Well, isn’t this a pretty picture. Now that she and Josh are kaput—who dumped whom is still in dispute, but that will be hashed out on their inevitable Dr. Phil appearance—Andi has dusted off her bandage dress and set her laser sights back on Farmer Chris, whom she so unceremoniously sent back to the fields post-hometown visit on The Bachelorette.
According to an “inside source,” which is probably Josh’s embittered mom, that eminent news purveyor celebdirtylaundry.com reports that Andi got in touch with Prince Farming mere moments after going public with the news of her and Josh’s demise. After Chris pretended not to gloat, she told him she’d been wrong not to choose him—although with all of America aware that Nick was her default second choice, it would be difficult to make that sentiment appear sincere.
Nevertheless, Andi wanted to talk with Chris in person, or at least have his people call her people. Chris told her no, because he’s engaged to some other famewhore now—and it’s “the real deal, not a publicity stunt like her and Josh’s engagement.” He must be really good at butchering hogs, because he sure knows how to twist a knife.
In other news, I read that the virgin Britt, who is billed as being a waitress, is actually an actress. Six of one.
Tonight is Jimmy Kimmel’s visit to the set, and some more making out for our hunky Old MacDonald. Jimmy arrives in the dawn hours to awaken Chris, who sleeps with his mouth hanging open. Between that and knowing he has probably inserted his arm into a cow up to the elbow, he’s seeming less and less appealing. Jimmy asks a dazed Chris if he’s naked under the bed covers, then hands him a cup of coffee. It’s similar to a lot of my dates.
The ladies squeal with delight when Chris the Host introduces Jimmy to them a little later. Jimmy will help plan this week’s dates, and will oversee the “Amazing Jar,” a receptacle into which everyone who uses the word must deposit a dollar. If they’d made it five dollars, they could fund Obama’s community college program.
Kaitlyn, the dance instructor, gets the first one-on-one date. Since Jimmy planned the outing, even Chris has no idea where they are going. It turns out to be a shopping expedition to Costco, which I think is a great destination. Free food samples, impressive bargains, and you can buy paper goods in bulk, an asset considering all the crying on this show. Jimmy wants the two to shop for him since he’s coming to dinner. They buy some steaks, lots and lots of ketchup, tables and chairs, and an industrial-sized jar of mayonnaise.
Chris feels he and Kaitlyn have chemistry, especially after he thought about what they could do with all that mayo. She handles the date with class, too, he enthuses—for example, by climbing inside a large inflatable ball with him and directing a group of small children to roll them down an aisle. Kaitlyn’s the Duchess of Cambridge among the bachelorettes.
They start cooking dinner back at Chris’s house. “It felt totally real,” Kaitlyn reports, as if preparing a meal were generally something she experiences as a hallucination. She likes that Chris’s lifestyle is not glamorous, although the yearly hog-slaughtering is preceded by the season’s most eagerly anticipated garden party.
As the two make out over glasses of bourbon, Jimmy appears and asks them to start cooking the steaks. So what were they doing in the kitchen earlier that brought them together so contentedly, unwrapping dishes from the caterer? Kaitlyn admits she is into farmers. If things don’t work out with Chris, she can place a personal ad in Agriculture Monthly.
Jimmy brings up the Fantasy Suite. Assuming love-making goes on there, he asks Kaitlyn how she would feel if she discovered Chris had shtupped a bunch of other women in the suite besides her. She considers that to be part of the process. Jimmy recommends Chris take full advantage of the opportunity, and the farmer laughs merrily. It’s all very funny until someone gets chlamydia.
Back at the house, the Amazing Jar is filling up faster than Chris the Host’s forehead with Botox. The group date card arrives. A huge crowd is going, something like eight pairs of lips. “Tomorrow’s date is going to be amazing,” says one woman, before putting a dollar in the jar. They all went to the bank and got singles for a couple hundred. Hopefully, part of the fund will be used to purchase thesauruses for everyone.
