The Bachelor US (Season 20, Episode 6): Pass another glass of swine

…and we’re back after Ben left us hanging last week, calling Olivia out just before the rose ceremony with all the other girls sharpening the daggers in their eyes.

And what an extra-long excruciating wait it has been for me.  How rude of my employer to not schedule “Meet the Parent” evenings around my viewing habits!  How devastating that my Foxtel box decided not to record Bachelor 20!  How almost homicidal  I  have been with an internet that has been dropping in an out all week  so that it is only now that I get to see it?  I can’t help but think that Ben has had Olivia bailed up in the back room in her shiny red dress just waiting for me to be able to reconnect so that I can watch the (drum roll, please) PENNY DROP.

So Ben tells Olivia that the other girls have issues with her and of course Olivia tells Ben that they are all just high on nail polish and other fumes emitted by their girlie-girlie habits and that they are just jealous because she likes reading books in her room (How to Catch a Guy in Ten Days, abridged and illustrated edition) and thinking (“I think it will be a good idea to dress like a stripper and jump out of a cake and dance like a camel in stilettos to impress my man”).

“I want to talk smart things!” bemoans, Olivia, ironically.

Of course, thinks Ben.  He just knew that the other six girls had to have the wrong impression about her.  So he takes her back, plonks down on the couch like she’s Julius Caesar at a meeting of the senate, then hightails it off stage with Chris, leaving Olivia to wipe her snivelling nose on the back of her hand.

Emily, who had been doing nothing but speaking in tandem and inane giggling while her twin was on the scene, has become quite the mouthpiece of vitriol.

“How the f*ck can he be f*cking falling for this f*cking act?  Her f*cking tears are f*cking fake, for f*ck’s sake!” she expletes (may have just coined a verb).  I know she’s from Las Vegas, but there has to be some Australian in her somewhere.

Finally the rose ceremony is underway and, to the uplifting sounds of mariachi (it’s been so drawn out, I’d almost forgotten they were in Mexico), Jennifer is left crushed like a discarded piñata and Caila is left to carry the flag for brunettes and women of any sort of cultural diversity.

No time to mourn Jennifer’s loss though, because Ben announces that they are all off to the Bahamas.

Quick as a flash, all of the girls are sitting in a line on the bow of a catamaran called Swish.  I do love how the producers always manage to find these exotically named craft. I’d just love it if one day they rocked up and all the other catamarans were booked and they were left with something named Davy Jones’ Whore.

“We’re in the Bahamas!” shout all of them in unison.

Cut to Becca, who tells us they’re in the Bahamas, proving that some of these girls have the attention span of a goldfish.  To confirm this theory, the girls are all looking forward to a romantic week with Ben, forgetting that most of it they will actually be spending with each other (read, Olivia).

Chris drops by to announce that there will be three dates this week, including the dreaded two-on-one where the one who doesn’t get a rose has to swim back to the USA.  Leah looks like she’s been slapped across the face with some sort of rotting sea creature. “Poor me.  I haven’t had any one-on-one time. Wah, wah wah..”

Then Caila gets the date and Leah looks like she has been forced to eat whatever it was she had been slapped with.

Emily bemoans the fact that Caila has already had one-on-on time and that’s not fair.  Well to be fair, Caila had to spend most of her one-on-one time riding around dodgy parts of LA with a comedian and a rapper on a movie promotion set-up, and sitting in a festy hot tub with Kevin Hart’s testicles on full display. Even clueless Ben realises he has to make up for this.

So he takes Caila deep sea fishing.  While sipping on a mineral water, Caila does her best to try to stick the knife into the other girls, but she’s a real novice at this.  Meanwhile, back at the hotel, Leah has locked herself in the bathroom with one of the other girls and is sobbing like a loon and soon all their hair has morphed onto one hairy, sobbing, mess and it’s impossible to distinguish the comforter from the comfortee.

After a great day of kissing marlin and dive bombing off the boat, it’s time for the cosy dinner by the pool.  Ben is concerned that Caila is so bubbly and happy all the time. If only he could pop up to see Leah for a minute, he mightn’t be so concerned about cheeriness. Anyway, Ben tells Caila that he wants her to show that she can be miserable with him and instead she tells him that she loves him, but she’s afraid she would break his heart, and Ben is confused, and guess what?  Nobody eats their dinner.  Mind you, am I the only one who thinks it odd that a human foreplay ritual is to spend an obscene amount of money to sit in semi-darkness across the table from a partner and watch them shove food into a hole in their face?  Sorry…digressing again.

Cross back to the hotel again for the group date announcement.  Leah, who has spent all day crying about the potential two-on-one date, gets selected on the group date and now she’s whinging about that. She can’t even see the silver lining:  Olivia and Emily will be fighting it out on the two-on-one, and whichever one of them has to pump up their Floaties for the trip home, it has to be a good thing, right?

