Attention Beggars Can Be Choosers

Props to Potes, as always. You've got...I don't know, something about waxes and faxes. It's true.

Why do I let reality television be smarter than me? WHY?

Hi, everyone. Djb here. You might recognize me from such recaps as "those three years I toiled in varying levels of fame and obscurity, watching people blow stuff up in the desert and then run away guiltily from the stuff they just blew up in the desert on Roswell" and "the day I watched my very first episode ofCharmed." But tonight there's a very different kind of recap for me to write, and it's not one I'm sure I can do at all. It's not a recap written in another language or a recap I have to write without a chair or a recap about people whose intellect exceeds mine or yours or the average bowl of cashews. Instead, it's a recap of such tremendous volume (two hours? TWO HOURS?) written in such a frightfully short period of time (I'm on a plane to L.A. on Friday morning and before I'm gone this sucker is done) that I hope you'll stand by me through the two exceedingly late nights of hair gel, hanky-panky, and Trista's increasingly hard-to-bear high, cackling laugh. Like, for instance, if I use the verboten, Gong Show-era-approved hyphenate "hanky-panky" just for its alliterative value even though it sounds really gay. Say you'll stay. We've already been through so much together. Well then, what am I waiting for? Your recap is served, and the season finale is on the menu! Hope you were hungry for "Disclaimer."

Wednesday, 10:22 PM. I just ate an entire box of Cheez Nips. Just thought you should know.

We're in the lady's chambers of Trista "Christian Oh The Time Has Come And You Know You're Not The Only One To Say...Okay" Rehn. The cameras wander inside to find her pretending to be asleep for the sake of some stray pick-up shots, but from the looks of her regal bedding, it's clear that she hasn't had a good night's sleep since the wily Brook snuck in under cover of darkness and disrupted her slumber with the strategic, mid-mattress placement of a single pea. In her arms is the stuffed Shamu that Rhymin' gave to her on their romantic date to Sea World. And you've got to give him credit for hanging in so long despite such terrible wooing opportunities; "a romantic date at Sea World" is as likely an expression as "an appendix removal at Chuck E. Cheese's." It just doesn't happen that often is all.

Anyway, still lying in bed and from the infinite comforts of her internal monologue, Trista tells us, "I've been here for six weeks and it's finally coming to an end." Word up, voice of a loyal (or getting paid to be here) generation. She floats down the ever-bending, undiagrammable Sentence River, in which she cops to being both "happy" and "sad" about the steps in her decision. Now she lies in bed wearing her Smart Glasses and reading diligently from Hit The Moot Button: A Guide To Reality-Show Twist Endings That Twist Too Late, continuing, "The person I'm most sexually attracted to is Charlie." The color sepia leaps out of my Crayola 64, jams itself into the sharpener on the back of the box (because only in this fantasy sequence in which my crayons come to life does that freakin' sharpener actually work, crummy thing), and proceeds to smear itself all over my fourteen-inch recapping television on my desk for the ensuing montage of Charlie-and-Trista- sitting-in-a-sepia-tree, K-I-S-S-E-P-I-A. They have a "connection" that grows every second. We relive the night in Cabo, when Charlie leans in and tells Trista, "You're glowing." Of course she's glowing; the production staff has drenched them in plutonium like it's Gatorade and they're the team that just won The Big Game. It all took place in The Gauzy Past. We get it. Now stow away from the color gels until you're doing a stage production of Miss Saigon and you're in need of a garish Vietnamese sunset.

In the kitchen and in the present now, the director gives itself (for truly the cobblers and creators of this action have not yet evolved far enough to assume a gender-specific form) over to a bit of a Beckett-esque moment, as Trista stands with her face in her hands and a towel on her head, waiting for a bagel to pop out of the toaster. The bagel pops out of the toaster. Let us put cream cheese on the bagel. Yes, let's. Stage direction: They do not move.

That was a Beckett reference, right up there. Damn, I'm pretentious. And thinking about having some delightful cereal.

Trista further bemoans her non-Utah state of monogamous love, reminding us, "I would so like to be with both of them. But it's just not possible." Because in tricky matters of the heart, it's best to be regimented by the hard and fast rules of a game show. That makes intuitive sense to me. Anyone? We're back to the past as we remember Trista's earliest interactions with Rhymin' (His rhymes often scare/ Even more so drenched in sepia/ But when it comes to Charlie's hair/ Well, I find that much creepy-a). Trista's voice-over reminds us that "when he comes out of his shell, he's this witty character," and this assertion is backed up by the seen-ad-nauseum sequence of Rhymin' begging for booty and telling the driver of the limo in Seattle to get them back to the Fantasy Suite in a hurry. Which, fine, whatever. I already said I thought it was kind of amusing. But "witty"? Isn't that word generally reserved for the pithy words culled from the great, bored minds of those who sit around drawing rooms and speak of Wildean things like art and dandies and "oh, isn't that just the most delightful frock"? Is Rhymin' any of those things to any of you?

