Welcome back! A three-hour episode on the first Monday of the new year after a two week vacation that also happens to be the same night as the national championship and oh by the way the kids have basketball, soccer, and ballet practice was just too damn much for me, so the blogging had to wait until tonight.
Turns out, the first hour was about as necessary as the pre-game show for the Super Bowl. A couple of "Colton's a virgin jokes," people with custom Bachelor themed t-shirts explaining how attractive Colton is, a proposal from a guy who claims that he first said I love you to his girlfriend after an episode of The Bachelor, and Crystal and The Goose in a hot tub in the parking lot. How desperate to be on TV do you have to be to hang out in a hot tub in the parking lot of a TV studio? Better yet, how desperate do you have to be to be one of those nameless extras in bikini's waiting in line to get in to a hot tub with Crystal and The Goose? C'mon people, be better.
We do get to meet a few of the girls during this terrible first hour:
Cassie - the beach bum speech pathologist from California. She seems OK. Not sure I want her spending time with my kids yet, but thankfully they're well spoken young people
Alabama Hannah refers to herself as the "Hot Mess Express." This is amazing, she seems pretty fun. Curiously though, she says that she's only "kissed four boys who have been her boyfriend.....but I'm not a virgin." This is a convenient way to omit the dozens of guys who got their "one night only" ticket punched on the Hot Mess Express.
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| All Aboard! |
Katie is from "the East Coast." Maybe the vaguest location we've ever had. She now lives in California because she "loves to dance." Apparently the East Coast is still under the jurisdiction of John Lithgow in Footloose.
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| Goddamnit Katie I said NO DANCING! You go to California with that nonsense. |
Onyeakachewku is from a Nigerian family and says she's loud and obnoxious and isn't afraid to do crazy stuff in public. She may stick around for a while, but the fact we met her family during her intro video makes me think we won't be seeing them again later in the season.
Nicole from Miami is not about "the hook-up culture." She's a social media coordinator. Her brother is autistic. Somehow I don't think this is the last time we hear that this season.
Kirpa is a dental hygenist. Kirpa!
Demi is a Texas girl who starts her intro by accepting a collect call from federal prison. It's her mom. "My mom had to go to prison because of embezzlement," she says, as if embezzlement is a random thing that can happen to anyone. Man, I hope embezzlement doesn't send my mom to prison. She seems all sorts of unstable. I don't trust this one. She also compares being a virgin to only eating vanilla cupcakes - which also makes no sense. "I'm the damn confetti cake" she says, as if that's the best cupcake flavor. She's so wrong.
We also get to see Colton and his upper body that looks like someone left the needle hooked up to the air compressor a little too long. We get to hear about how he was so focused on his football career than he sacrificed relationships and having sex. You know who says that? People who are scared or unable to have the sex that they want. Honestly, it sounds like something I would've said in high school. I was way too socially and mentally unprepared to have a girlfriend or be intimate with a girl, so I ended up saying things like "I don't have time for a girlfriend," instead of the more truthful "I wouldn't know what to do with a girlfriend if I had one." That's Colton to me. He's scared to have sex. He might be more terrified of having sex than anyone else in America at this point. And to be honest, that's OK. It's better to not have sex until you're ready than to make some sort of horrible mistake with the wrong person.
(Anyone who reads this, please remind me to show the paragraph above to my children when they start dating.)
Alright, let's get this show started! The first limo seems to hold all the girls we've already met. First we see Colton get out of a car driven by an older gentlemen half his size. That guy looks like he should be riding Seabiscuit instead of sitting behind the wheel of an SUV.
Oh, apparently Tiny Guy wasn't driving. He stands in the driveway and opens the door for the first limo too. Good luck dude.
Demi introduces herself and says she "hasn't dated a virgin since she was twelve." I keep hoping that means she dated some kid from seventh grade on until the end of high school, but given the way she talks and the looks of her hometown, I'm guessing that's not the case.