Next morning and it’s group date time.  Leah’s foul mood has not dissipated and she looks like she’s about to develop into a full blown storm.

 

Ben tells the girls that he is taking them to, “own, private island!”  I’m sensing a bit of a porky-pie there, Ben.  You’re a software salesman, but you aren’t Bill Gates.  And as far as porky-pies go, this is a corker, because Ben has taken them to that place in the Bahamas with the swimming pigs.  OMG!  I so want to go there! (Oops…I think I just let my inner vacuous bimbo out.  But I soooo do!)

All of a sudden though, the group date falls flat. Ben is confused as to why.  Really, Ben?  When all of these girl wrote on their application forms “I’d love to get porked in the Bahamas with the Bachelor”, not one of them was thinking about a Green Acres episode where Eb and Arnold take a vacation.

When low pressure meets warm ocean a perfect storm can form and so it appears to be with Leah who dominates her first bit of  “alone” time with Ben with her “poor me” diatribe, punctuated by an occasional grunt (presumably of porcine origin) in the background.

The date doesn’t go any better once the girls are back on shore and have washed the smell of sea salt and bacon (sounds like a project for the Kettle chip company) from their hair and spruce themselves up for the cocktail party.

Cue thunder.

Enter Hurricane Leah…who tosses Lauren B into the maelstrom.

Enter Lauren B. Exit Lauren B in tears.

And then zoom in on Leah on the couch, who seems to be morphing into Olivia before our eyes.

 

Then Ben comes in and gives the group date rose to Amanda and Leah festers like she is about to move into Category 5.

She heads off to Ben’s suite in the hotel.  Conveniently she knows where this is, and even more conveniently, a camera crew is already in place. And Ben conveniently has a bottle of red which has been airing on the kitchen counter.

So Leah starts her plan to bad-mouth Lauren B, but Ben, having ejected Jubilee last week and now has a taste for it, sends her home.  Ben stares into his red wine, girding his loins for his date with Olivia and Emily.

Leah gone, it looks like an actual hurricane is making its mark on this date. I’m not sure how much experience Ben has had in holding hair back so that a girl can vomit with dignity, but that skill could come in handy as the latest sea craft thumps across the waves. However, it does look like he has finally brought a hair tie.  Just the one, though, which Olivia gets.

This looks like the worst date ever. The potential for seasickness on the way to some remote beach.  Two women who hate one another. Hurricane force winds whipping up a sand blast.  Ben in a hoodie to protect himself against the elements while the girls freeze. Emily sitting alone on the beach while the winds whip the fringes of her Vegas styled bikini top into her eyes and Ben listens to Olivia.

“Deep, intellectual things are just my jam!” shouts Olivia, to make herself heard over the wind.

No response from Ben, whose ears are now full of sand. Lucky, because then she tells him that she loves him.

Maybe to avoid the sand blasting, Ben takes Emily to higher ground where she gets to plant her butt on a bit of jagged rock and have a deep an meaningful with Ben who she can’t see through her wind ravaged hair, can’t hear over the noise of the ocean and can’t feel because she is frozen solid.

Finally it comes to the issue of that rose. While Emily watches on on horror, Ben grabs the rose, then grabs Olivia and walks hand in hand down the beach.

“There’s no connection!” shouts Ben.

“What?” yells Olivia.

“No love!  No love for you!” replies Ben.

“I love you too!”

“You are such a deluded cow!”

“Me too!”

Ben rips the head from the rose and stamps it under his foot, kicks Olivia in the butt, landing her in the ocean where she is caught in a rip, drifts out to sea, sinks like a (news) anchor and is never seen again.

Ooops!  Did my dream sequence interject again?

Back in real time, Emily does get the rose, and she and Ben depart in the boat, leaving a forlorn Olivia staring at the blowhole…and some sea-spray shooting out of a gap in the rocks.

Back on the mainland her luggage is wheeled out of the girls’ suite in a funereal like ceremony, where, once out of sight, it is tossed into the ocean in hope that the current will reunite it with Olivia.

Just when I am thinking that I am at  2000 words already and I still have to endure the cocktail party, Ben does me favour.  Having struggled against the wind to a precarious outcrop over the sea to show how contemplative he is, Ben decides that it is just as easy to cancel the cocktail party as to throw himself into the ocean.  He sends in Chris to deliver the news that they will be going straight to rose ceremony (hazard pay, Chris?)

And, to cut a long story short, he keeps Lauren B and ditches Lauren H. Hmmm.

Lauren H doesn’t get it.  Me neither.  I thought she might be one of the front runners, especially after the chemistry when Little Ben was pulled out in Vegas.

To me, Leah’s sabotage was a triple backfire:  she eliminated herself, she didn’t eliminate Lauren B, but she did get rid of little old hometown, retainer wearing, kind teaching Lauren H.

But more importantly, consider this.  Now that Olivia and Leah are gone, who will emerge as the new villain?  Emily, anyone?