Jimmy oversees the close of the Kaitlyn date, tabulating Chris’s “amazings” as he explains why he is offering her the rose, which is basically, “Shucks, yer a purdy lil sweetheart.” “You have a way with words,” Jimmy tells Chris. “Are there people on the farm or just animals?”
Now the couple is alone. They speak incoherently about how unexpectedly great the date at Costco was, since shopping in front of cameras is so unconventional a way to get to know one another, compared to picnicking on a beach or going on a yacht ride in front of cameras. They then proceed to slobber all over each other in the hot tub. The camera pulls out, and there is Jimmy sitting in the water with them. It’s not at all awkward.
Back at the house, Jillian is working out, which she apparently does constantly. She’s proving she’d make a good, stolid farmwife, and could lift debris off survivors in the event of a tornado.
Next all the group goes off on their date, along with Jimmy. They must take a farm challenge with five tests: corn-shucking, egg-collecting and frying, goat-milking and drinking, manure-shoveling—which they are well-practiced at by now—and greased pig-wrestling.
“If she can’t shuck some corn and get her hands dirty, she’s not for me,” states Chris, secretly preferring to see how the pig-wrestling goes. Mackenzie breaks her egg yolk and is disqualified.
As banjo music plays, the goat-milking begins. Also taken out, Amber is glad not to have to drink the milk. “It tastes salty and warm—not something I like to have in my mouth,” she admits, eliminating herself from all romance opportunities. Jillian’s t-shirt says “stay classy” while her shorts are so brief, they require editors to place a black bar across the back of them at all times. She’s willing to get something dirty, Chris.
The winner of the challenge is Carly, the cruise ship singer. She must not have made it past auditions on American Idol. The prize is a picture of her and Chris dressed as the American Gothic couple. All that’s missing from this segment now is a hayride and a selected reading from Ethan Frome.
Meanwhile, Hyundai is offering a special Martin Luther King, Jr. Day discount on the 2015 Elantra. God bless America.
At the party that evening, the ladies don their sequins and stretch satin, and commence drinking. Carly and Chris go off, and she takes the initiative to kiss him, glomming onto his face like the creatures in Alien. Amber asks him to dance, and they kiss, too. Then he latches onto the next woman like a breastfeeding newborn. I hope he’s gargling in between.
Upset, Mackenzie questions him about all the saliva-exchanging. He considers it part of dating, or at least dating with a director present. She then worries that she offended him by questioning his manwhorishness, although were the shoe on the other foot, FOX & Friends would be calling for the show’s cancellation. Britt also doesn’t like the serial lip-locks, but virgins are known to be touchy about other people getting more action.
Becca offers a hug in lieu of kissing. She says she wants to stick it out through all the kissing of other people because he’s worth it, although she may get him with withered lips. While she doesn’t want to rush it, she worries that a kiss, or possibly an entire tongue, might be required to earn a rose. Maybe Chris could be bargained down to a quick feel.
Then it’s rose time for the group daters. Chris wants to give it to someone he’s impressed with, and with whom he has furthered his connection. The rose goes to kiss-withholding Becca, you whores.
Whitney, the fertility nurse, has been given the next one-on-one date. She’s so excited to be alone with Chris that her voice is actually slightly lower, around the range of a Munchkin who smokes non-filters. As they enjoy the scenery from a winery, she asks him what he’s looking for in a wife. He replies: Someone to laugh with and talk to at the end of a long day, someone who can go into a crowd and make immediate connections, someone whose Q score is comparable to his. They gaze out over the valley and see a wedding going on. Whitney suggests they crash it. Chris giggles like a cartoon kitty cat and agrees. The guests will surely not question them being followed by a bunch of cameras and crew people.
“There’s something about weddings that’s just very romantic,” Whitney observes. Funerals, though, she finds more of a downer.
They leave the winery, change into formal attire, and procure a gift for the newlyweds. Crashing has never been so structured. Since they think people will recognize Chris, they’re going to say his season has finished taping, and he and she are engaged. Chris gets nervous and has trouble lying effectively, which at least is a good sign for whoever does get engaged to him. He is impressed at how effective Whitney is at misleading innocent victims of their cruel charade.