Tayshia is a phlebotomist and seems nice. She gives him multiple hugs.
Heather declines to remind Colton that they've met before. Probably a good start.
Nicole says half her heart is in Havana (in Spanish), which I think is a reference to the Camilla Cabello song, but Colton doesn't get it. He just says "So you're from Havana?" Which leads to Nicole having to awkardly say she's from Miami, but her family is from Havana. That didn't go great.
Caelynn is Miss North Carolina 2018, at least that's what her sash says.
Sydney is a dancer for an NBA team. Or she was. She tells Colton she had to quit to come on the show. NBA dancers don't have a great track record on this show.
Elyse is a redhead. This makes her one of my favorites, but she plays it super straight and doesn't do anything to make me think she's going to have much of a role on this season.
Tazjuan says she hopes that she's "Tazjuan" for Colton. Then she asks what he thought of her pun. Just let it hang there.
Cassie brings some butterflies. Kirpa has a sparkly purple dress. Caitlyn pops a balloon that apparently looks like a cherry. Courtney has him hold some cards and then takes one. It's a V. She took his V-card. That was dumb.
Then we get Alex in a sloth costume who moves and talks in slow motion. Enough with the costumes, Bachelor. They're not funny, everyone hates them, and now we're going to get sloth jokes for five weeks.
Onyeka (who is not Tazjuan as I originally thought) calls him a snack and says "Momma's ready to eat." The last person to use the term "snack" to refer to a person was either The Goose or Jordan on Bachelor in Paradise, and I thought it was probably "Me Too"-ish, so I can't endorse this from Onyeka.
Tracy shows up in a cop car and pronounces herself the "fashion police."
Devin is from Medford. Gotta root for her.
Raylin uses the Chinese word for "studmuffin" which I'm 100% sure doesn't exist.
Nina speaks Croatian and might be my favorite. Liked her.
Bri fakes an Australian accent. That should be fun later.
Laura has the same dress as never been kissed Heather. Apparently this is drama in The Bachelor world.
Hannah G. is a content creator. Jobs in 2019 man, I tell ya.
DJ Catherine with her dog is going to compete with Aussie Bri for America's most hated. She loaned her dog to Colton to live with him.
Also, these people with their dogs. Like, when you meet someone for the first time and all they do is talk about how great their kids are and how important they are, that's annoying right? Now imagine it's a dog.
Erin shows up in a Cinderella carriage, which prompts Erika to say "I really could've done more than a bag of nuts." Erika just got my first impression rose.
Another girl, who brought a Georgia peach and asked him if he wanted a bite says "I need him to know I'm more than fruit." I'm more than fruit gets my last impression rose.
Then we get a whole segment of....not the show. Just former contestants talking and more people proposing at Bachelor Watch Parties. Absolutely no reason to have this be 3 hours. I like all the former contestants less than I did before I started watching tonight, and if you've read this for a few years, you know I'm not exactly over the moon for any of them. Kaitlyn Bristowe in particular has been on a downward trajectory from her first night on Chris Soules season. What a mess.
Colton then says a bunch of things we've heard every Bachelor say for the last however many seasons "I value honesty, I see my wife in this room......blah blah blah."
Demi with the felon mom gets the first alone time. She's confident that Colton has a crush on her.
Erika can't figure out why he's a virgin. This bothers her. She demands to know why. Colton again reiterates that football came first....as if no successful football player has sex. Again though, I sort of see some of high school Andy in Colton. The way he talks about it being a conscious decision, and then getting to the point that he wasn't just going to throw it away on a one night stand. That's exactly how I was with alcohol. It was a conscious decision, in that alcohol played a factor in my parent's divorce and one of my friends got suspended and had to miss part of his junior year of basketball season after being caught with alcohol. I was not going to let that happen to me, so I said "not in high school." Then I got to college and figured that I'd made it this far, why not wait until I'm 21 and actually have my 21st birthday mean something? Only by then, I had seen my friends make some regrettable mistakes, been annoyed more times than I could count by drunk people, and just basically didn't think it was something to celebrate, so I gave up on it at all.
