Well hello, Readers. Here we are in week 2 of our favorite waste
of time and in case you’re wondering, yes, I (intentionally) missed most of the
College Football National Championship game to watch the show. I suppose that says something either about my
affinity for The Bachelor or about my
lack of interest in the two teams playing in the final game. If your team won, congrats. At least Nick Saban is earning that $60
million dollars he’s getting paid.
We mosied into week two, fresh off what was
a relatively innocuous first episode.
Granted, there were the standard “spontaneous” limo exits featuring
horse heads, rose hats, and a few terrible plays on words, but overall the show
was about as predictable as the L.A. sunrise and about as eventful the morning
dew drying on the grass. While I was
mildly entertained, I found the entire episode to be . . . well . . .
unlovable.
Fast forward a week later where I sat on
the edge of my chair in breathless anticipation of Episode 2. Let’s get to it.
We begin this episode with the
predictable Bachelor cornerstones: expansive vistas, sunny LA skies, a rented
sports car, and a not so subtle shot of our Bachelor’s underwear-covered junk
being slipped into a pair of jeans after a shower.
However, some major foundation pieces are
conspicuously absent this time around.
We didn’t hear about this being the most (insert provocative adjective)
season of The Bachelor ever and
Harrison has been especially light on his “he had is heart broken last season
but is here to try one more time to find love” chatter. We haven’t seen Ben jog down a deserted beach
and no one’s husband has died . . . yet. I’d
say we’re off to a slow start. What’s
her face should bring that Shetland pony back.
As the girls kick it around their new
digs in the a.m., the first date card arrives.
Jubilee, Lace, Amber, Lauren B., JoJo, Becca, Jackie, and Jennifer draw
dreaded First Group Date duty. If
history is any indication (and it was), the First Group Date is usually the most
globally humiliating. Granted, the
second Group Date wasn’t far behind, but this one was up there.
After a brief champale toast in the limo,
it’s off to “Bachelor High” to meet Ben for some old fashioned “science
experiments.” Incidentally, I think Ben
selected the girls for this date by ranking them from highest to lowest in
order of having a stripper’s name.
Try this with the first three names on
the date:
“Gentlemen, ten dollar table dances, this
song and this song only, feast your eyes on the middle of the room while one
hand clapping against the other makes the perfect sound to welcome our next
dancer, (insert name here), to the center stage.”
Cue up any AC/DC song, throw in a ten
dollar Miller Lite, and a three dollar ribeye and you’re at a strip club in
Anytown, USA fumbling for a dollar bill and praying you won’t get bilked out of
a $100 glass of champagne after tacitly agreeing to some “company” from the
aforementioned center-stager. At least you’ll
go home smelling like infant detergent and sparkling with glitter . . . or so
I’m told.
Back to Ben.
Ben meets the denim short, flannel shirt
around the waist sporting girls on the steps of a local high school. He's seemingly
embarrassed by what he has been informed is about to happen.
The girls are given white mall cosmetic
salesperson counter-girl coats and forced to compete against each other in a fourth grade
science experiment in order to make “Ben’s volcano explode”. Subtlety is not this show’s strength.
JoJo tells us that she’s “never been this
turned on in a high school.” Of course
she hasn’t. That sort of thing usually
occurred behind her high school in the back seat of a Camaro. Lace tells us she hated school. I’m sure she did. It probably didn’t look at her enough or pay enough attention to her.
I think we all know she’s F-ing crazy. It got to a point this week where it was
almost disturbing to watch. She’s
clearly got some real issues and a reality television show isn’t the proper
venue to sort them out (see Padded Room).
Bobbing for Apples. Again, far from subtle and also disgusting. I hope they all got their trenchmouth
vaccination shots prior to that event.
Jennifer tells us that Jackie is “not great with her mouth.” I suppose that’s a matter of opinion and I’d
wager that Jackie has an ex-boyfriend or two who may feel differently. We should give her the benefit of the
doubt. After all, they weren’t bobbing
for bananas. Word has it that’s next
week.
“Find the state of Indiana”. Granted, Becca is a product of the Louisiana
public education system and I can even forgive her for misplacing Indiana a tad
bit to the East. However, confusing Idaho
with Oregon and putting Indiana sideways on the map calls for some serious
remedial Geography lessons. Oh, and the
fact that putting it there was a team decision is even worse. Good Lord.
She’s no Magellan.
Mandi loses her rose hat and takes Amber
to the house in a foot race for a Mustang ride with Ben. Throw in some green slime falling from the
sky and I’d have thought I was watching You
Can’t Do That On Television.
Cocktail party. JoJo is hot, he knows it,
and she’s a top 3 finisher. I’d bet on
it. Let’s talk about Lace.
