Tonight on The Bachelor: Jake takes the women on a nerve-wracking bungee jumping date, a comedy club challenge with Jon Lovitz, and a family-friendly date at Sea World. One woman leaves early, another gets a taste of her own medicine, and Vienna becomes everyone’s #1 enemy.
There are 12 women left, and only one Jake Pavelka! Yes, Jake, you should be worried.
That was the short recap. Here’s the long version:
Date #1: 1-on-1 with Vienna
Vienna gets the first individual date of the week, and the rest of the women act like it’s an offense to their principles that she should get such a high honor. How dare she! How DATE she! Ali actually calls it a “betrayal” after her own magical Chicago concert. Clearly there is a house-wide hatred of Vienna going on, but it’s not clear yet why. Maybe they just hate delicious canned sausages?
Jake whisks Vienna off on his motorcycle, and then onto a helicopter (it wouldn’t be a Bachelor episode without a helicopter! You know, normal dating stuff.) that takes them to a bridge, where Vienna learns they’ll be bungee jumping. But oh no! She is afraid of heights, and she is scared. Scratch that: she thinks she is scared. But that’s not scared. THIS is scared:
Jake wants to “overcome a fear together as a couple,” which means that he shakes and cries and nuzzles her shoulder like a scared puppy while she overcomes her urge to shove his panicking ass over the edge before the ropes are secured.
Get it together, man.
Finally, Jake calms himself, and they jump, sharing their first kiss while hanging upside down from the bridge. It would almost have been romantic, if not for the vomit in Vienna’s mouth running down into her eyeballs, mixing with Jake’s salty, snotty tears as they run down his forehead.
You’re welcome for that image. Just let it sink in.
ANYWAY!
In all seriousness, the jump is “magical” for Vienna and Jake, and after that harrowing feat, they reward themselves with a few glasses of chardonnay and a dip in the hot tub, where Jake grills Vienna about her wants and needs in a husband she finds on national television. She gets an A on Jake’s chemistry exam for her expert use of the words “looking for my best friend.” She gets the rose, and Jake is smitten.
“Vienna continues to surprise me!” he says. Us too! Just so we’re clear: this is the same woman who takes her chihuahua on dates and considers herself “Daddy’s little princess.” SHE is more emotionally prepared than Jake the pilot to bungee jump. What she’s not emotionally prepared for, however, is reality:
“This is the best day of my life so far. But the best day of my life will be when I marry Jake.”
LATER, AT THE MANSION…
Vienna comes home with her rose, and the other women are shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED!, to see her come home at all. They ask how the date was, and when she raves about the fun time she had, the women are, like, SO MAD! I’m talking scrunch up your face, roll your eyes and put a petulant hand on your hip FURIOUS!
“Jake must have terrible taste if he kept Vienna around,” they all group-think. “If that’s the kind of girl he likes, then I’m not the girl for him, that’s for sure!”
So with that, each of them packs up her things and leaves the show, knowing that this one man was neither the perfect male specimen nor their only shot at happiness. “Haha,” they say, “All this fighting… over a commercial pilot!” They laugh to themselves and shake their heads as they leave the mansion, both amused and ashamed about how desperate they must have seemed. But they can’t laugh too hard, because the three-week-champagne-diet hangover is now setting in something fierce.
HAHA! Just kidding, none of that would ever happen. Instead, everyone remains mad and hates Vienna for her undeserved happiness, but are confused as to why Jake would use his divine will to inflict a plague like Vienna upon them. But they all stay. Of course they stay.
Group Date #2: Corrie, Elizabeth, Ali, Tenley, Ashleigh, Jessie, Kathryn, Michelle
Jake meets the group at Universal City and escorts them to the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club, where Jon himself greets them and breaks the bad news: they will be the comediennes today. Jon tells them to just be themselves and have fun. Clearly, he has not met Michelle.
Ashleigh starts crying out of nerves, which get worse when they learn that they aren’t just performing for Jake, but for a real audience. As the people who were majorly suckered out of their hard-earned money file in, the women flip out and lament their lack of material. They’re MODELS, not comediennes! They worked so hard to be pretty and thin so they wouldn’t have to rely on their personalities, and NOW THIS?
Lovitz gets up on stage and cracks a few jokes about balls, and then introduces the ladies one by one. It’s an exercise in discomfort and horror:
- Ali tells a Winnie the Pooh joke she apparently got from a popsicle stick, and then giggles like she ate the whole thing in one bite.
- Tenley does some floor gymnastics, seeming to lift her feet behind her head, and says, “That’s all I’ve got.”
- Elizabeth tells a joke about getting exhausted by a guy with three penises? I think? It’s totally bleeped out, but still, HAHA, what? Girl, you crazy for that one.
- Kathryn summons Jake on stage for a kiss, and says “There’s no punch line, I just wanted to see how these lips taste.” Guess what! They taste like FAILURE, Kathryn.
- Michelle tells an awkward joke about her boobs being coconuts, and then makes a golf analogy about being on the green, waiting for Jake to make a hole-in-one? Even the crickets are just staring at her silently, wondering what it must be like to live in that brain for a day.
But it’s not all bad… some of it is just okay!
- Jessie makes a clever joke about her family being in the sequel to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, called They’re So Fat You Can’t Tell They’re Greek.
- Ashleigh gets over her stagefright to tell a few “yuck, yuck” jokes about blondes. (“How do blonde brain cells die? Alone.” And so forth.)
