This week’s Bachelorette was a disaster. I mean, this show always is a disaster, but this week was more than usual because we learned Ashley is really seriously not over Bentley. But I don’t know why we should be surprised with Ashley’s moronery, because let’s consider for one second all the things she’s done that should have signaled to us how horrible of a season it was going to be. I’m going to go through them in list form because it’s more severe that way.
1) Ashley fell in love with someone who was pretty open about how much he was conning her.
2) Ashley hasn’t gotten her dentistry degree because she’s too busy fantasizing about performing with the Jabbawockeez.
3) Ashley wanted to go on a boat with her date even when she learned the possibility of another tsunami approaching Thailand.
4) She eliminated West just because his wife died.
5) She is so boring that one guy felt the need to get completely wasted immediately after he met her. AND HE WAS AN ALCOHOL DISTRIBUTOR. Do you know how boring you have to be to transform a person whose profession is alcohol into someone who abuses it? You have to be very boring.
“Chiang Mai is the perfect place to fall in love with Ashley.” – Ames
So everyone left Phuket and boarded a plane to Chiang Mai. Once there, all the guys were admiring their surroundings of silent monks, temples, and claustrophobia and Ames said it was simply the most perfect place to fall in love with Ashley. Hahahaha, Ames. You’re a cultured one! Look at you trying to defend the ABC travel budget people against me, who’s about to accuse them of being completely ridiculous for thinking a place where monks live is a great place to fall in love? How do you figure it’s romantic, Ames? Because it’s known for being romantic? Whatever Ames, you’re probably just messing with everyone. I bet that as soon as the cameras go off of you and onto some smiling monk, you’re all like, “damn, this place is more straight laced then a dentistry student who dances in her spare time.” HEYO! Okay, anyway, so all the guys were unreasonably excited to be in Chiang Mai. They were all looking at each other in the car and saying, “if you can’t form a connection in a place like this, it’s probably not there.” I’m sorry, but yeah, the sun is shining and I bet the sunsets are really nice, but being in a terrarium with a bunch of monks doesn’t really get women feeling frisky. It just doesn’t. Porn? Definitely. Alec Baldwin? Obviously. But a place where monks who have taken vows of silence in Thailand? No, women are not really going to feel much freedom to explore sensuality. IT’S FUNNY THOUGH, BECAUSE LAST WEEK THEY ALL WENT TO AN ORPHANAGE, WHICH IS THE LEAST ROMANTIC PLACE ON THE PLANET. So once again, this is a show about love. Why is the cast traveling to places where you’re made to feel bad for choosing to speak rather than maintaining a connection with your God and only eating bread if it’s toasted?
“There’s this mutual attraction, but it hasn’t been spoken.” – Ashley
Ashley chose Ben F. to go on the one-on-one date with her because she developed feelings for him as they were painting an elephant on to one of the rooms in the orphanage. She said she also chose him because she really wasn’t sure if he was ready to let someone in, which is really just making more and more obvious that Ashley isn’t sure if she’s ready to let someone in who’s actually going to be nice to her instead of calling her an ugly duckling. So they went to a market and ate street food and Ashley kept telling us that Ben was being such a great sport by laughing and having fun and just going with the flow. She essentially admitted that she’s impossible to get along with. They bonded over their liking of birds, and Ashley was surprised that she wanted to keep her hand in his lap as he drew a face on his umbrella and personified it with a muppet voice. And then we got to the part where they were sitting down somewhere and wanting to kiss each other but Thailand law prohibits kissing in public, so they agreed to do it in their head. Great choice for your show about falling in love, ABC! The best place to take yourselves on the road is to a place where intimate exchanges are forbidden! Excellent plot twist. You’re so tricky, ABC! Did you dress up as Charlie Chaplin or Diane Keaton for Halloween last year? Man, how do you figure when the best times to be daring are? I admire that in you. You should teach me sometime about being tricky. At dinner, Ashley gave Ben a rose because she thought she could see herself with him, and as dancers came out and waved fire in the air, they kissed. And not in their heads! For real.
