One Dumb Gal's Bachelor Thoughts

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[npr]

What Would It Mean To Have A 'Hapa' Bachelorette?

ABC is set to announce a new lead for The Bachelorette on Monday night. But would choosing Caila Quinn, who is Asian and white, be a sign of progress in casting diversity or something else?

[bachelorgal]

Episode Four

Y’all.  I’m sorry for the wait.  It’s been a busy week.  But without further ado:

I felt like this week lacked a lot of development for anyone, except maybe the twins, but we will get into that later. One of the first things I noticed was that the twins have almost had no confessional time to themselves.  They always have to go in together, and because of that, they spend most of that time speaking over each other or making very passive attempts to say the same thing at the same time.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like I have gotten even the remotest feel for these women’s personalities.  They’re the youngest, (I think?) they’re twins, they’re from Las Vegas, and they took Irish Step Dancing, and that’s all I can say.  We know Olivia is confident to a fault, Jubilee is tortured and funny, Amber is desperate and sweet, Amanda has kids, etc.  But they have largely avoided introductions to the twins, Leah, Jennifer, and Rachel.  Is it a sign? Of course.  But like, give ‘em something, ya know?

On to the episode:

Jojo gets the first one-on-one in Las Vegas.  (They’re in Las Vegas.)  The twins are upset because it’s their hometown so they feel like they should be in on the action.  (They talk about that pretty much the whole episode.)  When Ben gets there he looks like he has put too much gel in his hair and then we get this gem.

I am not even 100% sure he is attractive, so much as he is pretty symmetrical.  But my favorite part of Ben and Jojo’s date was when he picked her up.  Because of this little Before & After. When Ben arrives to pick up Jojo:  

After he and Olivia make eye contacts and thier love is reaffirmed:

This girl is a murderer.   The intensity in her face is horrifying.   Anyways, they make out on a parking garage while everyone watches, because this season they really seem to enjoy making the other women watch the dates.  Maybe they aren’t worried the women will go crazy enough?  Either way,

they usually get bummed out and walk away, no matter how hard the producers try to rub it in their faces.  A helicopter shows up, and knocks over their flimsy cocktail table and they hide behind it and make out because that makes sense. Then they make out in they helicopter.  I am really interested in knowing how many helicopter make-outs have taken place over the 20 seasons.  Later in the night they watch fireworks that Ben pretends to have planned as a surprise, another thing that the other women are forced to watch and know is not for them.  Jojo is cute but boring.  I think she has more going on, but she isn’t being forward or vulnerable like Jubilee.  Also, did anyone catch that she might have been someone mistress?  She said something about her complicated past and Ben asked her if she had been cheated on, and instead of saying yes, she said that she had not been the only person in this man’s life.  Whether or not you were cheated on is a pretty easy question to answer, and she somehow managed to answer it very vaguely.  She’s got the cutest little button nose, though, and that’s fun. While that’s all going on, the group date gets announced, and it’s for everyone except Becca.  Oh boy, Becca gets the one-on-one.  They are brought to a theater where a ventriloquist who half of them pretend to have heard of explains that they will be putting on a talent show.  

I feel, you, Lauren H.  

I’m sure as a ploy to give this weird old ventriloquist any fame-cred, Caila pretends to have watched him on TV often as a child.  She has never seen that man in her life. At one point, I think Jubilee refers to them as not a talented crowd, and then moments later, Lauren B is talking about how they are a very talented group. Who can tell? Not me.  I’d say about a third of them show a legitimate talent.  But who cares about talents when you can do whatever the hell Olivia did.  I didn’t get any good screen grabs of her “performance.” But this one pretty much sums up where her mind was:

Yep.

But even with Olivia’s display of utter nonsense, my biggest problem was with Lauren H.  This.  Fucking.  Bitch.  

In the very first episode, I was rooting hard for Tiara, the chicken enthusiast.  She seemed warm, and normal (aside from how hard the producers pushed chickens on her.)  She likes chickens! BFD.  She probably didn’t make it far because she gave off a really reasonable and cool vibe.  But chickens were her thing.  

I was pissed.  I don’t give a shit about Olivia’s breakdown.  This was the most upsetting part of this episode for me.  Also, as a mediocre comedian I was offended by her pitiful jokes.

