| Aired on 12.02.2003
Props to Nad and Christine.
Fade up on a stock-footage shot of a remote-looking island -- a shot used in every television show and movie indicating travel to remote islands, ranging from The Bachelorette to Cast Away to If You Catch My Drift: Getting To Know Your Downtown Pangaea. We montage to an aerial shot of sweet, sweet civilization, past a dock replete with boats and other dock-related ephemera, and into "Le Meridien," the luxuriously product-placed resort for a discerning audience that loves fun in the sun, beachfront relaxation, and the perma-daytime effects of twelve camera crews blaring constantly in your face because you accidentally booked your honeymoon at the same resort as a fame-whoring Miami Heat dancer who is apparently experiencing her fifteen minutes in the time-space continuum that exists on Pluto, where one year takes 248.5 Earth years, so fifteen minutes there takes...some extremely long period of time. (That's right. Pangaea and Pluto. I'm just trying to ensure that if Trista should accidentally stumble across this recap while Googling herself one late, lonely night, she won't think this is actually about her. Sssssshhhhh...Trista's coming.)
Like the most awkward moments of the Seventh-Grade Dance at a suburban junior high school, the boys' camp and the girls' camp of the wedding party walk separately on a beach. In a confessional, a blonde named Sara tells us, "This is, hands down, a dream bachelor and bachelorette weekend. We are in the Caribbean with this blue water and the sunshine." Below her name on the subtitle is her trade: "Maid of Honor/Trista's Jr. High Friend." She's a maid of honor! He's our returning champion! I mean, is there a way to be more reductive of poor Sara than referring to her that way? Though I guess it's still a more honest portrayal of the character she's here to play than when they continually insisted on referring to Trista as a "physical therapist" long after she got out of the old "helping people who aren't herself" game.
The boys and girls meet in the middle of a sandy beach spot (without even the social lubricant of a DJ playing "Eternal Flame," which is so often what brought together the boys and the girls at the aforementioned Seventh-Grade Dance), hugging and drinking and drinking and yech. And speaking of yech, a confessional comes compliments of Russ, "Cast Member -- The Bachelorette" (and definitely not our returning champion), whose backwards dirty white cap speaks volumes more about his personality than anything he actually says, when he says, "I was really excited to come down here and meet Trista and Ryan's friends, and they accepted us with open arms." Hands off the ladies, you monster. I'll bet you a thousand dollars that, turned around, that hat reads "Cocks" across the front. It would be utterly appropriate, and for more reasons than one. Either that, or it's from Tiffany.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Back on the beach now, Bob "I'm Here, I Leer, Get Used To It" Guiney has appointed himself Master Of Ceremonies Of Tristopia, ambling around drunkenly with a big, froofy drink in his hand and welcoming all of the ladies with a nasty, lecherous hug. Man. A full calendar year since he first appeared on our televisions, and all his talent level will allow is for him to have finally achieved cult status as The Richard Dawson Of The New Millennium. The top six answers are on the board, Bob. And all of them are "Yes, You're Nasty."
Oh, look. Bob. Again. Identified as "The Bachelor Season 4" and wearing the most faggoty sky blue shirt this side of The Boy From Oz, he drones, "Ryan and Trista are very lucky...I'm very honored to be invited, actually." And then, right after that, in a vocal pitch and cadence that sound completely different than the one he was using until then and sounding like it was recorded one million years later and tacked on four seconds before airing, he adds, "It would be a lot more fulfilling if Estella could be here with me." You guys? We know they're not together. And for once, I thought I was watching some Wednesday-night programming that wasn't actually about Bob. Leave. It. Alone. Or you'll only make yourselves look sillier when their press tour is over and they're allowed to start seeing other failed reality-show contestants. Incidentally, my spellcheck really wanted me to change the word "faggoty" to the word "maggoty" before I did anything else. Which, I have to say...tempting, but no.
