Once upon a time the suitcases used to be wheeled out by faceless ninjas dressed in black. But not in Norluns, where a bold, brassy, red-haired woman comes barging into the apartment and hauls away the final traces of Taylor.
The girls can’t help but notice her. Shock! Gasp! Oh no! Corinne has survived…again, and Taylor is not coming back. Danielle M is particularly disappointed.
“Taylor thought she had the leg up in her relationship with Nick.”
While that may have been true, Corinne had her legs OVER, and over beats up anytime.
Little do the girls know that Taylor has escaped to clutches of the voodoo priestesses and is striding purposefully towards Nick and Corinne’s date.
“A. You lied, Corinne. B. Can I talk to you, Nick?”
Well Nick is trying to reform his bad boy image, so the least he can do is have a quick chat with some half crazed mental health counsellor who has traipsed thirty miles from an alligator infested bayou to speak her mind.
“You think I’m a bully and a mean girl. But Vanessa even told you she would give you back her rose if you were into THAT (Corinne)!”
Oh yes. I remember that episode. Nick gave Corinne a rose and Vanessa held on to hers like a starving chimpanzee who had found the last banana in the jungle. Perhaps not the most compelling argument, Taylor.
Nick, for his part, says he appreciates Taylor’s sincerity. In fact, he appreciates it so much that he ignores it entirely and before you can say “emotional intelligence” he’s back sucking face with Corinne.
It’s all water off a Waukesha duck’s back for Corinne.
“Cats have nine lives and bitches have too/two,” says Corinne, quoting some ancient philosopher of duplicitous homophones.
Kristina…
Raven…
Vanessa…
Jasmine…and…
Whitney. Yet again the almost mute one has secured a rose.
We farewell Alexis, Jaimi and Josephine.
What? No more Nicholas Cage inspired outtakes with Alexis? No more lesbian fantasies with Jaimi? No more…blondes?
Oh yes. Corinne. No more classy blondes?
Oh yes. Danielle M. No more classy, interesting blondes?
Alexis is lost. She feels like she should have opened up some more, but had she done that, for sure she would have poked someone’s eyes out. She’s wailing like Flipper has beached himself while Sandy and Bud are off at a little league game or something. Tips for Bachelorettes #564: No marine mammal inspired arrival costumes.
“…the Island of St Thomas!” exclaims our Bachelor, who is out to rename it St Nick.
Nick seems to think this will be the perfect place to find romance, ie. where the girls roam about in nothing but bikinis and cut-off shorts and producers have free range to create the ultimate in humiliating group date scenarios.
The girls have no sooner jumped all over the beds in the resort than they spy a sea plane which must only contain Nick and rush down to the wharf in anticipation. Fortunately it was Nick, and not some drug dealer flying down to check his off shore bank balances, and Nick announces that he is taking Kristina on a one-on-one date.
Good grief. This is going to be like when Mutley met Mumbles.
Meanwhile, back at the resort, Vanessa regurgitates what she read in the Lonely Planet guide to St Thomas. Apparently St Thomas once belonged to the Danish until the Americans bought it from them for a few strings of beads and a couple of other trinkets (or was that another island?)
But then there is a knock on the door.
“ ’Allo. My name is Lorna. I am here to service you,” says a lady dressed in a maid’s outfit. So before you can say “Cube my Cucumber”, Corinne has Lorna running around de-wrinkling her dresses and fetching lobster dip to be served to her by the pool.
At the dinner, Nick and Kristina and Nic continue to mumble. I can make out a few of her words: “Russian…orphan…prostitute…technicolour America.”
I know from this there has been a genuine conversation. Nick cries and presents the rose and they are off to dance to the sounds of steel drums, surrounded by dancing women dressed as colonial slaves.
Speaking of women being forced into humiliating situations, it’s group date time. Everyone except for Danielle-L-L-L-L, Whitney and, of course, Kristina is on it. There is a pall hovering over the two-on-one candidates, because usually when such dates occur in a tropical paradise, one of them is left marooned without so much as a Wilson volleyball for company.
Speaking of volleyballs, we’re back at the group date. This one is less of a romantic encounter than a training run for Bachelor in Paradise. Nick tells them that this date is about hanging out, and I’m sure this suits Corinne just fine. She’s hung ‘em out before and no doubt she will hang ‘em out again, given half a chance.
Anyway, the girls get to play beach volleyball while Nick watches.
And if Raven was a vegetable, she’d be a capsicum, because she has a tough skin, a little bit of spice, but she’s mostly filled with air.
Needless to say, the volleyball game is a DISASTER, except for when a progressively drunker Jasmine pushed Corinne over on her self-entitled arse. But for Nick it is a disaster. By then end of the date the women aged over twenty-five are scattered in bean bags along the beach: crying, sullen or staring forlornly out to sea.
HOW I LOVE THIS EPISODE!
Nick just hopes he can get his date back on track at the group-date cocktail party. That might have worked if he had any skill in picking, from a group of drunk women, which drunk woman is the drunkest. Had he picked her first, what might have been? Instead he goes through the other women for one-one time before Jasmine. By the time he gets to her, she has morphed from a turnip into a turnip puree: something very sloppy and running off at the mouth. Off she goes on a tirade about her mistreatment and lack of dating experiences, and then she grabs his throat and threatens to strangle him.
Awesome!
Nick tries to be diplomatic:
“I thought about your fingers around my throat and…NO!”
And the Isle of Romance ejects one.
At some stage, apparently off-camera, unless there is a special Australian cut, Raven ended up with a rose.
Finally, it is two-on-one time. Both Whitney (short-odds to be evicted) and Dani-L-L-L-L are picked up and delivered to a beach, apparently only accessible by helicopter.
He and Danielle-L-L-L-L leave Whitney in a storm of sand and shell grit, but at least they leave her with a daybed and a couple of vases of flowers for sustenance.
For the night time date, Nick takes Danielle-L-L-L-L to a St Thomas dungeon where they examine the writing on the wall. Oh! The metaphor!
Back on the surface, they reminisce about their previous date. She talks about how her dress ripped and she nearly popped out. Nick, like me, doesn’t seem to remember. She tells him that she is falling for him.
And he replies in past tense, the love rat.
“I hoped it would be you…I wanted to give you this rose…” all the while waving the damned bloom in her face.
Just like that, in the episode where we discover the girls actually had a nickname for her (D-Low), Danielle-L-L-L-L is reduced to nothing more than an echo.
Romance cull whilst on St Thomas (Isle of Romance): 3
So if the girls weren’t traumatised enough by the disappearance of two sets of suitcases, an emotional Nick rocks up to the resort to sob to the women about how hard it all is and how he wished he could do some…blah…blah…blahhh…
To be continued…..
We can only be thankful that Nick has started culling the women at such a ferocious pace. At this rate it could all be over next week. Just hang in there, Kath. Just hang in there.
Photos credits: 9 Now, Google Images
friday night with kath 