Anyways...  Olivia passively danced around in a spangled bikini and wasn’t wearing shoes, presumably because they wouldn’t fit on her weird feet?  And then she gets very self-conscious and has a major breakdown because she acted like a drunk maniac on television, and in front of Ben.  

I have two things to say about Becca’s marriage/wedding centric date.  First:

She has the face of a re-touched toddler in a tiara.  Those eyelashes are insane. The second thing was said better already:

I didn’t like Becca during Chris’s season, and everything she is doing on this season makes her whole “sweet and virginal” bit look really disingenuous.  How shitty must that be for Chris?  Whatever.  I was over Becca last season, and I am double over her now.

So that’s it.  The Rose Cerem-

WAIT

There’s more!

Last minute two-on-one! The Twins are goin’ into the Thunder-dome!  Except the Thunder-dome is their mom’s house.  The most demented part of this exploit, to me, is that they wear essentially the same outfit but each one is just different enough to show off some semblance of personality.  

But the only difference is one of them accessorizes like Avril Lavigne in 2002 and the other one accessorizes like Avril Lavigne now.  He picks 2016 Avril and the other one goes home to mom’s- or, stays home at mom’s.

At last, the Rose Ceremony.  Olivia is determined to make it up to Ben that she was “so awkward” at the talent show, and is eager to be the first to talk to him.  But Jennifer comes out of nowhere and grabs him first, although not much happens there because Olivia gives Jennifer enough time to say “He-” before coming to grab him.  Then she apologizes over and over while he tells her she doesn’t need to, over.  And over.  Then he squeezes her hand and through the power of the magical touch-language, they are whole once more.

She’s falling for him, and he reciprocated.  Right.  She also pulled a “That’s not me, I’m sorry I was acting crazy, but I’m not that person,” a la Lace.  (Is that gonna be a thing now?)

Jubilee (looking absolutely fucking stunning) then approached Ben.  She didn’t get any time with him this week, so she wanted a little reassurance that he hadn’t completely lost interest in her.  Don’t forget, she is tough, but also very emotional.  (Also definitely has the best sense of humor, by far.)  

Ben has what seems like another genuine moment with her before he is off to the next broad.  I like them together.  But I know they’re doomed.  America ain’t ready for The Bachelor to have an interracial marriage, (err... engagement.) Welp.

Poor Little Amber and Hannah, oops, Rachel, (who cares?) got eliminated.  I don’t know why Amber is so endearing to everyone, she barely makes it 20 feet away before she takes her shoes off and starts crying like a drunk girl in Wrigleyville.

Boo-hoo.  

Olivia gets picked last and is back on top of the world.  Rats.

Sorry again for the delay.

Until next week,

BachelorGal

[bachelorgal]

FYI:

I am a loser with no access to cable, so I will be watching Episode 4 tomorrow after work when it is on Hulu. Have fun tonight, y’all!

I’ll give you my take tomorrow evening!

-BG

[bachelorgal]

3 followers!

What?! Y'all make me feel like I just got a first impression rose. Thanks for the likes and the follows! I am really excited for next week's episode! -BachelorGal

[bachelorgal]

Episode Three

Oh, what a middle of the road episode.   The first one-on-one date was given to Lauren B.  

I like this girl on paper.  She is a flight attendant, she is really sweet.  I think she has kind of a weird mouth but, she is pretty cute, albeit a bit boring.  They flew in a yellow biplane, (aw, ‘cuz she is a flight attendant!) and then hung out in a Cialis commercial, except instead of two bathtubs they got to hang out in one hot tub, still in the middle of nowhere.  He gave her a rose and then it ended. Moving forward, the group date was for twelve of the gals, they ended up going to a stadium and playing soccer.  They were split into teams and each team was coached by a player from team USA.  Fittingly, when they were put in teams and made to play each other, one team wore stripes, the other wore stars, (v patriotic.)  Of course, only the winning team would get to go on to a cocktail party that evening with Ben.   Ol’ Crazymouth Olivia (her craziest mouth featured below) deliberately fucked over some poor girl who had been injured and won the game for the stripes.

At the cocktail party she went full on delusional and insisted that she and Ben had some kind of secret language.  We all know she is out of her mind.  Poor Little Amber got the rose, but Crazymouth don’t mind because Ben told her he loves her by using her knee to stand up.   The episode only took off during the second one-on-one with Jubilee.

