The Bachelor Recap: Helicopters, Baseball and Nudity…FOR LOVE!

AWWWWWWWWW YEAH, YOU GUYS! I hear we get to see what our ancestors looked like naked tonight and I am PSYCHED. Whenever I think about which guys on  TV  that I want to see naked, the guy who looks like a prehistoric Josh Groban is always in my top 3,000.

Also, don’t forget: You can win free stuff just by doing a few easy things. DOUBLE ALSO, every time you retweet / facebook link the recap, you get an extra chance towards winning. It’s not just a one time deal.

THE FREE STUFF YOU CAN WIN

At the end of this season, I’ll draw names for each of the three giveaways. Buying my book gets 5 chances at winning, writing a review gets 3 chances and subscribing gets 1 chance and retweeting / facebook linking gets 1 chance every week that you do it.

If you do all four, you get 2 bonus points for being awesome and thorough. I’ve got an excel doc tracking all the entrants and their chances so fear not: the more you do, the better your chances.

If you buy the book, leave a comment so I can verify it and make sure you get your added chances in the drawing. I’ll reveal the winners in the finale recap and everyone will be happy and life will basically be perfect.

Coming up on The Bachelor…

The adjectives are FLYING tonight, guys. Perfect, ahmeezing, magical, rad, fantastic, sparkly and I think I heard the phrase Latin Swagger, or it could have been Cro-Magnon swagger or maybe even Australopithicus Swagger. I can’t be sure. It’s all happening so fast.

There’s evidently a segment involving baseball which I CAN’T wait to see because you can tell basically everything about a guy by the way he throws a ball. Remember Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite? Perfect example. Something tells me Ben is going to have the form of Stephen Hawking.

Later on, we see… You know what? I’m recapping the preview now. There’s too many layers of meta in this so I’m stopping until the 45 minute preview is over. Even Ken Burns is watching this and all like, “You guys, the pacing is EXTRAORDINARILY slow on this show.”

Appropriately exotic music? Check. Sweeping panoramic shots of the exotic culture? Check. A shot of a lonely airplane flying up against backdrop of nature showcasing man’s natural isolation and loneliness? Check. Looks like we’re clear to launch on this rocket ship of love FOR LOVE!

Three seconds in and we see Encino man in a pair of aggressively over-sized sunglasses. If you want this to be a metaphor for the show and its ambition versus how it actually comes off, the line begins HERE.

We’re then treated to a map to show us where the contestants are coming from because we’re all geographically ill-equipped to understand how the modern human travels from Park City, Utah to Puerto Rico. I’m so glad the graphic showing a plane flying in a straight line cleared that up.

Ben tells us that NOW is when things gets serious. He was sport-dating before. NOW is when he breaks out the bloodtests and deep thought questions like, “What’s your favorite color?” And “Which Twilight movie was your favorite? Was it the one where Jacob took his shirt off real slow-like or the one where he ripped it off all  fast and sexy and fierce-like?“

The girls have landed and SURPRISE they are overwhelmed and excited at this ahmeezing and perfact opportunity to get to know Ban a little better and stuff.

Emily sputters through a description like she’s Rick Perry explaining how much he loves lamp. This will likely submarine her PhD candidacy due to its serial abuse of cliche and hyperbole. I know the A story is how RabbitFace Courtney is looking more and more like one of the creatures from The Hills Have Eyes (does she have a unibrow this week?)

But the B story is how Emily is becoming less and less reliable in being identified as a PhD student. At least with Horse Lady Lindzie, she’s always like, “Horse blah blah blah love blah blah horse blah blah blah horse blah blah perfect” so we know the horse thing is legit, but Emily’s identity as a professional smart person is getting more and more blurry.

Maybe it’s Kacie rubbing off on her.

Maybe she never was that smart to begin with.

OR MAYBE part of the PhD process is her spending time on a reality TV show and collecting data from the contestants like she’s a modern day Diane Fosse. Wouldn’t that be the BEST? I can totally see a Rom-Com about this. Reese Witherspoon could be the undercover scientist, Matthew McConaughey could be one of the mentally vacant test subjects and Katherine Heigl could be some terrible character because she seems like the worst.

