I’m not gunna lie. It’s been a struggle to get this in print this week. And yes,while my job and the cricket have interfered with my writing time, it’s also true that I think it has started to happen…Corinne is sucking the life out of me.
Honestly. The construction of villains is an integral part of The Bachelor. I get it. But this is like the producers have sat down during the off-season and binge watched Unreal as a training exercise. Everything about her is appalling; I can find no endearing qualities about her at all. Let’s just think back to last season. Lace was a sloppy drunk, but there was something funny about her and she didn’t stick around long enough to cause too much carnage. Olivia was a delusional narcissist, but who could not feel sorry for her, when she jumped out of that cake all feather and sequins and clomped around the Vegas stage like she was wearing orthopaedic shoes, and surely hearts broke just a little when Ben left her in the freezing cold on that windy beach? But for this one…nothing, naddah, zilch.
Worst of all, these girls just can’t let sleeping dogs lie. Corinne is only slightly more bearable when she is taking a nap, which is thankfully frequently, and that’s where we find her at the start of this episode…until Taylor and Sarah, forgetting the old adage about letting sleeping dogs lie, decided to wake her up.
“Well we don’t know how that whole bouncy house thing happened, but the girls aren’t happy,” offers Sarah.
“We know it’s just because you’re privileged,” observes, Taylor.
“Privileged? I’m not privileged. Those girls have just got their panties all bunched up.” Corinne replies, contorting her face into a series of duck pouts.
That’s waving a red flag at a bull and she goes off on a rant to camera like a privileged brat.
“You do you. You do YOU. You go, GIRL. Coz I’m gunna do me!” (Aussie translation: “Game on, mole!”
It is soon time for the rose ceremony and we viewers all know that Corinne is going to get one because she hasn’t dropped THAT line about her v-jay-jay yet that was promised in the season trailer, but all the girls are making threats about storming off if Nick gives her a rose because none of them have seen the season trailer.
That’s what scholars of Shakespeare know to be dramatic irony. Heaven forbid. Did I just manage to compare The Bachelor to Shakespeare? If there’s an earthquake today, it will be The Bard turning over in his grave.
The disharmony in the house has not escaped Chris Harrison, who has somehow managed to sum up all the interactions between the women in the thirty seconds it takes to drop an envelope on a table and herald the entrance of a boy band.
He takes Nick aside.
“Let’s talk about Corinne. It seems she is rubbing the girls the wrong way.”
Nick, who only a few hours ago was letting Corinne rub him the right way on an inflatable castle, responds with some drivel about respecting all the women, and the stage is set.
Taylor tries to build some tension by again suggesting there will be a mass walk-out if Corrine gets a rose, but then Raven’s name is called and Taylor is called second.
“Taylor, will you accept this rose?
“Of course!” Giggle. Cheek kiss.
God, give me strength.
And then Whitney (who I keep forgetting is even in the house until she keeps getting roses), Kristina, Jasmine, Alexis, Astrid, Danielle M, Jaimi, Josephine and Sarah…until there is Christen, Brittany and Corinne and only one rose left. And I am surprised. I really thought Christen and Brittany would at least outlast Jaimi and Astrid, but there you go. Brittany has never lived up to the bravado of the Adam and Eve wedding, and Christen seems to be the latest victim of the dibber-dobber’s curse.
Or maybe it’s because tonight, instead of her hair looking like a fluffed-up mess, it looks like a greasy, unwashed mess and her mascara is applied in clumps, like maybe she’d had a mini-stroke while completing her toilette.
“Corinne. Will you accept this rose?”
“Yes of course.” Kiss cheek. Duck-faced smirk. Game on, Moles.
There is no stampede. No-one has ordered a taxi home to Arkansas, or Texas or Canada (Vanessa…?). No greater sign of protest than an occasional eye-roll, not even when Corinne proposes a toast. I think it had a few more words in it, but all I heard was “Fuck you all. Cheers!”
The next morning Chris Harrison arrives to tell the girls to pack their bags because they are all headed off to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The girls scream and squeal with delight.
Have they all suffered a collective loss of hearing? He didn’t say Rome. He didn’t say Paris. He said MIL-WAULK-E. WIS-CON-SIN. You know. Where Laverne and Shirley bottled the beer?
But of course what this really means is Waukesha, Wisconsin, Nick’s home town, and the slight chance that they might meet the family and get the bridal endorsement from Nick’s parent and fifty-three siblings.
So while the girls all make their way, Nick meets up with his folks in a Waukesha coffee shop and I am immediately struck by one thing…has Nick always sounded that nasal? And you know how it goes. Once heard it cannot be unheard, and now there’s ANOTHER thing I have to overcome lest I discontinue the blog. Sigh.
Anyway, Mum is feeling sad. I assume this is because Nick has spent so long looking for love, because she hasn’t even met Corinne yet. Dad doesn’t want to see Nick on this program again. I’m with you on that one, Dad.
Meanwhile, the girls have arrived en-giggly-masse and are down by the pond effusing over a paddling of ducks (I know. Cool collective noun, right?) like they are some sort of exotic animal not seen anywhere in the world outside of Waukesha, Wisconsin.
“Did you see that? Did you see that? It ate…BREAD!”
Then Nick arrives and tells them that he will be taking Danielle-L-L-L-L on a single date, and a pall falls over the group that not even the ducks can remove, no matter how much they try.