I haven't eaten Ramen since my senior year of college. I totally wish it were my senior year of college.

A tiny, tiny plane carrying all of the people interested in spending lengthy vacation time in St. Louis lands on a small airport runway or maybe in the deserted city streets. I have seen St. Louis at 80 miles per hour more times than I can count, and I have stopped there not once. There's something about the arch which fairly screams, "I'm the only thing here!" that sends a defiant message to my bladder that sounds something like, "No thanks, we'll just wait for Illinois." Has anyone been there? Do y'all live there and you were reading this out loud with a match held under it and vitriol in your voice at, like St. Louis's TWoPcon And Djb-Effigy-Burning Extravaganza? Anyway, we learn from Trista that Charlie will be the first of the suitors to meet her family, and we cut to Charlie waiting for her, voicing over, "I want, by the end of this evening, to have Trista's family say, 'Wow, he's got a solid head on his shoulders and I feel that he would be great for our daughter.'" Well, I can't speak for the latter, but I can tell you that he's taken both Vidal and Sassoon hostage in an attempt to secure himself the most solid head one's shoulders could possibly support. He could split granite with his solid, solid head.

Out of her limo Trista steps and into Charlie's strong, virile man arms. She welcomes him to St. Louis and celebrates the overall beauty of the weather (with a beautiful breeze coming in off the...oh, wait, it's also landlocked), as she tells us, "He looked great. He always does. And today was no exception." I think that exact interview snippet has been used four times to refer to four different "he"s on four different days. Through the Botanical Gardens we go, Charlie explaining, "After our date in Cabo, I felt kind of a new connection to Trista. Kind of a new comfort with her." And, first of all, he says "Cabo" in a totally frat boy way, over-accentuating the "c" and drawling out the "ah" like he had a tongue depressor permanently installed in his soft palate. Actually, it appears as if he has indeed had a tongue depressor installed, called "Trista's tongue." They're in what appears to be some kind of tree house (and, I mean, you always feel younger than you are when you go home again, but let's not get too literal here), "joking" in a very similar fashion how wacky it would be for Charlie to enter Trista's parents' house with his face all smeared with lipstick. I don't know. Whatever. That's what they're saying. Trista notes with a painful lack of foreshadowing that it feels "right" whenever she's with Charlie. Yes. But do you have a connection?

I have a connection in Chicago.

The limo speeds through the empty St. Louis streets (the Gateway Arch is a gateway to hell) as Trista tells us, "I have no anxiety about tonight. I am very much looking forward to seeing my family, and I think that my parents are going to be very impressed with Charlie." Looks like somebody's family is a sucker for a guy who can recite the entire Greek alphabet backwards while holding a lit match and, I'm sure, is naked from the waist down. Who is he besides his smarmy, frat-boy persona? What parental impressing arsenal could he possibly have at his disposal? Let's go see!

Inside of middle America's most middle-class home, we meet an odd configuration of family members. Now remember, I didn't watch the first season of this show so I don't know if Alex met the parents or what, but you have to admit there's something weird about the dad being at dinner with both his current wife and his past wife, both of whom seem to get along quite well, actually. New wife is an eensy bit more glamorous, so I guess she's the one who, Sixteen Candles-style, will just offer to "open this box of donuts" as part of their palling-around dinner prep slapstick in the kitchen. If we tried this familial arrangement in my family, the salad dressing would be blood and the wine would be red and flowing because it would be made entirely of blood. The ex-wife and the current wife all bond-y like this? Are they staying together for the good of the game show? Because that would be really big of all of them.