The girls make landfall and sprint up the their accommodations and act like they’ve happened upon a colony of unicorns who crap Reese Cups. Just one time, I want to see them have to cope spending a night in a public restroom somewhere like Will Smith and his son in The Pursuit of Happyness.

CHRIS HARRISON WARDROBE UPDATE
Chris Harrison corrals the women and begins his….wait. WAIT. WAIT JUST A SECOND. Something is wrong with his finger. Let’s take a look.

ENHANCE!!

ENHANCE!!!

Is that an index finger ring? I have no words. None. Unless he lost his finger and that is actually how the doctors fastened it back onto his finger stump, there is no good reason, nor will there ever be, for a grown man to wear a ring on his index finger. And did you see his finger nails? He had french tips, DID HE NOT?

Chris painstakingly explains the ROSE GOOD / NO ROSE BAD strategem of the show like he’s John Nash explaining Euclidean Space.

The first one-on-one date goes to Nicki and Rabbitface is PISSED again thinking that she should have swept all of the one-on-one dates. The rest of the girls look either stoned or confused and this is because Ben wrote the note in Spanish which none of the girls know. Except for Emily! REDEMPTION. See? She totally IS smart! But did she blow her cover as a cultural anthropologist in search of answers and not love?

But then again, she isn’t that smart because the smart move would have been to say something like, “This translates to, ‘Don’t shower or clean up because you are going to a day spa. You should make sure you smell really terrible.” And then Nicki would have looked like a hobo for her special night on the town with Encino Man and Emily could have whispered, “Checkmate” while reading the Wall Street Journal or something.

Courtney does her evil spiel and ends it with calling someone a bitch or something. Someone needs to check on her. She’s like the person who kills someone over a board game at this point. Her point of escalation has gone from reasonable to Manson.

We spend a fascinating few minutes watching Nicki get ready. No, I’m serious. Lip gloss, hair dryer, hair up or hair down? It was like trying to figure out who was in the coffin when Jack went to the funeral home in season 3 of LOST. Really compelling stuff.

I’m trying to figure out how to describe her dress. It’s like if Picasso was set to paint on a purple canvas, but he spilled his paints on it and then died before he could clean it up.

SURPRISE! Ben and Nicki will be taking a helicopter to their date and Nicki acts like she just witnessed Pablo Picasso resurrect himself and design her a poorly conceived dress. I think I’ve said this before, but the bar is too high with these girls with the helicopters. They are getting spoiled. I think they should do public transit for a few dates just to cleanse their expectation palates.

Ben unironically says, “Rad” again, bringing the season total to 12,433,989 times he’s said that word. He’s trying so hard to bring it back, but he’s the metaphorical man in front of a line of Chinese tanks on that one. No says rad anymore for the same reason that no one wears fanny packs.

I want to see if we can have a good time.

Great strategy, Ben. You guys! Ben is playing for KEEPS tonight.

Fresh off the chopper, Ben and Nicki grab a piragua and you totally know that he’s the guy who makes sure to order in a foreign language when eating at an ethnic restaurant. Linguistically, it’s the same as a jock wearing a letter jacket in high school. You can’t NOT let the world how awesome you are.

They complete the piragua transaction and Nicki is just verklempt with emotion because the date is going so great and it’s like God is smiling down on us.

WOULD YOU SETTLE DOWN? YOU TOOK A HELICOPTER RIDE AND BOUGHT A SNOWCONE. God hasn’t had time to gauge his interest yet.

On cue, the rains pour down. Looks like God has passed his judgment and IT IS GOOD because it features Ben observing their need for cover amid significant rainfall and Nicki trying to run in heels.

Nicki is just flummoxed by the precipitation and offers a Gumpian analysis of the sideways nature of the rain.

Nothing can rain on this parade.

Except for the rain that is literally raining on her after the cutaway.