She started out with such promise for the
drunk girl who survived the first cocktail party out of the kindness of Ben’s
heart, the fact that he hated other girls more than he feared one crazy one,
and that the Producers smelled ratings gold.
Last night “I was a little too
emotional.”
Good start. Go on.
“I had a little too much to drink.”
Ok.
The Germans were a little too aggressive in 1939 too, but continue.
“F*ck these b*tches. I’m going to talk to Ben again.”
. . . .aaaannnnd scene.
Becca gets some one-on-one time to play one-on-one
and does a good job. Like I said, she’s
pretty, she’s cool, and she’s relatively dull.
The more I see Ben, the more I feel the same way about him. Dynamic, he’s not.
Jennifer gets an awkward lean in kiss
from Ben because he had to start sometime.
Oh, and we still haven’t found out what her “small business” is, but I
hear Ben is trying to get three people below him to move some product so he can
earn $5,000.00 a month without ever leaving the mansion.
Olivia with no makeup didn’t look like
Olivia with make up. In fact, she didn’t
look like any person I’d ever seen . . . ever. It was like looking at the barrio with no
graffiti. Amazing. It’s amazing what a coat of paint can do,
isn’t it? She went from Michelle Pfeiffer
to Ricky Schroder in one episode.
And why can she not close her mouth? I rewound to make sure she wasn’t on the
bobbing for apples date just to be sure she didn’t contract lockjaw. Regardless, she might want to look into a
tetanus shot before that gets any worse.
She looked like the freaking
clown at a putt putt round…up until Caila got the date card. Olivia was none too happy.
Lace, still starved for attention tells
us that she’s “not that person” who got drunk and super needy on night
one. First of all, what people really
mean when they say, “I’m not that person” is “I can’t believe I’m that person.” Owning the behavior is the first step toward
ensuring it doesn’t happen again. Lace
appeared a long way from owning anything but the string of profanities pouring
out of her needy little mouth between sips of chardonnay.
In another attempt to distance her
perceived self from her actual self, Lace begins to speak in third person. Lace is happy that Ben is holding Lace’s
hand. Granted, he held it because he was
likely making sure that hand didn’t have a knife in it, but I won’t steal away
her only victory of the evening. Lace
needed to take Lace’s meds and stop Lace from drinking Lace’s white wine in
order to avoid the synergistic side effects of mixing the two.
Jubilee interrupts for some one-on-one with
Ben in his plaid Moose Lodge Jacket to tell him that she is an orphan. Dude, a woman with daddy AND mommy
issues. Run, Ben.
JoJo gets the Date Rose after he talks to
her about her “attitude, energy, and bubbliness” and unwittingly rubbed it in
the rest of the girls’ faces by teeing it up in front of the group first.
Mansion.
Caila gets dressed for her big one-on-one date.
For some reason Kevin Hart and Ice Cube show up to ridicule
them on their date. What happened to
Ice Cube? 25 years ago he was a founding member of N.W.A. and now he’s an
angrier Tyler Perry in a Yankee’s cap? Remember
when it was a good day he didn’t have to use his AK? He’s gone from “F*ck the Police” to hanging
out with Peter Brady and Webster on The
Bachelor.
Caila deserves an award for putting up
with that nonsense. Ben shows off his Fonzie jacket. She gets a rose. She was low key, intriguing, not a child, and
relatively articulate. I think we’d all
agree that fireworks didn’t ignite, but they had a nice date. She’s pretty too.
“Ben and Caila” sits conspicuously on the
theater sign. They enter to find Amos
Lee on guitar. Half of America had no
idea who he is and the other half didn’t care (except for www.ihategreenbeans.com Lincee Ray). Caila
acts like she knows who he is and Ben fights the urge to wrestle Caila’s rose
away from her and give it to Amos Lee. I
suppose Jeffrey Osborn was booked.
. . . on the wings of looooove . . .
Amanda calls home to Facetime her
kids. She’s a top 3 in the looks
department but her kids will be her undoing.
She’s not going to stick around waiting her turn to talk to Ben behind
nutjobs like Lace and “bartenders” who have no particular place to be for the
next 30 days. As nice as he was to her
about her kids, Ben is not interested in inheriting a family. That is perhaps unfortunate, but
understandable nonetheless.
Knock knock knock. Date card.
Emily, Shushana, Sam, Olivia, Haley, and Amanda get Group Date 2.
Olivia wears white pants. Told you.
(Google White Pants Theory).
They set forth for The American Cement
Building, which sounds like something you’d find in an Ayn Rand novel. For some reason, the “Love Lab” is located within the building's confines and
it’s fully staffed by a “doctor” and his assistants.
