Bachelor Recap
I know, Sean. I KNOW.
So this delightful journey ends here, with three hours that will likely consist of 75% filler and 25% killer.
The “live” part of this is Chris Harrison meta-hosting it, which means we are watching a live studio audience watch the finale, and he promises me surprises and things that have never happened before.
You guys: It’s just like Inception.
The studio audience of Taylor Swift fans left their Taylor Lautners at home: it is wall-to-wall ladies. Confidential to studio audience: this will not end with Sean whipping off his shirt and choosing one of you.
Subtract the dude and multiply by 300 and you have the studio audience.
The clips that weren’t coherent enough to be in the narrative, now available to the audience.
I am not going to put this nicely: This behind-the-scenes look at the women from “the most dramatic season ever” (I’ll debate you on that, narrator) feels very quickly like a Frankenstein clearinghouse of parts not good enough to be put into the sausage. In this case, that sausage is a weekly TWO HOURS of television.
This is what this episode is like.
So this stuff’s amazing.
Chris Harrison gets up in front of the audience full of halter top-donning young women who recently outgrew Taylor Lautner, and the men that they hold captive. “What about Sean?” He asks the audience. Everyone screams.
“What about Sean with his shirt off?” Everyone screams louder. In fact, like some combination of Pavlov and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, the audience screams every time Chris says “Sean.”
Who will survive the Thunderdome this week?
Going to own something: Desiree was clearly my favorite, and, helplessly, like Colonel Kurtz with better hair and eviler motives, Chris Harrison manipulated me and I lost sight of the reality that was Desiree’s brother telling her, “Um, don’t get your next failed relationship on a television show.”
Shockingly, this is not one of the dates this week.
The recap:
The first portion of the show is dedicated to Sean porning around Thailand (see Sean lay in a hammock! See him walk across a bridge, pause in the middle, and think!) while going over his feelings.
We are left, as we always are when “villain” (inasmuch as anyone who is a real human being – even those appearing on reality programming – can ever be on the side of good or evil) has been vanquished: in a state of paradoxical ennui. Tierra/Voltron was edited into nightmarish 24 year-old embodiment of all that is horrible about Generation Y, about women on the prowl, about humanity, even. And now she is gone.
Catharsis achieved. We cheer her departure and hope our brothers/men friends don’t bump into her at the nightclub and tipsily get trapped into dating Tierra as she appeared on this show. But imagine if Darth Vader bit it forty-five minutes into Star Wars. Imagine if Die Hard was eighty minutes of Hans Gruber and 30 minutes of McClane filling out paperwork.
Buy me something, Daddy.
So tonight’s episode will “stop my heart” according to the voiceover. You know what would stop my heart? If one of these girls was all, “I’ve made $30,000 for being on a reality show, I’m 24 years old, why don’t I go travel the world instead of staying here to fight for a relationship that probably isn’t going to work out, and meet someone when I’m older?”
However, they arrive in St. Croix and the best rule of the show that can be broken is that Sean decides to fly everyone in on the same plane. Baby steps.
They set up lodging at the Bucaneer Hotel, where, in lieu of sharing a room with another woman, Voltron sets up a cot for herself in a hallway somewhere. Probably so she can say that no one likes her and she has to sleep in the hallway.
Part II of my ceaseless dark night of the soul.
The original World’s Worst Cocktail Party.
We open on Sean porning around in the nature. The action has moved itself to Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada, at the guest-free Fairmount Lake Louise. One girl comments that the lake “screams romance.” It’s basically The Shining.
There are nine women left. Sean “needs to turn things around and get back on track” after the drama (“drama” means “when people act like they are on a reality show”) of the previous week (which all took place 24 hours ago as far as I am concerned).
All together now: “You’re hilarious.” “You’re my prince.” “I love you.”
Tonight launches – in many more ways than just my being snippy about the extraordinary redundancy of this show -the Heaven’s Gate of The Bachelor. Four hours over the course of two nights. Of excess, of beautifully photographed natural beauty, of magic, of face-slapping inanity, of a moustache-twirling villain named Tierra.
“I am SO NICE I will punch your teeth down your throat.”
Chris Harrison announces to the eleven remaining girls that they are about to begin the journey around the world for love with Sean…in Whitefish, MT. I am sure that this is where all of these girls were hoping to go.
Brand-new pairs of roller skates, for which Sean has a brand-new key.
We open on a crowd of women who makes last week’s countenance of world-weary prostitute look like happy bunnies. Chris Harrison hands over the date card, announcing that “[Sean] sees his wife sitting in this room.” There are many intercuts of a comically bitch-faced Tierra throughout this entire segment, which ends with a date for Disney Princess Selma (DPS).
Tierra is here for the RIGHT REASONS. To cut a bitch.
Sean porns around the bathroom of his accommodations like the relentlessly positive and goofy Patrick Bateman he is, and says, “This week I want to make sure the girls trust me.”
No game has ever been so important.
We open with a shockingly brief “What to expect tonight” – it clocks in at a minute, which means the chaff is ALL on the inside in episode 3. And again, the first shots are of Sean engaging in athleto-porn, stairmastering and saying, “I’m really digging a lot of women, and it’s blowing me away.” Color me stunned by this revelation.
Chris Harrison greets the ladies in the house, whose enthusiasm is now on par with a level called “world weary streetwalker” (down from last week’s “cartoon bunnies.”).
I caught up on episode 1 of this, the 17th season of The Bachelor, which has spawned countless US Magazine cover stories and enough marriages to count on two fingers, over the weekend. I shan’t recap the first episode, which comes in at a tidy 2 hours, but will offer the following observations:
- There are 24 women named Jennifer, all approximately 26 years old, who regard this meeting with Sean Lowe as their last attempt at happiness before heading out to the pier with their dance partner and requesting execution, as life has become a series of heartrending, worthless despair. Oh, wait, we’re in America in the 21st century where women can literally do just about anything, proudly and independently? Hush. No, we’re not.
- A girl named Lindsay shows up to her introduction wearing a wedding dress and then proceeds to get drunk at the World’s Worst Cocktail Party™. (Which, to be fair, several of the ladies do). She comments, after going in hard for, and being denied, a kiss from Sean, “Maybe I shouldn’t have worn the wedding dress.”
dahGRAMS
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