Love Island's Megan gets ready for the World Cup by spectacularly letting down the nation
It is arguably unfortunate that the chief reason to continue watching Love Island is to witness the transformation of an otherwise well-appointed villa in Mallorca into Alex’s own personal version of the prison from which Bane spends a lifetime failing to escape in Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.
“There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth... Hope,” Bane gurgles at one point, through his analgesic mouthgun. “There can be no true despair without hope.”
No, there cannot, and Alex will eventually come to realise there can be no true despair without the wild emotional caprice of a former erotic dancer from Essex by the name of Megan.
That in her great moment of truth Megan went for Eyal and not Alex shocked no one and disappointed everyone.
Oh Megan. Can she yet know, in this World Cup week, that she has joined that ignoble canon of Waddle, Pearce, Southgate, Ince, Batty, Beckham, Carragher, Cole, Vassell and, well frankly it’s a big canon but the point is that Megan briefly held the hopes and dreams of a nation in her grasp and ballsed it right up.
Indeed, the inevitable had been inevitable since the very end of Tuesday’s episode, when Eyal had successfully charged Alex and Megan in the firepit area like a randy beta sealion up a beach, and dislodged his rival through little more than passive-aggressive begging requests to like him.
It is a pity, really, that in all the many variations on this theme in the Attenborough documentaries, the sequence always cuts before the new alpha leads his harem back past the halogen hobs for a gloat-snog.
Either that, or Eyal is the first creature to ever attempt such a thing. Certainly, he has other customs rarely, if ever, seen in nature.
Are there other beasts that mark out their territory by seeking to mate all around its perimeter, gloat-f*cking their onlooking rivals into psychological submission? Does Eyal stand alone?
All of which serves vaguely to ask the question of why it should be Alex and not Samira to have emerged as the villa’s resident romantic basket case? Nobody, for example, is hatching desperate plans to lure men into Samira’s romantic purview, as Adam, Charlie and seemingly everybody else was last night.
For the time being Samira seems relatively content to be keeping Alex as part Tamagotchi, part insurance policy, part grateful eunuch. She sleeps soundly by his side as he lies there plotting dreadful acts of revenge on whichever one of his posh friends ever convinced him that applying to Love Island would be a good idea.
It hardly bears repeating that Alex is a saver of lives, and here he was being given pep talks by a biro salesman and sympathy haircuts by an air hostess. At one point, sounding never more like George VI, he even popped in to tell the ITV2 cameras how touched he was that Jack had called him a “peng sort”.
In fact, the entire Alex experience would start to make sense were he some handsome prince dispatched to the East End to show solidarity during the Blitz and has since been told national morale requires him not to come back to the Palace until he’s found someone to marry.
All of which inevitably will turn out to be the first soft curves in the narrative arc we know will end with Samira’s grand Harry Met Sally style epiphany sometime in week six, as she comes darting across the astroturf screaming “THE BOY I WANT TO COUPLE UP WITH IS YOU ALEX!!! OH ALEX IT’S ALWAYS BEEN YOU! CAN’T YOU SEE! IT’S ALWAYS BEEN YOU!”
At which point, after hundreds of hours of unrelenting exposure to the others he will simply turn round, shout ‘MUGGY!’ directly in her face and go back to necking on with some newly arrived glamour model from Scunthorpe last seen in her undercrackers on the editor’s Chesterfield in the final print run of Nuts mag.
Elsewhere, in a seven-way recoupling in which she had last pick, Rosie was left with no choice but to return to Adam as does a dog to its own vomit, a metaphor helped on its way 15 minutes later when, for reasons unknown, the daily challenge involved the couples spewing spaghetti and profiteroles into each other’s mouths while racing in super slow motion across some kind of luminous conveyor belt.
Indeed Love Island episode 9 was greatly enriched by the minimisation of Adam, who spoke only to explain why nothing was his fault.
Charlie has taken on the Hayley project, and, despite having originally been cultivated into humanoid form from three droplets of creatine shake left in a petri dish, shows burgeoning post-Love Island potential as a politician. On no fewer than four occasions now he has lovingly referred to his new partner as “mad”, a judiciously chosen alternative to the correct term – “mindbendingly thick”.
Still, moments later he would be gazing up at the night sky, pondering over which one was “Ryan’s Belt”, so it’s possible the Mallorcan stars have finally aligned there. We shall see.
