This episode of The Bachelor opens with one of the lady-testants refusing to be eliminated. This episode includes two lady-testants breaking and entering and shooting things in the head. This season of The Bachelor might be the season where the women just break all the damn rules and tear everything down into an Amazonian Paradise Island. The Bachelor house might just be our modern-day equivalent of Wonder Woman’s island — except with more spray tans and first names with extraneous Es.
I’m thrilled to be here recapping The Bachelor. If there’s one woman whom everyone labels as “SUPER-CRAZY” this season, I might YouTube her greatest hits or a compilation of her nuttiest moments. I mostly look at this show as an expression of the lie that’s sold to us about love. Repeated continued contact with a woman who agreed to have repeated continued contact with you on television in a house with a bunch of other women who kiss you on regular basis will result in you finding your soul mate. That ol’ chestnut.
(If you’re a lady-testant on this show, perfect your side-eye and shocked face for those coveted reaction shots in your greatest-hits YouTube video.)
After their first night with Chris, our farm-boy bachelor, the host, also named Chris, sits all the women down and gives them the lay of the land: Bachelor Chris lives 15 yards away, and if you can find time to be with him, make time to be with him. If you want something, take it. If you dream it, be it. Vision boards and bikinis, America.
Bachelor Chris is thrilled to start the dating process. He could be going on his first date with his future wife today — his future wife and five other women.
In the early episodes of any elimination reality show, a few women are singled out to receive more attention than others. Ashley I. is my current favorite because she says she’s “more Kardashian than country.” She’s more kountry than country. Ashley I. is a virgin, and guys like taking girls’ virginity, so she’s got the advantage. She also tells Bachelor Chris that her belly-button ring is a magic lamp, and he gets three wishes if he rubs her tummy! Bitch is bold and beautiful.
There’s also a woman named Tandra, and that’s just amazing. God bless her, to the bottom of her Tandra heart.
The theme for the first group date is “Show me your country.” None of the women prepared dioramas of the Old Country or Ancestry.com reports; instead, the date is an homage to Bachelor Chris’s country lifestyle. (If one of the women showed him an Ancestry.com report, she would win immediately. It’s a lesser-known loophole in the Bachelor Rulebook.)
On the “country”-themed date, Bachelor Chris and the lady-testants go to a pool party, then head to downtown L.A. and race tractors. Because that’s what people in the country do. Kimberly, the woman who refused to be eliminated, makes Bachelor Chris perform a pantomime of their first meeting and gives him a tiny plant. Ashley I. wins the tractor race because she hugged the inside track in all the turns, and as a reward, she gets to sit on Bachelor Chris’s lap for what feels to the other women like an hour, while they stare at a rose on a cheeseboard. They all sit there and imagine what it could possibly mean.
I don’t know, America, it could mean what it always means because it’s a rose on this show.
Despite her white bikini and tractor-racing skills, Bachelor Chris picks Mackenzie to go on a one-on-one date (or something), which is not a solo date and a totally different thing than a solo date. Mackenzie reveals she believes in aliens, she’s super-observant because she notices he used to have his ears pierced, and says he has a big nose. Bachelor Chris sees some red flags there. She still gets a Rose.
Meanwhile, back at the house — which could be the title of a The Bachelor web series, like when Project Runway tried to make that show about the models happen — Megan and Jillian break into Bachelor Chris’s place and take note of the symbol of his masculinity (his motorcycle). Megan tries on his helmet and smashes her head into several walls and appliances. She is us.
Megan later gets a solo-date card and goes on a solo date with Bachelor Chris to the Grand Canyon. She tells him her dad died three days after she was called to be on the show, and then they make the hell out. She gets a Rose.
The second group date’s theme is “’Til Death Do Us Part.” This date starts with women in a limo being driven out into the California desert, and the driver turns the limo off. I think this is how Taken 4 would start. A series of underworked actors dressed as zombies attack the limo, and Chris pops in all giggly, askin’, “What’s wrong?” in his country twang. The women have to shoot zombies in the head with paintballs and find the shining beacon. A good way to tell if a woman would be a good life partner is to see if she’s willing to put a bullet between the eyes of a soulless monster that used to be a human. During the zombie excursion, Britt takes him aside even though she wasn’t chosen to receive a Rose that day (Kaitlyn was) and lets him know she’s serious about him and makes out all up on his face.
Bachelor Chris thinks it’s pretty sexy to watch girls shoot zombies.
Ashley S. walks up to zombies who are already dead and shoots them in the face again to make sure. She wanders around asking if they’re close to Masa Verde or the Four Corners. Ashley S. is my other favorite because she found a bunch of feral cats.
Meanwhile, back at the house, everyone is doing face masks and drinking, which is the only sequence that makes me want to audition for The Bachelor. Well, that, and all the day trips.
At the Cocktail Party, Bachelor Chris makes out with lady-testants all over the place. One woman gives him Iowa whiskey because that’s where America’s best whiskey comes from. Iowa. A bunch of lady-testants watch Bachelor Chris make out with Ashley I. after she’s treated her stomach like the lamp in Aladdin.
Finally, at the Rose Ceremony, Jillian thinks Bachelor Chris is calling her name when he’s really calling Juelia (see that extraneous E I was talking about?) and rushes toward him, slipping on the rug. Bachelor Chris helps her fix the rug because he’s a gentleman. Then Kimberly, the lady-testant who refused to be eliminated, was eliminated. I hope she just keeps refusing to go home and stays the entire time on a cot in the yard outside Bachelor Chris’s house.
The women who get roses are Britt, Ashley I., Trina, Kelsey, Samantha, Juelia, Amber, Tracey, Jillian, Jade, Nikki, Becca, Whitney, Carley, Kaitlyn, Mackenzie, Megan, AND …
Ashley S. Drunk, rambling, feral-cat-finding, zombie-capping Ashley S.
I’m really looking forward to the rest of this season.