Bachelor in Paradise, Week 3: For all the Wrong Reasons

I can't even get into a top five this week, because it was really all about one situation: Joe vs. Everyone not Named Sam.  We'll get into that in a second, but first, a few other observations:

• What happened to Ashley I? She was the unquestioned star of the first week, and I feel like we've seen nothing of her since....except for her weird way of peeing in the ocean.  Why not wade out to your waist and then pee?  Why squat in the surf?  So bizarre.  Anyways, we need more of her and her special brand of awkwardness.  Looks like we might get it in the coming weeks.
• Clare's Raccoon This used to be funny, now it's just overblown.  Wasn't the raccoon in Paradise last week?  Now he's at her house?  It's just too much.  Also, her freaking out that there's nobody to love her has got to stop.  I can promise you, there are hundreds of guys out there that would date Clare.  Take this guy for example:
  

  @Clare_Crawley I joined Twitter to remind you that you're a beautiful person. Your actions speak louder than TV editing. You deserve love.

  — Terrace Althouse (@TerraceAlthouse) August 12, 2015

  
  
  She's got options, so don't act like the fact that a bunch of drunk fame-whores not wanting to hook up with you is the end of the world.
• The return of Crazy Ashley S. I think this woman is quite possibly the smartest person ever to be on this show, and she's a HAIR STYLIST.  I think she understands people and their intentions incredibly well.  And I think she tried to play it straight for Dan.  But when Dan got bored with her, well.....now it's time for the circus to come to town.  And while I love grounded, intelligent Ashley, half-cocked, bird-talking, crazy-eyes, "MESA VERDE" Ashley is so much better for television.  The only problem is that nobody wants to sleep with that version, so her time on the show is probably numbered.
• Bachelor Math Every episode, some cast member gives us a break down of who's there and who has to leave, like it's a freaking third grade math problem. There are TEN girls here now, and only SEVEN guys. That means that THREE girls are going home this week.  We know how it works, we're not morons.  Yet every week, they explain it to us like it's this big surprise. "Three you say?!?  Holy crap, I had no idea!"

Ok, now back to the main event.  You might not agree with me on this, but....I think Joe is getting a bad rap.  He's a douche, but is he really that much more of a douche than JJ (with his moronic pickup lines and misogynistic comments like "she's not on my plane intellectually, but she's got a couple nice assets that make us a good couple?"  Is he worse than lyin'-ass Josh who's poppin Molly at the club then telling Tenley "nah, girl, that was a one time thing?"  I don't think so.  It was revealed during the show that the cast members submit a list of people they'd like to bang, and ABC happily obligies like the madam at a Las Vegas brothel.  Joe was there to meet Sam.  Sam wasn't there.  Joe needed to stick around to spend time with Sam.  When Joe showed up, Ashley S was with Dan, Jade was with Tanner, Clare had Mikey/Jared, Tenley was occupied with most of the other dudes there, Carley and Kirk were joined at the hip.....he didn't have a lot of options.  He basically dangled that date out there like a worm on a pole and waited for a fish to take a bite.  You know who bit?  Juelia.  The fish that needs love more than anyone not named Clare.  She asked to go on the date with him.  He needed a rose, she needed to feel special.  Did he take it too far?  Probably.  But remember, guys were already starting to run to Juelia saying that he was a bad dude.  He had to say that he was interested in her daughter and contemplating a move to Oregon (we don't want you, Joe) and make out with her to make sure she didn't doubt him enough to give her rose to a "nice" guy like Mikey T. or Jonathan.  And it worked.  