Ben tells us that the entire date he planned took place outside suggesting the lack of foresight that probably led to the extinction of his species. I guess he never thought to download The Weather Channel app for his iPhone.

As the show is wont to do, Ben turns an idiotic observation into a referendum on how Nicki would be as a wife. The fact that she didn’t go on a murderous rampage because of the rain turns me on. Ben’s logic is THE BEST. Ben is the Egg McMuffin of logicians.

They cut into a clothing store to find a change of clothes which has dressing room reveal side-by-side shot written all over it. Ben logically decides to go with all white because surely it won’t rain again and render him basically nude in his all white ensemble. What’s the old saying? A rainstorm never happens twice in the same place? Something like that.

Nicki counters Ben’s Labor Day abomination with an aggressively ugly dress sized for Queen Latifah if Queen Latifah was dealing with a Siamese twin who was built precisely like she was.

They aimlessly walk around and talk about how aimlessly walking around is super romantic and then they happen upon a wedding that they describe as beautiful. It’s SO beautiful as a matter of fact, that they decide to encroach upon its fringe, because the thing I wanted most on my wedding day was to have a Neanderthal dressed like Steve Harvey and a girl wearing a colorful parachute to shoot a scene for their vapid TV show up against my wedding. When you wish upon a star, you guys!

The wedding music begins and Ben breaks the douchebag scale by quickly identifying the music as though it was a relevant part of Nicki’s discussion on the merits of living together vs. not.

Nicki: “I don’t know. I’m just in a vulnerable place after the divorce and I think I would need to live with a guy before taking the marriage step because…”

Ben: “THAT’S PACHELBEL CANON IN D!! I KNOW THIS! Look at me and appreciate me because I is smart, I is good and I is important! The Help said so!”

Ben watches the wedding and comments that It’s a lot. I know, Ben. It’s hard to watch someone you don’t know get married while dressed like a colorblind gangster. HANG IN THERE, GUY.

Back from commercial and faint string music tells us that it’s about to get all romantic and stuff or as Ben repeatedly calls it, “super romantic.” He’s like a Paleolithic William Wordsmith.

Ben on the topic of Nicki’s divorce: Did you try working through it?

(Heavy sigh.) No, Ben. That concept was lost on them. Nicki wanted them to be Ross and Rachel for Halloween but her ex wanted her to be Michael Jackson while he would be a little boy and since they disagreed, they figured divorce was the only option.

Back to the house, Elyse is complaining because she hasn’t had a one-on-one. It’s because nobody likes you, Elyse. And I’d be careful about requesting attention because you seem like someone who should play it cool and under the radar so as to advance.

The date card comes and Emily scientifically discusses the data and plausible deductions we can make based on who is included on the group date and how that correlates to the one-on-one date.

Who else gets to read the date card but GINGERNUMBERS!!

GingerNumbers reads the names and SHOCK Elyse gets the one on one with Ben. I can’t wait to watch that one-on-one. I’d rather drink out of a urinal than have to listen to her explain why she is a valid companion for Ben.

Blakeley, her sunburnt fake boobs and her wrist tattoo of a sphinx having sex with a motorcycle are BUMMED because she totally wanted the one-on-one. Relax Blakeley. Something tells me that you are definitely making it to the Fantasy Suite episode and that something is your profession as a VIP Cocktail Waitress.

Back to Ben and Nicki and he gives her a rose because she was open and honest about her divorce. The bar is totally not low or anything.

Back from commercial and Ben officially ruins baseball for me forever because he apparently loves it. I’m going to hope he loves it like I “love” casseroles so it’s not completely ruined.

Blakeley tells us that this is a perfect date for her because she is super athletic as she fails miserably at a white man’s two-handed high five. BUT WAIT. Blakeley gets some batting practice in and she can RAKE. Casey S. thinks that doing baseball drills is awesome and she says it like a pothead talks about raking leaves.