Samantha uses the word
“like” like way too many like times for someone with her education and the
twins admit they’re both dumb, which—let’s be honest—is like Carrot Top
admitting he has red hair.
That whole “scientific” exercise was demeaning
beginning with the white see through outfits and ending with the smell my hips
test. Olivia “won” and Samantha and her
sour-smelling nether regions “lost.”
Shushana spoke English. What?
You didn’t think she could speak another language aside from
Russian?
Shush.
Her name sounds like a Jewish holiday. "My friend Moise is going to miss school tomorrow because he and his family will be going to the synagogue to celebrate Shushana."
Cocktail party. Four Seasons.
Hoodie and a sport coat.
Yes. You read that
correctly. Ben has on a grey hoodie and
a grey sport coat. Oddly enough, the Farmer
turned Perpetual Hanger On wore a similar twin set on the after show. A hoodie and a sport coat? That’s the black socks and sandals of the
hipster generation. It looks like
something that would happen if you were forced to go and check the mail in the
middle of winter. Odd.
Wine and a toast. Olivia had her face on and looked great in
pink. She gets to see the Bachelor
room. Samantha melts down. Many of the women were consumed by emotion,
which gave way to irrationality. The one
who keeps her head on straight does the best.
In Brad’s season, that was Emily.
Last night, it was Olivia.
One of the Haley's leaves with Ben
and busts his balls a bit and Ben apologizes to Sam for being honest about the
way she smelled below the waist.
Shushana may be a male
order bride. We should probably make
sure her basement-dwelling, glasses-wearing, Star Trek fan of a first husband's bloated corpse isn’t in a deep freeze inside a storage unit in northern Ohio before giving her a rose next
week. Sure, he meant well and probably
didn’t deserve the arsenic she put in his donut but she’ll be damned if she’s going to spend another harsh winter in Russia and she’ll do anything to not have to
endure two weeks in a tanker’s cargo hold trudging at 15 knots across the ocean
again.
Olivia gets inside the other girl’s heads
but eventually gets into her own. She
needs to tap the brakes a bit. She’s
clearly got Ben interested but it’s going to take more than a pair of white
pants, a passing score from “Doctor” Love, and the Date Rose in order to run
away with the Neil Lane ring. My
prediction is that she’ll become her own worst enemy. She’s this season’s Icarus. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a chance to emerge
from the ashes.
Speaking of being her own worse enemy.
Lace talks to Ben . . . again. To say that the conversation didn't go well would be like saying that Pete Best's career as a drummer was slightly inhibited when the Beatles replaced him with Ringo Starr.
“I have a bold personality.”
Translation: I'm boorish and inconsiderate.
“I’m hard to handle.”
Translation: No one likes me.
And my personal favorite, “I have a part
of me that I’m working on.”
Translation: My therapist wants to see me for a very long time.
Lace becomes . . .well . . . unlaced. She got a rose because she’s not done being useful
to the show, but she clearly needs Dr. Jamie to make a triumphant return. After all, look at all he did for Brad
Womack.
One of the Haley’s starts to cry. LB cracks a bit but keeps it together long enough to get a rose and then summarily hand it back to Ben on her way out the door. Amber starts to . . . whatever. Ben gives Lauren B, the stewardess, a picture
of the two of them from their first meeting.
I’m telling you, she’s a sleeper.
She’s not the best looking but she’s sweet, unassuming, and easy to talk
to. Like I said, she’s uncomplicated and
he likes that. She’s the tortoise to
Olivia’s hare. She’ll jog right past a sleeping
Olivia in a week or two.
After Ben goes on his reassurance tour we
get to the Roses.
Rose Ceremony.
Amanda (beautiful, but she’ll miss her
kids)
Caila (solid showing on the date)
Olivia (gorgeous, but ego driven)
Jubilee (the woman, not the celebration)
Lauren B. (sleeper)
Leah (event planner)
Rachel (quiet week, but still in the
hunt)
Lace (Lace needs to tell Lace to relax)
LB “can I talk to you”
Becca (good showing this week)
Jennifer (got a kiss and moved some hand
soap down the pyramid)
Emily (One of the Haley’s)
Jamie (did enough)
Laruen H. (did enough)
Shushana (spoke English)
Haley (the other of the Haley’s)
Amber (on her way out soon)
Adios
Sam (nice person, but needs to mature)
Mandi (nuts, but she got a tiara as a
parting gift)
LB (went home because she wasn’t feeling it)
Jackie (will have to stick to studying
old people)
Well, there it is. Episode 2.
I hope you enjoyed it. Comment
below or twitter me @someguyinaustin. If
you need me, I’ll be smelling my pheromones.
DP