Speaking of failed reality show contestants who just can't let go, Shannon just then shows up, telling us that we're still waiting for Trista and Ryan to show up, but that this amount of time was the perfect opportunity for friends of Ryan's and friends of Trista's (and, in Shannon's case, friends of Fleiss's) to bond the day away. "I'm not gonna lie," she plot-develops in a spot of foreshadowing that would have kicked ass if it had actually gone somewhere, "Ryan's friends are hot." She then pauses the full length of a sunrise on Pluto before finishing her thought: "Hot." Very illuminating thoughts, Shannon. In the world where the storybook love of Trista and Ryan and their journey is told entirely through the songs of Buster Poindexter.
The wedding party cheers merrily as Trista and Ryan (and some random third guy, who probably only performs some stupid, menial task like driving their boat, so why can't he just get out of the way and let Trista have her day, already?) are seen approaching on a life raft of some kind. There's a Simpsons episode that starts off with a couch having been dumped across a railroad track, I think, and in the background ruzzah, you can hear someone muse something like, "It seems to be some kind of a couch." There's a moment here a billion times stupider and 100% less ironic, in which a female voice cries out, "They're coming on a life raft!" And they are. Coming on a life raft. The collective stands at the shore shrieking with joy as if this is the life raft-y homecoming for two war heroes rescued from the sinking of the Lusitania.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Crowds cheer and fathers beam as Trista "Do You Take This Channel To Be Your Lawful Wedded Network" Rehn and Ryan "Just Cause" Sutter hop out of the boat, Trista voicing over all the while, "I'm so excited! This is my first time in St. Martin, and I can hardly believe I'm here, let alone that Ryan and I and all of our friends get to enjoy this entire resort to ourselves." Oh, my god, but her boobs are enormous! I guess we've never seen her in this bathing suit before, but it looks like she stuffed it with several miles of push-up padding and the shooting script to Tootsie. It's insane. Hugs and hellos are exchanged as Ryan and Trista hop off the boat, Bob standing right at the front of the receiving line, commenting on literally every move, every moment, every grain of sand. Ryan lifts Trista out of the boat, and Bob notes, "Always the gentleman!" Bob apparently saw himself as a much better friend to Trista than it turns out he actually was, as he way overshoots his hello and gets in turn the fakest greeting from her in the history of the salutation; she hugs him while cheating toward the camera and bellowing in her shrillest dog tones, "Hello! Mwah! What's up!" before turning immediately away from him and onto people she actually, like, knows. Ryan celebrates the "reunion feel" of this event in a confessional, while we're treating to copious shots of Bob, in the background, still talking. Seriously, Bob? Seriously.
"Hi, Daddy," Trista squeaks as if she's six years old and still figuring out why she only gets to see her father on weekends and alternate Thursdays. She gives her Hawaiian-shirted (and, nice jams, by the way) father a hug as we're taken down the path of the overly serious, Trista filling us in that she's glad her father was able to come to the island and chill, seeing as he's had no other meaningful part to play in this wedding at all. And now, a completely spontaneous and not-at-all staged walk down the beach so the two of them can catch up completely. She asks him how he's doing. He says he's doing fine. He Runs With Enormous Glasses reminds us of last week, when he talked to Trista about how she wasn't including him in any of the wedding planning. Now, on the beach, He Runs With Enormous Sunglasses tells us that he hasn't seen Trista since before that phone call, and he thinks this would be an excellent opportunity to "talk openly" about these issues. Sipping from a giant peenk dreenk so adorned with fruit wedges and decorative umbrellas that it ought to come with its own chaise longue, Trista tries to take it all seriously when she asks HRWES, "You feel in the know now?" HRWES responds that all he wanted was for Trista to keep the lines of communication open, and that he feels like he can ask her anything about the planning, if not (a) participate in them or (b) be told about them or (c) buy his daughter back from the soul-selling, blood-signed contract she inked with Satan. Sure is hard to be father of the bride. Trista takes this opportunity to ask HRWES if he'll walk her down the aisle at the wedding. He says he will, and Trista tells us what a "nice moment" it was, which we learn when we see that said moment has reached a niceness level nice enough to be rendered in a slow-motion hug. How odd that, for an event taking place in the Atlantic Ocean, HRWES is kicking it with so damn much Ocean Pacific.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Back at the party, Ryan wonders exactly how this weekend will go. It turns out, he reminds us, that bachelor parties have a tendency to be "a little over the edge," blazing new narrative turf though neglecting a nation's familiarity with the cinematic canon of a young Adrian Zmed. Whatever the legacy of these famed affairs, though, Ryan promises us that he's not going to get at all crazy, and that all he wants to do is "hang out with [his] friends." With strippers. And booze. In tears.
