Fasten your seatbelts, Bachelor Nation. With apologies for borrowing from Bette Davis, it looks like it’s going to be a bumpy ride, not to mention a really speedy one.
“The Bachelorette” crammed what would normally be two episodes worth of material into one on Monday night, including a “Men Tell All.” Hometown dates follow Tuesday. Next week is the two-part season finale, which presumably means fantasy suite dates on Dec. 21 and the proposal on Dec. 22.
It’s not quite Clare getting engaged to Dale fast, but it’s brisk.
Likewise, Tayshia Adams moved from dithering last week, so conflicted she couldn’t even hand out a group date rose, to extra decisive this week.
She let two men go ahead of the rose ceremony and then cancelled the cocktail party, so confident was she in her decisions. The final four are, in fact, no surprise. But let’s back up and recount how we got here.
First, there was Tayshia’s one-on-one date with Canadian wildlife manager Blake Moynes. Bachelor 101 says if you’re just getting your first real date the week before hometowns you’re probably a goner.
Indeed, after an awkward and kind of pointless session with a “Reiki and crystal master” — which included the inevitable “tantric breathing exercise,” i.e. crotch meld, not to mention Blake getting visibly, er, “charged” — Tayshia felt that Blake wasn’t her “guy.” He didn’t even get a chance to pretend to eat dinner with her before she told him they should go their separate ways, with Tayshia crying buckets as she handed him into the SUV of Shame despite her certainty she was doing the right thing.
That certainty gave Tayshia “clarity” about someone else, so she headed to the suite where the men were hanging out and asked Riley to step outside.
Tayshia explained that she didn’t want to lead Riley on by meeting his family “if my heart is not 100 per cent matching yours.”
Riley, like the lawyer he is, put up a bit of an argument, asking “Why keep me around so long?”
The real answer is that it’s always about the numbers in “Bachelor” or “Bachelorette.” Guys get strung along week after week because the number of men need to match the number of roses.
Tayshia said that her breakthrough conversations with Riley, the ones in which he showed her who he really was, “started coming a little bit later.” And then Riley stopped resisting.
“I can argue all day, but in the end it doesn’t matter because the end result is the same. So the longer I sit here, the longer I look at you, the longer I hear you talk, see you smile, the more pain I feel.”
He left with grace and class and generosity, and Tayshia cried a lot.
I couldn’t help contrasting her emotional reaction to letting Riley go to her sangfroid when she jettisoned Bennett, and thinking how ridiculous it was that Bennett — after coming back to surprise Tayshia the week before — had been allowed to stay until the rose ceremony.
It was absolutely preposterous to think that Bennett, despite already being sent home once, would vault past men like Brendan and Zac and Ivan in Tayshia’s affections to claim a rose. Clearly his being allowed to return was nothing more than a stupid producer trick, a way to stir up a little crap among the men.
And indeed, the other men were visibly displeased when Bennett came strolling back in before the rose ceremony, looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. “You guys looks like you’ve seen a ghost,” Bennett cheerfully told Ben, Zac, Brendan, Ivan and Noah, before adding that he’d returned so he wouldn’t be written off as a “Harvard D-bag.”
Then, after all the nonsense about Tayshia feeling conflicted because Bennett told her he loved her, he didn’t even get to converse with her again before she gave roses to Zac, Ivan and Brendan (Ben already had one), dispatching Noah and Bennett.
I did feel bad for Riley, who seems like a good guy, but it had to be those four for hometowns given that they’re the men Tayshia had gotten closest to. If it wasn’t, it would have been quite the shocker.
Next it was time for a truncated “Men Tell All.”
The bad blood between Noah and Bennett was rehashed. Nothing new there. Noah accused Bennett of being condescending and conniving; Bennett accused Noah of creating all the drama. Riley sided with Noah, Kenny with Bennett. There was some shouting between Noah and Kenny, and Kenny had to be bleeped, and host Chris Harrison had to whistle to get them to simmer down. Bennett eventually apologized, but Noah told him he was “an ostentatious Harvard D-bag” and they’d never be friends.
That was small potatoes compared to the real D-bag in the room. Yosef Aborady returned to rehash his exit and his berating of first Bachelorette Clare Crawley over what he called the “classless” strip dodgeball date, which saw the losers of the game strip down to their man goodies (thanks Demar).
Yosef claimed he was “sticking up for these guys,” but Blake and Kenny, who’d both been starkers, said no thanks to that. Jason called Yosef out for being disrespectful to Clare and told him to “shut the fuck up” when Yosef tried to talk over Jason the same way he talked over Clare.
Asked by Harrison if he had any regrets, Yosef was adamant he did not.
“Just so we’re clear, when you watch that, you’re like that’s cool, I would never mind anyone talking to my daughter like that,” Harrison said.
“If my daughter did something like that I would hope somebody would call her out,” Yosef replied, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know right there.
I hope we never see that misogynistic creep on any Bachelor show ever again.
What a contrast between Yosef’s bullshit and Riley, who got emotional after watching tape of his breakup with Tayshia, telling her that despite the heartache, “I appreciate everything you did for me. I would not change this experience for anything in the world.”
Tayshia reassured Riley that he hadn’t scared her off by telling her about his past, which he said was “a weight off my chest.”
Tayshia also made Blake feel a little better, telling him she’d subconsciously put up walls to protect herself against him, knowing he’d had feelings for Clare.
“I’m glad now I can look at you with a smile and remember you like this and not like that,” Blake said, referring to their breakup. “That was brutal for the longest time.”
I know Harrison talks about the bloopers being the funniest part of “Men Tell All,” but what really made me laugh was he and Ed reliving their bromance, spawned when Ed went to the wrong suite while looking for Tayshia’s room at the resort.
“We had a good time, man,” Harrison said. “Just a couple of guys hanging out, having a nice bottle of wine.”
“It was pretty epic,” said Ed. “I’m somehow glad I wasn’t at Tayshia’s that night actually.”
Enjoy the laughs while you can. There were an awful lots of tears in the promo for the final three nights of the season.
The next episode airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Citytv.
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