Marching Orders

A black stretch limo was clearly the most intuitive, logical, understated form of transport they could find to carry one small blonde across a miraculously traffic-free swath of Southern California sprawl. Maybe they were taking into account the breadth of her vaguely linebacker-esque shoulders, or perhaps they realized they needed a vehicle that could provide a wet bar stocked entirely with human tears, but whatever the reason, there's Jenny. And she's sad. And because she was The Capitalized Spy, she gets to let us know why she's sad. And she gets to let us know...again: "I'm on my way to the girls' house to let them know who I am. To meet them for the first time as Jesse's best friend." The camera crew crawls into a crevasse in Jenny's thigh -- ain't that always the way, making the crew sit on the hump during long car trips -- to get a tight shot of Jenny's wedding ring, which made her cry to take off. Like when she cries about worrying the girls will discover her real identity. Or when she cries about worrying how mad they'll be. Or when she cries about daylight savings time, the M&M that lost its color, or Air America being taken off the air in her local market. Or when she tears up at Oreo commercials, incorrectly-tailored pants, or the letter "y" only sometimes being called a vowel, the poor, ostracized Other. Yes. That's right. I'm saying that she cries a lot for no damn good reason, is what I'm saying. She cries on cryingly, "I hope that I'm forgiven for what I'm getting ready to do." For wasting a quantifiable amount of the average human lifespan on your fake, invented subplot? "I don't know if I would forgive me." Unless they severely edited this sequence and left out the part where that limo drove Jenny back to the house but on the way accidentally hit 88 miles per hour and sent her back in time, where she became despotic head of the Khmer Rouge and was responsible for the systematic, genocidal slaughter of millions of innocent Cambodians, her present emotional reckoning is slightly out of step with the nature of her crime, wouldn't you say? And if that is the case? Then, apparently, Jesse's best friend is a time-traveling Pol Pot. Now that's a subplot.

Miraculously, at that exact moment, Chris "Host In The Machine" Harrison presides over the living room at Cruella De Villa, where he calls the ladies to join him: "Ladies, if you would, come join me in the living room, please!" The ladies contractually oblige and would have done so without even the formality of a "please," but that's just the kind of guy Chris Harrison is, people. He's all about the random acts of cheese. It's his bread and butter. And it's topped with his cheese. Anyway, the ladies march into the room, self-satisfied sneers in full force, completely unaware that their entire perception of the safe status quo this show purports to represent is about to be...vaguely compromised for about thirteen seconds. "This week, three intimate one-on-one dates and one group date," Chris takes the liberty of Greek Chorusing, just in case the standing groundlings in the pit of the Globe have trouble following the action.

"Who's deciding who gets the individual dates?" Chris asks in a fashion so troublingly rhetorical that every existing punctuation mark -- including the Spanish-language upside-down question mark -- vies for placement at the end of it and causes the English language to descend into chaos and screw you, Chris Harrison, for killing English. And, the answer: "One of Jesse's best friends!" The girls laugh uproariously in a horribly non-contextual fashion, while back in the attending limo, Teary Lou The Uncheerful Fawn actual lets a full-throated sob let fly, thus creating an emotional average state between their laughs and her cries that equals "stone-faced passivity," which is also being represented in my house at all times that find this show airing. "This woman has known him since college, and she's married to his very best friend!" She's also...our returning champion! Chris picks up the linguistically repetitive phone and places a long-distance rhetoric-call, asking, "Would you guys like to meet her?" Yes. Yes, they would. And in she walks. It's Jenny! Jenny is The Spy! We're dragged screaming through a series of emotionally revealing reaction shots that were edited together with a staple gun and a dream: is that? But I thought? Can it be? Confusion! Shock! Incredulity! And, finally...acceptance! Trish looks surprised. But she's wearing a tiara. So really, she has no right to look at anyone else like that, ever.

"The first thing you think is 'uh-oh,'" Trish tells us in a confessional in which she's still wearing the tiara. Honestly, Trish. Take it off. I'll give you the same advice I gave to Uma Thurman when I saw her in the trailer for Paycheck: "You have to change what you're doing. Some of us are actually trying to like you." But she pays me no heed, vamping on, "I think we're all kind of backtracking in our mind about past conversations or things that we might have done." Says the girl literally wearing her anti-romantic, non-Bachelor-sanctioned feelings on her sleeve, sporting as she a t-shirt reading "Gold digger. Like a hooker...just smarter." And as much as I want to malign her for purchasing her TV-ready wardrobe at Spencer Gifts and ask whether she'll try and ruin one of the individual dates she won't be going on with some strategically-placed rubber vomit, I have to point out instead that my family's idea of dressing up for the holidays is, and I quote, "no t-shirts with writing." So if my music-teacher mother can be forgiven for years of personal messages to the world reading "I can't...I have a rehearsal," I say there's nothing inherently more disturbing about "Gold digger. Like a hooker...just smarter" than there is about, say, "Hold me...I'm a fermata." Just stop calling my mom a hooker.

