One man’s ‘Bachelor audition’ gets cut short on Bachelorette

Remember this night, Bachelorette fans.

There will undoubtedly be frustrating moments in the weeks ahead. Next week alone, everybody will get mad at Blake Moynes and it seems like Hunter is going to try to kill somebody. But we will always be able to look back on the night that Katie Thurston told Thomas to take his fake ass home and it will be like balm to our troubled souls.

“Your Bachelor audition ends tonight, so get out.”

I want those words on a T-shirt.

The Bachelorette producers, cruel puppet masters that they are, had just pulled off a great fakeout.

We’d spent huge chunks of the episode listening to people talk about Thomas not being there for the right reasons. Even at the cocktail party, even though it was after freakin’ midnight, people wouldn’t stop talking about Thomas. I’m with Katie: it was exhausting.

But it seemed like she had finally decided Thomas wasn’t worth keeping around, or so she told co-hosts Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe. There was one rose left. Katie picked it up, sighed . . . and called Thomas’s name. And the show cut to a commercial with everyone at home feeling like Justin’s face looked.

Yeah, I was pissed. I thought Katie had caved to production demands just to buy another week of the “everybody in the house hates Thomas” drama.

But when Thomas walked up to Katie to get his rose, she took a step backward. “You told me things I wanted to hear, but what I learned about you tonight is you’re selfish,  unkind and a liar,” she said before circumventing his “Bachelor audition.”

So Katie is back in my Bachelorette Hall of Fame.

Going into Monday’s episode I was on the fence about whether Thomas was as manipulative as the other guys said. Sure, he admitted that when he came on the show he was interested in becoming the next Bachelor, but I find it hard to believe that thought didn’t cross other men’s minds.

What convinced me he was faking his feelings for Katie was when he interrupted her just as she was about to start handing out roses to apologize to her for “any moment I wasn’t here for the right reasons” and to the other men “for any moments of disrespect.” It reeked of desperation and self-interest. If the guy really believed he and Katie had a solid relationship he would have kept his mouth shut and let the chips fall.

So yes, Katie seems to have a knack for quickly jettisoning the jerks, like she did with Karl. Now what?

Well, Blake Moynes is what. As promised last week, he’s back. (Didn’t you love all the nonsense about keeping his identity hidden until the moment Katie walked up to him? Um, hello, he was in the promo last week?)

Given my soft spot for Canadian contestants, I’d like to give Blake the benefit of the doubt and think he’s not just a reality TV fame whore or someone who has a Bachelorette fetish, but it’s hard — especially considering the bullshit explanation for why he didn’t join at the very beginning of the season.

Tayshia, whose season Blake was on as well as Clare Crawley’s truncated season, visited Katie to tell her an unnamed “someone” from her past wanted to meet Katie because he thought they would be “an amazing match.” He didn’t show up at the start of the season because he wasn’t sure he wanted “to throw himself back into the wild, crazy roller-coaster this is.”

Sure. Because showing up four weeks into the season and aggravating the men who’ve been there since the start, that’s so much easier.

Even though Katie thought Blake was handsome and they had exchanged DMs after her “Bachelor” appearance, she rightfully expressed some skepticism: “It is concerning that you dated, at this point, two Bachelorettes. If you stay I will now be your third Bachelorette.”

But with a rose going begging after Thomas’s ouster — no, she didn’t give it to Christian, Conor C or David — Katie decided her gut (maybe with the help of a producer?) was telling her to explore things with Blake, so she woke him up in the middle of the night, half-naked in his room, to tell him he could stay. And he locked himself out in the hallway in his boxer shorts and hoodie.

What else happened?

There was a group date on which for a whole 19 minutes or so nobody talked about Thomas. Instead they did ostensibly fun “dares” like eat platters full of Twinkies and chocolate cake and mashed potatoes; eat habanero peppers and “propose”; get their butts waxed (that was Tre); and “whisper sweet nothings” into a giant ear, not realizing that Katie and Tayshia and Kaitlyn were listening in.

On that front, Andrew S took his Duke of Hastings impression to a whole other level with his sexy talk. Front-runner Greg, on the other hand, talked about, er, the 50 states? “Everything’s bigger in Texas,” he said — which might have made sense if he wasn’t from New Jersey.

Greg had better luck later at the after-party when Katie told him she was starting to fall for him, although Andrew S upped the competition by serving Katie a plate full of Taco Bell and Lunchables.

But Tre scooped the rose away from both of them by sharing his suspicions with Katie that Thomas was being manipulative, a move that Andrew S vehemently disagreed with because he said it would cause needless drama. But then Josh and Conor and Christian and Andrew M all piled on, telling Katie they agreed with Tre.

It was inevitable that Thomas would make a play to save his ass, which he did by showing up at Katie’s suite before the rose ceremony. He complained that his integrity and character had been “demonsterized,” whatever the hell that means, and the only thing getting him through the unpleasantness was “an opportunity to be with you.”

Katie said he was “perfect” and “Prince Charming,” which kind of made me gag a little, although it turned out all right in the end.

You want to know who the real Prince Charming is? Michael.

When everybody else was getting their tighty whities in a knot at the cocktail party over whether Thomas would stay or go, he avoided the topic so as not to add to Katie’s stress, instead telling her how much he liked and missed her and that he was starting to imagine a life with her outside “The Bachelorette.”

“The person you are is exactly the person I have been seeking,” he told her and, you know, when he says stuff like that I believe him.

Katie moves into Week 5 with 14 guys left, including Blake. And yes, some of the other 13 will be hostile toward Blake, which is to be expected. And Hunter will apparently get aggressive in some kind of ball game (sorry folks, I’m not sporty) and somebody will get hurt, but whether those two things have anything to do with each other remains to be seen.

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