Practice is halted because Chris Harrison Plugs shows up to see the big sweaty baseball men girls and inform them that the winning teams gets a beach party and tons of LOLs with Ben and the losers get sent back to the house and have to continue being awful at life.

Two things quickly, I’ll give it to Ben. He actually looks competent in a baseball atmosphere and not like a mollusk in a DMV which is what I was anticipating. Also? Fantastic date idea. I say this every year. All the group dates should be competitive. When you have manic and self-obsessed personalities, the BEST idea is to add a layer of competition to the mix. Talk about drama? It will be like Fight Club. Spelling bees, paintball, laser tag. LET ME BE THE DATE COORDINATOR. Thank me later.

Gauging the talent, I think the early favorite should be the Navy team.

Kacie B. was really impressed by the red team’s first inning.

Y’all we like went out in the furst inning and scured 5 runs. And that’s a lot because 5 is more than 1 or 2 or 3 or even 4.

The navy team matches with 3 runs of their own in the bottom of the first.

I like how even when all the girls are given the same uniforms, Blakeley manages to sex hers up by leaving her stomach exposed proving the old adage that if you took away everyone’s sex appeal and redistributed it equally, some people would just figure out a way to still be infinitely more sexual than everyone else. Blakeley is the Warren Buffett of sexualization, you guys.

Emily coaches up her squad and I SWEAR she says, Let’s play good defense, be smart and deep breasts. Can anyone confirm this?

Blakeley records all three put outs for the navy team and Rabbitface says, Blakeley is like a champion out there. Who knew that strippers could play baseball?

That bomb misfired 1) because Courtney is just a malignant human being and 2) are baseball skills and stripping mutually exclusive things? My college roommate frequently streaked and he was a fantastic middle reliever. That’s just bad logic, Courtney.

Kacie B. is STEP INTO A SLIM JIM intense because she wants that beach party. Defense your ass off she says to Rabbitface.  Hahahaha. A for effort, Kacie. A for effort. It makes it all better though when the navy team rallies to tie and Kacie yells, “Bitches!” at a faceless frustration.

During commercial, did you see the preview for The Vow? Channing Tatum? CHANNING TATUM with Rachel McAdams? That’s like using your finest China to a bag of Funyuns. COME ON. Just throw Gosling in there and make it happen. Like anyone would be upset about it. You could even call it Notebook 2: Forget Me Not because McAdams’ character AGAIN can’t remember who she loves. Is Nicholas Sparks even trying at this point?

Back from commercial and it’s EXTRA INNINGS. The montage is a little squirrelly but we come to understand this: the game is tied and GingerNumbers is the navy team’s last hope.

GingerNumbers whiffs which is TOTALLY a GingerNumbers thing to do. That swing was so bad that it almost knocked the Commonwealth off of Puerto Rico. Talk about your anticlimactic finishes. Blakeley gets a little crazy about losing and has an emotional breakdown at the sight of (another) helicopter picking up the winning team.

On the plus side, we get a good 30 minutes of the red team and Ben at their beach party spouting cliches about love, games, sports, championships, and everything. It’s like the worst Queen song you’ve ever heard. It’s maddening. Cut back to the navy team on a dark and empty bus and we’re in full-on Friday Night Lights treatment. It’s like Street just got cured and then paralyzed AGAIN.

GingerNumbers talks about how tough it is and how much she wanted the time like she wasn’t the one who whiffed in slowpitch. GUH.

Courtney does her obligatory evil monologuing and we segue to Ben telling Kacie B. that his tragic flaw is that no one loves him back. I don’t know if I can do this much longer. If I could push a button and the show would end, but three people in the world would die, I would seriously consider it and more than likely do it.

The navy team returns and breaks down their loserishness.

Back to the group date and are we all agreeing to not talk about Kacie’s friz perm? I’m asking.

I like watching you.

Great line, Ben. That doesn’t sound creepy at all.

Kacie has a starfish for a ring and she gets the rose and this development conflagrates Rabbitface because Kacie can’t even count to potato and yet she is out-maneuvering Rabbitface.