Fine. Since you asked. One of mine actually said, "Duke: It even sounds cool!" Can we talk about something else now?

Suzie -- whose t-shirt should simply read a big-ass scoop of plain ol' vanilla ice cream -- notes in a confessional, "It looked like a streak of panic in her face. Like, 'oh my gosh, he knows everything.'" Yep. She doesn't even get sprinkles.

A somewhat wordy description of Jenny shows up on screen during her confessional, as we learn again who she is in three separate rows of subtitles: "Jenny/Jesse's Friend/Posed as a Bachelorette." Her treachery is a trifecta of lies. A three-tiered cake iced with shame, tied with the flimsy string of needless subplot. And left out overnight in the rain. Jenny: "I don't care how good your motive is...lying is lying is lying. I love these girls and I want them to forgive me, but that's not in my control." And, huge twist, we cut back to the house to find that the girls don't forgive her. BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER MAD IN THE FIRST PLACE. "Jesse was my friend going into this," Jenny explains to them through racking sobs. "But I never expected to fall in love with you guys here...I was afraid that I would lose you because of my deception." The girls laugh it off, Suzie shouting, "You can be one of the bridesmaids!" and effectively undoing four weeks of promos. Tara even confessionalizes that she had wished someone in the house could tell Jesse how the girls behaved when he wasn't around, and, well, voil. Sitting now, Jenny further explains that she has had the opportunity to talk to Jesse three times since she's been there: on the camping date, on the charity date -- oh, trust me, considering a woman is contractually obligated to look like she's enjoying herself on a date with that blockhead, these are ALL charity dates -- and the evening. Mandy Jaye notes that "this takes the 'I Never' game to a whole new level!" Yes. It does elevate the importance of a game typically played by high-school students to a place where it's now considered an accurate barometer in helping a grown man choose his prospective bride. Thank you for pointing that out, Mandy Jaye. And while we're making fun of t-shirts with writing, can we point out that Mandy Jaye is sporting a shirt emblazoned with the Texas flag with the world "HOME" written in big letters beneath it? Runaway Texas jingoism. It even sounds cool.

But this is really all about Trish, isn't it? As Jenny says her goodbyes and retires to her hotel room to weep uncontrollably over the soaring costs of the Slim Jims in the mini bar, Trish realizes that she might be in a spot of trouble, what with the sleeping with a married man and general other adventures in whoredom: "I could be packing my bags and going home." Uh-oh. She'll be back on the loose! Lock up your husbands, ladies! Or so another one of her t-shirts warns, I'm sure.

The Date Box is here! The Date Box is here! It seems to be...a child's coffin! Oh, how romantic. Appropriately, the note inside reads, "When our romantic evening leaves you buried in my love, you'll soar like a third-world country's infant mortality rate." Sorry. But it's not my fault they promoted Edgar Allen Poe to supervising producer. "Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous broken heart/shattered ego!" And yes, I blame this show entirely for leaving me so creatively bereft that it's led me down the long, slippery slope to dead-baby jokes. I should pack my bags and go. Lock up your husbands, ladies.

Okay, fine. The note is for Jessica B., and here's what it actually says: "Tonight I'll make a few passes if you'll wear my jacket and be my girl." She just about melts at the language of it; I, too, have often wowed the ladies with the international language of strained sports metaphors as scribed by the producer I keep on retainer for such moments as this. Jessica removes from the box a red and white letter jacket, a souvenir from the team The California Footballers. Jessica's jacket has the number "3" written across it, which stands for the approximate number of professional football games Jesse has participated in in which his team has won.

