The Bachelor Recap: Willy Plonker
Previously, on The Bachelor, Alex threatened to sue the other Bachelorettes for infringing her intellectual property rights to Richie.
Tonight on The Bachelor: a terrifying glimpse of the destruction that awaits us all, plus some upskirt action.
We begin at the mansion, where the Bachelorettes have an in-depth discussion about how there used to be more of them, but now there are not as many as there used to be. Makes you think.
TAFKAAG shows up to deliver a single date card, causing the Bachelorettes to say, “It’s a single!” repeatedly, and causing Alex to have another whinge about Rachael, whose strategy of destabilising Alex’s mental health by questioning her parenting skills is really starting to pay off.
The card says “Let’s take the plunge”, meaning that this date will be the one where Richie finally takes a woman to a volcano and jumps in with her. And Alex is the lucky lady! Before heading off Alex assures us that she “doesn’t buy into her games”, referring to Rachael, the person who has been her sole topic of conversation for the last two days.
Richie enthuses about how well he and Alex communicate — at least, to the extent that Richie is capable of communicating with any human. “I know this is gonna be an incredible date,” he says, and he knows this because it’s written on a card for him to memorise.
Richie shows up in a Ferrari. This impresses the hell out of Alex, who for some reason believes that the make of car supplied to Richie by Network Ten speaks in some way to the personal qualities of Richie himself. Which is absurd because as we know Richie has no personal qualities.
They drive away and the Ferrari makes car noises, which thrills Alex to her very core, as she is a simple woman with simple tastes. All she asks is car noises. Alex confesses that riding in a Ferrari with Richie really makes her realise that she enjoys riding in Ferraris.
Their destination is a disturbingly white kitchen and a French chef stereotype mixing a big pot of chocolate. This is master VALUED SPONSOR LINDT CHOCOLATE chocolatier Thomas, who tells Richie and Alex that today they will be making chocolate. He dispatches them to South America to pick cacao beans, and we wait.
We’re back. Thomas spreads the melted chocolate on the bench, and Richie and Alex starts sticking their disgusting dirty hands in it and rubbing chocolate all over each other and giggling like morons. It’s like the sexiest food fight ever, assuming you find awkward, stilted movements and unconvincing laughter sexy.
As they make chocolate and tell each other the ingredients they’re using, it really hits home how boring chocolate-making is. “I’m going to put some salt in mine, because you’re so incredibly grounded,” says Richie, and in a parallel universe where perfect justice has been achieved, three hundred people run on set and slap his face simultaneously.
Alex is so incredibly impressed by the way Richie can stick his hands with chocolate and speak at the same time. “Where are you even from?” she asks breathlessly, presumably wanting to know both the address of the factory and the exact number of the assembly line.
Back the mansion news of a group date has reached the Bachelorettes. “It’s more than just a fling,” says the card. “Bungee jumping!” Nikki squeals, incorrectly. Rachael is pissed off that Alex is coming on the group date too — “she needs to have a bit of a break,” she says, as if Alex is writing the cards. Which she might be — who knows how good she is at infiltrating the system? Life is very unfair to Rachael: sometimes it seems that every way she turns there is another woman who is attracted to man and wants to spend time with him without the slightest bit of regard for what Rachael chooses to call her “feelings”.
Back in Wonka Land, Richie has a surprise for Alex, and this is one occasion where I’m going to guess that Richie really did come up with the date idea, because it’s such a mind-bogglingly stupid one that you can see him thinking of it.
The idea is a chocolate bath. That is, a bath filled with chocolate. That you get into. And cover yourself with chocolate. “Chocolate’s good for releasing serotonin,” says Richie, apparently having skipped the bit in the Wikipedia article where it says you’re supposed to eat it, not sit in it.
They hop into the bath and are immediately struck how sitting in a bath filled with chocolate is extremely disgusting. It is almost impossible for me to get across in mere words how stupid this date is. “I’m here to find a woman to spend the rest of my life with,” Richie says, and obviously this is a very important test of her tolerance for total idiotic bullshit, of which there will be much in any of Richie’s future relationships.
There is now a sequence that could literally be screened to poisoning victims to induce vomiting, as Richie and Alex kiss and grope each other and rub chocolate all over each other’s bodies and it is just the most horrible thing you could ever hope to see. You could watch The Human Centipede and it would be less of a turn-off than this astoundingly off-putting and astronomically un-erotic scene. Even they seem to vaguely understand this, as towards the end I’m pretty sure they start trying to drown themselves.
The night finishes with both Richie and Alex looking like they’ve just passed through the digestive tract of diarrhoea-ridden rhinoceros. They need a shower, but not half as much as I do.
Alex goes back to the mansion to rub the other Bachelorettes’ faces in her rose, but I think if they’d been there they’d understand it wasn’t worth it. Rachael is mightily pissed off again, as she believes it should’ve been her wearing the full-body pooveralls. And Nikki is shattered because Alex is happy and got to rub sticky stuff all over Richie, and Nikki longs for Richie’s manly, clammy touch. Olena opines that Nikki is in love with Richie, a view she feels safe offering because Olena has long since come to terms with the fact that there’s no way in hell she’s winning this thing: she’s just there for the free food at this stage.