Then, we had to go through literally four hours this week of people trying to get him to admit to being a bad guy.  First the guys have a shot.  Joe tries to downplay his relationship with Sam prior to the show.  The guys know he's lying.  They tell the girls.  The girls try talking to Sam.  Sam shuts them down.  Now all of a sudden, Sam is somehow responsible for Joe's bad behavior.  This is a girl move that I never understand.  Your friend gets cheated on, and it's somehow the other woman's fault?  I just don't get it.  Apparently Sam and Juelia were friends prior to coming on the show, but when Sam asked Joe to go on the date, Juelia didn't go over to her and say "hey look, we've got a good thing going, could you maybe pick someone else?"  She just let her go.  This is followed by the comically idiotic scene of Joe and Sam, who have MICROPHONE PACKS STRAPPED TO THEIR BODIES, trying to have a "secret" conversation behind a bunk bed.  Essentially the only parts of their bodies hidden from the camere were their faces and their knees, yet they think they're hidden?  This is the toddler philosophy of hide n' seek - if you can't see my face, I'M INVISIBLE.  Also, you could literally BE invisible, and we'd still hear everything you say thanks to the aforementioned microphones.  It was pathetic to watch.  

But the real absurdity of the whole situation is that people keep bringing this up to Joe OVER and OVER and OVER, but I don't know what their end game is.  To catch him in a lie?  We already know that he lied.  He's admitted to using Juelia to stay around to get time with Sam.  To get him to apologize to Juelia?  What will that solve?  Juelia isn't going to forgive him, and she's not going to get that time back.  Multiple guys have said "Juelia spent that time with Joe that she could've used to cultivate a relationship with someone who actually liked her back."  WHO IS THIS MYTHICAL PERSON?  They've all had a chance to establish that connection.  Mikey tried, and got shut down.  Jonathan made an attempt, but that went nowhere too.  Juelia is the Mikey T. of the girls:  everyone of the opposite sex loves her as a person, but nobody wants to date her.  The only difference is that Juelia isn't throwing herself at every guy she talks to.  It really seems as if everyone wants Joe to break up with Sam, admit he treated Juelia badly, and then GET BACK TOGETHER WITH JUELIA.  This is insane.  Nobody wants that, yet that's what they all seem to be implying.  

Now, if you want to knock Joe for calling Juelia stupid, for yapping about people being 35 and "running around on a TV show" as if he won't be doing the same damn thing if offered a spot in five years (he's 28), or for just being a caveman with hair products, go for it.  But this bashing of him for maneuvering to get a date with the girl he actually wants to date has to stop.  He made the case that Jared went on a date with Ashley, made her feel special, then went after Clare.  You could say that Dan is doing sort of the same thing to Ashley, only he at least told her he didn't see a future with her.  Point is, he's still sucking face with Amber hours after ending it with Ashley.  It's all crap.  They all want to be on the show as long as possible, to get atrocious sunburns and free booze and have a better chance of not having to get a real job when the show ends.  So let's just move on to something else, shall we?  I'm done with this.

Bachelor in Paradise, Week 2: Put the Molly in the Coconut......

So this week continued on the themes of last week:  Lauren I. continues to hate being there, Mikey continues to not have any sort of a clue about how people perceive him, and everyone continues to apparently disregard every warning they ever heard about using sunblock.  Onto this week's power rankings:

Women in their 30's: I'm not sure when the switch actually happened, but the women attracting the most men are the elder stateswomen of the group.  Clare has multiple guys angling for her (or had, until her rambly speech about how her friends never ask her how she's doing or what she wants), Tenley barely makes it back to the cabana before a new dude scurries her off to some other part of Mexico attached to her lips, and Juelia....well Juelia has a lot of guys using her to get a rose.  It's like a four hour weekly infomercial for cougarlife.com:

Joe:  Definitely not the most popular guy around, but boy did he ease right on in to that villain role.  He finds the desperate widow who doesn't really have an attachment to anyone and makes her feel special to earn him a rose to apparently hang around to meet a girl named Samantha that nobody really remembers except for him.  Of course he says all the right things to her while telling production assistants that she's "not very smart" and sucks at kissing and all sorts of other unflattering things.  Joe's a jerk, but as pointed out on After Paradise, he has to do something to get a rose from a girl in order to even have a chance to connect with Samantha, who isn't even there yet.

Josh:  Who saw the drug thing coming?  The backwater yokel from smalltown Idaho gets a little taste of the nightlife and starts changing the words of Harry Nilsson's classic song:

Put the LIME in the coconut, idiot!

