the clues she holds to the whereabouts of dry land. However, filmmaker Kevin Reynolds, Costner’s friend and director of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, had a feel for the action choreography required to fill the vast spaces of the open sea (they shot off Hawaii, at astronomical expense). His set pieces are cynically skillful: they come together like intricate wind-up contraptions, subtly mocking the star’s triumph and foreshadowing the pair’s split when the cost got way out of hand.
John Wick (2014) Premiere Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
A sequel is reportedly being made of this ludicrously violent film starring Keanu Reeves, which is as good an insight as any into the genre’s bankruptcy in this era of comic-book superheroes, whose vast otherworldly powers make a sure shot and a lethal punch look positively archaic. You can easily see what fans liked in the movie, which was directed by former stuntmen David Leitch and Chad Stahelski with an unusual amount of visual grace and coherency. The editing in the action sequences is restrained, with the camera often moving alongside Reeves, who plays a vengeful former gangster, as he stabs, shoots and generally smears his assembled adversaries. You can actually keep track of the carnage. I topped out at 76 victims. That can also help blot out the curious mythology of a police-free crime milieu, where criminals share a luxury hotel as a safe house, which sits atop the boilerplate plot of Russian gangsters who anger the wrong man. Reeves, years past The Matrix, plays his widowed killer with doleful blankness, as if he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies once he picks up a gun again.
Craig Mathieson