La Isla del Encanto y Chica Desnuda

You'd think an episode that features Courtney getting totally nude would be a high point in the season, but it sure didn't feel that way to me.  I think we're getting some fatigue due to the large number of women who have no business still being there.  The downside to 25 women is that it takes an eternity to get rid of them all once we tire of them.  The tribe needs to speak more quickly because Ben is incapable of feigning interest in even three of these women.  I'm starting to pay more attention to Ben's temperamental hair again, and that can't be a good sign.

I think by now we've come to expect the gratuitous product placements and commercial sponsorship that occurs during a show (Seinfeld used to feature a new Mac every season), but there no way to yell out a gravely-throated "PUERTO RICO DOES IT BETTER" and have it sound in any way natural.  Stick with the lingering shots of "W Spa & Resort" and fleets of Honda RAV-4's instead.  If I'm visiting PR, it's for the sun and fun, not the awkward plug.  Just for that, I'm going to the Dominican Republic instead.


Not to say that Nicki made the best decisions in getting ready for her date (she probably could have done without the weeks-old chipped yellow nail polish), but she put a lot more effort into things than Ben did.  Sure, he knew he'd be picking up some plantation era duds in Old San Juan after that fake rainstorm, but the hot pink bacon necked t-shirt and gray Old Navy bargain bin shorts short said "I dare you to make me care about how I look."  I'm honestly sad to report this, but the more I see of Nicki, the less I like her.  Not because she's a bad person or anything, but it's just a shame to see those good looks wasted with such a one-dimensional personality and a brain that doesn't seem to have sufficient internal wiring.  There are times when I wonder how she can successfully feed herself.

Voted "best dressed," under $10 division.

Nicki is probably the most desperate of all of these women to find a husband, and she makes it very clear that it almost doesn't matter who the guy is as long as she can sign her name with "Mrs." again.  She seems to wear the "divorced" tag like it's a scarlet letter that she can't wait to rid herself of.  Still, I paused for a moment when she said she'd be "bummed" to go home after her one-on-one date with Ben.  Bummed?  For as overwrought as she gets at times, I was expecting something more like "suicidal."

The success or failure of the show doesn't rest on Ben's shoulders, and thank god for that because he's working intently to make this show extremely difficult to watch.  My least favorite moments are the segments where he tries to convince us just how much potential he sees in certain women.  With Nicki, he feels like a "kid" and thinks this day is going to go "extremely WELL" with special inflection on the "well," for whatever reason.  By now, you've taken stock of Ben's odd mannerisms, and if we give him a pass on the dancing for a moment, he has this strange tendency to put emphasis on words that don't require it.  He also gets this confused look on his face as if to say, "I can't believe I just said that I would have a great day with this woman."  In many instances, Ben acts like something of an entitled dick.  He's acquired a large head throughout this process, and some of the girls have been dutifully put in their place for thinking this is your usual relationship dynamic.  Well, it's not.  It's one-way traffic, as Martin Tyler would say.  Know your role, Emily.  We'll let you know when we need a case study on cholera outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa.


Being a fresh divorcée, the producers promote the idea that Nicki is a deeply flawed woman who can only be fulfilled by marrying again.  And boy, has she ever come to the wrong show to fill that void.  Though we have a rich history of forced moments to sift through with this franchise, seeing these two sit to watch a wedding from across the street actually stands out as painfully forced.  Why would anyone want to do this in real life?  You might walk by and say, "oh, hey look... a wedding" and move on.  But no, we see these two intentionally walk to see this thing and ponder what it all means and hit us over the head with Nicki's past and supposed motivations for being on the show.  If I buy what they're selling and let myself get a little too carried away, I start to find symbolism in these images, something akin to, say, Hopper's 1925 House by the Railroad which depicts a Victorian mansion isolated by vast space and partially, yet intentionally, obscured by a lonely set of railroad tracks running perpendicular to our view.  Is marriage an elusive if antiquated notion?  Has modernity eviscerated our traditions and values?  Is monogamy rad enough to be viable?  Did someone give Courtney that "Be Nice" t-shirt?

Hopper, Edward: House by the Railroad (1925), oil on canvas (24 x 29 in)

"Nicki's been MARRIED."


Oh god, Ben, keep your pants on.  I don't know if I'm alone here, but I find it odd and maybe humorous that someone who has never been married, and gets visibly uncomfortable with the very idea of marriage, judges someone so thoroughly and harshly about their divorce.  You'd think his disdain would be for someone who stayed married, but yet he seems to treat Nicki like she's patient zero of a leper colony.  But now we're getting into Emily's area of expertise.