I'll bet that bar he referenced in LA that's passing out drug filled coconuts is pissed.  Juelia should take him out on a date, because you know he'll take her extra "e." (drug pun, and also a good reminder that Juelia spells her name wrong.) Of course, when Tenley questions him about it, he shrugs it off like it was no big deal.  If I remember correctly, he got booted from Kaitlyn's season after saying something to the guys and then flat out denying it to Kaitlyn in front of them, or something along those lines.  So it isn't this guy's first rodeo with "misremembering" what happened.  Of course Tenley gives him the rose, apparently oblivious to red flags.

Ashley S:  Count me among the people who think the whack job thing is basically her Verbal Kint persona that hides the Keyser Soze underneath.   Once she got on the Bachelor with Chris Soules, she realized he was a doof and had to get out of there....but how to do it while still ensuring she would get the level of fame that would allow her to continue to capitalize on her appearance?  Act like a psychopath.  As a result, she goes Mesa Verde on people and talks to animals, parlays the nutjob act into a spot on Bachelor in Paradise, where she meets Dan, a guy with an acutal personality, talks to a few parakeets for effect, and poof....she's happy and can collect appearance fees for the next couple years.  She seems like an actually intelligent person, and one of the first people to see through Joe.

Jonathan:  This guy.  He goes from playing the token minority guy on Kaitlyn's season, to Mr. "I've had threesomes with sisters and, oh yeah, did I mention I've bagged my fair share of virgins?" in the first week, to Joe's patsy in the second week.  Did Joe have his kid tied up in a Brooklyn basement? (Notorious BIG "Hypnotize" reference)  I just didn't get it.  He's crying and apologizing to Joe for what?  For telling Juelia what he observed?  It was all so weird.  Also weird was his spot on After Paradise, where Mean Jenny from Twitter says that Joe did him a favor by making him likeable again after the "virgin" comments.  No.  This is not true.  He's not likeable, he's an idiot.  This guy can't think for himself.  I'm worried about his child.  

After Paradise:  Tenley was the star of this week's episode, but I really felt bad for her as they continued to bring up the fact that her ex dumped her and put a baby in a new girl a few months later.  "Didn't your ex have a baby the same day this show debuted?  How do you feel about that?"  Why do they ask these questions?  Then, when she says that she has no animosity towards them, and that the new girl is actually quite nice, Mean Jenny from Twitter screams "so what, you're gonna babysit for them?"  No, idiot.  Mean Jenny annoys the crap out of me.  Also, Tenley seems like the kind of girl that guys on reality shows like the idea of:  cute, nice, energetic, normal.  If the guys are Brad Pitt (they're not, but just go with me), she's Jennifer Anniston.  You know how that ended up:  she got Jolie'd right out of that relationship.  Juelia is an Anniston too.  I wouldn't be surprised if it happened to both of them here in the coming weeks.

Bachelor in Paradise, Week One - We need to talk about After Paradise

So we're off and running on Bachelor in Paradise.  It's pretty fantastic....in fact, it almost always seems to rejuvenate my love-hate relationship with this franchise after slogging through the regular shows, which always seem about three episodes too long.  It always seems like the more serious the relationships become on the Bachelor/ette, the less interesting they get.  However, there's no marriage /commitment pressure in Paradise, so people are more willing to be flippant with their affection, and it makes for some great "eh...he'll do" hookups.  Likewise, with a more equal distribution of the sexes, there's more opportunities for sparks to fly.  Nothing's better than the "I really hit it off with this dude, he's AMAZING, and I think he feels the same about me!" followed by some new floozy coming in with a date card and taking Mr. Perfect out to a sexy salsa dancing class.  The heat, humidity, hormones and hooch (the 4 H's of good summer TV) all combine for some truly epic meltdowns.

I'm not going to go into a long breakdown of the episodes, but let's do a power rankings of the competitors:

Ashley I: Unquestioned star of the show.  Refers to anyone over 30 as an "old lady," actually said the sentence "I could give a crap about Cinderella, Jasmine is MY princess!", and when feeling her relationship with Jared was threatened says she needs to "get drunk and claim my steak."  Methinks she might've already been drunk.