Again, if there had been some drunken, casual, maybe even extramarital hookup of someone from the boy's side and someone from the girl's side, I could rationalize a few dozen extraneous shots of everyone hanging out and performing an "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"-length rendition of "Getting to Know You." But hell be it to that subplot, because we still haven't gotten up to a few innocent dancers making all the boys cry. But wait! Here's something: there's a little boy -- no wait, girl, GIRL -- in a strapless red dress, sitting alone in the middle of all this LOOK-MA-I'M-ON-TV mayhem, looking downtrodden and used to feeling downtrodden. Who could this mysterious mystery girl be? Wait, wait, don't worry...Trista is more than happy to explain: "I'm actually not sure what's going on with Jackie." Though Trista wants this so-called "Jackie" to be included in everything, she realizes, "I think she probably feels a little out of place." And what does this Jackie think about all of this? "I feel like I don't fit in here. Because I'm younger. I don't have children. I'm not married. I don't have, like, a steady career." And, I mean, I don't want to split the excess hairs that seem to be sprouting from Jackie's chinny-chin-chin, but I don't think we've met one person there who possesses all of those qualities (married, children, steady career) except for My Two Dads and maybe one of the producers. Who is this Jackie? Why does she have such a complex? What soul-sucking life force could have had such a formative effect on this girl's delicate ego and psyche that left her such a husk of how acclimated people normally enter into social interaction? Won't you tell me what? And then, according to the subtitle under her name, Jackie is finally identified: "Trista's sister." Ah.
Jackie is not ugly. But say what you will about Trista (though some of you will respond to that with "What I say about Trista is that she's hideous"), I maintain that, objectively and conventionally, Trista is rather comely. Jackie, on the other hand, with her short-cropped hair and glasses, fits more plainly into the category of looks that makes my mother shake her head mournfully and opine with all intended subtext and some hearty tsk-ing, "Not a pretty girl." Her hair is parted on the right and swooped over with a certain amount of product that still can't control the flyaways, and her glasses are the identical pair to the ones I wore for many, many years until they broke in my hand during a visit to Wing and Glark's going on three years ago and I was forced into the present. ["Man, that was a good trip. Except for the part where you broke your glasses and suffered a blinding migraine by having to watch The Contender half-blind." -- Wing Chun] Jackie is me in ninth grade. A little bit, Jackie is all of us in ninth grade. It is why she is pitied, like a mirror onto our own dorkiness that we always wished someone would be nice to. But it is also why she is ignored, like a skeleton we've jammed into our closets along with our shoelace-less white Keds and our NKOTB pencil holders. Sorry, Jackie. We're not trying to be bullies. It's just that we had enough of you back when we actually were you.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Because she's so attuned to the needs of her guests and her family (or because a helpful producer pointed the way to the intriguing subplot), Trista takes notice and approaches HRWES, asking if her sister is okay. HRWES shoots back that Jackie feels a little out of the whole celebration, and confessionalizes to us, "On the one hand, I can tell that Jackie is feeling emotional and I'm saddened to see that. On the other hand, I'm immensely elated that Trista is as happy as she is." On the one hand, awwwww. And, on the other hand, ouch.
But a father's work is never done, even when it's merely the emotional stability of his second favorite child at stake. He takes his distraught daughter aside, and they walk toward Sad Beach (the opposite direction he walked with Trista just a few choppy moments ago), where he puts his arm around her and asks what's wrong. Jackie doesn't like being "so young" and "not knowing anything." He tells her that "those people" would be totally willing to talk to her. Dude, they've been drinking since they stepped off the plane in New York. That Pete dude would probably talk to a shoe if it had an interesting enough pickup line (I imagine "I'm a shoe!" would even qualify). Jackie wails that she doesn't want them to be forced to talk to her, and HRWES tells her to strike up a conversation and, well, see what happens! And, in her defense, I know many people who have felt exactly this way before. And, on the other hand, once they turned twelve, these feelings usually started to recede somewhat.
