It’s the home stretch on The Block NZ and things are getting more fragile than a marshmallow spaghetti sculpture.
It’s Week eleven of The Block NZ, and the wheels have officially come off. Life in Hobsonville Point is careening out of control like a bunch of balls Mark Richardson just threw onto a footpath in the hope that some exhausted reality show contestants will fly past on a trolley to gather them up in a washing basket.
It’s the penultimate week of The Block NZ, and this glorious journey is nearly over for another year. The endless hours we’ve spent watching people hack up sponge cakes with power tools and using their painted buttocks to create works of art will be but tiny recessed shelves in the tiled bathrooms of our dreams.
Thankfully, there are still two more spaces to be transformed. It was Laundry and Do-over week, meaning teams chose their worst room and made it shine like a Bosch power tool wall in the Hobsonville Point evening light. Agni and Claire decided to fix two rooms, Ben and Tom did-over every wall in their house, and poor Em and Chlo spent two episodes at Resene trying to choose a wallpaper.
Spoiler alert: they did not choose a wallpaper.
Our beloved teams are shattered. They struggled to make decisions, and everyone was grumpy. The Wolf shouted at Agni for staining Auckland’s pristine footpaths, Amy scolded Chlo and Em for calling her ‘Hurricane Amy’, while Stu yelled at paint trays and shopping bags. Even Judge Jason let rip after he saw one wooden shelf too many and became so enraged over the state of New Zealand shelf design that he spontaneously combusted.
Everyone’s had enough. I’ve had enough, and I haven’t gone anywhere near a paintbrush. Let’s dip into this week’s power rankings.
1) Claire and Agni
Em reckons Agni “walks to the beat of his own drum” but I reckon Agni also “traps himself in a cupboard of his own nightmares.” The truth is probably hiding in Claire and Agni’s monkey wallpaper, but either way, this season Agni’s been more entertaining than a thousand marshmallow and spaghetti towers joined together.
Whether he’s trapping himself in a cupboard, chucking a ponga tree in the bathroom or dressing up like an excitable dachshund, Agni gave us some classic TV moments that we’ll never forget, no matter how hard we try.
2) Ben and Tom
Who knew four humble shelves would elicit such a strong reaction from Judge Jason? It was the outburst of the season, as Jason unleashed a stream of fury over the wooden shelves in Ben and Tom’s entrance way. It didn’t matter that last week Jason loved the exact same shelves in a different room, because nothing symbolises the decline of society better than some chunks of varnished wood stuck to a wall. It’s official, New Zealand, please add those shelves to the fire as we all burn to the ground.
3) Stu and Amy
Is there anything left in Stu and Amy’s My Little Pony bag of tricks? They slayed the competition with their Entrance/Stairwell/Powder Room and wowed the judges with their rendered walls and incredible magic eye toilet wallpaper. In an even greater feat, Amy and Agni managed to put aside their differences and bond over the colour mustard. Their newfound friendship’s stronger than a roll of Sudoku toilet paper, and it’s a beautiful/terrifying thing.
4) Chlo and Em
Poor Chlo and Em, who barely had the energy to sit in the gutter and cry over a peeled orange. Fruit has a lot of answer for in the wallpapered corridors of history, so please take us back to those golden Block days when a couple of purple wigs and a blocked toilet pipe bought out the best in our two favourite rays of sunshine.