Claim it!

Mikey T: Call him a meathead, call him a beefheart, call him Jersey Shore, whatever you call him, he's hilarious.  He referred to himself as the Alpha Male, despite the fact that he takes almost no steps to establish dominance over anyone, in fact at one point giving Tenley advice on how to get another man to notice her.  Once he set his sights on Lauren, his first thought is to take his shirt off.  However, he can't just simply take his shirt off - he has to ANNOUNCE that he's taking his shirt off to make sure everyone gets a good look.  Furthermore, I don't know that there's any time a man should be shirtless while wearing slacks/khakis regardless of his physique.  Jeans are a bit of a gray area for me, I'll need some sort of ruling from someone who is physically attracted to men.  But really he takes the second spot for his performance on the date with Clare, when he said his favorite position was  the "Downward Clare" and then lets everyone at home know that he really wants to have sex with her in that position.  Such a classy individual.  Even better, after Clare lets him know that she's there to "explore every opportunity" and hasn't had a chance to talk to some of the guys yet, Mikey responds with "I really want to kiss you right now."  I don't think he heard a single word she said.  It's like his brain only processes visual stimulation.  I love this guy.

Kirk/Carley: Goddamnit, I actually like these two.  They act like normal people.  Teasing each other about their quirks, awkwardly trying to figure out the right time to kiss, and making fun of the other people there.  I hope they make it.

Jared:  Ashley I., Tenley, Clare......really?  How is this guy the "it" guy this season?  He's not particularly funny, he kind of looks like a rodent (not his fault, but still) and he stubbornly wears facial hair despite the fact that it looks awful on him.  I just don't get it.  He is nice, which is an honest to goodness quality that is desirable in the real world, but typically not catnip for desperate women on a reality show.  

Lauren I: pains me to include her here, but nobody else really did anything memorable (Ashley "MESA VERDE" S.  got sent to the  ER and even that was pretty boring!) and she was at least interesting, from her opening "I'm the opposite of a virgin" statement, to her confusing "I hate being here attitude" despite there being no real reason for her to have come in the first place, to the almost constant pleasure she derives from tearing apart what little self esteem her older sister has.  

Most Unexpected Moment: Jonathan letting us know he's had a threesome with two sisters, and that it didn't feel nearly as "dirty" as he thought it would, and then letting us know that he's been intimate with a couple of virigins too, and that while they "might require a little more work" they're also fun.   Where the hell did that come from?  Like nothing that happened on Kaitlyn's season led you to believe that this guy was the type of guy to casually brag about his sexual conquests, especially since he got absolutely nowhere with Kaitlyn and has yet to even talk to a girl on the show that I've seen.  I'm tempted to call shenanigans in on his Penthouse confessions.

After Paradise:  THIS WAS AMAZING.  I've never really been into these "after the show" things before...in fact I go out of my way to avoid shows like Talking Dead, but I may have to re-evaluate my stance after watching this.  It was incredible.  The unquestioned star of the show was the lady whose name I  didn't get, but she's essentially a female me who just talks crap about the show and its contestant and someone decided it'd be a good idea to let her say these things to people's faces.  I figured she might be a little tentative and hesitant in her first national TV appearance, but homegirl took her earrings off and got FIERCE.  She made really off color sexual innuendos (the chicken or the egg comment was incredible), she said Jillian had a hairy ass or a penis (or both!), and just basically said the most "OMG" statement she could think off as fast as possible before Harrison could cut her off.  She's definitely that friend that you have that everyone invites to parties, has a ton of followers on Twitter, is super fun to be around, but inevitably gets way too wasted and has to be helped out of the bar and ends up sleeping alone on her own couch every night.  I picture some guy asking her friends about her, and the girlfriends saying "she's amazing!  So funny, smart, sexy....I LOVE HER!" and then when the guy asks to be set up with her, the girlfriends all look at each other and say "yeah......well.......I'm just not sure she's your type......" because she's such a disaster in one on one situations.  It's fascinating television.