The Bachelor — Season 18, Episode 1813 — Live Blog and Discussion

Ooooooooh, Fantasy Suite Night! I hope they get room service. Alas, things do not bode well for tonight’s sexy-time romps with Juan Pablo–and not just because in the previews, everyone is variously crying, enraged, or devastated. According to Chris, JP will very likely not come away from his Bachelor adventure having fallen deeply in love with a potential new wife and stepmother for Camila, after having bonded with his soulmate over the course of the many minutes they spent together being filmed bungee-jumping and making out on the beach.

That’s because the poor sap simply isn’t able to present his true self to the girls. In fact, he’s as closed off as the George Washington Bridge when Chris Christie’s in a bad mood. Reveals Chris, “I think Juan Pablo has had a really tough time with that, and I don’t know exactly what that is, if it’s a cultural difference, if there is a language barrier.” Well, that explains why, when it’s time to have a substantive conversation, he just rams his tongue down the girl’s throat. It must be an old Venezuelan custom.

Hopefully, in the fantasy suite, someone’s going to open up something.

The show opens showing us that there are lots of colorful creatures in St. Lucia, and also frogs, bugs, and lizards. JP looks forward to talking to the girls without cameras present, and putting his hands in places he couldn’t before.

He meets up with Clare first, with cameras present. He hoists her into a boat as she talks giddily about how great it will be to possibly get engaged to the man of her dreams here. She wonders, though, how she will feel if JP asks her to spend the night with him. They’re not even engaged and already she’s got a headache. It’s Camila again, though, making her concerned. The child will never have any siblings at this rate.

As they cruise along in a yacht, she wants to know what he thought of her family. They are both disgusted with Laura, the sister who was suspicious of the whole business. Now Clare thinks tonight would be the perfect time to tell JP she’s falling in love with him–but that fantasy suite looms. Love mixed with sex? It just doesn’t work for Clare.

As they go off to dinner, JP says he had a great day with Clare, and that tonight will be a great time to find out how he feels about her, because spending time with her dressed just doesn’t permit that. Bringing up Camila, Clare tries to understand the concept of a child having a stepmother, as if such a phenomenon had never occurred before in human history. “She already has, like, a mother, you know?” she explains to JP.

The key to the Fantasy Suite arrives and they discuss whether to use it. Never before have two people whose tongues have been entangled so often in such a short time been so coy. Another exchange ensues about feelings and being on the same page and what matters to each other. I’ve read Apartment 3G comics with more substance.

They rise and enter the suite, as we knew they would, those sluts. “Tomorrow when we wake up, we will know each other a lot more,” JP tells her as they click champagne glasses. He would have added “in the Biblical sense,” but that’s another phrase he’s unfamiliar with. He’s also probably never read the book. Now we have to watch them fondle each other and giggle in between trying to express emotional concepts  apparently stolen from bumper stickers. Ultimately, it’s a fade to the Jacuzzi. I wonder how many takes they had to do.

Morning dawns on the island, and JP has nothing lurid to report other than he’s happy. Where’s Clare, in the stirrups at the ob-gyn? Now he has to meet Andi. They stroll hand in hand to a seafood fiesta. “I feel like a real couple with him,” Andi says, seemingly with surprise. They hassle a couple of little kids who are just minding their own business, which charms Andi because even though he jabbers endlessly about Camila, she has never seen JP with children. Always get engaged to a guy whose kid you’ve never met. Instead, worry about whether you’ve had more one-on-one dates with him than the dozen other girls you live with in a hotel.

Off they go in some dune-buggy kind of vehicle to a jungle, which they go through to a waterfall. Always with the waterfalls with him. She asks him what her family talked to him about. JP liked her mom, and seems to have missed the fact that her dad wants to have him fitted for cement overshoes. As we see them sitting under the waterfall smooching, Andi smiles beatifically and says, “This is what I came here for, to find love.” That, and a really bad fungal infection.

They go to dinner. JP worries that Andi said she wants badly to fall in love. She shouldn’t push herself, though. He better not do anything to encourage her to like him. She says she would never force it, though, because of Camila. How would you force love, anyway? It’s not a stubborn jar lid.

JP is concerned about choosing his wife. He doesn’t want to regret it later. Could Andi be like her mother, marrying after only six months? Does Andi fit in his life?  Did she remember to bring some Summer’s Eve? The conversation is like a BuzzFeed quiz.

Here’s the Fantasy Suite key! They answer with a hearty “yes” to that question. Pronouncing Andi “wife material,” JP pushes her back into the pillows and jumps her as swooping music plays. You wonder why she chose to wear a ponytail in these circumstances.

Next morning, JP is delighted. They get along very well, he says. They have chemistry and her cheeks are rounded, a critical element of a successful relationship. Andi, on the other hand, could not wait to get out of the suite this morning. It was a nightmare! She saw a side of him she didn’t like. Maybe his backside? He’s a self-centered, egomaniacal dickwad, it seems, who never asked anything about her. She’s just noticing now? But he also told her about his overnight date with Clare! Well, to be fair, all of America heard about his overnight date with Clare.  Andi despairs that she spent so much time with him, and is just finding all this out now. Somewhere, her dad is laughing bitterly.