Over by a small footbridge, Ryan, Trista, and just one camera crew, a supervising producer, and that guy who stands around and holds that big-ass light all share a wonderfully private moment between the lovebirds, as Trista and Ryan kiss and say "I love you" a lot of times. She baby-voices, "I'm so excited my friends are here," and Ryan furthers the discourse of human nature with a stultifying "I know. It's fun." Ryan doesn't think it's fun.
"I think this is a huge fairy tale for Trista and Ryan," says Katie, a college friend of Trista's who cleverly remembered that they're actually going to SEE this on TELEVISION one day. "I think that there are so many skeptics as far as whether you can meet the right person on TV," but she thinks Trista and Ryan are "the real deal." Similarly, Chris, Ryan's brother -- who is not currently romancing Trista's sister, causing a distinct lack of symmetry and I'll bet you ten dollars is one of the reasons Jackie's so upset -- shares with us that any reservations he might have had got conveniently washed away in a tide of free first-class flights and booze. He can tell it's "real," he tells us, when Trista and Ryan are "eating breakfast" in their sweatpants and there are no cameras around. Trista, meanwhile, is all, "Oh, there's a 'no cameras' now?"
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Back at Le Meridien (St. Martin is a French-speaking island, so allow me to translate for those of you not in the know: "The Meridien." Thank me later), My Two Dads take Trista and Ryan into a plush room and sit them down on couches, telling them they have a surprise. "Are our moms here?" Trista asks. Oh, well, erm, cough. Not such a good surprise after all, I guess. My Three Moms (Ryan's mother Barbara, Trista's stepmother Carol, and Trista's poor, suffering mother Roseanne, who has to HATE this) are quick-cut down a long spiral staircase and onto couches where Trista, Ryan, and My Two Dads continue to sit. Immediately, the evil stepmom is all up in Trista's grill, confessionalizing her way back into last week's weak subplot: "We had a list." Back inside Le Meridien, Babs tells them that she doesn't want to feel like "a guest" at the wedding. Fine. Then don't come. They ask questions about invitations that Trista doesn't and can't answer. "Number 6, Item A," Cruella DeStepmom reads off of a scribbled piece of loose leaf paper, "When? Where?" Trista tells them that they already know when, but that she can't tell them where. It's at the Rancho Mirage in Palm Beach, California, Cruella. Read the tabloids. I do. When she suggests going on to "Item 7," Ryan sighs and halts and sputters through the joke, "Whose idea was it to invite the moms?" Roseanne, taking this opportunity, shoots back, "We can actually do this tomorrow." Go, RealMom! A cry of joy goes up from the couple. Trista's happy. Ryan's happy. The Sutters are happy. HRWEG muses quickly and silently on a lot of mistakes he's made in his life.
More. Partying. Shots. This is the official shower, I guess. The best man and maid of honor welcome us all to the shower, the theme of which is "Love and Lust." Well, none out of two is...well, the null set of premarital bliss, is what it is. In accordance with this, Ryan doesn't not smile once the whole night. And then -- oh, god -- Bob. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announces, the gayest Leading Player character I've seen on a stage since Pippin, the gayest of all plays, "we are going to play a little game with Trista and Ryan." A sea of stone faces meets his intro. Trista and Ryan sit to each other in two chairs, facing the audience, holding oak tag and black magic markers. Is this the ceremonial "Making Of The Premarital Shoebox Diorama" you hear so much about in traditional wedding lore? Because I can make Abraham Lincoln's boyhood home out of Popsicle sticks and a raw umber crayon faster than you can say "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mr. President?" Except, sadly, no. Instead, they're playing some kind of Newlywed Game thing, except they're the only team and, mercifully, you don't have to use the word "whoopee."
