Oh great... it's Ben Flajnik.

Welcome back, internet friends.


Some of you might be wondering what happened to this blog after I left it for dead on the side of the highway mid-season during Bachelor Pad.  Have a baby.  You'll see how much time you have for trivial endeavors.  I think there's some way to make money doing stuff like this, but I haven't figured that part out yet.


Anyway, I think we're back for good now.  The wunderkind is nearly five months old, babbling, and sleeping more than three hour stretches, so let's not tempt fate further by discussing it here.




There are few things like probing life's deepest and most perplexing mysteries.  That's why, after a rather long viewing hiatus, I was compelled to flip on the TV to follow one man's quest to travel the world in search of clarity and understanding.  Even better if we can live vicariously through the eyes of someone who, albeit imperfect, what with his disheveled haircut and awkward hipster fashion sense, taps into something uniquely human that is implicit in all of us.

Ben Flajnik doppelgänger Brian Cox.

Of course I'm talking about that delightful BBC series Wonders of the Universe hosted by the affable Professor Brian Cox of the University of Manchester.  The Science Channel was running a marathon tonight, and who was I to pass this up?  Did you know that Cox married a blogger?


Turns out Season 16 of The Bachelor was also on tonight.  I watched that too.


I heard about Flajnik's selection several months ago, and (hopefully) like you, I was mortified.  What a terrible choice.  Long time readers of this column have come to appreciate what makes the perfect Bachelor principal:  assertive, rich, glib, confident, and just a few dashes asshole to taste.  Ben is basically none of those things.  Well, he's probably rich, but he seems more of the trust fund baby variety than the self-made man.  I mean, who starts a winery with their buddies?  People who can afford to fail, that's who.  The last image I have of Ben is a guy two months overdue for a haircut and sweating his ass off in Fiji.  There he was groveling  on one knee for that flesh-toned Smurf Ashley to marry him, and the whole scene had like 15 things wrong with it.


So now he inexplicably gets a reprise as the lead so that he can charm America with his understated wit, intelligence, and personality until we get bored and watch How I Met Your Mother instead.  Well, we wouldn't do that, but it's the best idle threat I could muster.  But hang on.  The best part about The Bachelor is that it's not The Bachelorette, so the real stars are the women, and it looks like we've got a pretty good crop of crazy, hot, and crazy-hot this year.  Because I'm a male, here is my obligatory top five:

1. Nicki - Sweet Moses on the Mount this woman is gorgeous, and she's not even the model.
2. Courtney - She is the model, and the attitude inevitably made its way to the surface.  Fine by me.  She's about as hot as Michelle Money thought she was, which is pretty damn hot.
3. Elyse - Not sure who the woman is shown the official ABC bio, but the version that walked onto the set was much more attractive.  Personal trainers never last long, but god let's hope this time is different.
4. Kacie B. - Got loads of camera time, and the camera was more than pleased.  A reasonable facsimile of Emmy Rossum.
5. Casey S. - Looked to be about 42 feet tall.  The token blonde of this tier.

This doesn't imply anything about who can, will, did, or should win.  We'll get into that later.  Actually, I should point out now that I'm not going to read spoilers, so this season I'm going to pretend like all of this is happening now, even though it actually happened like four months ago.  I'm not against spoilers, I'm just too lazy to read them this time through, and reading Reality Steve often hurts my head.  We'll see if it's any more interesting not knowing.  (Probably not.)


I kind of wanted to skip the clichéd intro, but for the sake of completeness I really couldn't do that.  So sure, I watched the glorious scenes of Sonoma half-heartedly while playing some Words With Friends on Facebook.  This is the kind of multi-tasking that every good blogger needs to hone if they want to be relevant these days.  Part of my disdain for the opening of every new season is how unfailingly cookie cutter it is.  By now we've all come to realize that Fleiss isn't going to fix what ain't broke, but you could storyboard every season with remnants of past seasons and be none the wiser.  And I'll be damned if they ever decide to not hose down that driveway before the limos pull up, as if L.A. is continually being struck by an evening deluge at just the right moment leaving a glistening sheen that captures the house lights just right.  It's a meme that will never die, like the Wilhelm scream. It's an industry joke at this point.  We did get some candid video moments of the ladies talking inside the limo.  There was also a decent David Gray tune thrown in there, which I didn't hate.  God willing, by 2025 we might see the reins handed to a less ambitious Christopher Nolan so that we can watch the season in reverse and wonder why some genius didn't think of doing it sooner.


