The cat doesn’t come back and it’s a drag on The Bachelorette

I can understand if Monday’s “Bachelorette” episode made you feel like spitting up a hairball: there was a pointless masturbation challenge; there was one of those lame fake wedding dates; there was a drag queen group date that was conspicuously short on drag; there was more House vs. Hunter drama; then Katie Thurston sent Connor the Cat home early and the other men were as bereft as she was (well, except for Blake).

And then we ended up with a top seven, just a couple of weeks from hometowns, that had everyone going “Huh?” Katie sees a future with Mike the Virgin and Brendan the Hair Quiff?

Well, no, of course she doesn’t. It was just a process of elimination. She told the fellows at the rose ceremony she had no more time for man drama and since Aaron, Tre and James had all stirred up shit by whinging about Hunter, they were marked for elimination. She also ditched the target of the conflict, a.k.a. Hunter, but no big loss there.

The irony is that while everyone on the House Un-Fraternal Activities Committee was worrying about whether Hunter was there for the right reasons, no one was paying attention to Blake, who stole deeper into frontrunner territory with a “Say Anything”-style visit to Katie’s suite while everyone else was still drying their tears over Connor’s exit.

Look out Greg and Michael and Andrew.

The episode began with an odd time waster in which Katie dispatched co-host Kaitlyn Bristowe to tell the remaining 11 men to lay off the “self-love” for a week, which Katie bizarrely described as a “fun challenge” dubbed Operation WOWO.

I have questions. Isn’t a sex-positive Bachelorette telling her suitors not to masturbate a little off brand? How would she know if anyone cheats? Would the camera operators stake out the bedrooms and bathrooms? And doesn’t a challenge imply some kind of reward? What was the point of them avoiding “solo hockey,” as Connor put it?

Ok, I’ve wasted enough brain cells on that topic. Next!

Katie’s first one-on-one date was with Justin Glaze, he of the hyper expressive face (and problematic teenage tweets, from what I read Monday night).

The plot line going into the date was that Katie didn’t know if there was a spark between her and Justin or if they were just friends. And what better way to find out than with a fake wedding?

“Bachelor Nation photographer” Franco Lacosta oversaw the faux nuptials, which included the donning of wedding apparel, the reciting of vows they wrote themselves, cake, and lots and lots of kissing, so I guess that answers the question about the spark.

Later, Katie confessed to Justin that the fake walk up the aisle (well, the space between the trees) was tough for her not only because her dad was dead but because he wasn’t her biological father, a secret her mother had kept from her, and now she was struggling to form a relationship with the man she didn’t know while mourning the one who raised her. Yeah, this woman has been through some stuff.

Justin said he wanted to support Katie (what the hell else would he say really?) and there was more kissing, and then dancing and kissing as a musician named MAX sang a song called “Butterflies.” All I know is it wasn’t country music, so bonus points there.

Time for the group date. All that Blake, Andrew, Michael, Greg, Aaron, Mike, Brendan, James, Tre and Hunter knew going in was that it was about “queen” Katie looking for her “king.” But no Brendan, there was no medieval theme. Instead, two “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” winners, Shea Coulee and Monet X Change, were there. But the men weren’t being asked to put on drag — more’s the pity, Michael was game — but to “throw shade” at each other in a so-called Great Royal Debate.

The date was obviously designed to allow the other men to insult Hunter, but they mostly just got mushy with Katie. Greg even wrote a poem. At least Aaron kind of got it, taking a swipe at Hunter’s short stature by calling him a leprechaun and telling him he couldn’t add Katie’s “heart of gold” to his pot.

Clearly, these guys have never watched a minute of “Drag Race.” Also, Blake said he’d never met a drag queen before and didn’t know if he “should be checking them out.”

Hunter claimed to be falling in love with Katie. That somewhat contradicted what he told Shea earlier when she asked if he was in love with Katie and he said he was “not in a place where I’ve been able to explore that.”

Hunter’s other offence in the eyes of his fellow contestants was that he told Greg he thought he, Greg and Connor would make Katie’s top four and then denied making a top four list. Like even writing that out, as much as I haven’t been a fan of Hunter’s, really guys? That’s what you’re obsessing over?

Katie warned the men at the after-party to spend their time improving their connections with her, but instead James, Aaron and Tre bad-mouthed Hunter and Hunter was unable to defend himself to her satisfaction. Katie was distressed enough by the drama to throw up, and she cut the party short and didn’t give out a rose.

Then dear sweet math teacher Connor, the guy who dressed up like a cat on Night 1, got a one-on-one date, but it was clear he was in danger of getting tossed like yesterday’s kitty litter since Katie was already friend-zoning him.

It would come down, she said, to his kiss.

And no matter how hard date buddies Kaitlyn Bristowe and Jason Tartick were rooting for Connor, Katie wasn’t feeling it. She went to Connor’s room later, in jeans and a hoodie rather than her dinner dress, and told him that no matter how “great of a man” he was there was something missing in their kiss.

And Connor, struggling to hold back his own tears, kept telling Katie it was OK, that it was worth it to have met her.

What was more extraordinary were the reactions of the other 10 men when Connor went to say goodbye. They lined up to hug him; Michael kissed him on the cheek; Greg and Brendan and Hunter wiped away tears; Tre out and out cried.

Their genuine affection for Connor was a nice antidote to all the sniping.

But leave it to Blake Moynes to turn all that sadness to his advantage. As Katie sat in her suite still crying about Connor, she heard music outside. It was Blake doing his best John Cusack, holding some kind of speaker over his head blasting “Memorize You” by Laine Hardy, the song they danced to on their date.

He was there to cheer her up, he said, and judging from the amount of smooching they did in the hallway, in her suite and on her balcony I doubt she was thinking about Connor anymore by the time they were through. As Katie said in her voice-over, “When I’m with Blake I don’t think about anything else except him and I, I’m in trouble.”

I’m pretty sure Blake failed the Operation WOWO challenge when he got back to his room.

By rose ceremony time, Katie wasn’t messin’. She showed up just long enough to tell the guys she already knew what she wanted to do and there’d be no cocktail party.

Except there was another one of those fakeouts when Katie picked up the first rose, and after an inordinately long pause, called Hunter’s name, but instead of handing it to him asked him to go outside for a chat.

Hunter claimed to be “on fire with emotions” for Katie, but Katie didn’t seem particularly impressed. She gave her six roses to Blake, Andrew, Greg, Michael, Mike and Brendan and, of course, Justin already had one, which left Aaron, James, Tre and Hunter out in the cold.

Next week, we’ll presumably get our top four unless we have another one of those “To be continued” cliffhangers.

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