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Bob poses Question #1, which is, "Trista, what is Ryan's most annoying habit?" They both guess correctly that it's "hanging up the towels." They kiss, and I could join in the celebration that these two soulmates know each other as well as they do, or I could finally get on the side of the attending party and try to strike Bob dead with my mind. The question is about how many kids they're planning on having. Trista says two. Ryan hedges "two or three." Like it would be another number besides those, as if Trista would write, "My Mormon beliefs mean I would like as many kids as the Good Lord intends for me to have" or Ryan would write, "I would like eleven kids, one for each of the Colonel's herbs and spices, because garsh dang it if I don't love me some chicken." : "What city were you both in the first time that you had sex?" The tittering crowd is delightfully shocked by the ribald, non-whoopee-esque direction this game has taken. Where is this game taking place, anyway? I wasn't aware that Le Meredien was a Victorian drawing room that exists in The Past. Everyone calm down. Trista whispers, "I don't want to give that up," and one of the guys who I think is soon going to emerge as That Jerk Ben calls out, "You gave it up already!" Now see, that is a very funny line. Bob feels the need to piggyback on the laugh, literally hollering, "Is it me, or is it very hot in here?" It's you, you greasy freak. And not that I'm an enemy of the adverb to any extent, but you really needed to lose the "very" on that sentence. And you needed not to make a joke about how hot is was in there. When, considering the context of the event, "Take my wife, please" would actually have made a better quip than the one you made, it looks like you lost your emcee privileges. And, scarily enough, it actually would have. Ryan, protecting his wife-to-be's honor, holds up a card reading, "We haven't." Everyone is very filled with rejoicing at this answer, but I can't hear the television above my screeching Bullshit Detector to know if anything else was actually said. ["Huh? Of course they haven't, Djb: they are not married yet. Sheesh!" -- Wing Chun]
I sing the "you've died three times" end music from the videogame Jumpman as I so often do when something terrible finally ends. Bob thanks Trista and Ryan for "proving America right," and Bob tells a certain "Ben" character to clap along with the rest. He's in Ryan's wedding party, and we know this because boys are only friends with boys and girls are only friends with girls. But Ben's not happy, and he tells us that the shower was "stupid." He sits sullenly. He gives the finger to the camera. He complains that Bob shouldn't have been left to "run the show," saying that someone who was actually a good friend of Ryan's should have been able to do it. Gee, I wonder if he had anyone in particular in mind. Ryan, on the other hand, was glad for the presence of Bob. Which means that Ben difficult as he is, actually has a lot in common with us. He's a better story than what's usually going on around him and he knows it. And he really, really, really hates Bob.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Chris and Sara give another toast and present Trista and Ryan with a framed photo of their families, as well as two framed quotes. One of them, Chris tells us, "pulled [him] out of an unbelievable spiral," adding, "That quote saved my life." That must have been some quote. Too bad we never get to see what it is and have ours lives saved as well. Trista's quote is from Emerson, which apparently Ryan once recited to her in one of his video messages, but, I mean, good luck finding where. And then, fireworks. Drunk people LOVE fireworks.
Finally emulating the actual series that got us all here in the first place, the girls lounge around the pool and do fuck-all while pretending that upright citizenry is for suckers and bikinis are for hot, TV-whoring them! Trista meets the other girls at the pool, pulling off her shirts and revealing the words "Ryan's Babe," written, in script, in sequins, on her ass. Did I mention the sequins? A million dollars for the shoes she'll be wearing, and we can't do better on the swimwear than a scrap of black latex and an intern with a particular knack for the Bedazzler. I mean, I know this whole series pretty much has a silent "gack" shrouding it at all times, but sometimes I really do think it's worth noting again, just to remind us that it's always, always there: gack. "Ryan's Babe." Gack.
Trista wraps up the Jackie subplot in one sentence, as we're treated to one shot of what looks like Jackie making nice with a bosomy friend of Trista's by the pool. It's not until the raw tapes of this season are released to the public that you find out that the entirety of the conversation between the two was the bridal party member sneering, "Okay, time to stop staring at my implants, Gnome." It's so not nice how they call her "Gnome."