I have liked this girl from day one.  The obligatory POC that ABC throws into the mix never gets much attention.  Or, gets a lot of attention in the first episode or maybe second, but nothing like this.  Is it just me or does Ben seem sincerely interested in her?  She was talking to Jojo (I think) about being fearful that Ben prefers simpler, happy-go-lucky women.  Much to her (and my) surprise, he seemed genuinely interested in the very complicated and tough person that she is.  She is being appropriately vulnerable and forward, but also joking with him and making him laugh.  The women at the mansion get their panties all bunched up when Jubilee makes a joke about being afraid of heights and offers the date to someone else.  Apparently because she has a spine and a sense of humor and does not immediately ingratiate herself to Ben (out of what she claims is nervous awkwardness) all the other ladies think she is ungrateful to be going on a date.  They assume she won’t get a rose, and when she does, and is back in her bed the next morning, they basically all drop a giant turd in unison.  

When Ben enters for the cocktail party before the rose ceremony, he tells the women that he found out that two people he was very close to died in a plane crash (after taking one date on a plane and another in a helicopter, yeesh) and is feeling a little down.  Crazymouth is the first person to get time with him, and instead of being warm, or caring, or even remotely considerate, starts tearing up about her cankles.  

Most of the women are still all riled up about Jubilee, and are further put off by her silence and growing disassociation from the gang.  At one point someone asks her what’s on her mind and she says that she is trying to think of something to make Ben feel better.  Which, frankly, all of them should have been doing, but most of them seemed hell bent on reminding him they existed, and pushed the fact that he wasn’t feeling so hot, completely out of their mind.  So Jubilee sets up a massage table and gives him a massage and now the women are even angrier because she is stealing all their time, and she already as a rose.  It’s insane.  Women have come on this show to meet this shmuck and fall in love and they are barely considerate of him when he is hurting, and when one of them is, the women turn against her. The only other stand out moment is Lace choosing to leave.  In a wild act of maturity and self-respect she pulls Ben aside and tells him that she needs to figure out her shit and that she can’t be there anymore.  It took 3 whole episodes and her departure, but I totally dig her now. Shushanna and Jami go home.  Jami was friends with Crazymouth and was mostly just stirring up stuff with the ladies, and Shushanna got one talking head the whole 3 episodes, so no real surprises there.   This episode started slow and bland and eventually ended up with some pretty cool development. Until next week, probably.

-Bachelor Gal

[bachelorgal]

It starts here.

I only started watching the ABC series The Bachelor 5 years ago.  I considered myself as having really good taste, and truly, I thought the Bachelor was beneath me.  I thought it was fake, and stupid, that the people on it were all shrill, vapid, morons, and the people who watched it must have been even dumber for buying into such a load of crap. Then I watched it.  The first season I ever watched was Brad Womack’s second go ‘round.   This is Brad: 

He is a moron.  It was his second time on the show.  The first time, he didn’t pick anyone.  He got to the final two and didn’t propose to anyone, and didn’t even want to continue a relationship with either woman.  In short, he is a tool. One by one, women got out of limos and reacted to this fool.  One of them even slapped him, for dragging women along and not even having the nerve to pick one.  I was in.  These women weren’t all vapid idiots.  (Of course, some of them were.)  Some of them were smart, and spunky, and assholes, and *gasp* relatable. You get suckered in because the next season’s Bachelorette is one of the women that the Bachelor doesn’t pick, and it goes back and forth.  So you spend a whole season investing yourself in some broad and then you watch her heart get broken.  And if she is pretty/charismatic/angry enough, she is given the chance to pick from an assortment of slack-jawed ding-dongs who are either boring, or assholes, with a handful of sweethearts in the bunch.  

This is one of my favorite shows, if not my favorite reality show.  

I decided to start writing about it because no one was stopping me, and I wanted to talk about it, and if you read this, and want to talk about it, we can talk about it together.  I will definitely post after watching each new episode, but may post other stuff through-out the week if I am thinking about it.  

If you haven’t watched it, give it a shot.  It’s a train wreck but if you are a naive goon like me who wants to believe in love, even if its on an over-produced wildly edited reality TV show, it's a good time.