I spuddle.

You know how some people like to watch horror movies?  I never got that.   I mean, I have no desire to watch someone being gorily (is that a word?) chopped into small pieces and then eaten or hacked up with a chainsaw and not eaten or really any variety of being cut and consumed (or not).    It is just not interesting to me.   I’ve heard that there is some adrenalin reaction people have to being scared in a controlled environment and that’s the big draw of horror.   Still?  NO THANK YOU.   But as it turns out, I have a weirder quirk:   I am drawn to things that make me cringe so repeatedly that by the time the credits roll, my insides are so embarrassed to be attached to my skin that they’ve shrivelled to the size of raisins.   I mean, obviously.  If this were not the case, there is no way on God’s green earth that I could possibly enjoy watching this season of The Bachelor.

And yet.

I sort of love it.   I mean, what’s not to love?

This episode opened with a group date that involved an extremely contrived photoshoot for InStyle.   Is InStyle owned by the same conglomerate that owns ABC?   My guess is ‘yes’, but we’re still supposed to believe that Jake just planned this as a ‘surprise’ for the girls and his good ‘friend’ (it’s impossible to type this without the sarcastic use of quotes, sorry) just HAPPENED to be the stylist for InStyle and bam!   Jake thought, “The girls would love to be in a magazine!   I’ll just set that up!”  Either that or the producers did.   I don’t know.   Call me cynical, but I’m betting that maybe if you knew the stylist from InStyle and you were on a group date with four or five or eight (or however many of them there were) fake-breasted girls, YOU TOO WOULD BE ABLE TO JUST HAVE A PHOTOSHOOT!   No?   Really?   You’re kidding!    Gosh.   Well, maybe Jake didn’t ‘plan’ it per se, but it’s just semantics, if by that I mean “a blatant lie perpetuated by this show season after season that the ‘star’ is actually planning and organizing the dates him/herself.”

The photoshoot was embarrassing to watch, as you might have guessed, the cringe-factor upped considerably by Christina who was determined to not even pretend that she wasn’t a painfully insecure mess.   Someone needs to tell this girl that fake breasts are available for a couple of grand (probably less in the case of some of the other contestants who appear to have bought theirs on sale in some third world country where pesky rules and regulations about how hideous they can be do not exist) and that having fake breasts does not make a girl prettier or more interesting.    Christina, who had a shot at Jake, blew it completely by getting plastered and blathering incessantly about how sexy the other girls were.   GIVE YOUR HEAD A SHAKE, GIRL.

Rozlyn spent a good amount of this date shivering alone on a rooftop waiting for the rose that she set about getting with the kind of slimy intensity of a pimp at a bus station.    Maybe plastic breasts provide some sort of warmth, but I doubt it.   She looked cold.   And she got the rose.   Big surprise.   The other girls were depressed.  I’ve forgotten everything else about this date because it was all trumped by what was happening back at the house, which was that Michelle was completing her metamorphosis into Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.  I swear, even her facial bone structure is changing.    Girl is getting so psychotic that I’m surprised they haven’t put a metal detector at the door.    I will not be at all shocked if it comes to pass that they need one.   Seriously.    Get the girl some medication, ABC.    A one-on-one date is announced with no name attached and Michelle simply cannot contain her crazy.    Oh, sorry Michelle, it’s going to Ali and will involve … Cloud Nine.   I think maybe the production staff sat down and wrote down every cheeseball phrase they could think of that could somehow be attached to flying and they came up with:  On the Wings of Love (THEME SONG!) (FTW!), cloud nine, and … nothing else.   Needless to say, “cloud nine” is going to be drummed out a lot this season and if you are playing drinking games while watching involving the phrase “right reasons”, you may want to add “cloud nine” but only if you want to be so wasted by the end of the episode, you’ve forgotten your own name and why, exactly, you’re asleep in your bathtub.

The one on one date was so filled with cringeworthy moments that I actually found myself standing up, shifting from foot to foot, like my body was wanting to run screaming from the room while my brain said, “NO, YOU MUST STAY SO YOU CAN BLOG THIS MESS!”   Ali, who I liked somewhat until she started talking because she originally seemed sort of almost normal, apparently wants to add Jake to her litter of J-boyfriends, a list that was long enough that I felt like she should have dropped one or two of them just so she didn’t sound so sluttily insane.    Most of what else she said was drowned out by the SOUNDTRACK, which was a relief because most of it was probably the word “like” over and over again because like that’s just like how she like talks like you know.     Oddly, the band Chicago was dug up from the crypt where old balladeers go to end their careers and we spent a good ten minutes listening to songs that we’d prefer to forget while Jake and Ali struck dance poses and pretended to have ever heard of the group.

How old is Jake, anyway?   It occurred to me somewhere around this point in the show that I should look it up, because I’m guessing he is actually in a different generation than these girls.  Oh, he’s 31.   Figures that most of these girls are 23 then.    Nice job, Jake.   If you can’t find a partner your own age, pick someone young enough not to know any better.

