The Bachelor recap: Skanks for the Memories

Well, I’ve got to hand it to The Bachelor. Just when I thought the show would never again achieve the level of tense awkwardness it reached during the Jason and Melissa disaster last year, we get the excruciatingly uncomfortable Rozlyn ”Hot Seat” encounter in this Women Tell All special. Truth be told, I’ve still got a little post-traumatic stress from the whole ugly experience — and just my luck, Xanax is verboten during the ninth month of pregnancy. Somehow, I’ll soldier on.

But it’s going to be awhile before we get to the woman at the center of ”the most shocking TV scandal of 2010” (I guess that’s fair, seeing as her eviction aired 11 days into the year). The episode kicks off with Harrison’s one-on-one with the Bachelor, and after lots of soft-focus replays of the Infamous Cocktail Party, Jake reveals his first thought upon hearing the news about Rozlyn: ”Did I make a mistake, coming here to find love this way?” Short answer, sir? Yes. The walk down memory lane continues with a random stop at Elizabeth/She Who Will Not Be Kissed (”I’ve had games ruin more relationships than I can count,” explains Jake), before veering into well-trod territory: Vienna and the bungee jump kiss, Tenley and the coincidental fortune cookies, and Ali, who bolted and left Jake with ”no closure.”

The clip recycling finally ends after the commercial break, when we’re treated to a ”where are they now” segment focusing on (God, I can barely type this without vomiting in my mouth) ”a sexy new phenomenon: Bachelor cast reunions.” What follows is a skanky montage of all the usual sad sack subjects: Jesse from The Bachelorette, tiara-wearing Erica from Lorenzo’s season, Nikki and Natalie the bear-lover from Jason’s season, and a bunch of other people who I couldn’t name if there was a gun to my head. (Thank God for chyrons!) Apparently what these folks do with their free time is drink to excess while exchanging bodily fluids in various sunny locales. Oh look, it’s Wes — a.k.a. ”America’s Favorite Villain.” I guess life has been treating him well since he snowed poor Jillian on The Bachelorette. ”My dating life didn’t suck to begin with, but since the show, I’m having about 1,000 times more nibbles than I did before. That’s a lot of nibbles, you know what I’m saying?” (I had to watch four times before I realized he was saying ”nibbles,” not ”nipples.”) Not everyone there is a fame whore — some folks really appreciate the ”friendships” and the ”bonds” they’ve formed while a,lherdfozjadjxldakossxs;a9oawt9aep… Oh crap, sorry — I fell asleep for a second there. Anyhow, the whole segment is essentially an infomercial for the recently announced really bad idea extension of the franchise, Bachelor Pad.

The ridiculata continues in the next act — ”The Bachelor gives back — which Harrison, bless his heart, somehow manages to introduce with a straight face: ”With great success also comes a greater obligation to give back — and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.” While Idolatry host extraordinaire Mike Slezak summed up my first reaction quite nicely — ”What are these people giving back? VD?” — after watching the segment, I changed my mind. I mean, if these folks want to extend their 15 minutes by performing charity work, more power to ’em, I guess. We see a bunch of assorted contestants and Bachelors (hey, it’s London Calling‘s Matt Grant! And world’s drunkest bachelor Charlie O’Connell!) painting murals with local children and distributing food to needy families in Los Angeles, while Harrison is shown donating a computer and other school supplies to students in St. Lucia.

NEXT PAGE: Gia, Michelle, and the 10,000-pound elephant in the room

I’ve gotta say, it’s impressive (and surprising) that producers actually devoted five full minutes of their special to, of all things, community service. Self-serving? Sure. But even a self-serving PSA about the importance of donating your time and talents to people in need is worthwhile — it’s certainly worth more than showing us five additional minutes of bachelorette bloopers (did we really need to know that Corrie farted in the RV?). And I’m not just saying all this because the segment featured my all-time favorite contestant, Michael Stagliano, whom Jillian foolishly cast aside last season. Great to see you, my break-dancing buddy!