Her counter is to steal Ben away, which pisses off everyone else because evidently there’s an unspoken rule that when a girl gets a rose, the other girls are required to bask in the presence of that girl for at LEAST 5 minutes. Rabbitface barely observed 2 minutes of that. She’s the worst.

Rabbitface is applying the “when in doubt make out” strategy and saying things like bottle of wine, skinny dipping, and secret rendezvous and Ben is like I like all of those words and the various combinations of possibilities they imply. If we hadn’t seen the entire show in the preview we wouldn’t know that this is foreshadowing, but we DID so we DO.

Also LOTS of blurcles going on. Courtney’s breast falls out, Ben’s mouth at the prospect of Rabbitface’s proposal says a bunch of words that you can’t say on TV and thankfully we cut to commercial.

Back from commercial and it’s time to suffer through the entertainment purgatory that will be Elyse and Ben’s date.

Elyse says a lot of things telling us how emotionally invested she is in this date, which concerns me that Elyse won’t be around much longer. This isn’t at all heavy-handed or suspicious, rather it’s done with the subtlety of the rape scene from Girl with a Dragon Tattoo.

She also says that she deserves to find love because she left her job because she believed in this, but really all she deserves is to not have a job because she’s the kind of person who thinks that a poorly conceived reality show is a better path than an actual job in the worst economy of our lifetime. But HEY, the girl has moxie as big as her hoop earrings, right?

Ben picks up Elyse in a yacht which is 2 of 3 in the “By land, by ground, by sea” trio. Correct me if I’m wrong, and I shouldn’t know this, but I feel pretty confident that there’s a historical precedent of dates ending poorly that use yachts. It’s basically the reality show version of seeing oranges in mob movies.

Elyse initiates much of the conversation with Ben by talking about everything she gave up to be there as if that had any rational bearing on building a functional relationship with someone. It’s ALWAYS a good move to play the entitlement angle when on a date. Entitlement is SO romantic and hott and sexy.

Going into commercial MAN the producers are really being subtle about Emily Maynard being the next Bachelorette. They are two weeks away from turning it into a GoDaddy.com commercial with Danica Patrick and bikini models.

Also during commercial: Denzel in a movie where he is a worldwide man of intrigue? I’M IN. Not even Ryan Reynolds can screw that up (can he?).

Back from commercial and the nightmare is still going on because Elyse is STILL here. Ben pops a bottle of champagne and he does it well because he owns a winery and we know this because he and the show mention it routinely on the 8s.

Ben brings up Elyse saying that she already accomplished everything she wanted to accomplish. I must have missed that, but the statement is a tremendous indicator of one (or all) of the following:

1) Elyse is very bad at talking.

2) Elyse had a very low bar of accomplishment.
EX: Bucket List: Dye hair dark. Never improve my thick Chicago accent. Have a grating personality.

3) Even if Elyse isn’t #1 or #2, she’s a certain amount of oblivious because she didn’t anticipate how that would sound to a potential suitor.

I’m sick of being single.

OH NO. Warm up the rejection gun, you guys.

Ben chafes at the mere mention that someone could be here for less than idyllic reasons.


Is it that you are just sick of being single he asks even though she literally just verified that fact for him 6 seconds prior.

It’s not that I’m sick of being single.

WHY IS EVERYONE SO BAD AT TALKING? YES IT IS ABOUT THAT. You literally just said it.

Elyse talks about being annoyed at how the other girls are getting dates and Ben purses his lips. This is the same look I give people when they want to talk to me about attending a presentation about an opportunity that promises to make me a lot of money. Time to calibrate the Rejection Gun.

Elyse suggests to Ben that he should be honest with her which is actually that worst possible strategy right now considering her floundering. What she SHOULD be asking for is irrational hope.

At this point, we see a laser dot on Elyse’s forehead because the Rejection Gun is warmed up, calibrated and ready to eliminate Elyse’s empty aspirations to not be single anymore.

