PHOTO CREDIT: All photos courtesy of Citytv
You know that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a summer vacation? You had a blast, but you’re about to head back to reality?
That was Sunday’s penultimate episode of “Bachelor in Paradise Canada.”
With the season about to end, couples were folding like cheap tents and Camp Paradise was emptying out.
And what reward would we get for our nine weeks and counting of watching these Canadian and American singles mingle? Engagements perhaps?
One maybe; two if we’re really lucky, but the way the episode ended even fantasy suites were feeling like a stretch.
(And just a note, given the lack of “fantasy” accoutrements we glimpsed when Brendan M and Angela opened the door to theirs, perhaps the Canadian show needs to come up with a different name. Intimacy suites, maybe? Cut-rate fantasy suites?)
The wheels on the true love narrative started coming off even before the final rose ceremony when Mike told Stacy he wouldn’t feel right accepting a rose from her.
Of course, Mike had been accepting Stacy’s roses and vice versa since he first arrived in Week 3. He told Stacy she was “a gorgeous girl who’s an amazing personality” whom he liked a lot, but they agreed they weren’t where they needed to be emotionally with potential engagements just around the corner — although the subtext from Stacy’s perspective was that had more to do with Mike than with her.
She was in tears when she told the other campers she was leaving. “I deserve love. I deserve someone that knows what they want and knows what they have when they have it,” she said.
Amen to that. Sorry to see you go Stacy, you’re one of the good ones. Mike, hmmm.
No one else chose to forgo a rose and Angela’s, Kit’s, Lisa’s, Caitlin’s and Illeana’s were handed out in short order. Maria’s was the only question mark, although it wasn’t really.
Karn, who showed up just last week with a cocky confidence befitting his job as an actor, tried his best to wrest it from Josh, but Maria warned him, “It’s really hard to have a connection with someone you just met.”
She kind of just met Josh too, but she just met him sooner than Karn, plus Josh finally kissed Maria — though I’m not sure the reaction you want after you’ve laid a smooch on someone is for them to laugh loudly. (For the record, Maria tweeted Sunday she laughs when she feels nervous.)
Maria explained that she wasn’t as “open physically and romantically” as other people, plus the fact she got her rose from production rather than a man made her feel like “second choice” — that would actually be fourth choice if we’re counting the other women Josh had already kissed.
Nonetheless, Maria gave her rose to Josh, saying “the more I get to know Josh the more I like.” It was a good pick. Never mind Karn ungenerously saying, “Maria, you fucked up” as he departed.
The next day, with roses in hand and no new arrivals to disrupt the couples, it seemed like everyone could get on with exploring their connections, as they say, and then host Jesse Jones arrived and used the f-word. No, not that one: fantasy suites.
“Take this as the last opportunity to figure out if you’re both really looking to take things to the next level because, if not, you and your partner will be heading home from Camp Paradise today,” he said. Dunh dunh dunh dunh.
Is anyone surprised that Josh and Maria said no to a fantasy suite? Why would she want to spend the night with him when she didn’t even really want to kiss him? They went their separate ways, albeit expressing gratitude for having met each other.
Likewise, Connor and Lisa felt a fantasy suite was too much pressure for their fledgling relationship and said they’d continue to figure it out away from camp. “See you soon,” Connor said after they hugged and kissed.
I wasn’t sure which way Alex and Kit were going to go considering how little we’ve seen of them together since their first date in Week 3. And that’s a shame because I think we missed out on a warm, respectful relationship. I love that Alex put glitter on his cheek to match the sparkle under Kit’s eyes and on her dress at the rose ceremony, for instance.
But when push came to shove, Kit told Alex she needed “to love myself more and be stronger on my own” to be the partner he deserved, so they’d be skipping the fantasy suite and parting ways.
Alex was disappointed, but he said Kit made Paradise “one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever been through . . . I’m happy I got to know such an incredible woman.”
Awwwwwwww.
With three couples down, it seemed like the remaining three were shoo-ins for fantasy suites.
Angela and Brendan M were the first to take Jesse up on the offer.
They did a “memory lane” tour that included the two docks where they snuggled and watched sunsets and stars, the amphitheatre where they shared their first kiss and the bar stools where they first met.
