#abcthebachelor

Welcome back to The Bachelor, a show that’s a fun distraction from end times.

This episode jumps head first into the Olivia drama we left behind last episode. Ben, who has taken Emily’s evil sobfest to heart, pulls Olivia aside for further information on why nobody likes her. Olivia tells Ben that the other women enjoy doing their makeup and watching kink porn while she’s an intellectual. She likes books and thinking and silently watching others from across the room until they get uncomfortable and leave.

Olivia’s manic speech has earned her the right to keep her rose and a plane ticket to the Bahamas. For the record, I like Olivia but I’m surprised Ben didn’t send her home after she told him about her reading and thinking habits. Ben’s favorite book is probably “Flowers for Algernon” and he only thinks when ABC pays him to do so, usually about whether he kept the right twin. 

RIP Hayley. 

Meanwhile, Emily has made a name for herself as a major shit-stirrer this season. Her anger is moderately inexplicable – Olivia got the first impression rose! Emily’s occupation is “Twin”!! She’s literally half of a person! Emily shouldn’t qualify as real competition for Olivia but because this show operates outside of reality, she is. 

I’m just kidding you guys, I know twins are two separate people but two separate people have a lot in common with one whole person. For example, you can sabotage yourself and you can also sabotage your twin sister by either eating her in the womb or waiting to ruin her life until you’re both young women of marrying age. 

Jennifer, small business owner, is denied a rose at the ceremony, leaving only one contestant whose name we don’t know. Her name turns out to be Leah and her personality type turns out to be “unstable”. When the ladies get to the Bahamas, Leah has to watch as Caila gets her second one-on-one date with Ben before Leah has even had her first. This enrages Leah because she’s hot and Ben is treating her like an average-looking person. I’d be mad too!

RIP Jennifer. May you return to a world where people know who you are.

Cut to a montage of Ben and Caila fishing on a yacht with a voiceover of Leah threatening to kill everyone in the house. This is as good a time as ever to let you all know I’ve been fishing approximately one time and I caught a massive fish within the first ten minutes and I felt like Nancy from The Craft when Manon gifts her ten dead whales. I don’t have pictures of it because you can’t bring your cellphone in a kayak, you dumbass, so I guess you’ll just have to believe me.

It looked like this.

Anyway, the producers do a cool, fun thing where they put the audio of Leah saying “He’s not taking that leap with me” over a clip of Caila and Ben literally leaping into the water from the yacht. Remind me to sit down and dissect that metaphor later on.

At dinner that night, Ben makes a couple erudite observations, including that he’s happy Kevin Hart and Ice Cube aren’t there and also that Caila smiles a lot. You smile a lot, he says. I’ve noticed that. Caila confirms that, yes, she’s a smiley gal and Ben is like, honestly that’s great Caila and I‘ma let you finish but I need a girl who’s down to leave the bar early and order a pizza and cry with me. Can you cry with me, Caila, I need to know.

Caila, at this point, is probably looking around at the producers in terror like, what the fuck have you done to me but to Ben she’s like, I love you but I’m also not that into you and also men shouldn’t cry. And Ben is like, fair enough. You can have this rose.

Yay Caila!  

Here’s the thing about The Bachelor producers – I feel that they are my people. I think that I could get a beer with these producers and we could sit there for hours watching the rain and emotionally manipulating each other and there would be no hard feelings. Just a good old fashioned power session and I would be Rachel from UnReal except I’d wear better clothes and take showers.

What’s it like to not value power in social situations? I have a friend who doesn’t. She’s well-liked. It’s weird. 

On the group date, Ben invites the ladies to take a yacht to an island full of pigs and initially it seems like this date has all of the right ingredients – adorable swimming pigs, unlimited chicken hotdogs, titties popping out everywhere for the heteroflexible women – but it turns out to be somewhat of a disaster. It appears to be the same level of awkward as all of the other dates but we learn via confessional box that it is, in fact, worse somehow. I’d be willing to bet it’s because they all made a sisterhood blood pact when the cameras weren’t present and Ben is just a sexual object that takes time away from their drunken MarioKart tournaments. The bad vibes may alternatively come from Ben having just unleashed an army of wild pigs on these women without their consent. 

PIGGIES! 

One of the prerequisites of being cast on this show is that you have to take pretty much everything personally. People need to be able to pick up a pencil several miles away from you and the first question you ask yourself is what did I do to make her pick up that pencil. All of these women fit the bill except for maybe Jojo, Earth Goddess and spirit animal of women everywhere.

That evening, Ben takes Leah aside to try to get to know her because they haven’t yet spoken. She’s like, my name is Leah and that one girl you have a huge connection with is a fake bitch. The girl she’s talking about is Lauren B., who appears to be friendly with everyone in the house and undeserving of Leah’s vitriol. Ben pulls Lauren B. aside and asks her if she’s a fake bitch and she’s like, I don’t think so? Which is true, women can never be sure if they’re a fake bitch or not, I often wonder about myself. And then Lauren B. starts crying on the couch with the other women and Leah looks her right in the eye and says “Wasn’t me, byyyyyitch.”

But Lauren B. suspects it was because Leah has that classic saboteur look to her and thus begins Leah’s comeuppance. That night, Leah sneaks over to Ben’s apartment where he’s sitting, staring into the void with a glass of red wine in his hand like I wish I were doing right now instead of watching The Bachelor sober. He’s like, sup Leah, and she’s like, about that fake bitch, and he’s like, please leave my apartment and also this country. So she does. Bye, Leah. Congratulations for securing a role as “real fake bitch” on the next season of “Bachelor in Paradise.”

This is/was Leah. *Great* purple romper.

The next morning, Ben takes Olivia and Emily to Shelter Island where they sit on the rocky shores and try to forget that there is an asylum full of crazy people who want them dead only a few hundred yards away. The producers have edited in scary music over Olivia’s proclamations of love so we know there’s a twist that’s going to twist again and it does when Olivia tells Ben she loves him and he tells Olivia that SparkNotes was a pivotal part of his college experience. Olivia is denied the rose and left to find a way off of Shelter Island before Leah finds her way out of the straitjacket the producers put on her. Emily returns triumphant, confident that the pile of rotting bodies she is leaving in her wake will only grow taller from here.  

 That night, Ben cancels the cocktail partying, intent on denying these women even the basest of comforts. It’s that time in the season where he must choose between the two blonde Laurens. We all knew this day would come but, like death, our knowledge of its inevitability fails to blunt the pain. Lauren H., fellow lover of baby pigs, is sent home with nothing but her perfect body to dry the tears.

 “I don’t get what he wants,” says Lauren H. who also *says* she quit her job teaching kindergarten to come here but was probably forced out by moms who were threatened by how often their husbands volunteered to chaperone her class field trips.

Good night, sweet angel.