They move to the dance floor, where Whitney is pleased at how well Chris comports himself doing the Shopping Cart and the Lawn Mower. What a valuable litmus test for a future together this exercise is proving to be.
“Chris could potentially be my future husband,” Whitney squeaks assuredly as they make their way home. “It wasn’t the date, it was her,” Chris marvels, apparently just now coming to the realization that he should marry a person and not a series of planned activities. He presents her with the rose, and they kiss enthusiastically, largely because Chris has had so much practice.
Cocktail party time. Chris prepares by taking a homoerotic outdoor shower with Jimmy, which just confuses all the women viewers. Jimmy then visits the bachelorettes. Noting that the Amazing Jar is packed to the brim with bills, he says there will not be a cocktail party—instead, it’s a pool party. Chris is pleased to have a pool party with 18 women. That’s 36 chances a strap will break. He leaps into the water while all the women protect their make-up and hair.
Juelia feels the pool party is the proper setting to tell Chris about her husband committing suicide. Since his death, she now cares only about love, not material things like the rhinestone-studded headband and false eyelashes she is wearing. She explains that she couldn’t deal with her husband’s mental health issues because she had a baby to care for, and the mommy blogs didn’t address bi-polar disorder in husbands. Chris looks concerned as she describes suicide notes and guns, although maybe he’s just worried the hor d’ouevres are getting cold. But he hugs her as she sobs piteously, asking how a man could kill himself when he has a little baby. Meanwhile, we all ask how a woman could go on a reality show when she has a fatherless daughter. Chris assures her her daughter will be fine with such a strong mom, because he sure as hell isn’t going to get involved with this basket case.
Ashley I. is worried that the more aggressive women will have an advantage. The other virgin, Britt, wastes no time with idle chatter and just starts making out with Chris. Jade asks to see his place, where there are probably etchings. Jillian and her black butt bar follow. Inside the house, Jade expresses concern to Chris about the many strong personalities among the other women, since advertising yourself as a wuss is so attractive. Afterwards, though, she reveals that she finally feels she’s gotten to know him, especially now that she’s had her own make-out session with him.
Jillian is there when they come outside, sitting on the edge of the hot tub so they don’t have to add the black bar. Some other girls start peeking at her and Chris as their make-out session ensues, about the fifth so far in just the last couple of hours. He must own stock in ChapStick. The trio joins the couple, but Jillian maintains a death-grip on Chris’s leg. Ashley feels this is unfair, that Jillian should cede Chris to others for kissing when her own tongue has had its allotted time. Frustrated, Ashley leaves in tears.
But then she finally gets her chance with Chris’s tongue. She uses the moments to tell him she’s upset and have a hormonal episode of laugh-crying, dabbing carefully around her Lambchop-the-puppet-proportioned eyelashes. Afterwards, they make out. If he were wearing a belt, the notches would have worn the leather clear through.
Back at the poolside, Chris the Host arrives to announce the Rose Ceremony’s impending arrival. Chris tells the women he’ll be doing a lot of thinking until then, doubtless with some help from his hand.
Jimmy commiserates with Chris, who is in the difficult position of having to jettison a few of the women whom he had not previously seen in a bikini. At the ceremony, Chris assures everyone that his intentions are true. He is here to find a wife, or least someone who can kiss well on demand, because you would not believe the lame matches eharmony.com kept sending him. Jade gets the first rose, followed by Samantha, then Juelia. Mackenzie is next, then Kelsey, then Britt. Next is Megan, followed by Carly, then Ashley S. Nikki is next, then Jillian, and then the final rose awaits. Jimmy comes out and does the “when you’re ready” line, which apparently the Reality TV Show Host Union allows. It goes to Ashley I., who is vastly relieved, both because of the rose and the Midol she took earlier.
Rejected Amber feels he didn’t get to know her. There must be someone who wants to be with her, she cries. She should try some false eyelashes.
Jimmy is told by Chris the Host to say his goodbyes. He sobs in the limo about not having had enough time. Appropriately, he is listed in the credits as Love Doctor, but he has only eased the pain momentarily for these very ill competitors.
