CHRIS // week three

Can we chat rill quick? About my dead husband?

JA: I'm all for a crossover, ABC, but this Jimmy Kimmel nonsense was way too much. Every time I thought he was gonna go away, he didn't go away. From his forced "jokes" about having sex with all the girls to that Costco date to being gross in the hot tub with Chris and Kaitlyn, I thought this whole idea fell ridiculously flat. But I don't want to get ahead of myself.

SA: So, ratings are down this season. Big surprise, ABC, you chose fucking Chris Soules. Who I hate. But, more on that later. I would say this Jimmy Kimmel thing was to compensate for those ratings but they filmed it months ago, so I don't know what the incentive was, other than to wink to the audience. Because having Jimmy Kimmel highlights how fake and unnatural this situation is, which viewers know anyway, but like to suspend their disbelief. With JK in the house, that is just not happening. However, I must say that I love Jimmy Kimmel and I hate Chris. So, I was just glad there was another lead on whom to focus.

When Chris announced that the women would have another man in their lives this week, some amazing girl replied with, "Is it an animal? A pig?" Bonus points to that young lady. I couldn't figure out who said it.

Now, this ain't my first time at the Bachelor rodeo, so I get that the early-season dates are super low-budget in order to compensate for all the world travel that happens later on. But I didn't get this Costco trip at all. First of all, who were those random children pushing around Chris and Kaitlyn in that giant inflatable ball? Second of all, why did they buy literally all of the ketchup in stock? If I had ketchup on my Costco grocery list, and then showed up to find that it had all been bought as part of some dumb Jimmy Kimmel joke, I would have been pissed. Third of all, they had to buy furniture? You mean there's nowhere for three people to sit and eat in Chris's Bachelor house? The hell?

I kind of disagree about the Costco date. I thought it was a fun idea, the fact that the date card said, "unlimited appetizers" and then they show up at Costco. That's a great, joke! The thing I didn't like was how Chris was such a baby about it. He was stomping around like, 'where's my helicopter! I want a helicopter! and 25 more women's bare legs to rub.' Also, 'enough ketchup to fill a hot tub' was clearly a joke, the fact that Chris and Kaitlyn took is so literally was the real life equivalent of when Valerie bought Seth Rogen the ham on the Comeback.

And then, Jimmy doesn't just join them for a drink. He sits down to dinner, between them, and asks questions that sound like they're coming out of a 12-year-old boy's mouth. (Although his hard-hitting investigative journalism did reveal that Kaitlyn is down with some Fantasy Suite sex. Jury's out on how Farmer Chris feels about that.) Then he gets into the hot tub and says something else gross while eating a chicken wing. Get me out of here.

Kaitlyn is not okay with fantasy suite sex with multiple partners. Kaitlyn is a 'cool girl', and she's clearly more interested in impressing Jimmy Kimmel than she is in Chris. But I don't want to be mean, I would want to impress Jimmy Kimmel more than I would want to sit on Chris's lap too. And  I like Kaitlyn, I can't wait to see her on Bachelor in Paradise this summer, but she and Chris have NO CHEMISTRY and I hate watching them pretend to (I hate a lot about this season). Can I take yet another moment to lament that we are not watching Jef or Arie right now??

THEN (because he's just not ever going away), Jimmy Kimmel subjects about 12 of the girls to a hoedown involving various farm tasks. And it appears that no season of the Bachelor is complete without a race to guzzle goat's milk as quickly as possible. Jillian, who apparently has sewn two headbands together and is calling them shorts, is the odds-on favorite, because she spent the whole night before doing squats, but she's edged out by Carly, who is also a person I do not ever remember seeing.

(glad you brought up that milk thing so I didn't have to!)

Luckily, everyone gets a break from Jimmy with a little rooftop cocktail party post-hoedown, where Kale's Mom straight up asks Chris why he's making out with all of the people on earth. It got a little awkward after she asked that, but I don't blame her. A girl needs to know if she's gotta pick up some Abreva on the way home.

Bonus points to Ashley S for the look on her face when Chris gave Becca the rose. It was a look I shared.

