Michelle shows the men who’s Top Gun on The Bachelorette

Welcome to AP “Bachelorette.”

Your teacher for this advanced class is Michelle Young and she’s schooling all our asses on how to run a season.

For instance, if you find you’ve got a troublemaker in the bunch you don’t keep him hanging around so he can stir up more drama. You walk him to the elevator and send his butt home with nothing more than a polite “Have a good night.”

That’s how Jamie Skaar got his comeuppance on Tuesday’s episode.

To refresh your memory, Jamie caused a brouhaha at last week’s rose ceremony cocktail party by telling Michelle that unnamed men in the house were questioning her authenticity because of a rumour that she knew Joe Coleman before the season started. She did not, other than exchanging a couple of texts with him a few years ago. And the only man who seemed bothered by the possibility was Jamie himself.

Michelle got upset enough about Jamie’s revelation to cancel the rest of the cocktail party, which had the confused men wondering who’d been telling fibs about them. Jamie didn’t own up and probably would have kept his mouth shut indefinitely (or at least until “Men Tell All”) had Michelle not outed him to Rick, who told her that none of the men had been questioning her character.

When word got out at this week’s cocktail party that Jamie was “the rat,” to use Casey’s term, Jamie still wouldn’t fully own up, dancing around the question of what he’d actually told Michelle and then, bizarrely, suggesting he’d been worried about speculation by people watching the episode at home.

I’m with Nayte: “Why the fuck are we talking about episodes?”

Also, “Come on, man, you suck.”

Which was essentially Michelle’s verdict on Jamie, although she put it more eloquently.

“I’m very hurt by you right now. I don’t trust you at this moment and I have to be done with it. I think it’s best that I walk you out tonight.”

Boom.

One wonders if she would have had more to say had she heard some of Jamie’s other on-camera pronouncements.

His arrogance going into the second group date was already galling, but when Brandon got the date rose instead of him, Jamie pulled a producer aside to complain that Brandon was “not even fucking close” to being in his league.

“I really felt like it would be a stronger group of guys. It was a nationwide search, where they at?” he sniped.

And then, “The challenging part with Michelle right now is she’s basically just in fucking spring break mode. It’s a little bit of a turnoff.”

You want to know what else is a turnoff? Men who act like they’re god’s gift to “Bachelorette”-hood.

Jamie wasn’t the only one stirring up crap on Tuesday.

Peter, the “pizzapreneur,” couldn’t shut his piehole on the first group date, which involved the men going through a bunch of “Top Gun” challenges in aid of promoting the “Top Gun: Maverick” movie.

That included a G-force simulator, one of those contraptions that spins you around really fast until you feel like puking (or so I imagine, thankfully never having been in one).

That scared the crap out of Will — a.k.a. Little Willy — who was apparently prone to motion sickness. Plus the men were supposed to tell Michelle how they felt about her while they were spinning around, which could be tough if you’re keeping your mouth closed so you don’t blow chunks.

But Will managed to tell Michelle he wanted to grow old with her in Spanish without barfing. That majorly pissed off Peter — a.k.a. Dough Boy — who told Michelle essentially the same thing in Italian.

So of course Peter and Will were paired up in the final challenge, which had the dudes “dog fighting,” or rather muscling each other off a mat with things that looked kind of like padded battering rams.

Will dominated Peter and, given that and his puke-defying G-force ride, he was named the “Top Gun,” given a spiffy aviator jacket and got to drive around with Michelle in a vintage car from the new movie — although note that she did the driving.

That Peter would continue the feud at the cocktail party followed as naturally as cheese on pizza.

Peter was all “You’re a bully,” blah blah blah, and “See the cheques that I cash and then you call me a pizza boy” and “We’re gonna change lives one slice at a time” and really?

And then, because he’s a sore loser and a dick, Peter took Will’s new jacket and threw it in the pool, which made Will cry when he found out. But he didn’t snitch about it to Michelle because he didn’t want to ruin her mood (although how the hell her mood wasn’t already ruined by the noise of Peter and Will yelling at each other is beyond me).

Poor Will didn’t even get the date rose as consolation. That went to Martin because he’d taken a few minutes during the Top Gun exercises to pull Michelle aside and ask how she was feeling. So Martin got to dance and smooch with Michelle as a string quartet played “Take My Breath Away” — the big song from the 1986 “Top Gun” movie — while Will fished his soaking wet jacket out of the pool.

Onwards!

