Opinion: Waterloo Road 6.12

Ruby wades in.

The hubub surrounding single-gender teaching having evaporated overnight, Waterloo Road ticked on by like it usually does, continuing its subplots and throwing a few more specific (all the while ridiculously melodramatic) threads at us. It's maybe symptomatic of Waterloo Road's format, but each week's exaggerated plots are getting tiring by this point. Take this week, an incident claimed by one of the staff to be the "worst thing Waterloo Road could have seen in its life". Said character obviously wasn't around for the suicide pacts, explosions, stabbings or attacks by a JCB.
     Our two main plots unique to this episode were interesting but not focussed or refined enough to stand out. Miser English teacher Grantly Budgen has been getting the raw edge of the saw recently, his wife dying slowly of Alzheimers and his flat neglected and (a bizzarely TV version of) untidy. A worried Ruby decides to help out, so steals his house keys, fills his fridge with food and cleans his entire house from top to bottom, all in half an hour, as if she were some form of cleaning Superwoman. Elsewhere, a student named Billie gained the sympathy of ex-student and secretary Franscine by claiming that her mother wanted to adopt her teenage baby, in a scenario that eventually resulted in an insane Billie hanging her baby over a stairwell.
     Along the sidelines, our weekly subplots persist. Francesca and Jonah continued to flirt with more innuendo than a Carry On film, Josh got jiggy with Weirdy Pervert Nate and Jess's inquiries to Bex about the mysterious Hodge resulted in one of her trademark tantrums. After being subliminally "hyped" for the first term of Series Six, it's a real disappointment that Bex's character has turned into this walking tantrum dispenser.
    I think I might stop reviewing every episode of Waterloo Road in the long term because there just isn't enough notable differential in quality between episodes. The show's idiosyncracies make it decent mid-week entertainment, and there's nothing to comment on unless otherwise. 6.12 was a standard episode of the show - an entertaining hour of madness and melodrama.
  
Thanks.