The Bachelor Canada (Season 1: Episode 3) Dunk Me in Maple Syrup and Wrap Me up in Bacon (Wait…that’s NOT the quintessential Canadian experience?)

So it’s a new day. It’s a new dawn. It’s a new life for me…and I’m feeling good…

Oops.  Wrong Canadian.

Back in the Bachelor mansion it’s the morning after the night before and given the oversized sunglasses, there are a few bachelorettes nursing sore heads. Some dehydrated from wine. Some dehydrated from tears, and one or two who may have been punched in the noggin out of the sight of the cameras.

Tyler, the host, appears poolside with the news about the six-on-one, five-on-one and one-on-one dates and the announcement that two of them will be eliminated this week.

The first clue is a cryptic one.  “Saddle up, because Brad will be down to wrangle you later.”

(Crickets chirping)

A minute later, and eleven of them couldn’t care less, because it is Kara who wins the one-on-one date, and she has guessed that she will be going horse riding with Brad. After she gets eliminated from this, there will definitely be a spot for her on Celebrity Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader: Canada.  Whitney, the boxer, decides there is someone other than Gabrielle she wants to punch in the head, yet she again shows remarkable restraint.

Brad says that he has trouble figuring out whether Kara can have a real conversation, so he starts their date with a helicopter ride.

“How’s the view, eh?” shouts Brad.

“What?” replies Kara.

“Me too.”

“What?”

Or something like that.

They land at the ranch and Brad says it’s just like something out of a wild west movie, except for the helicopter, the skinny jeans and the ranch owner’s wife’s kitch knit sweater.

Brad is excited to wrestle some cattle. It must bring back his Greco-Roman days at whichever private school his senator dad sent him off to. Kara is out of her element, so in an effort to fit in she pulls her best horse face.

Before long the world’s tamest cattle are “wrangled” and Brad commends Kara for surviving this down and dirty activity that “not many girls” could handle. Given that Kara admits to have at least ridden a horse before, Brad, and you have admitted to being a horse riding virgin, that could possibly be the most patronising thing you have said about one of these vacuous nitwits so far.

At the end of the ride Kara says she is falling for Brad. She is not. She needs to look at the tapes of Matilda (Bachelor NZ: Season 1).  She fell off a horse, broke her arm and in the end won the man.  Sorry, Kara, but you’ve got nothing on those tough southern hemisphere sheilas.

Back at the mansion, Nicole is peeling some coffee pods and lamenting that she is the only one who hasn’t been on a date yet.  She’s an optician, so she can see where this is going.

As long as where she was going was not on the five-on-one.

Meanwhile, Brad calls upon his brief history of horsemanship to decide that Kara is the best backer-upper of horses he has ever seen and gives her a rose in the hope of some more backing up later.

But before you can say “Hi ho, Silver..away!” Brad is jetting off to Mexico to meet up with the sex…I mean six…I mean five.

Brad’s adventurous date is to visit a school and give them a bunch of balls and stand back and watch the girls.  For reasons unknown, he decides Gabrielle has a soft side (oh boy) and then tries to connect with BianKKa, who has been as cold shouldered as Kim Kardashian after being served Passion Pop in a plastic cup.

After the soccer game, Brad throws a pool party “for the girls”.  Yeah, Brad.

So, he has a pash with Gabrielle in the spa, a deep and meaningful with BianKKa and then goes back to sit with all five to tell them that he has decide to take BianKKa on a one-on-one date.  Gabrielle takes the opportunity to back stab BianKKa by calling her two-faced.

Next day, Gabrielle and her bitching minions are back in Canada, and Brad and BianKKa go on their one-on-one date.  They loll about on the front of a boat and make a connection.  They then go for a plunge into cold Canadian water which makes things shrink; for example, BianKKa’s bikini bottoms.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, Nicole is still going on about how she hasn’t had a date, but given the carbon copy appearance of the brunettes in that house, I’m not sure that Brad has even realised.

Anyhow, the date card is finally read and Nicole’s misery is over, except that she is now on a date with five other girls, one of whom is Whitney who will do “whatever it takes to frickin’ win” (except for knock out Gabrielle on the two occasions she had the chance to).

Brad says that the girls are going to be participating in the most Canadian experience of all time.  From an Australian perspective, I’m thinking that must involve maple syrup. But no.  It’s something called “Lumberjack Mania”.

Pole climbing. Check.

Sawing. Check.

Trying to knock each other off a log with giant cotton buds.  WTF?

Anyways, keen to redeem herself from the boo-hooing-on-the-loo experience at the last rose ceremony, Laura B races up that pole to ring the cow bell first. Then Whitney knocks Sophie off the log. Finally it’s down to the sawing challenge.  Chantelle is so excited she’s almost orgasmic, except she has nothing to compare it to.

Chantelle has no trouble sawing the top off that log, and if that’s not a metaphor, then nothing is. And poor Nicole is on the losing team after 19 long days peeling coffee pods in the mansion because according to Whitney, she couldn’t knock the end of the log off fast enough.

So Brad ends up with Chantelle the virgin, Laura B the morbid drunk and one of the brunettes that isn’t Nicole and he takes them off to a date at a guest house where he has Canadian country singer Dean Brody performing for them.  Judging by their reaction, this is the equivalent of taking the Aussie bachelorettes to a Blue Mountains retreat where the Hemsworth brothers have checked in for a family reunion. Great way to get them to pay attention to you, Brad.

Heat of the moment cooled, production assistants whip out the blankets so the poor girls don’t freeze. Brad conveniently warms up Laura’s lips before she can continue on like a drama queen.  Then it’s Chantelle’s turn. She decides that she should tell Brad about the big V, but ends up telling him it is four years since her last kiss, and that is pretty cryptic.  Did she root like a rabbit before that?

When Chantelle is back talking to Laura, she realises her mistake: “Oh shoot.  I forgot to tell him. Dang.  I’m going back down.” Chantelle!  That sort of language will send you straight to Hell!

Anyway, Chantelle finally spits it out.  Brad says she has some serious guts.  He finds her serious guts very attractive, but he has to digest what she has told him.

Finally, it’s the cocktail party and the rose ceremony…

But wait!  It’s Tyler who appears, shaking like Sergei the subservient meerkat. Brad has apparently decided that four of them will go home instead of two and there is no need for a cocktail party. There is undoubtedly a pretty pissed off liquor store proprietor somewhere in Vancouver.

Chantelle gets the first rose, then Gabrielle, Brittany, Ana, BianKKa, and Laura B.  Tyler rushes out, announces there is only one rose left, shakes Brad’s hand, says, “Good luck”, then rushes off, like he is saying final words to an work experience munitions technician.

Whitney gets the final rose, thus preventing Gabrielle or Brad, or both, being thumped around the temples…at least for another week.

And Nicole, the optician, wondering why she didn’t see this coming.

 

The Bachelor: Canada, Lifestyle You (Foxtel Channel 129), Tuesday 8:35 pm, repeated on Fridays.