So I guess the point of the intro is reinforcement that we'll be seeing the same tired formula, and that Ben was probably not a good choice for this role.  I openly argued that a third season of Brad Womack would trump just about anything they could come up with, but much like Jeb Bush's political aspirations, there's inevitably some fatigue that is built into the system.  Still, you know you'd watch, and it would be glorious television.  I mean that.  I really truly do with all of my heart.  We could have made it work.


I'm still a little bummed that the Amesbot 3000 didn't get a shot, but that was too "risky" for this production team.  Their failure to recognize the untapped potential of automaton-human interaction is almost offensive as a critical viewer.  It could have been special.  Just imagine this crew of hotties put in a room with a guy running an Intel quad core in his brain and some top shelf synthetic language processing algorithm developed at Carnegie-Mellon.  Hell, they could just redo Weekend at Bernies and prop up a dead guy, and the show would basically run itself.  You'd think Ben would fulfill that role to a degree (haven't checked his pulse), but the problem with him is that he's a bit too competent to really pull off what I have in mind.


Let's get to the ladies already.


We had the usual shtick:  a "never heard of it" pageant sash, an obnoxiously large hat, dorky memorized/flubbed lines, bring along grandma, ride in on a horse.  Thankfully no one was wearing a mask.  I'm not going to lose my mind over all of the stupid things that people wore or did when they came out.  It's hilarious how the talent pool collective turns on anyone who the producers convinced to do something corny.  Like, "I can't believe she rode in on a horse.  Who does she think she is?" I know these women aren't exactly sporting steel trap intellects, but c'mon.  We have nearly 25 seasons worth of data on this franchise to pull from.  I think the Egyptians even wrote about this kind of thing on papyrus.


Aside from sizing up their bodies, the most interesting part about the limo exits and brief intros is how quickly you can detect the crazy.  There were a few that just reeked of it immediately.  Jenna (the blogger) was a train wreck out of the gate.  She was about as sure of herself as Jan Brady was when Marcia started sprouting boobs.  They hit us over the head with the Carrie Bradshaw comparison (which the hairdressers did their best to hammer home), but I don't remember Carrie being that much of a space case.  Maybe Candace Bushnell was.  This reminds me to tip off Hollywood:  please stop making those awful Sex and the City movies.  Samantha is getting close to 60.


Also pinging the nutso-meter (with crazy ratings on a ten point scale):  that waify Princess of Power Shira (7.8), Lyndsie the Limey (8.4), Courtney the model (safely at 6.5 with plenty of room to grow), Dianna (6.7, though I think this is a low number), Jennifer (redheads start at 7.0 by default), "I miss my dog" Monica (7.9; she's probably this season's obligatory plant), Lindzi the equestrian (7.1), Amber Baconator (Canadians start at 8.0).  Four of them didn't live on to see a second episode.


"See you inside" count:  22 (approximate)


Ben looked absolutely terrified of most of these women, which belied his Michael Madsen-inspired Reservoir Dogs suit and skinny tie combo.  In some cases, it might have been justified, but he's already got that uncomfortable stink on him, and not in the way that made Ames a better candidate.  I'm sure he'll warm up, but we're going to need a bit more aggressiveness to make this season live up to its full potential.  I think by this point in Brad's most recent season (I still find it funny that we need to distinguish which season) he'd already bedded three women, so there's a lot of room for improvement there.  Going full bore after that stupid dentist had to have emasculated him.  Well snap out of it, Gomer.  We need to be entertained.


