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Recap: ‘The Bachelor’ week 9, Feb. 28
Welcome to the jungle.
There are roaring lions; funny-looking giraffes; big gray elephants; and a slow, lumbering creature that drags its knuckles on the ground as it walks.
Sorry, Brad, that was a cheap shot.
This week Brad and the three remaining harem members are in South Africa doing all kinds of South African-y things. He begins the episode by saying that he has no clue what he’s doing and I’m thinking that might be the first time he’s struck me as having a clue.
He’s going to spend a whole day (and, if he plays his cards right, a whole night) with each contestant — Chantal, Emily and Ashley. He starts with Chantal because the producers asked him to go in alphabetical order. Sorry — that was another cheap shot, but nothing is happening yet and I’m bored.
Brad asks Chantal to guess what they’re going to do on their date. Chantal is thinking, “Duh. We’re in the middle of a wildlife refuge in South Africa.” But she doesn’t want to lose the game, so she gamely asks, “Safari?” and Brad is all stunned that she figured it out. Everything Brad does is “amazing” to Chantal. He’s an “amazing, amazing man.’ He’s “so amazing.” Amazing, amazing, amazing. And I’m thinking he must be doing magic tricks off camera or something, because I’ve been watching this show for nine weeks and I haven’t seen a single thing yet I’d describe as “amazing.”
Read about the dates and find out who goes home after the jump.
For instance, Brad sees a giraffe and describes it as “beautiful.” He asks Chantal if she thinks the creature is beautiful and she’s like, “yeah, in a funny kind of way.” But then she sees the confusion and disappointment flash on his face and agrees that it’s beautiful. Funny and beautiful. At least that’s how I remember it. Quick, Brad, you’re losing her … pull a coin out of her ear or saw her in half or something.
Amazing.
The couple runs into a rhinoceros, which always makes me think of this scene from “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls” in which Jim Carrey hid inside of a fake rhino to conduct clandestine surveillance and had to exit through it’s rear when the door panel got stuck.
Chantal says that the safari is a metaphor for their relationship and I am kind of impressed that she knows what a metaphor is and used the term correctly. I also think that a safari is a good metaphor for Brad and Chantal’s relationship: both give the illusion of unpredictability and wildness in a natural setting but that’s just an illusion created by behind-the-scenes players in a hyper-controlled environment.
This date would be a lot more fun if the couple were in Jurassic Park and that was a T-Rex instead of a giraffe.
Chantal says that she “wants to be better” for Brad. “I want to put him first,” she says. Sheesh. Brad says he gets “fired up” when he hears her say that and I’m glad he told us because there is absolutely zero visual indication that this man’s excitement level is any different than when he is sleeping or lying on Shawntel’s embalming table.
During dinner, Chantal tells Brad that they should just skip the engagement and get married right there in Africa, right then. Gosh, this is going to make the part where Brad gets to ask her to spend the night with him kind of anti-climactic, isn’t it?
This would be a good place to point out that I think that it’s really weird that it’s not actually Brad asking the women to spend the night with him, it’s host Chris Harrison. Brad hands Chantal a room key and a letter from Harrison, signed by Harrison, in which Harrison asks her to spend the night with Brad. Am I the only one who thinks that’s odd and wrong? Harrison has kind of always seemed like a pimp, but this is some blatant stuff right here.
Anyway, surprisingly, Chantal tells Brad to tell Harrison that she’s not that kind of girl and that she and Brad won’t be watching the sun rise together until there’s a ring on her finger.
Just kidding! Did I get you? That’s a little trick I just pulled. Kind of like a magic trick. I showed it to Chantal and she thought it was amazing!
So Chantal says she doesn’t want the rest of her dinner, she wants to head off to their romantic fantasy suite immediately. Unfortunately for Chantal, there’s no door for that shiny key and the fantasy suite isn’t much of a fantasy , unless you’re Tom Hanks in that movie where he befriended that volleyball, nor is it really a suite. It’s a big tree house that’s more like a platform with a four-poster bed with mosquito netting around it. They don’t show us how the couple gets way up there, but I’m assuming Brad snapped his fingers and a helicopter appeared to give them a lift.
I hope the hippos and lions will be able to sleep with all the racket that will be coming from up there during the night.
Brad’s next date is with Emily. He likes Emily, he tells us. “Emily is one in a million,” he says. Brad meets her out in the wild and promptly tells her to stay put because he has to go get something that he forgot. He leaves her there for what seems like an eternity and she just stands there, afraid that she’s going to be some critter’s breakfast. Eventually he returns, riding on the back of an elephant.
“Shut up!” Emily exclaims. Women are always saying that to Brad and he never takes them up on it. “I have always dreamed of going to Africa and riding on an elephant,” she says. Really? That’s what you always dream about? Is that common? Because I usually dream about houses with secret hidden rooms and stuff.
I Googled “elephant” and”dream interpretation” and I got the following:
“Animals in dreams such as Elephants come into our dreams it is a message that we are able to deal with any obstacle we are faced with at this time. Dream Elephants represent power, sovereignty, stability, and stead-fastness.”
That would seem to bode well for Emily, but less so for whoever wrote that — especially the first sentence. Yikes.
Emily wants to tell Brad that she’s falling in love with him, but can’t work up the nerve over dinner. When he hands her Harrison’s pimp card, she says that she’s the mother of a five-year-old and she wants to set a good example, so she must respectfully decline.
Just kidding again! She does say all that stuff about her daughter, but goes off with him anyway, But she hints that all they’re probably gonna do is talk. The jungle animals, walking into trees and stuff from lack of sleep, smile contentedly to themselves and yawn.
