no chaos damn it

'The Bachelor' Recap: Putting the Train in Trainwreck

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WOW. The Bachelor was an overflowing bucket of nutjob tonight, wasn't it, you guys? Is it seriously only Week 2? I feel like I've already spent months with Brad reliving his childhood traumas and hearing him work through his debilitating "commitment issues." Maybe if I was his therapist getting paid $500 an hour to listen to him reexamine his life, I'd be fine with that, but as a lowly blogger, I must say: Brad, I'm SPENT with your problems. Just put on your damn prince crown and play the part. I've got enough on my plate without you getting into the insecurity game!

Speaking of which: What about these women, who went from total strangers to total bloodthirsty balls of tears and terror in the course of a week? Did you know they hold Bachelor casting calls at mental outpatient facilities and under fairytale bridges? Is there an expression like "the claws came out," but where you replace "claws" with "staggering delusions"? Somebody call Timothy Olyphant, because THE CRAZIES have taken over!

And it's only WEEK 2! But that's OK. Let's just breathe, write, drink, look at funny pictures of these women embarrassing themselves, and get through this together.

Date #1: Ashley H.
Ashley H. gets the first date of the season, which means it's time to start a well-loved tradition: Transcribing the date cards, because they are SO DUMB and I wish I was the person who wrote them. Ashley's date card reads, "The road to love is a wild ride," which if you think even medium-hard about it doesn't make any sense, but that's not a problem for these ladies. Everybody screams and pounds their fists at Ashley because they are SO JEALOUS of they don't know what, especially Ashley S., who is playing a name-envy-game with the hated H.

Not knowing what she's in for and wanting to dress prepared for anything, Ashley H. puts on her favorite gold Christmas gift-wrapping tube-top poofy thing, and Brad whisks her down a dark and deserted road toward the ominous hawk-noise-filled unknown. "It feels like something out of a horror movie," says Ashley. Because it IS! Brad leads her to a scary looking switch and tells her to flip it ... IF SHE DARES. Then the lights come on and it's a creepy carnival for two! Get it? Because they have the brains of children!
 

*Creeeeeak* "WELCOME TO THE CARNIVAL ... of SOULS!"

If there is one thing that women are definitely not scared of, it's clowns. And the dark.  Especially robotic clowns who slowly sway back and forth in the dark. Who watch you with their dead eyes as you make out with the tall, strong stranger who drove you to the carnival without telling you where it is, so you have no way of escaping.

COME IN, ASHLEY. PLAY WITH US.

If it were up to me, Ashley would discover that the cord to that big yellow switch led nowhere, because it was never plugged in, because this is a ghost carnival that only appears every fifty years to claim new souls for its clown parade! But this is The Bachelor, so hear's what Ashley says:

"I get to dress up like a princess and still act like a child."

This is a positive thing! So Ashley and Brad eat cotton candy, play games, giggle a lot, go in the photo booth, and then talk about their similar daddy issues while sitting on those little stands that elephants do circus tricks on, AS YA DO:

"This looks like a good spot for us to talk about serious concerns as mature adults."

Ashley: "I'm scared you feel obligated to pick someone." (DING DING, SMART DENTIST)
Brad: "I'm not going to waste your time." (WHOMP WHOMP, LIAR ALERT)

SHOCKER: Ashley is really pickin' up what Brad's puttin' down, has never fallen for someone so fast before and feels it is the start of something great! So they head to the Ferris Wheel for a quick spin ... of their TONGUES.

FERRIS CAM! GOTCHA!

She gets the rose. And she gets to live, despite her night in the hellish midnight carnival. Better luck next time, circus ghouls!

While all this is happening, we learn two VERY important things:

1. Melissa is insane. Straight up, no need to qualify or parse words, NUTS. In her own words:

"I've been thinking about doing this for eight years. I spent all this money on dresses and clothes. I quit my job" ... she says about rehearsing for a reality show to win the love of a man whose identity she just learned LAST WEEK.

2. Michelle is the real life incarnation of Vanessa, the hot body that the evil sea witch Ursula in The Little Mermaid gave herself using dark underwater magic. She is beautiful and terrifying and most of all HORRIBLE. And if you didn't catch it one of the 500 times she mentioned it, TODAY IS HER G-D BIRTHDAY. "It's my 30th birthday," she says over and over like it's an incantation. They cut to commercial before she can go on: "30th ... century, I mean. I am Ursula, queen of the underworld, and I am immortal." Here's Michelle, singing "Happy Birthday" to herself:


Get outta there, Scuttle! Michelle is gonna rip off your wings and use them to construct her next set of RIDICULOUS earrings!