Trista and Charlie enter the house as hugs and handshakes are exchanged. The attending crowd consists of Trista's mom, stepmother, father, and stepsister. We cut right to Roseanne (Trista's mother), who offers her first impression of Charlie: "Wow." That's creepy in a sex way, Mom. Say something else: "Tall, dark, handsome." Awww, Trista went and brought herself home a real-life film noir clich, didn't she? Trista's stepmother, on the other hand, notes, "You're a failure of a wife and a failure of a lover, and I got your man in the end so neener neener." She doesn't actually say that, but...wha? Aren't these two people who have no earthly right getting near each other without a catfight of the most primal, Kibble-throwing variety? Maybe it's me. I'm from a broken home. Much like the home I live in now. A home with no food left because I ate twelve toasted waffles during the freakin' blizzard Monday. I couldn't even leave. Thank goodness, actually, for the impulse buy of those waffles the day before the storm, or I would have been in my apartment gnawing my own arm off in some exceedingly Gus Van Sant shot-by-shot remake-of-Alive- but-without-the- airplanes-or- the-soccer kind of way. Oh, man. Where the hell was I? Ah, yes: "The first thing I noticed about Charlie when he walked in were his eyes. His beautiful eyes." Does he have nice eyes? They always seem so obscured by the weeping willowiness of his too-bushy eyebrows. In the kitchen now, Old Mom and New Mom discuss Charlie's inherently oozing freaky-deakiness, Mom arguing, "Wow. I wish I was [sic] still thirty." Dude. No kidding. Trista feels exactly the same way sometimes.

The grilling begins early in the living room. Trista's father, He Runs With Enormous Glasses (I've forgotten his proper Christian name, so I've been forced to resort to this less conventional but no less appropriate Native American moniker) asks Charlie what kind of hours he keeps at work. Because talking work hours makes for riveting television at all times, always. Those trendsetters at the Human Resources Network will see to that, as in their new reality show Time Won't Give Me Time: A Look Behind The Scenes of Payroll Processors. And that includes the hidden footage that they didn't want you to see. Charlie continues on that his "true love" is "the stock market," which he mentions is "booming." I'm sorry, wasn't this show taped in October of 2002 and not instead during some past year that maybe contained any number of "9"s? The market sucks. Who doesn't know that? I mean, besides this unemployed "Wall Street" guy who I don't think has ever been to New York. He Runs With Enormous Glasses changes the subject to mention that it's time for dinner, and that he's going to "bring the questions." The aforementioned "questions" refer to a white porcelain bowl filled with questions the family has written down, up to and including the obvious "Why'd you let that new tramp wife of yours come ruin our dinner?" which I'm sure will be read in conjunction with its follow-up question, "Maybe if you hadn't have been so frigid all those years I wouldn't have needed to step out on you." Those two. Always fighting. And that last one wasn't even a sentence.

You know what? They were Cheez-Its, not Cheez Nips. Which is the inferior non-union counterpart of the other? And, more importantly, how are you now supposed to believe anything I say? Trust me when I say this question will be important later.

Hey, do you think you could pass the...oh, you say you can't? You say you'll be hogging every damn thing in the house including all of the conversation, Charlie? Well, all right. Just as long as you're somehow forced to pay for it later. In fairness, though, I must say that Charlie kind of kicks ass at dinner, and if anything this meal reasserts Charlie and Trista's overall "rightness" for one another in a smarmy, plastic, public, wholly performative, we're-turned-on- when-this-thing's-on kind of way. HRWEG certainly sees it (as well he should, what with his enormous...oh, never mind), toasting the couple and wishing them "many good days ahead." Which I'm sure they'll experience. With other people. HRWEG requests the aforementioned bowl of questions as Trista voices over that she thought the questions would be intended for everyone, and not just a full-out third degree-ing of Charlie. Somehow, though, when HRWEG was unable to formulate a cogent reply to the repeatedly chosen, "You cheated on me with her HOW MANY TIMES, you craven BASTARD?" they were forced to abandon the socialist "everyone's playing" concept they'd apparently told Trista about. Back in the dining room, HRWEG asks the first question, practically taking one out of the bowl and holding it up to his forehead like Carson with a killer joke about the Ayatollah or how many times he nailed Jerry Hall. Carson. Not Trista's dad. But it's Trista's mom who instead asks the first question, inquiring of Charlie, "Are you a morning person or an evening person?" Trista's NotMom has the probing question, standing up (come back! You haven't even eaten your poorly-edited-together after-dinner mint yet!) and wanting to know, "How would you feel if your wife made more than you?" Charlie cracks up the crowd with a deadpan "All right." They love him. Love him! Well if they love him so much, why don't they marry him? Hey, hear that, everyone? Lisa's gonna marry a carrot! Ha ha! Lisa's gonna marry a carrot.

Mmmm...carrots are the same color as Cheez-Its. Sort of.

But NotMom isn't done with the questioning just yet. Whoa, no. "Could you be a Mr. Mom?" Charlie looks around. "Fine," his eyes seem to say. "Just as long as I don't have to be a Multiplicity later on." What he actually does is give some lilting speech about how a woman's place is on the Miami Heat dance floor, and he thinks that "marriage is a partnership," and women can make as much money as they damn well please. In a hilarious rebuttal, HRWEG makes a joke about wanting to see Charlie's tax forms. Oooh, take that, IRS. Burn.