“There are going to be eight guys on this date today and I want to see how they react to everything.” – Ashley
Ashley’s main goal (now that she knows most of the guys wishes Emily was The Bachelorette) was to show the guys a good time in Thailand, so she signed them up to kick the shit out of each other at a martial arts center. Ashley explained that she really wanted to find each guy’s masculinity, and all of a sudden Ashley knows what she wants, everyone! After the guys were warmed up and took off their Adidas shorts and put on uniforms that had been laid out for them (Ames was too slow in choosing one so he had to wear the pink one! HAHAHAHHA, right ABC? A guy in pink! Hilarious!), they got into a taxi and were ushered off to a ring where they were going to fight each other. The first ones up to battle were Luke (the guy who got divorced but doesn’t ever believe that passion can die) and Blake (the dentist who told Ashley that they would be perfect for each other because they were probably both perfectionists). Essentially, their performance was less enjoyable than every mother and daughter fight that has been in an episode of MTV’s True Life. Ashley was sitting there smiling but voicing her beliefs that maybe this date was too dangerous, and after Lucas took a hit to the kidney, even the Thai people watching the fights were like “NO SHIT ASSHOLE ASHLEY!” Next up to fight was JP and Mickey, and they were particularly more aggressive towards each other. JP ended up winning, and Mickey was a little bit embarrassed because he was from Cleveland and Irish. Then Ames fought Ryan, and everyone was nervous for Ames because as Lucas said, “While he was at Harvard and Yale studying, we were fighting in the streets.” So Ames got up there in his pink shorts and gloves and couldn’t even get a swing in. Ryan socked him repeatedly in the head, and after Ryan was declared the winner, everyone noticed that Ames was completely disoriented. The fighting CONTINUED with Nick and Constantine, but instead of watching it, Ashley went and got a Bachelorette producer and told him to call an ambulance for Ames, which the producer did, and then Ames was taken to the hospital. So obviously the fighting stopped. Later that night at the cocktail party, everyone was bruised and broken and Ashley acted like she felt so bad about the scars on everyone’s nose and forearms. Ames didn’t show up until later and he told Ashley that he just felt dizzy and that he was having a hard time talking in general. He told her the doctors told him he was in love and that he had a mild concussion, and it was kind of cute. But the rose ended up going to Blake, the fellow dentist, because he worked up the courage to tell Ashley he didn’t believe she liked him.
“The stakes are high, but I feel confident things will work out as they should today.” – Ben C.
Ashley chose Ben C. and William for the two-on-one date, and they got on a raft and halfheartedly paddled down a river while some other guy did all the work in the back. Then they had a picnic, and William tried to badmouth Ben C. by saying he’d much rather meet someone on a dating website than stay in Thailand to get to know Ashley. And like a dummy, she believed William and told him the possibility that guys would rather go home than be with her brought up some severe insecurities in her. Then Ashley got both of the guys together and said she wanted to end the two-on-one portion of the date, and she blindly decided to send Ben home without even considering that the source of her information about Ben wanting to do online dating was William, who said during the roast that every guy wished she had bigger boobs and was Emily. Ashley spent the rest of the day with William riding elephants and wearing off the shoulder dresses and talking about how she “needed” to send Ben C. home because it was the right thing to do because she didn’t want to be with someone who didn’t want to be with her. And just as Ashley admitted in an aside that just because Ben C. was gone didn’t mean that William was safe, William told Ashley how he wasn’t ready go grow up and that he still wanted to act like a little kid most of the time. It then became clear to Ashley that she wasn’t going to feel that spark that she felt for William on their first date ever again, and so she decided against giving him a rose and instead, sent him home. Then, very dramatically, she tossed the rose she was supposed to give to one of them into the fire and watched as it got really slick-looking and put up a pretty good fight against incineration.
“What is it exactly that is on your mind?” – Chris Harrison
Before the cocktail party before the rose ceremony, Ashley sat down with Chris Harrison and told him that she was still thinking about Bentley. She acknowledged it wasn’t fair to the guys she still had and that it wasn’t an ideal situation, but that she really wanted to find a way to get over the fact that Bentley left. And she said that even though she feels really strongly about a lot of the guys on the show, she wasn’t being honest with them about how she still had feelings for Bentley. Chris (who tried to tell her after Bentley left that she was better off without him) told her that they way they were doing the show wasn’t going to result in a happy ending (which got everyone thinking, when has it ever?). Ashley told Chris that she really wanted to talk to Bentley, and he (sensing the possibility to get another responsibility on the show other than saying “gentlemen, this is the last rose”) agreed to try and get Bentley either on the phone or in person. Then she went off to do the rose ceremony, and promised the guys she would be honest with them, and that she hoped they would be honest with her back. God, this show sucks. She ended up sending Nick home, which was somewhat random. But the best part of the show was when it was about to end, we got a nice preview of what’s happening next week, which is that Ashley goes to meet Bentley and then she tells the other guys that Bentley’s coming back, and they all FREAK OUT and start cursing about how she’s wasting everybody’s fucking time. US TOO, BOYS! US TOO!