Meanwhile, the men chill out like men do to a soundtrack of the literal cumulative amalgam of every instrumental song on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack (listen to it...it's spooky). They surf. They play volleyball. They swim. They remove, open, and drink cans of beer from their own finely-honed six-packs. Jet skis. Kayaks. Chillin'. Ah, to be a dude. Catching a rare private moment and apropos of absolutely nothing, Ryan takes out his T-Mobile cell phone and dials a number. Back at the pool, Trista's phone rings, ringing the actual jingle that you hear at the end of every T-Mobile commercial, and she picks it up, exclaiming, "I got a message from Ryan! A picture message!" Man. What a horribly depressing exercise in corporate synergy. I guess this also means that Trista and Ryan are talented enough to win Oscars, much the same as the former pitchperson of this campaign, against whom it seems they've now forced a hostile takeover. Yuck. That sucked. At least we have the comfort of knowing that those two and this show have now totally lost all of their integrity! Oh, wait.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
Chris predicts that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the bachelor party is going to rank "a twenty." At least he didn't suggest that they crank it up to eleven. Not that this sucks that much less. Anyway, we've moved to some sort of outdoor deck area, which finds Ryan and his friends doing a lot of drinking and cheering. Some dude named Sadler presents Ryan with a "ball and chain," consisting of a bowling ball painted pink emblazoned with the word "Trista" and connected to a bicycle chain. Some other dude gives Ryan a pair of underwear, which...well, fruity, wouldn't you say?
Ben continues to be a dick. "The thing about Ben," Ryan fills in, "is that he sort of has this sarcastic, witty sense of humor, and the more he drinks the more it comes out." They have a word for that where I come from, Ryan. And it's "mean drunk." When Ben stops slurring his own name long enough to start spouting off like Noel Coward I'll amend my thoughts on this, but until then we're going to strike "witty" from the list of things that the devil's poison has made Ben become.
Ryan's father stumbles through a speech about the love and devotion that comes of having children or some such insane thing, and everyone toasts him in a respectable, paternal way, except Bob, who you can juuuuuuuuust make out shouting, "Thank you, Mr. Sutter! Godspeed!" in the background because SHUT UP.
And, onto the partying, sexed-up bacchanal that is the bachelorette party. In the world's most elaborate tiki bar, a dude juggles fire and the soundtrack plays the steel-drum solo from the middle six minutes of "Just the Two of Us." More speeches and more loving as Sara demands that everyone have a good time tonight. They present her with a tiara with a long veil coming off of it, and they all giggle girlishly. A friend named Stephanie presents Trista with a game called "Sexual Chocolate." Shannon makes a speech to the effect that she met Trista when "she was trying to steal [Stephanie's] boyfriend from [her]." Trista retorts, "No!" Or some such equally clever rejoinder. The first person to tell me correctly what the hell Shannon is doing there gets a free T-Mobile phone.
And, strippers. Two latex-clad chicas enter the dudes' party, and Ryan identifies them as "the first wave of strippers," like they're the kamikaze front-line offensive in The Titty Wars. They dance and grind and we get a review from mightybigtitty.com (because, under the circumstances, there's no way we could call it "televisionwithouttitty") recapper "Lucas," who positively remembers his experiences with "the blonde one," who "can entertain." Check your forums, Lucas. They're out of control.
| Aired on 12.02.2003
"Tonight we have a dare checklist!" Sara presents Trista with a list of wacky things that she has to do tonight, just as Trista did for her when she planned Sara's wedding five years ago. Totally unimaginative AND with a million dollars of corporate cash behind it. This ought to be...synthetic.
Dare #1: Write your married name in lipstick on a guy's butt. She does. "Sutter." With a smiley face underneath it. Whoo! Chicks are so cuuuuuuute!
Dare #2: Drink a body shot off a shirtless guy. She does. Whoo! Sisters are doing it for themselves!
Dare #3: Get a pair of guys underwear. Amy -- wow, I didn't even know she was there -- muses, "I'm really surprised that all of these guys are volunteering to, like, take off their underwear and do all these crazy things with Trista!" And don't look at the cameras, the lights, or the staged scenarios to explain it. Because they've got nothing to do with it. What? They don't.
Trista takes a picture to some guy's butt. In the good news column, this moment is a quickie refresher course of "Lowest Common Denominator," for those of you who haven't thought of it since third grade. Which is apparently where all of these people will see each other.