Next day the Bachelorettes go to a field. TAFKAAG is standing in a field — it turns out this is where he lives. Suddenly bagpipes start — yes, today’s group date is war with England.
Along with the bagpipes, Richie has shown up wearing a blue singlet and a kilt. He kind of looks like a truckie who’s recently robbed and murdered a Scotsman. He tells the Bachelorettes that today they will be participating in the Highland Games. What does this mean? What does anything mean? In what way does The Bachelor, as a television experience, now differ from the nightmarish delirium of a killing fever?
Richie tells us that this date is designed to let the girls fully understand his personality: he is a pointless imbecile.
The first event is the caber toss, a sport requiring the manipulation of large blocks of wood: an important skill for anyone wanting to hook up with Richie. Rain starts to fall as God Himself expresses his disapproval of these happenings.
I’d tell you who wins the caber toss but I refuse to dignify this.
The next event is throwing a bag of hay over a bar while the camera looks up Sarah’s skirt. As the shot lingers on her buttocks, the purpose of this show finally becomes clear.
All the Bachelorettes seem to be very keen on winning these games, which is strong evidence that they’re as dumb as they look. Rachael tells us that she really hates losing, which is a fairly clumsy way to shoehorn in some subtext about her ongoing attempts to psychologically crush Alex. But it’s also foreshadowing of the next bit of the show when she eats a haggis.
Haggis is a Scottish word meaning “big pile of revolting crap that a normal person would never eat”, and the final event of the Idiot Games is eating one. A haggis is basically all the bits of a sheep that are thrown away for very good reasons, and it looks like an egg laid by Satan. The Bachelorettes and Richie face off to see who can eat the most haggis in five minutes for reasons that nobody remembers anymore.
Rachael dives straight in and starts shoving great handfuls of haggis into her gaping maw, devouring the sheep organs with as much gusto as she devours other women’s dreams. It’s an impressive performance, and will no doubt raise Rachael’s standing in Richie’s eyes as a potential life partner, as a willingness to eat almost anything will be crucial in the future when Richie is unable to feed his family.
Then everyone does Highland dancing in their dumb kilts and Richie acts like a total tool and then he takes Sarah outside and Alex starts sticking her lip out and whining about her stupid feelings again.
Alone together at last, Sarah asks Richie if he has any questions. “What the hell is with the voice?” doesn’t spring to mind, instead Richie asks whether Sarah has any “deal-breakers” in relationships. This is a classic trap: you ask her whether she has any deal-breakers, she says, “bestiality”, you whip out your fox terrier — GOTCHA! Sarah says she doesn’t have any deal-breakers, which clearly disappoints Richie, a man who demands rigidly judgmental behaviour in all his women. He tells Sarah about his own deal-breaker, which is apparently putting on makeup in the morning. This is weird, but I guess we all have our pet peeves.
It’s cocktail party, and Sarah is nervous about her failure, during her one-on-one conversation with Richie, to say…well, anything at all, really. She confides her fears to the other women, to which Rachael responds by staring at her while imagining biting her throat out and spitting in the wound. Richie breaks the tension in his usual boyish, plastic-faced style by showing up and taking Kiki away to ask her why she doesn’t try harder to be white.
Steph, Olena and Sarah have a discussion about what crazy bitches Alex and Nikki are. Olena has trouble expressing her emotions, but at least she has some: Richie was born without emotions and uses car noises as a substitute.
Richie shows up again, saying nothing about whatever amazingly athletic intercourse he’s just had with Kiki, and takes Olena away to shine a spotlight in her eyes and demand some goddamn answers.
“I feel like I’m not on the same page as you,” says Olena, cleverly putting her finger on Richie’s inability to read. She thinks she needs to trust Richie more, but “it takes time”. “You can’t rush your feelings,” says Richie, a blatant refutation of the show’s premise.
Olena is starting to tear up due to her inability to open up to Richie’s bland, sandy-haired advances. But there is an upside to keeping your emotional walls up, and it is that you don’t end up with Richie.
The real trouble seems to be that in order to get to know Olena, you have to have an actual conversation with her, and Richie doesn’t know how to do this: all he is capable of is saying “love has no boundaries” and “communication is important” over and over again.
Anyway it’s rose time, and while Alex is safe — or, depending on your view of Richie, in mortal danger — the other seven are on tenterhooks. The first rose goes to Steph, because she’s hot and doesn’t give a fuck. The second rose goes to Nikki, because she’s going to win. The third rose goes to Kiki, who had sex with Richie several minutes ago. The fourth rose goes to Faith, who thinks that’s, you know, OK, really, it’s fine. The fifth rose goes to Olena…if that IS her real name.
So it’s between Rachael and Sarah, and if Rachael goes home Sarah will not survive the night.
But Rachael gets the rose, and Sarah lives to regret her inability to name a deal-breaker, as having no deal-breakers happens to be Richie’s deal-breaker. Well, that and the morning makeup thing, whatever the hell that was.
Or maybe he just got sick of that voice like everyone else.
Sarah buggers off home, ending with the false statement “Richie is a lovely guy.”
Tune in next week when Richie indulges his true passion: making women suffer.
If you, unlike Richie, can read, then Error Australis is the book for you — number one with literates everywhere! Buy it now