Oh, bonjour! Jesse "J'Adore La Futbol American" Palmer chills in the back seat of a red convertible, decked out in an unzipped black jacket and a pale blue turtleneck from the Sprockets Gay fall collection. His hair is so afraid of his ensemble that it looks like it's trying to run in the other direction, like he walked into the Supercuts right to the Meadowlands and demanded, "Give me the cartoonishly terrified, please." But then, I guess that's the kind of request you can make when you're as unaccustomed as Jesse is to wearing a helmet on a regular basis. He furthers the utter non-plot plot of Jenny/Jesse's Friend/Posed as a Bachelorette, explaining, "There's no point in just walking in there and pretending it didn't happen." It didn't happen. Nothing happened. No one cared. Except Trish, who opens the door wearing another shirt over a t-shirt doubtlessly reading "Actually, I don't care that much either." Jesse tells the women that they all look nice, and they return the compliment by silently agreeing that yes, they do think they look nice. You guys? They hate him. And not even in subtle, we-can-change you ways, where they're all "if only you were taller" or "no, seriously, tell me again about your band" or other things about past Bachelors that seemed slightly more fixable. They find him dull, unlikable, and seemingly made of bricks (dumb bricks, at that), and we agree. Jesse speaks to them in an off the cuff fashion with the studied oratory of a present-day Presidential press conference: "I know that what has happened today has probably been very confusing for some of you, and I hope that you all can see how important this is to me, and I hope that you guys can all see that Jenny's intentions were really honorable." Suzie tells us in a confessional that she thinks Jenny's presence in the house confirms that Jesse is in this to really find the right person and get married. I agree with that seemingly arbitrary correlation, and will extrapolate it to mean that the presence of soap scum on my shower curtain means that one day there will be a free Tibet. And I'll stop using that joke construction the moment these girls start talking some damn sense.

The Rose Bowl? The red roadster pulls onto the field of the biggest football stadium ever allocated for one sporting event a year, so I guess it's not all that whorish that they have to rent it out for things like this and weddings and Bar Mitzvahs and stuff. Jesse explains, "We're in a 100,000-person capacity stadium, and it's just Jessica and I [sic]." It's a good thing I have to ding him for the fact-checking reality that the Rose Bowl only seats 90,000 -- maybe a few more if they're not all wearing turtlenecks that have the circumference of Pluto in order to fit around his gross beefy neck -- so that I don't have to explore the many vagaries of grammar that mar his every spoken sentence.

They carry a picnic basket and a blanket to the middle of the field, and sip champagne (it's The Bachelor, where ladies always drink free), while Jesse tells Jessica why she's so damn fabulous: "You've really brought it through college if you're only twenty-one and you've got two years left of law school. That says a lot about your drive." Her drive to complete her law degree through the mail. From an unaccredited law shanty. In South America. She replies with casual immodesty, "If I do something, I don't drag my feet. I do it full-force." That creates a segue for Jesse to suggest that they "toss the pigskin," adding, "it's time for a lesson." Yeah. Maybe Jessica's got some tips she can give him so he can find a way to run for more than nine yards season and play in front of lives crowds bigger than the one they're currently entertaining. Jesse gives Jessica actual tips for the game, telling her where to put her feet and how to step. Someone just taught me how to do that with darts, and you know what I learned is the hard part of darts? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing hard about darts. Any sport that gets easier as I get drunker is good enough for me. It's like bowling. It's like bowling for the weak.

"I don't think of Jesse as an NFL quarterback," Jessica tells us. Also in agreement: the NFL.

Back at the house, another large Date Box -- this one far more ornate, so let's call it a Victorian-era child's coffin -- arrives. Trish runs outside, knowing she has the same chance of being its recipient as other fictional villains throughout narrative lore, such as robber barons who would tie damsels in distress to railroad tracks and mustachioed gentlemen who tell a gingham-dressed country girl, no matter how many times she tells him that she simply doesn't have the money, that she still must pay the rent. Anyway, it's for Mandy Jaye. She pops open the box to reveal a white skipper's hat. They're going to a Gilligan's Island-themed costume party? I get to be Mary Ann! Someone in the room who I think might be Suzie screams, "You're going on a sailboat or something!" Maybe the Tyra Mail or whatever will have some further information: "It's time for a first-class adventure on the deep sea." The girls all scream again because that sentence smells like money.