Any time you can pit the women against each other in teams, I think that's a good thing.  Who knew strippers VIP cocktail waitresses could play baseball?  Not Courtney.  I've seen fairly athletic dudes look like inept idiots trying to hit a baseball, so I was surprised that most of them held their own.  Yeah, it had a bit of an MTV Rock N' Jock feel to it (back in the era when they played music), but overall it was entertaining.  And these ladies were going all out too.  Even Casey S., who couldn't care less because of her boyfriend back home, seemed to be going a good 60% in this one.  I think I even heard Kacie B. call the girls "bitches" at some point.  That's pretty serious stuff.  It was an effort that Roberto Clemente would have approved of.  I would have liked more power in this game, though.  No one seemed capable of taking that noodle arm Ben deep, and he was serving up junk the whole game.  What was that fence at, 150 feet?  This is the problem with having a gaggle of 110 pound women play baseball.  And yes, there is crying in baseball.  Lots of crying.  Pitiful sobbing, really.

Maybe they used cricket scoring.

I still don't know what was up with the score.  The game was supposed to go two innings, but it was tied 6-6.  This should have been a Blue Team victory at the end of the third, but instead they went two more innings until Red pulled ahead and blanked them in the bottom of the fifth.  Win by two in the third?  Multiply by π?  Carry the three?  Fourier transform?  I'm lost here.  I'm assuming there was some reason for this and not just lousy math, although the latter seems entirely plausible to me.


Kacie actually gets Ben to admit that his previous relationships have been "INTERESTING" but largely unrequited.  He doesn't want to talk about them voluntarily, but it doesn't seem to be a sore subject or anything, just that he's already declared himself king of reality TV and doesn't care for the scrutiny.  My guess is that Ben is treating this with exactly as much seriousness as it deserves and prefers not to bare his soul lest he ruin future hook up possibilities with the other potential Jennifer Love Hewitts out there, i.e., Hollywood types who are fans of the show and will drunk tweet for attention.


Courtney is exactly correct that Kacie does come across like a little girl, baton twirling or not, and I think that's probably going to wear thin on Ben and the audience alike.  Still, Courtney seems to think four extra years of seasoning and a penchant for public nudity is winning game plan.  Could be.  It is a stark contrast, I'll give her that.  The best part of all of this is how the model can turn the gooey-sweet Kacie into a foul-mouthed sailor with almost no effort.  Courtney has this evil villain thing down pat by now.  I've read people comparing her with Vienna and claiming they're basically the same person.  Courtney isn't Vienna, folks.  Vienna was trashy, sunken-eyed, and stunningly stupid.  Yes, she made the other women angry, but mostly because of Jake's cluelessness (great how that relationship ended up).  Courtney is much more tactical and deliberate.  She's playing a game of chess, if chess was actually a much easier game to play than it is.  Chess just makes it sound important.  Most importantly for evil bitch status, she knows how to prey on womens' insecurities, having studied her own for years.  It's not easy to do what she's doing.  In fact, it's really never been done to this effect before.  Michelle tried, bless her heart, but didn't have the chops or emotional stability to make it happen.  Let's see how version 2.0 fares.  Part of it depends on how willing Ben is to play along, and he seems almost deathly afraid of a woman like Courtney.  If that's not entertaining TV, you might as well stop watching now.  "Waaa, Ben is boring."  Suck it up.  This is important television.


Elyse, who may as well have been invisible to this point, is just as young as Kacie.  She's also just as naïve, but with 95% less Kewpie Doll.  Maybe that's because she's accomplished everything she ever wanted to at 24.  It is a rockin' tan, I'll give her that.  Ben says that he "likes what he's seen" so far, and it's difficult to take issue there.  Unfortunately, that's about all Elyse brings to the table.  You know you're in trouble when Ben tells you that he's getting close to being in a serious relationship and you've yet to talk to the guy.  Pretty good chance you're not in those plans.  But we push on anyway knowing full well that Ben is going to pull a page out of the Brad Womack Official Bachelor Handbook and dump Elyse by the side of the road.  Or the moor of the dock.  Or however you want to align these analogies.  She's this season's Britt, but with a better body and an allegedly superior résumé.

"Oh that little thing we're towing?  It's your ride home."

There are worse women still hanging around than Elyse.  Way worse.  Take your pick:  Blakeley, Rachel (took me a second to jog the memory), and Casey S. are all beyond their sell-by date.  There's also Jamie about whom Ben has had nary a thought in five weeks, so she's expendable too.  There wasn't much perceivable chemistry with Elyse, and she spent an inordinate amount of time talking about getting married as soon as possible irrespective of whether she met someone interesting, so that might have been it.  Still, why throw potentially useful equipment overboard when there's tons of jetsam you could dump instead.  I mean, Rachel?  Ew.

With Elyse gone, that's one more "incredible, incredible woman" that is sent home by dinghy.  David Gray's "This Year's Love" is starting to sound like a funeral dirge.