This is where I will tell you that I'm so glad that I decided to abstain from alcohol instead of sex....one of the smartest decisions I ever made.
Colton tells Hannah G. that she made a huge impression on him and she is relieved because she was so nervous, so he holds her hands and says "here, I do this with my mom, it'll help." I'm not sure this is a good sign for Hannah that he's already associating her with his mom, or maybe it is. Either way, it's creepy to me.
Miss Carolina gets the first kiss. She says she's from Virginia, but moved to North Carolina about a year ago. Immediately I'm wondering if she evaluated the pageant scene and saw a better opportunity to succeed in North Carolina than Virginia. Was there an especially deep pool of beauty queens in Virginia in 2018, so she transferred to a smaller state for more playing time? In any event, it was a good move for her - she finished second (first runner up in beauty pageant lingo) in Miss USA, so good for her, but I bet the runner-up in Carolina is still pissed and filing appeals on her residency.
Sloth is named Suzette, but the girl inside is a Boston girl named Alex. She says her brother is the best guy in the whole world....so her brother isn't Grant. (Just checking to see if you're reading, bro!) All I really want to know about Alex is if she was wearing that dress under the sloth costume the whole time, or if she just put it on real quick before getting her one-on-one time....because if she was climbing a tree in a dress in a sloth costume, that's hella impressive.
DJ Catherine is interrupted by Fashion Cop Tracy who is then interrupted by Onyeka in a snorkel who blows a whistle and tells Colton she heard he was "drowning in bitches." Strong play Oneyka. She wasn't kidding about not giving a crap about what other people think.
Onyeka isn't taking this crap, so she pulls Catherine away to discuss her "behavior." Onyeka tells her not to be disrespectful. This is the girl who said Colton was drowning in bitches. Unreal.
Catherine clearly does not give a crap. She makes a third interruption to get some more time. As usual, the girls who haven't had time yet are pissed that Catherine keeps taking time from them, but do nothing about it but whine to Onyeka so hopefully she does something about it.
Hannah the content creator gets the first impression rose. I'm sure this is good for her career. I don't get it. All my favorites got barely any screen time, which means I'll be saying goodbye to most of them tonight. Hannah says "this validates everything." She brought an empty box because she heard Colton didn't wear undies. Validated her underwear joke?
Gotta love the girls crying BEFORE the rose ceremony. That's new.
Then we get a Chris Harrison tribute video. I think we've all made a joke about how Chris Harrison hasn't aged a bit, but when you see him in a side by side with a clip of him from Season One, you can definitely tell that he's older now. A good little montage though. More of that, less of Kaitlyn and JoJo please. And no more Ben Higgins. Ever.
Finally, it's rose time. Colton says "you all look so beautiful" and dives right in.
Miss North Carolina, Katie, Alex B., Hot Mess Express, Onyeka, Caitlyn, Annie (who's that?), Kirpa the dental hygenist, Never Been Kissed Heather, Redhead Elyse (yay!), Tayshia, More than Fruti Courtney, Speech Pathologist Cassie, Demi the felon-offspring, Croatian Nina (yay!), Erica McNutt, NBA dancer Sydney, Fake Aussie Bri, Angelique, Fashion Cop Tracy, Half Cuban Nicole, and DJ Catherine get the roses.
Time to go home Laura. Devin makes it two consecutive seasons that a sports journalist from Oregon is sent home on night one. Cinderella Erin is gone, as well as some girl whose name I've forgotten who mentally sent home quite a few girls who stayed.
We get a montage of the season upcoming, and every single girl seems to have mastered the Becca Kufrin "jump into the guy's arms and straddle him" move. Also, the girls all hate each other. Also, Colton walks a long way in a suit. He's like the Bachelor Elf. "And then I walked through the candy cane forest, jumped a fence, and disappeared into the night."
See you next week, y'all!
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