Back at the Rose Bowl's annual We'll Stoop To Anything To Pay Our Rent Bowl (I tell you, they've got a Bowl for everything these days), Jessica and Jesse freeze from their mercifully unaired conversation ("Hey, you like rocks?" "Yeah, but how come they're always, like, grey?") at the sound of a ringing whistle somewhere off in the distance. And then -- and really, I kid you not -- from out of the Hellmouth portal that is the Rose Bowl's Gate 19 comes charging an entire marching band, dressed in full marching-band regalia and playing while marching. It's horrible. It's the living depiction of the third scariest nightmare I've ever had, right after the one where my mother turns into a witch and the one where I die in Nebraska when I turn thirty-one. I know. Crazy, right? All I'm saying is, if you live in Nebraska, I'm not visiting you when I'm thirty-one. Don't even invite me. It's nothing personal. It's just not going to work out between us. It doesn't mean I don't think you're a perfectly nice person. Anyway, I'm trying to avoid the horrific, awful reality here: there's a billion-person marching band on their date. Jesse and Jessica are falling in love to the sound of "Celebrate Good Times (Come On!)" on fourteen tubas. Actually, I don't know what they're playing. It sounds a little like the music piping out of the car of the guy who's running for mayor in Back to the Future. What it's not, as Jesse tries to pretend it is, is "awe- inspiring." An aerial shot shows the band take on the shape of a heart. Jessica recaps, not leaving it to the professionals: "We're in the Rose Bowl, okay? We had our own marching band. And then we had a heart around us. Hello!" Uh, hi. Jesse agrees, "This is dope." God, he writes the way people talk. Jessica thanks him for "planning this," recognizing how much investment it took him to field the producer's memo (and have someone read it to him) that there was going to be a marching band on the date and responding, "Wow, man. They march? I can't even walk and chew gum at the same time." And, smacky kissing. Because who can resist a guy in a sky-blue turtleneck? Jessica tells us that this is the best date she's ever been on in her life: "It just gets better every day." Or is it just an illusion in keeping with the incremental lowering of standards? Uch. I hate Jesse so much it's a problem. A math problem.

I can't get a read on Mandy Jaye, but I've learned that if you can't figure out what a girl's hook is on this show by the fourth episode, it usually means that she's not one-dimensional enough for the producers to pigeonhole her into an archetype. Oh, wait. She was the one in pageants, right? Yeah, never mind. She and Jesse are off to a private yacht and dinner at Newport Beach. Well, if no other solace exists, the one thing we do know is that Newport Beach is in Orange County, which means some unlucky member of this entourage will be getting his or her face bashed in by the end of the night. Were we only able to choose who. Mandy Jaye walks down the steps carrying a red bag and wearing a pink pashmina scarf. I guess she knows that the turtleneck blew all style recognition right off of America's collective cornea and she just decided to say fuck it.

"This is definitely not the perfect date for me, by any means," Mandy Jaye admits, but not for the natural your-date-has- the-word-'cro'- in-his-species reasons you may assume. "I'm actually pretty terrified of water." Why does one girl always end up on the Fear Factor date, where she's shipped off to an exotic location, but then the exotic location becomes Ukraine circa 1986 and they end up mopping up chemical spills at Chernobyl? They had to know she didn't like boats. Why so mad at Mandy Jaye, Fleiss?

If the words "Olive Garden" represent the very best in Bachelor-related awkwardness, this moment here typifies the worst. Because in the former example, at least they felt it too. This time we are, as an audience, left to suffer alone. To feel sickness. And anger. And disgust. Jesse and Mandy Jaye are steaming along on a big, big boat, right? And they walk to the front. The stern. Or the starboard. Or the aft. And Jesse stands behind Mandy Jaye. And makes her put her arms out. And then he yells, "I'm the king of the world." And then he gets action using a line that wasn't sexy or romantic six years ago. Surely, this musty old chestnut couldn't really be the aphrodisiac it's played to look like here. Surely, Jesse must already have had her at hello.

One more Date Box. Smaller. Human head-sized. Karen pops it open and reads a note intended for "Karen, Trish, and Suzie." Karen barks an incredulous "No, sir!" Again, um, I know Jenny's shoulders are a little broader than those of the average female in the house or ever, but that's no reason to mock her entire gender assignment. By the powerful force of inference, they figure out that Tara is the recipient of the final one-on-one date, which causes Karen to note, "I was sad because I was looking forward to getting to know this guy that everyone says such great things about." Totally. Karen mourns on the couch and actually accepts a hug from Trish. Because she hasn't seen the PSA that hooker sweat can kill you.

As the U.S.S. Unengaging Plotline charts a slow course through the Cheese Sea, we pop in on Mandy Jaye sipping a Dramamine Shake. They exit the boat and we're suddenly at dinner, Jesse reporting, "The Rose Ceremony, I'm giving roses to those whose families I'm gonna meet. Would you want somebody like me to meet your family?" Mandy Jaye pauses long enough for the response "I would want someone like you to meet my family" to present itself as the most likely unspoken rebuttal, but instead Mandy Jaye goes with "I would love for you to meet my family." Jesse presses on for reasons that anybody on earth would want to meet him, asking if it's because he's the Bachelor, or maybe because her father heard that Jesse was a quarterback. Oh, lord. Just give him that damn line that it has nothing to do with that, and that you just like him for him, okay? Man, they'd better get back to the boat, because Jesse brought himself enough line to fish for compliments until the ocean runs out of them. Jesse tells us that he's skeptical of Mandy Jaye because "she was in pageants, and she knows what judges and the audience wants [sic] to hear." Back at the table, Mandy Jaye tells Jesse that there is no point in her being anyone else besides who she says she is, because what would be the point? "I definitely see myself falling for him," Mandy Jaye admits, feeding him chocolate cake off her plate as he responds, "Sit-ups tomorrow. Nine o'clock." Where does he GET this stuff? Seriously, Jesse. Did you just think of that now?