Danielle-L-L-L-L is being treated to a walking tour of all of the places in Waukesha where Nick lost his virginity.
“There’s a dirty river. I jumped in that for like twelve bucks. There’s the library. I had sex there. There’s the computer repair shop. I had sex there. See those hills in the distance? I had sex there.”
Eventually they arrive at bakery. It’s not disclosed whether or not the server has bedded Nick or not, but she certainly knows him well enough to craft cookies in his likeness.
And she surely has captured him perfectly, right down to the dick in the middle of his head.
So this part of the date sees Nick and Danielle-L-L-L-L ice cookies in each other’s likenesses. Danielle-L-L-L-L at least manages to produce something resembling a human form surrounded by roses. Nick, meanwhile, draws what he knows best: a vagina.
And what better way to finish a date than by dropping into a coffee shop to have an awkward coffee with one of Nick’s earlier sexual conquests, then walking through the rain to sit on a grassy knoll where Nick had sex. Lots. Wet spot indeed.
A quick change of clothes and they are off for a drink in a bar which, judging by her outfit, must be considerably warmer inside than out. Danielle-L-L-L-L opens up about her parents’ divorce which in Bachelor World is classed as a GENUINE conversation (because genuine conversations are never about anything happy) and a dead certainty for a rose. And sure enough, Nick is moved enough to whip a rose from under the couch cushions:
The next day all the girls except for Danielle-L-L-L-L and Raven are off on a group date. Raven doesn’t mind because this means she gets a single date, and besides – the group date is to a farm and there are plenty of those in Arkansas.
This farm is a dairy farm. For one who is a bit of a cow herself, Corinne is not impressed. The whole place smells like cow dung and she is in a shitty mood to match. The girls find Nick in the barn where he is doing what he does best: teats. These ones are being used to feed calves, of course. Nothing like baby animals to make you forget that you are competing for the affections of a man-whore with a dozen other women.
Soon the farmers arrive to explain the details of the group date; it’s a fun day of farm work. This is the new Trump America. All the illegal immigrants have been chased back to Mexico and the farmers have to resort to luring bachelorettes to the land to get the jobs done.
Nick is useless at milking a cow, but ex-lesbian Jaimi proves to be a deft hand. The producers must have been slapping themselves on the back over that one.
Milking done, it’s a fun day of spreading hay and shovelling shit.
But Corinne is not having a bar of it. She doesn’t even handle her own shit. That’s what Nanny Racquel is for. Besides, she’s tired and ready for a nap, but there is no bed, so she just takes herself off to sit on a rock and pout.
“Well that’s shit,” observes one of the girls.
“If she can’t handle the shit, she should go home!” offers another.
“We’re shovelling shit and she’s speaking shit!” sums up Jasmine.
And I guess that’s what you call a shit fight.
Later at the group date cocktail party, while Vanessa is giving Nick a book made by her special needs kiddies that she has carted all the way from Canada to Los Angeles to Wisconsin (…awwww), the girls take Corinne to task. They suggest that her napping and her unwillingness to partake in hard work suggest that she is too immature to marry Nick.
“My fingies were cold,” whines Corinne. “I thought I would have to go the hosstipul. Waaaaaaah!”
And then Kristina, like the little mouse that roars, calls Corinne on her bullshit.
“бред сивой кобылы,” she says. “Bullshit.” Not only that, Kristina scores the group date rose and looks like the Кот who swallowed the канарейка.
Finally, it is time for Raven and Nick’s one-on-one date. They’re off to Nick’s little sister Bella’s soccer game. They warm up with the team, and Raven gets to have soccer balls kicked at her head.
They watch the soccer and Raven gets to meet the folks which can no doubt be used as leverage later on. Then they go roller skating with Bella’s soccer team where Raven gets the stamp of approval from little sis, before dressing up for a dinner date and roller-skating through an art museum.
It’s not clear whether Nick has ever had sex here, but the conversation soon turns to that anyway when Raven recalls the time that she turned into her superhero persona Kung-fu Spider Monkey and kicked down a bedroom door to rescue her boyfriend from the grips of Vagina Nurse and somewhere in that story she belted someone across the head with a shoe. Best. Bachelor. Story. Ever. That’s what I call a GENUINE tale.
Nick thinks so too, and gives her a rose. After what seems an interminably long episode, we are finally back at the barn where the women have donned ridiculously inappropriate cocktail dresses for the climate and they are all clamouring for time with Nick because he has the only blanket.
Danielle-L-L-L-L initially causes a storm by being the first to grab Nick even though she already has a rose, but that is soon forgotten. Josephine and Corinne shove canapes down their throats like they are about to enter a winter hibernation, and wash it all down with bucket loads of chardonnay. Corinne is very sloppy and slurring her words and even her duck face pouts are waddling all over the place.
There’s nothing more likely to cause trouble than a nap-deprived, alcohol fuelled Corinne. She’s pissed off and she has Taylor in the cross-hairs. This seems mostly to be because Taylor uses lots of big words and patronises Corinne and Corinne thinks Taylor is some sort of psycho who had no right being a mental health counsellor (like I called out in episode one).
But just as the tension is building and the tension music is reaching a crescendo and Corinne threatens to hit Taylor across the head…
TO BE CONTINUED…
And thanks for that. Because this little duck needs a drink. See you next week.
The Bachelor screens on 9 Life, Tuesdays 8:30 pm
Photo credits: Nine Now
friday night with kath 