PHOTO CREDIT All photos Craig Sjodin/ABC
That stink you’re detecting isn’t the smell of cheese from Rachel’s group date; it’s the stench of this season of “The Bachelorette” being treated like a zero sum game whereby Rachel Recchia and Gabby Windey aren’t allowed to be happy at the same time.
Last week, we got sad Rachel after Logan jumped ship to Gabby’s team. This week, we got sad Gabby after a) she sent Nate home because she wasn’t ready to be a stepmom and b) she had to cancel her group date after-party because Logan . . . wait for it . . . got COVID-19.
Yep, that “there has been a situation with Logan” promo from last week? Manipulative nonsense. And I have so many questions. How did Logan get COVID? How come no one else got it considering we saw him unmasked and less than six feet away from the rest of Gabby’s men in last week’s episode and laying smooches on Gabby? And why did he look so healthy during the day portion of the group date, which involved absolutely ridiculous S&M-tinged shenanigans?
And you’re seriously telling me that after Logan was essentially made the star of last week’s episode he’s just gone with not even so much as an exit interview? Weird.
I missed about the first 10 minutes of this episode due to some technical difficulties with the TV in my B&B (I’m writing this from Stratford, Ontario), but I was able to catch Gabby’s heartrending breakup with Nate.
provide any photos of them this week and I couldn’t do screen grabs.
And yes, I said heartrending. I read the stuff all over Twitter last week about Nate supposedly dating two women at once and keeping his daughter a secret from one of them, but even if it’s true it doesn’t negate the sadness of his breakup with Gabby.
It seemed obvious from the moment Gabby said she hadn’t figured out yet if she wanted to be a mother that Nate was on the way out. We didn’t need a totally staged conversation between Logan and Johnny back on the Good Ship Bachelorette to hammer the point home.
It’s not exactly rocket science that someone who’s still trying to get over her dysfunctional relationship with her own mother wouldn’t be jonesing to be a parent.
“It’s so cliche, but I’m, like, terrified of not just being a mom but being, like, bad at it,” Gabby told Nate through tears as they sat on a bench in the heart of Amsterdam.
There were tears on both sides and long hugs and kisses goodbye and Nate, despite his frontrunner status, was gone.
Gabby seemed so very sad to lose Nate and Rachel, conversely, seemed so very happy.
She and Zach had a one-on-one, a bucket list date apparently that began with them taking crappy Polaroid photos of each other in a massive field of tulips (sorry, no photos; ABC saw fit to provide photos of Gabby’s S&M date but not Rachel’s picturesque tulip date).
Then she and Zach went bike riding and among the things you can find in the Dutch countryside are cheese, wooden shoes, lemonade and, um, hot tubs.
Also windmills but, unlike Pilot Pete and Hannah Brown, Zach and Rachel didn’t get busy inside one, they just did some smooching in front of it.
There was a lot of smooching on this date.
Zach had some revelations to make at dinner in a gorgeous museum full of old Dutch masters (might have been the Rijksmuseum, but I’m not 100 per cent sure). First, he said he used to be 85 pounds overweight and didn’t love himself so he went to therapy. And Rachel was as thrilled about that as Gabby was upon hearing about Jason’s therapy.
Second, now that Zach felt like a man who deserved love, he knew he was falling in love with Rachel.
Zach’s hometown date rose was never in any doubt, but that revelation sealed the deal.
Cut back to the cruise ship: Gabby was still sad. She tearfully told her remaining men — Johnny, Jason, Erich, Logan and Spencer — about sending Nate home and they all gave her hugs, which was nice of them.
Gabby was still sad about Nate the next morning, but she said her other connections were deepening and she had “a so amazing and so fun” group date planned.
But she didn’t plan it obviously. Nobody but a “Bachelorette” producer would think it would be entertaining — for either the participants or the viewers — to have a leather-clad dominatrix ask the men intrusive sex questions and threaten to whip them if they didn’t answer.
I am not a prude, but it’s nobody’s business but the individual men’s and Gabby’s whether they like giving oral sex (I’m assuming that was the bleeped out bit), how often they masturbate (again, bleeped out, but my assumption) and how many people they’ve had sex with.
The guys were also forced to strip off their shirts (Johnny at one point stripped to his underwear) so they could be tickled with feathers, whipped, and have whipped cream and even flames applied to their chests.
As Logan said, “I was hoping today would be the deep dive into who we are and what we represent. I’m blindfolded, laying on a shag carpet, waiting for her to rub whipped cream on my nipples.”
And how would any of that help Gabby decide whose hometowns she wanted to visit? It wouldn’t obviously. (Not unless she wanted to analyze why Johnny’s safe word was “pumpkin” and Logan’s was “asbestos.”)
And the fact that Gabby was able to choose three men for hometowns (instead of the usual four) despite not getting to talk to any of them at the cancelled after-party shows the group date was kind of superfluous anyway.
The same applied to Rachel’s group date. Did anybody really think that Ethan was going to get a hometown and that either Tino, Tyler or Aven would not? Of course not, but they went through the motions nonetheless with a trip to a town called “the cheese capital of the world” (no, I did not catch the name).
Eventually, the four guys had to take off their shirts — are you noticing a theme here? — and hold yokes across their shoulders laden with wheels of cheese. They eventually got up to four wheels on each side, which looked really heavy.
Tino won, barely beating out Ethan. Poor Ethan, who had been nibbling cheese despite being lactose intolerant, collapsed on the grass from exhaustion. Tyler had cuts on his hands and wrists, but what hurt the most was having to watch Rachel kiss the victorious Tino.
And let’s be honest, Tino acted like kind of an entitled dick at the after-party. He figured the date rose had his name on it, but Rachel gave it to Tyler, who told her he was falling very, very hard for her.
Tino walked off to complain to a producer that it was “a fucking joke” and was making him second guess everything, which prompted one of the other dudes to call him a “real baby back bitch.”
But at least Tino apologized to Ethan the next day.
Of course, all this talk of Tino feeling blindsided and not knowing if Rachel felt the same as him was bullshit to try to build up suspense for an utterly unsuspenseful rose ceremony. Which is also why Tino’s name was the last to be called for a rose, after Aven’s. But sorry producers, no one seriously thought Rachel was going to dump Tino for Ethan. No offence Ethan.
Likewise, it was obvious that Gabby was giving roses to Erich, Jason and Johnny, and sending Spencer home.
Does that mean Logan would have got a hometown if he had still been around? Guess we’ll never know.
So next week, hometowns and if you believe the promos it looks like rough waters ahead for Rachel and Tino, but you can’t believe everything you see.
You can watch Monday at 8 p.m. on Citytv. And you can comment here, catch me on Twitter or chat on my Facebook page.
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