And, back at the house again, the girls grill Trish on her thoughts of what makes the ideal man. She argues, suddenly, that she doesn't have a type, but just wants someone who treats her well (or, as she puts it, "good"), taking pains to add, "It has nothing to do with money." Karen asks her if she "would do an Anna Nicole Smith," meaning, according to Karen, marrying "someone with a bad ticker." But then again, I wouldn't marry someone who ever called the heart a "ticker." So, y'know, who's shallow now? After copping to the fact that she couldn't fall in love with someone poor (which, admittedly, is a challenging moral stance, but it's not like she added, "And I also hate the blacks and the Jews"), Trish takes us to a confessional that finds her bemoaning, "This is just one more reaffirming fact of why I have a lot of guy friends. Because I don't deal well with the crap of girls." Karen tells us that Trish is worried because she has to do "damage control" on the date tomorrow. I could think of a wacky quip to follow up that statement, but it might take away from the fact that I just want to make fun of Karen's lipstick.

"Today it's important that I get some alone time with Jesse to clean up this mess that all these b-- girls have made," Trish tells us in prep for the group date. Since when is "girls" spelled with a "b" and an em-dash? When it's trying not to be "bitches," is when. I love it that Trish has been so castigated that she's forced to become the edited-for-television- version-of-Police-Academy- on-the-Superstation version of herself in order to survive.

An SUV gobbles up half of the world's natural resources without keeping anyone in it so much as one lick safer as it pulls up to...an elephant? Jesse and his group date walk into a hut of sorts and eat what looks like some kind of Mediterranean food. And they talk a talk of Jenny. You sing it now, Palmer: "It was being done for the right reasons." The girls who didn't cop to banging a married dude think Jenny did a great thing. Trish asks Jesse if she can talk to him privately. Karen sneers gleefully. Trish and Jesse retire to underneath a nearby tree of shame, where Trish tells him that she has "a past" and did some things when she was younger that she regrets. Which, if you're twenty-eight and you're not saying that, you're a Eunuch. Or a virgin. Either of which would carry with them some form of regret in their own right, so never mind. But Jesse has some questions as well: "I'd like to know why you got into dating an older gentlemen who was already married." Trish responds that it was "wrong," and that it just happened. Jesse asks if she and the married man slept together. No. He felt her up above the bra and then they stopped. Are you children? Of course it's reprehensible for her to sleep with a married man, and I pity that man and I pity his poor children and I pity his poor wife (now it's England 2, Colombia nil, and I know just how those Colombians feel) because really, once a cheater, always a cheater. But all of that notwithstanding, it's not a rational response to be less mad because she was in some way immorally involved with a married man that didn't result in a fully coital relationship. Jesse judges Trish and wonders what would stop that from happening again, saying that he doesn't think Trish took into account the feelings of the man's wife and the family. And, okay. Again, you can't sleep with someone who's married. Like, you can't. It's wrong. It's bad. It's actionable in a court of law. But it's ludicrous for Jesse to take for granted the response of the wife and the imagined "family," who might well not have existed. Maybe the couple had been married for two years and were legally separated and dating other people. Maybe not. But it's that faux-moral stance of "why doesn't anybody think of the children?" that makes this so platitudinous. And also, for the girls to be all "Isn't she disgusting?" is so sickly transparent that it borders on satire. As much as all of those women may be horrified by Trish's behavior, they'd be reacting the same way if they found out that one of the girls put the toilet paper on the roll in the inappropriate overhand fashion if they thought it would score them points with The Bachelor. It's outrage registered on an political scale rather than an ideological one, and that's just as gross as boffing some old dude in the first place. End rant. But seriously, kill me.

And then, this from Jesse: "I heard your reaction to what happened when she walked in." Which, apparently, is a salient, salacious detail of a totally different story. That happened to Trish when she was in college. Nice spying, Jenny. I would sarcastically clap for you, but, see, I'm recapping. Trish keeps on by saying she's a different person than she was before. But she still shakes her head incredulously and barely contains her rage. As I would do in this position. In any other dating capacity, you'd either dump her outright, or philosophize that she's a human being and a human being is bound to make mistakes. Ain't none of us the savior. But you be good, and strong, and when you make a mistake, you own up to it. It's not only mighty, it's righty. As the good book says. Then Trish submits to kissing him. Which I would NOT do in this or any other position.