Anywho, Ali is predictably on CLOUD NINE and is the LUCKIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD.   She sheds some tears about this, which is embarrassing because it’s a little early for tears.   IT IS A LITTLE EARLY FOR TEARS.     I repeat this because this is a memo that none of these kids received.   There are more tears on this episode than at Michael Jackson’s funeral.

On to the next group date, which is at an amusement park and does not feature the entirely un-amusing Michelle.   Fitting, really.    I feel sorry for these girls on this date because not only does Jake want to see them acting twelve (er, why?) (creepy), it means that all day long they are going to have to pretend to enjoy rides that make them want to vomit.    It does not make you a better person to like fair rides, says the blogger who hates fair rides, but these women have no choice.    Off they go for a day of photoshoots of them pretending to love it!   Yay Six Flags!   Product placement galore!   Then Elizabeth trumps everyone by whipping out a note she’s written on a tiny piece of paper (do they not provide regular sized paper in the Bachelor mansion?) about how he only gets to kiss her if he picks her.   Uh, what?   She is willing to AGREE TO MARRY HIM without ever having kissed him?   This guy has a tragic track record when it comes to dating, you don’t KNOW that it’s not his revolting kissing style.    This note strikes me as perhaps the dumbest note I’ve ever seen on this show, and I’ve seen a lot of dumb notes.    In any event, Jake is “intrigued” (but keep in mind, he’s the same guy who finds Rozlyn “mysterious”).    He keeps Elizabeth and sends the others back to the mansion and then proceeds to lick her forehead while she coyly says, “I really want to kiss you, don’t you want to kiss me?   Don’t you?   Do you want to kiss me?”   Elizabeth, honey, this little game will only intrigue him for about two more episodes, then you’re going to start to look like the manipulative game-player that you clearly are.    So good luck with that.

Somehow this brings us to the Rose Ceremony which is interrupted by what we’ve seen 80 times already in teasers.    It’s so painfully spread out over the last HOUR of this episode that it has upped this series to The Most Cringe-Worthy Of All Time, which you’d think by my measure would make it the best, but somehow has the reverse effect.   Maybe I only like to cringe a little, but not this much.  In this instance, Chris Harrison was forced to say things so painfully awkward, I was actually forced to scream and leave the room briefly to get more tea.    I came back to find him  very very very very awkwardly (SO AWKWARD) telling Rozlyn that he knew what she did last summer, oops, I mean, yesterday, and he hopes she’s proud of herself because the guy she was with in the back room has now lost his job and probably contracted some kind of irreversible STD.   Rozlyn looks first confused — weren’t ALL the girls blowing the staff? — and then just slightly pissed off.   I think she’s had Botox, which is weird because she’s pretty young.   In any event, her face was blankly impassive.   Off she went and packed and left in the longest packing/leaving/not speaking sequence in Bachelor history.   For a minute, I thought I was watching ANTM.  (FYI, Rozlyn is not still with the producer in question, but they are still “really good friends” in the way that you are friends with the fake-breasted slut who was using you in the hopes of getting more air-time on the show and subsequently cost you your job and your pride and probably your clean bill of sexual health.)

Then, inexplicably, the other girls started weeping and gasping like fish who had been unexpectedly thrown up on the shore by a rogue wave.   Why in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks were these people crying?   IT MAKES NO SENSE.   NO ONE could be shocked that Rozlyn was a bit of a slut who will now get rich from the lawsuit that will follow because like Bill Clinton, no sex took place.    And are they really upset that she’s gone?    Je ne comprende pas.    Nor can I spell in French.    Jake takes some time to contemplate how he’s not going to get a crack at Rozlyn in the final episodes and to feel sad about that because he knows that outside the context of a TV show, the likes of Rozlyn would not be interested in a mere commercial pilot, they’d have their sights set on, you know, rich guys or TV show producers who can control how much camera time they are given on the sordid, embarrassing reality shows that they star on.

Finally the roses are doled out while the camera pans slowly on the pained expressions of Michelle and some of the others, but mostly Michelle, who finds it better — during rose ceremonies and other stressful moments which include EVERY MOMENT OF HER LIFE — to practice her breathing techniques for childbirth.   Shockingly, she gets a rose but Jake is so depressed to have lost Rozyln’s chest that he probably let the (remaining) producers choose.    Ashley is sent home for goggling too often at the camera — seriously, do NOT widen your eyes every second syllable, it makes you look like a robot whose batteries are running low; and Christina for being too drunk and insecure.   Bye girls.

That’s about all I have to say, which is good because my wrists are cramping.    See you next week for more irrational open-mouthed shrieking, fake dramatics, and a whole big fat plethora o’ sobbing.    Enjoy!

Filed under: The Bachelor