I’ll be honest, I would have pegged Rodney — a.k.a. the guy who didn’t know a Granny Smith from a Delicious apple — as perpetual group date fodder, but he got the week’s one-on-one. Still, was this going to be one of those dates where the lead figures out she’s just not into a bro and sends him home?

Most of the activities seemed as friendly as they were romantic, like Rodney feeding Michelle different foods while she was blindfolded — there was a can of whipped cream involved, but it ended up on Rodney’s face rather than being sucked off his big toe, a la Riley and Maurissa on “Bachelor in Paradise.”

They also had to open giant boxes full of balls and balloons while handcuffed together in search of the key and, the most entertaining, Rodney got naked and streaked through the lobby with just a throw cushion covering his man bits, while hosts Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe and the other men watched, hooted and hollered.

“It’s pretty bad when everyone sees you out in your birthday suit and it ain’t even your birthday,” said Rodney in perhaps the line of the season.

But another funny thing was that the more we saw of Michelle and Rodney together, the more adorable they were together. By the time they got to cuddling and smooching on Michelle’s bed, Rodney had definitely passed from the friend zone to the relationship zone, as Michelle put it.

They also bonded at dinner over their admiration for their moms: Rodney’s had to work three jobs to support him and his brother after his dad left when he was 6, while Michelle talked about her white mom standing up for her Black dad.

She also shared a story about having the N-word directed at her in a grocery store and her white boyfriend at the time essentially forcing her to justify why she was upset. “I just felt that same way with my ex,” said Rodney.

A tear rolled down Rodney’s cheek when Michelle told him, “I really do not see you as an underdog. I see your heart.”

But then she said she would “apple-lutely love it if you would accept this rose.” Hee.

The one-on-one wasn’t Michelle’s only reference in the episode to the challenges of being Black or mixed race in a white-dominated world.

On the second group date, the men were introduced to spoken word poet Rudy Francisco and asked to write poems that focused on their own stories, which they performed in front of the non-date men.

Chris G from Halifax was so excited he looked like he was going to pass out, clutching Leroy for support and covering his mouth with his hand. “He’s the poet who got me hooked on spoken word,” Chris said excitedly.

None of the men embarrassed themselves, a nice change from the usual group date cringe — although Romeo, uh, “Romeo, Romeo, where’s your Juliet?”

But Jamie, who kept banging on about how there was no competition between him and the other men, ignored the assignment and just told some dumbass story about a girl getting lost in the woods and guided back to the path by her guardian angel. And . . . sorry, just dozed off there for a minute.

Michelle, meanwhile, shared heartfelt verse about being the “token black girl” at school who “got invited to all the big parties as long as I followed the basic white trends . . . I was never the girl invited to cute dates at the apple orchard in the fall. I was the girl picked last for prom but the first for basketball.”

She promised herself, she said at the end, to be a role model for “young brown girls.”

The men gave her a standing ovation, which like, duh.

At the cocktail party, Brandon, who is also mixed race, told Michelle how much her poem resonated with him, recalling that he too was a late romantic bloomer in school, and how he was told he wasn’t Black because of his light skin or that he had to choose a side.

Michelle told Brandon she was attracted to his mind although the attraction was also clearly physical given all the kissing they did. In his voice-over, Brandon said he was falling in love with Michelle.

Michelle also smooched Jamie, who looked over her shoulder at the camera, presumably to make sure his masterful kissing skills were being recorded for posterity. “I’m looking at a person who’s staring me back in the eyes and I can tell that she’s, like, captivated,” boasted Jamie in his confessional.

That kind of makes my stomach feel like Will’s must have felt on that G-force simulator.

Anyway, we’ve already covered the downfall of Jamie.

There was a rose ceremony. I feel the need to point out that this is the third rose ceremony in three episodes, none of the usual “To be continued” nonsense. I mean, I doubt Michelle got to sit in on the editing, but is she schooling the people who put the show together too?

Anyway, she gave roses to Joe, Rick, Leroy, Nayte, Casey, Chris G, Chris S, Clayton, Olu, Romeo and Will. Along with ones already bestowed on Martin, Rodney and Brandon, that leaves 14 men in the hunt for the final rose.

And oh yes, Peter was one of the men shown the door. Later Dough Boy!

But you know, villains are kind of like whack-a-mole. Yes, Michelle cleared out two of them this week but, according to the promo for next week, Chris S is going to step up as agitator in chief and get into a dust-up with Nayte.

You can tune in next Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Citytv. And you can comment here, visit my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter @realityeo