As far as I'm aware, there are no "rules" to the show that say you have to sit on your hands and wait for the next thing to happen, so Courtney storming the beach with her nude assault has to be considered a rare act of honest individualism and, I want to say "outside the box" thinking, but it may have been firmly inside the box.  Eventually, Brad figured out Michelle.  Ben isn't figuring out Courtney yet.  He's barely able to keep up and even looks nervous around her.  I don't really care if these two have a connection or not.  What really matters is how things play out in the hen house, and my guess is that it won't go over well.  Is there no one that can trip Courtney up on the way to the end zone?  She's practically high stepping all the way down the field.  It's getting ridiculous at this point.  I'm trying to figure out which of these women can throw a wrench in this plan, and I'm coming up empty.  All of the strong-ish personalities are gone for various reasons (perceived lesbianism, etc.), and all you have left are needy crybabies.  I think the only thing that can stop this train is Courtney pulling a Michelle and unleashing the real crazy, or Ben deciding for himself that her mouth really is as weird as it seems.  I've conjectured that Ben is taking this show about 30% seriously, so there's a path for Courtney to win.  A very real path.

"Those other girls?"

Blakeley got a little more camera time this episode and spent it begging to stick around through the trip to Panama.  She pulled out all of the stops, even calling Ben "charismatic."  He even had to have smirked at that.


I feel a little stupid, and maybe even used, by endorsing Emily early on in this blog.  That was severely short-sighted by me, and it was probably fueled in part by hubris after essentially calling J.P. as the winner in week 1 of The Bachelorette last summer.  Of course, guys are like a Golden Book compared to women who are more like a Joyce novel, but nonetheless, I should have seen the vulnerability and telltale weakness in Emily's game.  I guess I was drawn in by remnants of normality, but didn't consider that she hadn't been battled tested yet.  I hated her rap shtick on night one, and that memory should have stuck with me longer than it did.  We've rarely seen someone self-destruct more thoroughly than Emily is right now.  She's a slow-motion trainwreck with about 50 box cars coming off the tracks one by one into a giant burning pile.  It's difficult to watch, mostly because it's completely avoidable.

Speaking of which, in late January of 1986, NASA called up the engineers at Morton Thiokol for a quick chat:

"Hey guys, NASA here.  Say, quick Q for you.  Have y'all tested those super important SRB O-rings at temperatures below 30 degrees?  You know, the ones that prevent crazy hot gasses from leaking out and blowing up the space shuttle?"  

When informed that they hadn't collected sufficient data even below 53 degrees, NASA pulled the equivalent of "fuck it" even though prescient guys like Roger Boisjoly practically begged them not to.  You know the rest.

Good thing Emily gets another shot to fix what she screwed up the first time, right?  I mean, how often do you get a second chance like that.  Phew!  Just Emily and Ben from here on out.  No distractions, no Courtney bashing.  Good.  That's settled.  So now that we've totally moved on, let's talk about what a vile skank Courtney is.


Whether Ben actually likes Courtney or "gets" her is really immaterial to me.  More interesting at this moment is how he tells Emily to "drop it and tread lightly, be careful."  I've seen probably ten full seasons of this franchise (okay, it's more) and that's got to be the most out of touch line I've ever heard from a principal.   Tread lightly?  Or what?  Is this an episode of Dexter?  Hard to find a body in the ocean, is it?  Good grief.  Ease up there, Don Corleone.


So naturally, Emily transitions into her super attractive self-loathing state which is getting to be a tired thing to watch.  Do none of these women (other than Courtney) prep for this show?  This sort of thing comes up all the damn time.  If you want to alert Ben about something, at least have the sense to do it anonymously, and certainly don't pull that same stunt twice.  Whatever part of the brain spawned this idea was probably also responsible for generating that horrid rap.

With Elyse on a pontoon back to the states, there's only one to discard.  We're still not down to any difficult calls yet, so it almost doesn't matter what he does.  Stay tuned for more bad acting and strange insistence that everyone is still in the running.

Blakeley was nearly about to hyperventilate until she got her rose.  Or at least it appeared that way.  Crisis (sadly) averted.


Casey S. keeps treading water as Courtney's personal assistant and adoring fan.  These people need staff too.


We still know nothing about Jamie.


The general consensus seems to be that Jennifer was a surprise exit, but I don't think it's all that shocking.  Ben's body language with her was always pretty lackluster, and all he could muster as a compliment was that she was a good kisser.  That never evolved into anything more substantial.  Jennifer just has a crazy look about her, and he was probably smart to cut that off early.  She was more like his stalker than anything else.  That hiccup-cry deal proved it was the correct call.


This really should have been a four-girls-go-home show.  There's still nine left?  Dear god.

Only chicas with a shot in hades of winning this thing:

• Kacie B. - Showed some sassiness and a total lack of decorum.  To quote Ben:  "It kind of turned me on."
• Courtney - Running a clinic at this point.  Will probably have to pull a hammy to lose.
• Nicki - Texas and NorCal don't really mix.  Did you know she's divorced?
• Lindzi - Disappeared on us this week.  Still digging the dimple.  Best strategy would be to challenge Courtney to a fist fight soon.

In purgatory:

• Emily - Might need some self-help books on introspection and things you can control.

Play them off, Keyboard Cat:

• Blakeley - Enough.
• Casey S. - Can only suckle at the teat of Courtney for so long.  The free vacation is about over.
• Rachel - Time to rest those awful vocal chords.
• Jamie - Total head-scratcher.  Seems lovely enough, but Ben pretty much ignores her completely.