The ravishing Nicki seems to really like this guy for some reason.  Not sure how Ben feels about Texans, but she makes former Cowboys cheerleader Melissa Rycroft look stunningly average by comparison.  Even Ben can't screw this up, right?  She's a bit of a dim bulb, but so was Emily Maynard and I personally loved her.  I really don't care at this point.  Besides, the show's marriage track record is already pretty awful.  Count on a month or two of fun tops and maybe another few months of misery under intense media scrutiny.  Your standards change big time if you know this going in.  Don't pick a wife, Ben.  There have been exactly zero wives resulting from The Bachelor.  And no, I don't count also-ran hook ups after the fact, Jason.


Dr. Emily performing her white girl rap had to be the most cringe-worthy moment of the episode, and that includes the Jenna meltdown which was clearly overblown and egged on.  If I'm Ben, I cut Emily then and there like Kasey on the glacier.  Ice cold.


Actually, runner up for record-scratch moment was Jenna's "maybe we can share a tampon sometime."  No idea what was going on there.  "Constanza, the ocean called... they're running out of shrimp."  "Yeah, well the jerk store called, and they're running out of you!"  Zing?  Wither, Carrie Bradshaw.  Doesn't she know about toxic shock syndrome?  Then again, some of these things are obviously scripted, so Carrie lives to blog another day about how hard it is out there in the trenches with bitches being bitchy in the NYC (or L.A., whatever).  Just stick to obvious digs like Monica's bulbous schnoz.  Don't get creative in the clutch, just shoot lay ups.


Jenna's biggest problem is that she makes these strange Debbie Downer faces all the time.  You rarely see people frown as much as she does, and I think it's some kind of odd defense mechanism.  I truly believe that she's a self-loathing woman, and not just because she blogs for a living.  I mean, really, we bloggers are a jovial lot.  Mostly.  Really I'm only part time.  So...


I'm fine with Lindzi (thanks, mom) getting the first impression rose.  Whatever.  She rode in on a horse.  That has to be worth a look.  World's Biggest Dimple rose might be more fitting.  I think her personality is grating, but it's not like this is the finale or anything.  Still, there is a history of these things being predictive.  Don't see it here, though.


Let's talk about Blakeley.  I guess she is the reigning veneer queen of Season 16.  Her dental work probably makes former title holder Emily jealous.  "VIP cocktail waitress" probably needs a bit more fleshing out.  Did she ever give her number to Monica?  That little interlude reminded me of that Jersey Shore episode (ok, guilty..) where that tub o' goo Snooki and horseface Deena hooked up in Italy.  Although, even those two pretended like it never happened afterward, and at least they could claim to be shitfaced.  Sticking with the supposition that Monica is some kind of clumsy plant, I really don't know what to make of anything she does.


Did Jaclyn win a "Get Through to Round 2" contest that we missed?  Is she friends with a producer? What's going on there?


Let's consider show logistics for a minute.  They present 25 women that Ben talks to for a few hours while moderately to heavily inebriated.  It seems likely that maybe four, five tops will be interesting enough to want to keep around, four to five he'll want to strangle and hide the bodies, yet he has to keep 17.  That's a whole lot of cast that is basically irrelevant to Ben's goal of finding someone he likes at the end.  My question has always been:  how many of these women are in on it and what kinds of instructions do they get?  Safe to assume Monica is part of this cabal.  Beyond that, it's tough to tell what's going on.  They spent too much time focusing on Jenna's inadequacies.  I suppose it's fair to guess that the Monica-Jenna pair was prearranged for maximum effect.  It certainly looks like Courtney is playing the role of Michelle Money in a younger, hotter package.  I'm also curious to see how Nicki handles herself since she's got an Emily Maynard vibe going on, but is much more aggressive right out of the chute.


It still kills me that Ben is the beneficiary of all this.  He even went on a date with Jennifer Love Hewitt at some point.  There's senseless violence and evil in the world, and then there's this sort of perverse injustice.  Why, God?