In recent years, Home and Away’s musclebound River Boys have introduced an air of easy violence to Summer Bay, interspersing the perpetual grumble of Alf Stewart and good-natured chookery of Marilyn with flashes of underworld danger straight out of Animal Kingdom. But Neighbours, though peppered with the occasional murder, remains a friendlier proposition, soaked in the progressive attitudes of cosmopolitan Melbourne.

Still, Neighbours has always been a little flaky. A door that opened with the notorious Bouncer’s Dream – a 1990 episode told from the perspective of a dog dreaming of marrying his collie lover – has never been allowed to close. The bursts of magic realism that invade Ramsay Street share common cause with David Lynch’s mid-to-late 80s purple patch, where the mundane and stilted suddenly abut left-field creative decisions. Lynch obviously draws heavily from soap opera. He even cast two Home and Away actors in Mulholland Drive. But no one could have predicted how hard Neighbours would go in on Lynch at the turn of this year.

First, the late Jim Robinson appeared to his son, Paul, on Christmas Day. Paul had just crashed his car en route to digging up a dead body on an unlit backwoods road, prompting Jim to manifest in a bauble hanging from the rear-view mirror. What began as Lost Highway ended as the manifestation of Glinda the Good Witch at the end of Wild at Heart. Seasonal whimsy, surely? Nothing more. Then Raymond Renshaw arrived in Erinsborough.

Let’s not put too fine a point on this: he was dressed like Evil Cooper from Twin Peaks: The Return. That leather jacket! The hair! Even the shoes! Within 10 minutes of his appearance, he had ordered the execution of Robinson scion Leo Tanaka. And, to underscore the point, every evil pronouncement was accompanied by an atonal orchestral sting straight out of Twin Peaks’ notorious atomic bomb sequence.

Who knows what the Lynch/Neighbours fandom Venn diagram looks like in 2019? Regardless, those who do cross over will no doubt feel joy at the show’s Lynchian transition.