There are only seven girls left now, and they are having a hard time adjusting. Surely there must be plenty of chairs kicking around the mansion by now, yet two of them persist in sitting on the kitchen benches. You know, the place where most people prepare their food.
Even Osher is appalled by these poor hygiene practices. He emerges long enough to deposit a date card and then bids a hasty retreat before the girls can offer him a homemade bikkie. Besides, there has to be some sort of demoralising group date that he must finish setting up.
Florence is the lucky recipient of the single date card, and in the blink of an eye she is standing by the side of a paddock waiting for Matty to pick her up, which he does – in a helicopter. Florence is impressed.
“This is already better than our last single date!” she yells over the sound of the rotors. Given that their last date involved throwing themselves from the top of a building, the only way a date could go was up.
The helicopter lands in a field where two potters’ wheels have been set up and Whoopi Goldberg is hiding in the bushes. Matty has decided that they are going to work the wheels and each will create a piece of ceramic to gift to the other as a reminder of their experience.
Well. It turns out that Matty was Australian Junior Pot Thrower for six years running, and quickly fashions something resembling a bowl. Florence creates a short, stumpy, albino dildo.
Matty does not think that a short, stumpy, albino dildo is an adequate representation of their time together, so he goes the full Swayze (except that Channel 10 couldn’t afford to pay the Righteous Brothers royalties), grabbing her from behind and sticking his fingers into her mound…of clay.
A whole lot of pulling and stroking and massaging goes on, and even a bit of pottery. At last her masterpiece is finished…
…a longer, skinnier, albino dildo.
Impressive as this might be, both pieces of pottery are abandoned as Matty guides Florence through the bush to prevent her snapping an ankle, because yet again he has failed to establish a decent dress code. They arrive at a clearing where Matty has set up a couch precariously close to the edge of a cliff. The view is amazing, or at least it would be if he had set the couch up to face it.
Without a view to enjoy, and running the risk that too raucous a belly laugh might result in them leaning back too far and toppling into the gully, they are forced to talk about their feelings. This must go well because all of a sudden that music that the Fatherhood Foundation use in their “Dads for Kids” ads comes on. I’m pretty sure every time The Bachelor plays this music a member of the Fatherhood Foundation dies inside, because they’re all about God and monogamous, heterosexual, missionary-position marriage, and this television program would not sit well with them at all.
I interrupt this blog for my own public service announcement:
Now where were we?
Back on the couch Matty and Florence share a kiss, then while Florence forages around for dehydrated fruit, Matty skilfully extracts a rose from the day cushions, which Florence eagerly accepts.
The next day all the girls are assembled in a park somewhere, but considering how quickly Osher disappeared yesterday, there really isn’t too much to show for it. Maybe he had to mow the grass.
Osher announces that the challenge will be all about confronting their greatest fears: writing, reading and grammar. He hands each of the girls a piece of plywood and a Sharpie and tells them to write what they fear most about relationships. Elise looks at the Sharpie like she’s about to sit the test for her pen licence.
At one point during the boxing, Lisa punches Matty somewhere within a thirty centimetre radius of his penis, for no other reason than watching a bunch of girls doing a boxing workout is excruciatingly dull.
Of course, the training does have a purpose; now the girls are highly trained plank assassins and they are going to punch those boards with the notes written on them into the middle of next week.
“Who’d like to go first?” asks Osher, and Cobie shoots her hand in the air so quickly that she dislocates her shoulder.
She’s like those little try-hards that would always have their hand up in class in an attempt to impress the teacher, and if they were really confident that they could show-up everyone else in the class, they would flick their arms and click their fingers and lift one butt cheek off the chair.
“Read what you wrote, Cobie,” says Matty.
Cobie’s face drops. Like, nobody told me that reading would be part of this. Maybe if I cry he won’t make me do it.
It takes a bit of coaxing, but eventually she starts:
“I was afraid of falling in love and loosing a boyfriend…”
ARGGGGGGHHHH!
Now I don’t profess to be an expert in grammar, and I make errors when I’m typing quickly, but when it comes to knowing the difference between loose and lose? Well I defiantly loose my shite when their mixed up.
Anyway, they’ve all been unlucky in love, dated arseholes or are afraid to make themselves vulnerable to disappointment. Tara’s story ends up sounding the least pathetic, so Matty chooses her for some alone time and a spot of dinner.
Matty hopes that Tara opens up to him, and that she certainly does with a dress cut down to the navel and held in place by industrial Hollywood tape. It is also an incredibly practical choice. Matty has employed a personal chef to whip up a pad thai, and Tara runs no risk of destroying her outfit should a rogue noodle fly off her chopstick and land in the middle of her chest.
The dinner goes well, Tara tells Matty she really, really, really likes him and they share a kiss.
It’s cocktail party time.
Matty feels remorseful about exposing Cobie’s grammatical deficiencies, so he takes her off to the secret garden where he gives her the rose that he didn’t give Tara at dinner.
The rose threatens all the other girls, but Elora is particularly worked up. She virtually drags Matty by the penis into another lounge area where she produces a piece of paper.
Oh my god. Paper only means one thing – horrendous poetry.
Thankfully, before she reveals the contents of the paper, she drags Matty off behind a curtain and tries to go the pash. But Matty’s having none of it. He might be dating twenty-four women on national television, but that doesn’t mean he’s unprincipled and pashing behind a curtain when there are six other women on the other side? He draws the line at that. Of course, this is conveniently forgetting that Elora is the woman he invited on an overnight date, knowing full well that the other girls would all assume the worst.
Elora realises that she may have made a grave error…
…but no poems would die that day.
Finally it’s time for the rose ceremony, and despite the best efforts of the producers to build suspense, Elora survives and it’s Lisa who is going home.
There are several lessons that we can learn from Lisa. If you want to stay, don’t admit that you only love the Bachelor like a brother, don’t punch the Bachelor in the nuts and NEVER wear a tea cosy to a cocktail party.
See you next week.
friday night with kath 