Something weird, meanwhile, is happening with the dudes. Some guy named "Josh" tells us, "It's just one of my convictions and one of my commitments to my faith and to my wife just not to be a part of that." Dear Prudith, won't you come out and play? There's a whole cabal of guys down by the beach who refuse to be up in the room with the strippers, and Chris has to go down and beg them -- BEG THEM -- to go watch some hot young ass with the bachelor boy. But for some reason they won't. Ryan tells us that "a real separation" opened between the guys at this point, and that he felt responsible. Leaving out the moment where Bob makes a gay-themed joke in Russ's direction -- because (a) ew, and (b) I've been cutting high-pitched Bob some sexuality slack, but, sometimes, pot meet kettle, is all I'm saying -- a drunken Ryan begs them to come back into the stripper tent. What the hell is going on? What kind of group of pussy-ass losers is this? He's sitting in a chair telling them, "I understand everybody's point of view." What point of view? Isn't this a bachelor party? When did everyone convert to the temperance-loving religion of Dorkism? Free booty! On display! For free! And suddenly everyone's all, "Tithe! Tithe! Let's drink a Fresca and listen to Creed." Straight men. Can they do anything right?
| Aired on 12.02.2003
For reasons I think you'll instantly understand, there's a late-breaking nickname christening from "Ryan" to "Cryin'." Carry on.
Everyone consoles Cryin', who is really upset that people didn't want to watch the strippers. I'm still not following. And even less so when a second wave of strippers makes its way in and suddenly no one has a problem with it anymore. My brows are so furrowed with confusion and concern it's like I suddenly have two televisions right to each other. A new TV! Thank you, Uncle Fleissy!
The ladies, meanwhile, are having NO problem with this bacchanal of sex and death (well, neither). A guy strips to his boxers and jumps in the pool. Trista teaches two guys a dance from her Miami Heat days. Don't they mean her "physical therapy specialist" days?
Two of the wedding girls go spy on the Eyes Wide Shut (meaning: steeped in misbegotten symbolism but secretly really boring) moment unfolding with the guys, promising that what she's seen (and what we haven't) is not for Trista's eyes, and that she "won't be mentioning" any of what she saw to her. Well. Mission accomplished.
This juxtaposition is giving me whiplash! Oh, now Trista gets a stripper. And all of the women are fine with it. And no one is uncomfortable. One of them is in a fireman's costume. Jackie proclaims the entire situation "gross." You said it, sister, not me.
The two girls lure Cryin' away from the main set, teasing and flirting and blah. They amble off with Cryin' as, back at the bachelorette party, Shannon screams, "Let's go find the guys!" Whoo! Cryin', meanwhile, is sitting in the dark with the two strippers, who are all over him and telling him they won't get him in any trouble. But Pete and another guy come over to rescue him, telling us all earnestly, "I don't think Ryan's love for Trista needs to be tested by a girl in a catsuit." Not that there's much competition, but that wins Best Line big-time. Back with the guys, Cryin' proclaims the entire situation "stressful," and he takes off. He wanders drunkenly out of the camera's gaze, turning back to the attending crews and yelling that staple line of put-upon reality-show contestants everywhere, "This is my life!" That's right. So stop looking at me like it's my fault.
Fun turns to boozy turns to strippers turns to, somehow, rain. Wow. God watches The Bachelor. What an emotional tipping point. The ladies come to crash the party and discover that Cryin' is missing. Trista becomes very upset and starts to cry, worrying that she knows he wants and needs her. Trista walks off by herself, still walking slowly enough that the cameras can get a mark on her, into the hotel and into a bathroom, where we can hear her wailing with sadness behind the closed door. Wow. It is pouring down emotionally appropriate rain!
| Aired on 12.02.2003
But not where Cryin' in, off wandering in totally dry circumstances, on a tiny island! That really is the smallest low pressure system in the history of The Sadlands. He walks cobblestone streets by himself, stopping to pet a stray dog along with way (awwwwwwwww!) before quickly returning to the bar. And...there he is. Two hours, we learn, he was gone. Concerned glances abound, everyone happy to see him except a seriously wasted Ben, who slurs something about how now "he's our friend again." Ben's famewhoring is impressive because it's so ambitious.
And, finally, reunited (and it feels so good). Knowing as if by instinct where she would be, Ryan walks into the hotel lobby just as Trista exits the bathroom. "Nothing else mattered anymore" at that moment, Ryan tells us, because "she was back." Conventional wisdom shouldn't even BOTHER having to point out that she wasn't the one who left.