At long last, it’s time for the ”ladies.” It’s a somewhat random group (for example, why Channy and not Elizabeth from D.C.?) but it’s no surprise that Ali gets the biggest cheer of the bunch. After the ”what a crazy season!” recap — my favorite part of which was the heretofore unheard choice sound bites from the ladies about Tenley, including ”She s–ts rainbows” (Gia) and ”I think she might dream in cartoons” (Vienna) — Harrison gets straight to the point: ”What was it about Vienna…that just pissed you girls off so much?” Ella chalks it up to Vienna being 23 and ”immature,” and that’s essentially all we get on the subject. Fine by me, because like everyone else, I just want to hear what the ”ladies” have to say about Rozlyn, a.k.a. ”the 10,000-pound elephant in the room.” Harrison is careful to set up the discussion as an objective look at ”the facts,” as producers clearly feel the need to counter Rozlyn’s denials that she had an ”inappropriate” relationship with a staffer. Gia goes first, and while she admits that she ”doesn’t know” if something sexual went on, ”Something definitely went on. Because, as her roommate, you know, I got to see where she was and where she wasn’t, and she was not in that bedroom at night.” Ashleigh follows that up with talk of ”inappropriate” behavior including ”cuddling” and ”kissing on the forehead,” but it’s Jessie who drops the biggest bomb: ”I went inside and I heard something on the stairs…. So I walked over and I peeked around, and there was Rozlyn and the producer. The producer was lying back on the stairs and she was on top of him and they were making out.” Ella also has a story to share — something about Rozlyn on all fours, presenting her behind while asking for the producer — but it’s not entirely clear what she’s talking about.

In keeping with the disjointed structure of the evening, however, Harrison suddenly steers the conversation away from Rozlyn to Gia, who is the first bachelorette to take her place in the Hot Seat. Her interview is pretty boring (”I never showed him how I felt,” yada yada yada) though she does say one truly shocking thing: ”Being on The Bachelor was probably the best experience of my life.” Gia claims the show helped her learn a lot more about herself, so I guess The Bachelor doesn’t just give back to soup kitchens and children’s charities — it also helps emotionally needy swimsuit models.

Next up in the Hot Seat is Michelle, who walks to the stage accompanied by tepid applause from the audience. Though Harrison tries to joke with her — ”She probably shed more tears per minute than anyone we’ve had on this show,” he says by way of introduction — Michelle is definitely working hard to rein in the crazy. In fact, she comes across as kind of (dare I say it?) sensible: ”Coming on to the show…to me, it’s not the true way to find love.” At this point, Queen of Bitch Mountain feels the need to pipe up and defend the franchise that may be her future employer: ”It’s a little bit offensive for me, like, for you to say you don’t believe that this is the way to find love, because I fell in love.” Shut your piehole, woman. No one asked you.

NEXT PAGE: Yes, Rozlyn, you probably should have peed first

Even Ali’s annoying interruption doesn’t rattle Michelle; in fact, she seems at peace with the fact that her behavior set her up for the requisite Crazy Edit. ”I don’t think anything really bad happened on the show with me being there,” she says. ”It’s just — there wasn’t a connection. I’ve come to find out that he really didn’t want to kiss me, which I feel was embarrassing for him to say, but, um, that’s okay, you know? Nobody’s perfect. Things happen. I have no regrets.” All in all, that’s probably the best any reality TV contestant can ever hope for, right?

Oh, goody. It’s time for Ali to take her place in the spotlight. As regular readers know, I really cannot stand her — and this cutesy-whiny-teary-phony explanation of why she left does not help matters: ”I think in the end I kind of just believed if this was really love…then it didn’t matter whether I was physically there. Even if I left and he loved me, he would come find me. He’s a pilot. I was like, ‘Get in the plane, come find me!’ And, um, he didn’t.” Yeah, sweetie, he didn’t, because he was contractually obligated to shoot a TV show, you dumbass. She does, however, eventually work her way around to offering a non-idiotic clarification about her decision: ”I have bills to pay, and my family lives in Massachusetts…. It’s not like I can just go and stay with my mom if I lose my job and my apartment.” After that, it’s on to the image-rehab portion of the discussion, as Harrison asks Queen of Bitch Mountain why she was so mean to Vienna. Stating the obvious, Ali says, ”I’m very blunt, and not in a good way sometimes!” And yes, she regrets tearing Vienna a new one after the bungee jumping one-on-one date: ”That was mean!” she admits. ”I am disappointed in my actions that night.” Ali says her former rival is being unjustly ”trashed in the tabloids,” and adds that in the future she hopes to ”choose love over work.” All of this is her way of saying, ”America, please don’t send letter bombs to ABC when they inevitably name me the new Bachelorette.”