Ben walks Elyse towards the ocean like he’s going to drown her or something but then she asks what she did wrong. Ben doesn’t hear her so she has to repeat which is always tremendously fantastic and awkward. She asks again and Ben is like the only thing you did wrong was being born. And Elyse is like, Fair point.

Back from commercial and Blakeley surmises that something is in the air because one of her fake boobs begin twitching and it usually does that when strange things are afoot.

On cue, a maintenance man snags Elyse’s luggage and Nicki and Blakeley react like they just found out that Taylor Swift is just a really effeminate 50-year old German man. Rabbitface rubs her hands together and laughs a low, villainous laugh.

Maybe she drank too much and the Jersey Shore came out.

How does this even make sense? Isn’t she from Chicago? Am I making that up? That’s like me saying that my neighbors put their dog to sleep because it didn’t do their taxes well enough.

Rabbitface stalks Ben to his room and says the word nightcap 67 times because she wonders if he’s ever skinny dipped with a model before. She should have said, I wonder if Ben has ever skinny dipped before with a model as ugly as I am.

Here’s the thing with Rabbitface’s move: while it will be effective in the short term, long term it will ruin her chances because it’s fundamentally crazy in the context and purpose of the show and as a rule, you date crazy, but you don’t marry it. Ben skinny dipping with her is the equivalent of going to a strip club. He may really “connect” with a stripper, but he isn’t marrying her because strippers and Rabbitfaced models make for terrible wives.

Rabbitface considers how this will play with the other girls when they find out about it. Great question.

Remember how everyone FREAKED when Shawntel the Undertaker merely showed up out of no where? It was anarchy ABSOLUTE red hour anarchy. Jaclyn punched a hole through a concrete wall, Erika fainted and all the other girls cried tears of blood.

When Rabbitface reveals the skinny dipping thing, it’s going to play out like an emotional version of the Mayan apocalypse.

At the cocktail party, GingerNumbers and her dress that looks like a tie-dyed / modified hammer pants outfit get Ben to say Rad again.

Blakeley tells us that she realized something about herself that she never knew before and she wants to share it with Ben. She then says a lot of words that don’t seem like anything, but they both act like something important was said.

GingerNumbers pioneers a conversation about skinnydipping and she is 93 sheets to the wind or she would notice that Rabbitface is BEGGING for them to find out about the skinny dipping.

Emily gets some time with Ben and wisely uses it to talk about how she wants to focus on Ben and not Rabbitface. Solid move, Emily. She then spends the next 45 minutes lecturing about how everything she said about Rabbitface previously was true and how she stands by it and effectively, this negates her strategy of trying to not look obsessed with Rabbitface. NEGATIVE 15 POINTS FOR GRYFFINDOR.

Rabbitface celebrates (prematurely) Emily’s imminent demise and we go to commercial break before the rose ceremony.

Back from commercial and wistful and soulful Puerto Rican string music take us in to Love’s pressure cooker: the Rose Ceremony.

Prediction? I say it’s either GingerNumbers time to go or Snaggletooth.

First rose…Horse Lady Lindzi.

Second rose…Jamie.

Third rose…Snaggletooth. I’m kind of surprised.

Fourth rose…Rabbitface.

Fifth rose… Casey S.

Sixth rose…Blakeley.

Chris Harrison: “It’s time for the final rose because one rose is left. One rose means that only one more girl can get a rose. Not two more or zero more. If there were zero roses, then no one else could get a rose and the show would be over. But there’s one rose. And one more rose means that it is the last rose. If you would reference this study guide for further understanding, you’ll notice that I’ve broken down the essential elements of the ramifications of only having one rose left…”

Seventh rose…Emily.

GINGERNUMBERS NOOOOOOOOOOO! It’s because she whiffed, ISN’T IT? I was just getting attached to her.

Ben dispatches her quickly into a silver Jeep Wrangler and the ugly sobs commence while interposed with her trying to list all her aspirations that now can never happen because the ugly Neanderthal-looking guy rejected her on The Bachelor. Good night, Sweet GingerNumbers.