They left out the cabin stairs where Brendan blew Angela off before he went on a date with Maria. Although, to be honest, the more I think about it the more that whole thing seems like a plot device cooked up by production.
Angela wrote Brendan M a letter in which she said that despite the “speed bumps along the way” — which, just to refresh your memory, included his flirtation with Stacy and her going on a date with Josh — “we always somehow make our way back to each other.”
“I genuinely feel as though I’m falling in love with you,” Brendan told Angela, as orchestral music swelled in the background.
“Really? I’m falling in love with you too, for real,” Angela replied.
Brendan also said he could see himself giving Angela a ring.
And then it was off to the, er, fantasy cabin where, instead of the high thread count linens, candles, rose petals and jacuzzis we usually associate with fantasy suites, we glimpsed what looked like plywood walls with a framed poster that said “Life is better by the lake.” Now, that’s what I call an aphrodisiac!
And what of the other Brendan, Scanzano, and his Day 1 sweetie, Illeana?
I suspect they’ll end up in the fantasy suite, but production was doing its best to make it seem like a question mark.
They’d already said they loved each other but now, Illeana said, “logic needs to come into play.”
She’s not wrong. Cross-border “Bachelor” relationships don’t have a good track record (although it seems like Chicagoan Joe Amabile and Torontonian Serena Pitt are still together).
And while Brendan kept saying he wanted to do what made Illeana happy, she kept expressing doubts that they were on the same page as far as making things work outside Paradise. Whether those are doubt doubts or “production wants to make it look like we won’t end up together” doubts remains to be seen.
Still, Brendan S and Illeana seemed rock solid compared to Kamil and Caitlin.
Those two have been Paradise exclusive since Episode 2, after they got their respective flirtations with Vay and Chris out of the way. But the episode ended with Kamil walking away from Caitlin in the midst of what seemed like a mini-meltdown.
As with any of the disagreements we’ve seen between Kamil and Caitlin, it can be hard to disentangle exactly what’s going on.
It started with Kamil saying he wanted to leave with Caitlin before the rose ceremony, let alone the fantasy suites — perhaps to avoid the awkward experience of not proposing to Caitlin in the finale the same way he didn’t propose to Annaliese on U.S. “Paradise”? I don’t know, just my speculation. But Caitlin wanted to spend more time with Kamil in Paradise, so he agreed to go to the fantasy suite after all, saying he didn’t want to dwell in the past.
So what went wrong? They started talking about the distance between New York and Toronto, and whether Kamil was good at texting and calling (he said he likes to keep his phone on silent), and things started going south after Kamil said he planned to FaceTime Brendan S every day, which seemed to make Caitlin a little jealous.
Kamil said it wasn’t a big deal: he just wanted to leave Paradise with Caitlin, but Caitlin wanted to have a post-Paradise plan in place.
Kamil said he felt like Caitlin was putting him in the “hot seat” and wasn’t behaving like the “sweet” and “gentle” person he knew. Um, gender stereotyping much?
“Right now it feels to me like you don’t even want to take this outside of here,” Kamil told her
“Quite frankly, I don’t know if I want to leave and work on anything if we can’t resolve it here,” Caitlin answered.
Saying that Caitlin seemed like “a totally different person” and that their conversation seemed like a “fucking prank or something,” Kamil walked away from a distressed Caitlin.
“I’m having flashbacks to my bad time in Paradise when I was sitting in the hot seat and the whole world hated me,” Kamil said. “It was like a nightmare that was unfolding in front of me and I can’t believe it’s happening for a second time.”
Well, boo hoo hoo to that.
On next week’s finale, besides more Kamil and Caitlin drama and Illeana continuing to express doubts about Brendan S, Brendan M and Angela look proposal-ready and there’s a spicy “After the Final Rose” on tap. The highlight of that — or the lowlight, if you will — is Joey saying that he found Vay “in the arms of another guy” at the wedding he took her to, and that she and her friends talked shit about him. Not cool, Vay, not cool.
You can watch it unfold Sunday at 8 p.m. on Citytv. And don’t forget the final “Bachelor After Show: After Paradise” at 9:30 p.m. If you want to talk Paradise with me you can comment here, visit my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter @realityeo
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