What’s that? Did I just hear Robert refer to Charlie as Charles? It’s like he just signs the execution warrant on Nathan and puts a baseball cap on backwards and somehow he is King.
And, as in all tyrannical dynasties, the rest of them are a little on edge.
“Boo!” yells Osher, suddenly appearing from the butler’s pantry.
Noticing their frayed nerves, Osher apologises for the joke, then slaps them with a double-date card.
“Two of you will go on the date, but only one of you will be coming back. Have fun, Ivan and Bill!” and he magically disappears in a puff of smoke.
Ivan is devastated. He has no idea why he is on this date because he has poured his heart and soul out to Ali in interpretative dance – at every opportunity.
Wow. Talk about answering his own question.
He just can’t cope. And in a world first, a Bachelorette contestant does a diva run, in tears to the bathroom with three of the others in tow to comfort him. Like that’s going to dispel stereotypes about male dancers.
The other bloke to be chosen is Bill. He’s pretty sure that he’s there because of some sort of edict from King Charles.
We are treated to a flashback to the previous cocktail party where Charlie is talking to Ali:
“Bill’s not genuine. He’s pushing his own agenda,” says Charles, clearly pushing his own agenda.
Anyway, apparently the way to tell whether someone is genuine is to make them prepare lunch for you and the bloke you are competing against.
Bill heads off to the kitchen so that Ali and Ivan can chat.
Ali wants Ivan to step up; Ivan want to be on Step Up. Two, three months tops, he will have made it in the States (hahahahaha) and then he and Ali can be joined in a state of neverending hip hop and jazz hands and perpetual pregnancy as Ali spits out his troupe of Ivanettes.
Sounds dreamy.
Ivan wants to kiss Ali, but she thinks that would be disrespectful to Bill, but really she’s afraid that his outspoken virility means that he might impregnate her with his tongue.
But that’s all OK, because Ivan reckons he’s made his point.
Bill has served up something mediocre for lunch that the producers don’t bother showing us and Ivan is sent into the kitchen to make dessert.
This should be idiot-proof, except:
- Ali wants some sort of pretentious thing where avocado is used in a dessert.
- Ivan has never seen an avocado before.
- The recipe doesn’t have pictures.
Ivan puts two WHOLE avocados in a blender. He is either the dumbest person who ever set foot in a kitchen, or some sort of master-mind-culinary-date-saboteur. Apparently it is pretty much impossible to conduct a romantic conversation when a Kenwood blender is trying to pulverise couple of avo seeds.
“Some of the blokes are saying…” attempts Ali.
Grrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
I know who’s spreading that bullshit. It’s….”
Grrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
“Bill, I feel….”
Grrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
“Ali, I…”
Grrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
And to be perfectly honest, Ivan probably still had a chance…right up until Ali started pulling shards of Hass skin out of her teeth.
Bill gets the rose, and Ivan gets to moonwalk out of there. At least Ali offers to accompany him to the door, concerned he might knock himself out on a light fixture like he almost did coming out of the kitchen.
Ivan is hurt – like, emotionally.
“She’s made a mistake. If she thinks she’s gunna go through all the boys and then come back to me…no fucking way.”
He fights back tears.
“Not even is she replicates every move in every Sia vid eva.”
OK. No threat.
Meanwhile, Bill proudly strides into the house with his rose on full display.
“Who thinks I’m not here for the right reasons?”
Crickets.
Crickets.
“I told her you’re feeding lines,” Charlie admits.
“Well I got a rose, so na-na-na-na-na!”
Charlie takes it like a man, assuming the man is John McEnroe, as he throws his imaginary racquet and storms off the court out of the lounge room.
The next day, Ali has invited all the good-looking boys, and country Dan, to a sprawling manor where the boys are to spend the day wrangling children.
Osher has abducted said children from the surrounding estates. They all have names like Ivoca, and their parents won’t miss them because they assume they are all with Peter Dutton approved au pairs.
“On the count of three,” announces Osher, “you are to run to the human you would like to spend the rest of the day with.”
After wrenching their horrified fingers from where they are wrapped around his thighs, they all make a run for Todd.
Harrison gets there first, and the rest of them reluctantly pick one of the others.
“This is my Hairy-Bear!” says Todd, and Harrison immediately regrets his decision.
The challenge involves putting together a kid’s push-bike. Not surprisingly, Charlie breezes through this challenge. The media has leaked that Charlie has an eight-year-old son, something which hasn’t managed to make his honest and open narrative with Ali.
“And the winner is Charlie!” announces Osher.
Pete’s kid looks like he is about to golly in his face.
Charlie gets the one-on-one time. There’s no surprise here. Charlie gets the rose.
“I’ve ticked a really huge box,” says Charlie to camera.
I can’t confirm that, but there was some blurred-out kissing.
King Charles returns to the castle mansion like he has been off crusading for three years and has returned with the Holy Grail. He declares his requited love for Ali, then heads off to commission an Elizabethan poet laureate to pen a timeless sonnet before pondering whose death warrant he will sign next.
The cocktail party is quickly upon them. Ali has had to rush back from a meeting she and Osher had to attend with a child psychologist at the country manor, and in her rush, she has forgotten to put on her pants.
Paddy, seriously starved of one-on-one contact with a woman, blows his melon.
Bill confronts Charlie and some-how they end up with some sort of bromance. Jules, observing this, is LITERALLY frozen in place – gobsmacked.
Then Ali chooses Bill for a quick chat.
So much for the bromance. Charlie hides in a pot plant to eaves-drop on every word before going the full Serena Williams:
“I’m a father, and my son is going to see this, and I am not a possessive f-wit. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair…”
Yet the boys remain silent. Since Charlie has dobbed on all of them, they would just come across as petty if they were to in return dob on Charlie.
He returns to stand sullenly with Bill at the rose ceremony, where once again Jules wears his emotions on his sleeve, this time with good reason. There is no rose for Jules.
His demise now means that one-third of the remaining men go by Dan/Danny/Daniel. One of those hasn’t said a word all season, one stuck his tongue down Ali’s throat without an invite, and one of them bored her senseless with a description of his degustation.
These qualities apparently trump a mo, blonde highlights, and a first impression involving a segway.
Despite this, Jules takes it in his stride.
“Ali. You’re a bloody darling. One of you had better marry her…and invite me to the wedding.”
If I was getting married anytime soon, I bloody-well would.
I know he was never going to win, but at least he had a little bit of personality. He was a little ball of happiness floating in a sea of brooding testosterone.
And I, for one, shall miss him.
friday night with kath 