Finally, finally, finally, we come to Rozlyn, who’s been sequestered in the back this entire time for dramatic effect. The discussion starts off calmly enough, as Harrison tells Rozlyn that he has ”no ill will” toward her. That said, he continues, ”You have denied, or even said we fabricated, much of what was reported. So I want to start with what is true, in your mind.” The ousted bachelorette says her ”friendship” with Unnamed Producer Guy (UPG) began when he interviewed her in her hometown, and nothing physical ever happened. So why, presses Harrison, didn’t Rozlyn protest the night of the cocktail party when he told her she was being booted for ”inappropriate” behavior? Her answer contains a liberal amount of revisionist history: ”Because you didn’t accuse me of that…. You very clearly said… that what he was doing was inappropriate.” And by ”what he was doing,” she means the fact that UPG let her call her son on his phone. Of course, anyone who watched the episode where Rozlyn was kicked off knows that Harrison did in fact accuse them both of wrongdoing; his exact words were, ”You entered into an inappropriate relationship with one of our staffers.” (And while that night’s conversation was no doubt edited, Rozlyn did at one point respond with, ”So you think that there’s no other girls here that felt for other people before they came on the show?”) Meanwhile, the two other moms on the panel, Ella and Valishia, both say they were allowed to call their kids regularly. Rozlyn suggests that this was because the fathers of Ella and Valishia’s kids signed release forms — and implies that the father of her son did not — but the situation is never fully explained.

NEXT PAGE: Rozlyn hurls some accusations of her own

Harrison gets perhaps the biggest laugh of the night when he likens Rozlyn’s version of events to his son’s stories about ”unicorns and magicians and stuff.” And yes, the idea that she was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy is pretty ridiculous — if the producers were going to feed the ”ladies” fabricated stories about Rozlyn’s relationship with UPG, they certainly could have come up with something better than Ella’s butt-in-the-air anecdote and Valishia’s vague story about how she once woke up at 4 a.m. and couldn’t find Rozlyn, her roommate. But really, is there any reason for the show to be so aggressively on the defensive with her? Rozlyn’s just kind of a pathetic figure — she’s not really a dangerous target that needs to be annihilated with guided missiles of mockery.

The whole thing just gets uglier and uglier as the ”ladies” give their eyewitness accounts again (”We all saw you guys cuddling 24-7. I’ve never touched one of my male friends’ thighs,” says Christina). While Rozlyn maintains her innocence the entire time — ”On my child’s life that never happened,” she says of Jessie’s story about the stairs — she eventually bares her claws at Harrison. ”I said [to UPG], ‘Chris Harrison seems really upset, because he says he’s a friend of yours.’ He said that’s news to him, especially when you were hitting on his wife in New Zealand.” Harrison is so mad his head is about to explode, but he manages to keep it together: ”I clearly won’t dignify that with a response.” Kudos, by the way, to the producers for keeping that exchange in — if the show is going to dish out accusations, they’d better be willing to take them, too. It’s just too bad Harrison had to be the one standing in front of the bullet.

After that interview, the final segment — Jake faces the ”ladies”! — is totally anticlimactic, and I basically zoned out after the Bachelor used the phrase ”My heart was crying.” The closing blooper reel had some above-average highlights, courtesy of Harrison singing ”On the Wings of Love” and directing Jake with the classic flight-attendant two-fingered point. (Tenley popping out of the Steamer Trunk of Doom and scaring Gia sh–less was pretty priceless, too.) With that, there’s nothing left but the crying — and from the looks of the finale preview scenes, there will be plenty of that next week. So, as we wait for Jake to hand out that final rose, tell me what you thought about tonight’s viper pit of hostility. Did Rozlyn make her case or are you convinced that she’s a producer-seducing vixen? Is Ali your choice for the next Bachelorette? And most importantly, now that it’s down to Vienna and Tenley, WHO will land the man of her dreams, and WHO will go home brokenhearted? Post your comments now!

When you’re done, be sure to check out Chris Harrison’s exclusive blog on PopWatch to hear what was going through his head when Rozlyn served up that ”you were hitting on his wife” low blow — especially since Harrison’s own wife was in the audience! And if two hours wasn’t enough WTA for you, check out the super-extended deleted scene below, featuring never-before-seen moments, including the time Jake left Vienna on the Chair-O-Plane a little too long at Six Flags. (Hmmm…maybe he should have kept her up there for good.) Also, one programming note: I’m due to give birth any minute, and though I’m currently in negotiations with my baby to stay put until after the Bachelor finale on March 1, it’s more likely that I’ll be heading out on maternity leave this week. Don’t worry, though — we’ve got a great writer lined up to recap the big finish on Monday, and of course Chris Harrison will be blogging the finale as well. Thanks for coming this far on Jake’s ”journey” with me. Now, let’s talk Bachelor!

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