In their fantasy suite, which this time is actually a room with walls and a ceiling and stuff — and in which, if you fall out of bed, you won’t fall 30 feet, land on a zebra and kill yourself — she tells Brad that she’s falling in love with him. “I didn’t expect that at all,” Brad says. Oh, by the way,” he adds in my flight of fancy, “there’s a couch over there for the ghost of Ricky Bobby to sleep on.”
Brad’s final date is with Ashley, and you just know that can’t be good. Somebody has got to go home this week and those first two dates were just too dreamy. Brad takes Ashley on a walk that is, she points out, eerily similar to the one they went on during their first date, when they ended up at that creepy, deserted carnival. But this walk is leading to something even scarier - a chopper! It turns out that Ashley is afraid of helicopters. Whew! The producers haven’t had a chance to torture any of these girls by having them experience that which terrifies them more than anything else in the world for weeks! That feels good, doesn’t it, producers?
The helicopter whisks them up and over vistas that, frankly, justify the existence of HDTVs. It’s really beautiful stuff and Ashley is handling it well. They land in a place called “God’s Window.” It’s got a really spectacular view, which is probably why God leaves the curtains wide open. It’s here that I start to realize that Ashley is sounding more and more like a Kardashian. Not in the structure of her sentences — Ash is capable of stringing words together — but in her intonation. She sounds like a Valley girl doing a Valley girl impression. “I want to be a great dun-tuuuust,” she says (that’s dentist to you and me).
Brad gets all freaked out about Ashley wanting to be a dentist and not coming to live with him in Austin. Hey, Brad … some of us here actually have teeth. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I think dentistry is the kind of thing that can be done successfully just about anywhere. Cripes, last week you weren’t this concerned about Shawntel leaving her clingy dad and his plans to trap his daughter in their funeral home. If you didn’t flinch at her idea of becoming a freelance Austin embalmer, what’s your problem with Ashley becoming a dentist? My Spidey-sense is tingling, and that only happens around manufactured drama.
Brad takes this opportunity to tell us that Ashley is “one in a million.” Sound familiar? Because that’s the exact same thing he said earlier about Emily. How lucky is Brad that he found two one-in-a-million girls? I flash back to high school algebra and start trying to figure out if it’s even possible to have two ones-in-a-million. I don’t think it is, right? But I guess that staring into the eyes of a woman you might propose to in a week and whispering “Baby, you’re one in 500,000” just doesn’t sound as good. Or maybe he just can’t count — it seems as if Harrison has to tell him every week that he’s only got one rose left to hand out.
Anyway, Brad really presses Ashley hard to tell him whether or not she will drop all of her career plans to be with him and she gets defensive and clams up. In their fantasy suite, they look around and talk about the decor a bit before Ashley says “we’re off our game.” And she’s right, unless they’re playing “Trouble” or “Sorry.”
Ouch. God’s window just slammed shut.
It’s now crystal clear who’s going home and Brad tells Harrison as much just before the rose ceremony. He wants to be sure, though, so he pulls Ashley out of the lineup and leaves Emily standing there, just like he did earlier, except this time she’s got Chantal to keep her company. Watch out, Emily — Chantal could be as deadly as any jungle cat.
Brad and Ashley argue a little more and he tells her he has to send her home. In the all-terrain vehicle (I guess they don’t have limousines in Africa) Ashley tells the camera that she always felt a spark when she and Brad were together, but maybe that’s not enough. I think she’s right. I’m not sure their relationship could have caught fire with a blowtorch.
Brad heads back to Chantal and Emily and holds the rose ceremony anyway. But not before he tells them both how amazing Ashley is and how it broke his heart to send her home, which seems kind of unnecessary and cruel. Know what else is cruel? Making Chantal and Emily go through the stupid rose ceremony — phony dramatic pauses and all — when they both know they’re going through to the next round.
That episode will find them meeting Brad’s family. Don’t worry — they’re not coming to Austin. Brad’s family is flying to Cape Town. Whew — that’s a long helicopter ride!
But first, apparently, a bunch of this year’s rejects are coming back for some kind of a reunion to dish about their experiences on the show. The previews show a bunch of them and the voice over guy is all, “will this one’s rivalry with that one still be happening?” and I’m realizing that I don’t recognize any of these women, even those who were were just booted in recent weeks (and certainly not the two who had some kind of a bogus reality show feud six weeks ago).
I’m not sure I’ll be recapping that episode.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment Categories: Entertainment, Local people on TV, Reality TV, Recap
Comments
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By Ruthi
March 1, 2011 3:57 PM | Link to this
Hi Dale,
After seeing you on FB, I checked out your article and it was dead-on and hysterical! My favorite line: "Harrison has kind of always seemed like a pimp, but this is some blatant stuff right here." My guess, is since we didn't see Harrison and his snazzy suit this week, producers had to work him in somewhere. But yes, that was just weird. By my calculations Brad has now had "relations" with 6 women on ABC's dime, making him a pretty highly paid gigolo... =D
By k
March 1, 2011 3:36 PM | Link to this
This is Hysterical!! I have never seen the recaps!! I didn't watch the show this week and I have to admit this is much better...
By Julia London
March 1, 2011 2:36 PM | Link to this
I agree, your recaps are the greatest. And you haven't really seen Bachelor until you've seen the reunion show.
By gracie
March 1, 2011 2:22 PM | Link to this
I agree with sam!
By sam
March 1, 2011 8:11 AM | Link to this
you **must** recap next weeks show. Your recaps are the best thing on Tuesday!