- And then there’s Corrie, who takes the opportunity to lampoon her fellow contestants with expert “impressions” that go something like this: “Hi, I’m Tenley! I like to exercise, hee hee hee!” Her fellow contestants (and only them) find these amusing, and even Jake is chuckling… until Corrie gets to Vienna. Her impression sounds like this: “Hi, I’m Vienna, I love hair extensions and being naked and being a total BITCH who should totally DIE ALREADY!” Great impression, Corrie! You nailed it:
Later, at their “wrap party” for the totally “successful” “comedy” show, Tenley tells Jake about her divorce, and he likes and respects her more for it. Ali and Ashleigh both use their private time with Jake to explain how much they hate Vienna, and Jake listens, but is not convinced, because “Bless her heart, she’s not even here to defend herself!”
Where she IS is BACK AT THE MANSION, where Gia is confronting her about starting drama and rubbing her date in everyone else’s faces. Vienna reacts by calling everyone in the house “fake as can be,” running up to her room and crying while writing a letter to Jake. Gia says Vienna is “dangerous” because she loves to create drama and doesn’t care about other people’s feelings.
Back at the party, Ali leads a toast to Corrie for her courageous “impression” of Vienna, but Michelle refuses to participate because… something about love and marriage and being here for love and babies and marriage. There is no “because” for the full-blown crazy. Michelle says “me” a lot, but the other words out of her mouth are complete and utter needy nonsense. “Love and marriage, I NEED IT I NEED IT I NEED IT!” she seems to repeat in her damaged brain as the words come out in angry fragments. Michelle is looking for love like a drowning person is looking for air… except that I’m not afraid a drowning person is going to snap and pull a knife if I try to help them.
She finally gets her alone time with Jake, where she demands a kiss. Jake reluctantly gives it to her, but it’s not up to her hair-pulling, nail-digging, blood-drawing passion standard, so she thinks she should just leave, right now. This just isn’t right for her, and she would rather go. Unless Jake wants her to stay! She’ll stay if he wants her to stay. But no, Jake says in the voice of a hostage negotiator (which, in a way, he is), he thinks it would be better if she left.
“I can’t believe you’re doing it,” Michelle seems to say to Jake, but could just be saying to the voices in her head. “Everybody felt… certain people felt… that I was THE girl.” Yes, Michelle, whatever you say. Just get in the van and go far away.
BYE, MICHELLE!
Jake ends the group date without giving out a rose, saying he just needs time “to think.”
Date #3: 1-on-1 with Ella
Jake picks up Ella in a helicopter, and they fly to Sea World, where she learns that this is actually a 1-on-2: her son, Ethan is there to surprise her.
The happy little family does the whole Sea World thing: whales, dolphins, penguins, you know… sea stuff.
At their picnic lunch, Jake plays with Ethan, and Ella revels in what a great dad Jake will be someday. Ella says she can see being engaged to Jake at the end of this show journey. She wants exactly what Trista and Ryan have: true love and pure magic. And somewhere, an ABC executive listened in on a hidden microphone and peed his pants with joy.
After their fun-filled day, Ella has to say goodbye to Ethan, and she and Jake sit down to a romantic meal where he tells her that he admires what a great mother she is, and he gives her the rose. They kiss as flamingos obnoxiously honk in the background.
(I swear, I’m not getting lazy. That date was just boring. Consider it free mental birth control.)
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE MANSION: Vienna tries to apologize to the group for being a bitchelorette, but Ali’s not HAVIN’ IT! She accuses Vienna of talking badly about everybody (odd, we saw none of that footage) and causing everyone to feel so uncomfortable that no one will sleep in her room.
Thanks for ruining the slumber party, VIENNA.
Cocktail Party
Jake says it’s been a long week, and I agree: I mean, I’m exhausted from all this nonsense, aren’t you? These crazy loons are draining my will to live. Let’s wrap this up before I start reading Twilight in hopes of just feeling something, anything, again:
Elizabeth keeps up her “no kissing” game with Jake, and he calls her out for being a tease. He literally spells it out, saying he doesn’t need to kiss her, he just doesn’t want to sit there and let her dangle a kiss in front of him like a carrot. But she’s neither a genius nor a good listener (but she is soooo pretty), and thinks he’s telling her that he needs to kiss her, and her pretty little face is pretty f’ing pissed. “I don’t understand why he’s pressuring me to kiss him!” she tells the camera.
And that’s all that happened during the cocktail party. FUN!
Rose Ceremony
Jake comforts the two women who won’t get a rose by telling them, “This decision was horrible.”
Vienna and Ella already have roses.
Jake gives roses to…
Gia
Corrie
Tenley
Ali
Jessie
Kathryn
Ashleigh
Eliminated: Valishia and Elizabeth (and Michelle)
Valishia says she put it all out there, but unfortunately we saw… none of that. She had one line during her entire time on the show (“What happened?”) but now she hits us with a real heartbreaker: “I’m used to things not going my way, and that’s something I’ve learned to live with.” Geez, ABC, that is SO SAD and we didn’t even get to really meet this woman, to even find out WHY!
Elizabeth tells Jake as she leaves, “I should have kissed you!” Withholding begets withholding. Lesson clearly learned. Face, so pretty, for the very last time:
Next Week: A road trip down the California coast, and a romantic vineyard make-out for Gia and Jake. See you then!
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
Meghan hails from Walla Walla, WA, the proud home of the world’s best sweet onions and Adam West, the original Batman. An avid grammarian and over-analyzer, you can usually find her thinking too hard about plot devices in favorites like The Office, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and How I Met Your Mother. In her spare time, Meghan enjoys drawing, shopping, trying to be funny (and often failing), and not understanding the whole Twilight thing. She’s got a BA in English and Studio Art from Whitman College, which makes her a professional arguer, daydreamer, and doodler.