Nikki arrives half-dressed to go horseback-riding. JP declares her sexy, oh so sexy. A Saddlecam records her reaction when he suggests she ride with a just a thong on. She tells him her family really liked him, which, after they hear that last exchange, may no longer be the case. He explains how he told her father he isn’t 100 percent sure yet. She hopes she has the courage tonight to tell this asshole she loves him.  At dinner, she uses another phrase he doesn’t know: “I can see the wheels are turning.” That’s new to him because no one ever saw his doing that. I’ve read about a border collie who has a larger vocabulary than JP.

They go to the Fantasy Suite, too, which by now must be pretty rank.  Crickets chirp as they begin the awkward mating ritual. She finally manages to say “I love you,” immediately followed by telling him how hard it was. He murmurs platitudes prior to producing his tongue for insertion. “My intention is for her to see the real me,” he tells us. I guess that means without Viagra.

I wonder if he yelled out Clare’s name on Nikki’s night and Andi’s on Clare’s night. Or maybe Chris’s. Then again, according to Andi, it could have been his own name.

Next day, he and Chris meet up for a locker room wrap-up. A giant phallus-shaped outcropping looms in the background as they chat. “I’m feeling very, very good” about the girls, JP assures Chris. He has assigned each of them four stars in his little black book.  He can see himself with any one of the three, just like Rick Blaine could see himself with Ilsa or either of the other two women he’d spent time with in Paris before the war.

Now Nikki appears on a TV to tell him how she feels. The evening they spent together was awesome. Clare felt the chemistry from their first date, and has fallen in love with him. Now for Andi, heh heh heh. Sounding like an ADA giving a summation, she says she has a lot of thoughts to share, and wants to do it in person. In white short-shorts.

There is no doubt in her mind that she has no future with JP, she explains. All he ever wanted to do when she tried to tell him something important was say “it’s okay” and give her a kiss. He could do well as a UN attache. Meanwhile, JP is confused. He likes her, so what could be wrong? She arrives and he looks all pleased. As she starts to talk, he gazes at her with the concentration of a dog following a ping pong game. She says she doesn’t love him, and he shrugs.

“That’s okay,” he says pleasantly.

“It’s not okay!” she replies emotionally, explaining how she left her life behind to find love on the show and be paid for it.

He tries to say he didn’t mean to be flippant, but of course he doesn’t know that word.  So he opts for  saying he respects her. She’s dissatisfied with that. She wants him to respond, to have emotions. Is “bored” an emotion?

She asks him if he thinks it’s offensive that he told her about his overnight date with Clare. He brushes that one off; he was being honest, you know. Then, when she points out that he told her she was there instead of Renee “by default,” he insists he doesn’t know that word, and that she’s actually “barely there” instead of Renee. Annnnnd, he officially wins the trophy for most despicable human alive, after that guy in Uganda and anyone who beats up the elderly.

She tries again. “Do you have any idea about me?” Does he know what religion she practices, whether she wants kids, her ideas on social issues? He seems stumped about what all those things are, so he asks her defensively  if she knows what religion he is. She tells him he’s Catholic. And not much of one, either, what with all the pre-marital sex and the child out of wedlock.

Anyway, at this point it’s moot. JP only ever cared to know her cup size and her bank balance. He blames her for his own obtuseness and self-centeredness. She should have told him she wanted him to stop being that way. “Ai, Andi,” he finishes, clearly tired of the topic. “I appreciate your honesty.”

“Am I disappointed? Maybe a little bit,” he tells us when she’s left. “But arguments?” Homie don’t play that. If your distress can’t be palliated with an “it’s okay” and some tongue hockey, JP can’t be bothered. Andi drives off, worrying that she will never find love and have a family.  OKCupid would have been a better risk in the first place. She just wanted JP to have emotions, reactions, to feel something about what just happened. I think that might not be possible since the lobotomy, though.

Clare and Nikki wait for the Rose Ceremony, looking confused that Andi is not there. Chris arrives and explains that she’s gone, and that they need to know about it–but they’ll hear it from JP. This should be rich. “She decided that she wasn’t feeling right, she didn’t have strong feelings for me,” he says, glossing over the entire crux of the issue. But he tells the girls that if they need to talk to him about something, they should come to him and he will be, of course, honest, possibly even telling them about sex he had with other girls.

Nikki and Clare accept their roses. Next week, the gals all return to dis JP big time. Chris says the conclusion will be shocking! Maybe JP will not say “ai” anytime during the entire two hours.

 

About E.M. Rosenberg 240 Articles
Favorite 40-volume series issued by Time-Life Music: Sounds of the Seventies. Favorite backsplash material: Subway tile. Favorite screen legend I pretend wasn’t gay: Cary Grant. Favorite issue you should not even get me started about: Venal, bloodsucking insurance industry. Favorite character from the comic strip “Nancy”: Sluggo, or maybe Rollo. Favorite Little Debbie snack: Nutty Bars. Favorite Monkee: Mike.