Then we have Whitney, who literally shed tears when the date card arrived with her name on it. She had all night to get ready for her date, so naturally she picks out a sensibly distressed denim vest and a giant necklace from that rack right by the register at Chico's. Sartorial choices aside, I am rooting for Whitney. She seems fun and easygoing and genuine and like she shouldn't be moving to Nowheresville, Iowa.

I like Whitney too. And let's not forget that Whitney didn't get any dates last week, or the week before (including group dates). That means she has been trapped inside Bachelor Mansion for over two weeks! If I had been forced to stay in the same house for that long, and then a little piece of paper in middle school handwriting declared my release, if only for a day, I might start crying too.

The whole wedding crash was a fun little way to cap off their date, but I laugh out loud at any suggestion that it was "spontaneous." All I can picture is a bunch of PA's running around that wedding getting all those hundreds of people to sign releases. I loved seeing the occasional blurred-out face of someone who was like, "NOPE."

So, the moment I was starting to settle back into real life and maybe thinking that Jimmy Kimmel on this show was just a nightmare, he reappears to tell the girls that the evening cocktail party is scrapped in favor of a pool party. So many bikinis, so much white wine being drunk out of straws. But of course, it's not a pool party until Julia With An E tells the gut-wrenching story of her husband's suicide. As we all know here in Bachelor Nation, stories of personal trauma are a great way to quickly generate false intimacy between you and the Bachelor. But as genuinely awful as this story was, I found it kind of gross. I couldn't connect emotionally the way that Julia With An E (and the producers) wanted me to.

This was a horrific story. A lot darker than most traumas that used to come up on this franchise (though they've been raising the bar steadily for awhile now). But man, a pool party is not the place. I felt bad for Juelia, but still can't believe she could pour her heart out like that to a shirtless bro-slut wearing a leather necklace. Talk about any port in a storm. Jesus.

The rest of that pool party stressed me ALL THE WAY OUT. Kim Kardashleyan (I'm still working on that pun) finally cracked under all that stress. In her mind, she'd made a deal with Jillian to let her stay alone with Chris in the hot tub as long as she could have next up. But then, "next up" turned out to be, like, 30 seconds. I don't know, Ashley, maybe it's time to step up your game. I could accomplish (and have accomplished) quite a lot in a hot tub with only 30 seconds. I can see how, under the influence of about a gallon of Pinot Grigio, it could be a bit too much pressure, though. But she pulled it out in the end. Never underestimate Kim. This girl is emerging as the most entertaining woman of the season.

Let me just take a moment here to say why I hate Chris so much and why I find this season so difficult to watch. He's a man who probably hasn't dated that much, so is looking for all the action he can get. I realize it is polarizing to say 'Chris shouldn't be kissing all these women'.  Cynics (and Jimmy Kimmel) will always counter, 'isn't that the point of the show?' And yes, to an extent it is. But, Chris does not seem to have any connection whatsoever with most of the women he is kissing, caressing, and taking into his bedroom like a high school boy. Usually on this show, physical intimacy is a sign of the relationship progressing. Yes, that happens with more than one person (on the bachelor and the bachelorette), but it doesn't usually happen with EVERYONE. Take Amber's elimination tonight: on the group date, Chris was all over her. Yes, she was the aggressor, but this early in the season, the lead pretty much knows who they plan on keeping around, and acts accordingly. Chris had no problem hitting it and quitting it with Amber- giving her false hope, then sending her packing. The intimacy was fully selfish on Chris's part (as it appears to be with most of these women.) That, to me, makes Chris a despicable lead. Much more so than Juan Pablo, who in his defense, was at least good television. Because the other thing about Chris is that, he's boring as fuck. ABC is leaning so hard on all these farm metaphors because we literally know nothing else about Chris. They even had to bring in a late night TV host to make the show more interesting.

Also, on this season, the women who Chris is not making out with / treating as objects, etc...and with whom he's taking things a bit slower (their choice, not his) are the ones who appear to be emerging as front runners (Whitney, Becca). This makes the whole season a gross and regressive lesson in  'the rules' and feels a lot dirtier and meaner to women than the show usually comes across.

In the end, no real shockers at the Rose Ceremony, as three more women I couldn't distinguish from carefully coiffed honeydew melons are sent packing. As is Jimmy Kimmel, whom I hope to never again see on this show.

I miss Kacie B. I miss everyone, from every other season. #neverforget