Totally appropriate earrings for a 30-year-old woman.

Actually, they're more appropriate than you think: They're actually tiny circular saws that Michelle can detach to use as ninja throwing stars on her enemies. And to rip all the holes in her birthday outfit.

It's my party and I'll bitch and storm out and cause a scene and wear a slutty Pocahontas Halloween costume if I want to!

But wait, we need to back up. Because what caused Michelle to storm out? Oh yeah, only the bigger whore in the room: THE AMERICAN RED CROSS!

Date #2: Keltie, Chantal, Madison, Melissa, Kimberly, Marissa, Raichel, Britt, Meghan, Emily, Stacey, Alli, Shawntel N., Michelle and Lisa. (That's FIFTEEN!)
Date Card: "Let's share something from the heart." (GROSS!)

What are you doing to yourself, American Red Cross? Why are you debasing yourself and your totally worthy and legitimate cause, American Red Cross? Why are you pretending these horrible PSAs that Brad and the girls filmed are even REMOTELY usable, and not completely tacky and tasteless, American Red Cross? Do you think you are on the same level as the band TRAIN, American Red Cross? No, you're better than that. At least you used to be. Now this is your brand:

"We're helping people decide whether or not they want to give blood [by dressing up in french maid costumes and pleather vampire gear and slapping each other and making out when we forget our lines]. It's so important." - The Women You Authorized to Represent Your Humanitarian Organization

American Red Cross, whatever led you down this dark path: You should have just asked for help. Talked to somebody. Anything but this.

I don't even know where to begin on these PSAs. Everything is terrible. Everything they EVER film on this show is terrible, but this one is particularly terrible because there's a really important message being "thrown under the bus," as they say in Bachelor-speak. Here's a list of things that DO NOT MAKE ME MORE INCLINED OR INFORMED TO GIVE BLOOD TO SICK PEOPLE, which also sound like Mad Libs inspired by a creep's vivid nightmares:

Pubes hotglued to a man's waxed chest.

A french maid and a ... hooker? fighting over a Just For Men model.

A man feeding a lesbian who has been inexplicably paralyzed.

A dominatrix drinking a cosmopolitan in a diner and kicking another patron in the face.

A Twilight-inspired mid-life crisis.

Melissa jumps into a scene she's not supposed to be in and attacks Brad with her cougar mouth, proving beyond all doubt that she is not just insane, but dangerous. The other women talk about her in the way key witnesses always remember the scene before the killer SNAPPED:  "She's acting a little weird today," "She's kinda losing it," "She's a little ... off." The countdown to Melissa's self-destruction has begun. Put on your brain armor, it's gonna be messy.

While all this on-camera chaos is going on, Michelle is backstage dressed as Rainbow Brite at a rave, fuming over Brad making out with all these other women on her birthday. On HER birthday. On her BIRTHDAY. Not her 29th birthday. Not her 31st birthday. HER 30TH BIRTHDAY. She's just sitting there going, "ON MY BIRTHDAY?" and not feeling special at all. Special the way you're supposed to on your birthday, and it IS her birthday, didn't you hear? This is NOT the way she imagined spending her birthday, feeling like just another number to the guy she signed up to be just another number to! NOT ON HER BIRTHDAY. 30 long centuries since she hatched deep within the molten bowels of the Earth's core and clawed her way to its surface, beginning her reign of terror that still holds strong today. AND WE WERE SUPPOSED TO THROW HER A PARTY!

All I want for my birthday is to control Brad, like this. Like a little puppet. See?

So Michelle changes out of her sad clown hooker in the 80s outfit and back into her slutty birthday cowgirl outfit and cries about it. When he goes over to comfort the whining birthday girl, she puts Brad in a deep trance, forcing him to promise that he will keep her around and give her the Group Date Rose because I don't know if you heard BUT IT'S HER BIRTHDAY.

At the PSA "after-party" (since they have so much hard work to celebrate!), Melissa the psycho and Raichel the manscaper get in a fight about who's more childish and inane, but it's a real stalemate! Guess we'll have to wait for the rematch. Chantal's got the right idea: "The sooner they kill each other off, the easier it's going to be for me to end up with Brad."

My thoughts exactly.

Michelle ("I don't know if you got the memo, but it's my birthday") steals Brad away and mounts a double trance on him where she tells him that his body is made of walls and she wants to dissect him by peeling his skin off. He's so far under her spell that he's into it. Compelled by a dark force too strong to ignore, Brad gives Michelle the rose, and she ingests it, for it shall make her mortal body stronger:

"I got a rose, I got a rose, I got a rose," she whispered into the amulet, and it glowed fiercely, as if in reply, "Yes master."