Meredith "Count Bland-ula" Phillips (that is her last name, right? I've never used it once. Where am I? Who are these people? What's going on? Who took my pants? I miss my fly-fly, dada!) sits on her bed packing colorful yellow clothing she must be saving for an upcoming "Come As Your Favorite Color That Isn't, In Fact, Just The Absence Of All Color" costume party. Poor Meredith. It seems that just as she's arrived at her manse, already the cruel demigods of reality television are casting her back into the cold, cold world. So what happens now? Another suitcase in another hall. So what happens now? Take your picture off another wall. Where am I going to? You'll get by you always have before. Where am I going to? Meredith. Don't ask...anymore.
You won't have to ask anymore, Meredith, because you're going on an all-expense-paid trip to scenic, tropical Puerto Rico! She tells us, "I'm really excited to go on these overnight dates with these guys" in a monotone vocal cadence that indicates that her excitement for the situation is somewhere between the range of "I just spilt tomato juice all over myself during the first twenty minutes of a flight to Tokyo" and "my puppy is in a coma real, real bad." Nevertheless, she soldiers on, really selling it: "I'm gonna learn a lot about these guys, which is a great thing." Unless you learn that one dude lives with his mom. Or that another dude only wants to speak through the universal language of lurve. Or that yet another dude has incurable vampire brow. Anyway, Meredith, good luck with all that "learning."
We discover through her continued "confessional filibuster" (one wonders how I've never used that expression before) that Meredith has "invited" (because "by contractual decree" has such a judicial ring to it) each of the remaining guys to three different Puerto Rican cities for her overnight, intimate one-on-one dates. Three different Puerto Rican cities? Puerto Rico has three cities now? Wait. WAIT. I'm just kidding. I've actually been to that self-styled "commonwealth" many times, and I know much about its rich history and the inability of its people to participate in the electoral process for reasons I can't completely understand. A proud and registered citizen of the mainland, Meredith casts her vote for Ian to meet her in San Juan, Chad to kick it in Isla Verde, and Matthew to not win in Dorado. Now I know Puerto Rico isn't exactly the biggest rock on earth, but I have to say that, from my own experience, I know there's only, like, twenty miles separating the two farthest cities on this itinerary, those cities being San Juan and Dorado. And if the "Isla Verde" is the same overdeveloped, touristy Isla Verde I stayed in when I was there, that town is literally about seven miles away from San Juan and means, translated into English, "San Juan, but shitty."
Ah, Puerto Rico. It's nice to be back. Reality television hasn't taken me to this overhyped island paradise for quite some time now. Over three thousand miles from Meredith's manse -- even though there are far nicer island paradises much closer to the sunniest city on earth -- flags of the Motherland (is this really the Motherland for anyone? Isn't this more like the Auntland?) fly high, discount airlines transport Floridian tourists, and waves crash on the beach in slow motion. Those must be some bored-ass surfers on those there slow-crashing waves. We zero in on a stately old castle that I know from years of family vacations as "El Morro," which we went to every year for our one misguided shot of "tourism" until we went for the last time when I was in high school, couldn't find the parking lot we thought we'd parked in like six times previously (which is actually true, since in 1992 the grounds were restored to their eighteenth-century majesty and the parking lots were all removed), drove around futilely for an hour, had my sister's boyfriend (and future brother-in-law) tell my mother that being with my family was like being trapped inside of an episode of I Love Lucy, parked illegally, and came back an hour later to find all four of our tires slashed. Anyway, that's where our romantic scene is set. Oh, and once it kept out the Dutch.
Ian rounds a corner and spots Meredith on the fort grounds, shouting out a generally pleased "How are you?" The dude is, like, fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and he can't even grace her with a foreign "hello" whilst in a Spanish-speaking land? Halfway around the world she flies to be here and she'd have a better chance of having someone whisper sweet Spanish nothings in her ear if she'd gone on an intimate overnight date with Sesame Street.
Flouncing on the green, green grass where my family's rented Impala once stood so many years before, Meredith and Ian take the advice I've been subliminally offering to this entire season as they just go fly a kite, already. No, that's really what they're doing. Flying kites. In shitty-looking weather. Knowing full well that the only way to save themselves from the most boring episode of this show ever is by inadvertently discovering electricity. Meredith tells us in a confessional that she feels "relaxed," and just as sure as the floating booze cruise they call Earth will keep on turning, we cut to the couple with a picnic blanket spread out as they enjoy themselves some fine champagne. Ian toasts "to a day in Puerto Rico, baby," but he roles his "r" so you know his language training is utterly authentic. In yet another strained confessional, Ian sticks to the talking points, saying, "It's been hard for me to open up. But it's time, really, to sort of let her know how I'm feeling. Hopefully, she'll be able to tell me, too." A closed emotional book. An ambiguous backstory. Seemingly no family. A facility with languages. Or, at least, their dominant accents and "r" rolls. It is clear to me now. Ian is a big fat spy.
The spy who...loved? Back on the blanket, Ian asks Meredith what she's worried about in her relationship with him. What "relationship" is that, exactly? Oh. You're right. I'm sorry. Trifling concerns like that they fully don't actually know each other at all are so fourteen seasons ago. Meredith suddenly finds the importance of being earnest, and floats a love biscuit (okay, ew. Sorry), sweet-talking, "Lately, I haven't really been worrying about anything. Except when I'm going to see you ." Ian tells her how "nice" it was of her to say that, and Meredith tells her that she isn't just being nice. That makes Ian wants to cram his tongue down her throat. I find love between consenting adults confusing and full of mixed signals.
"As long as I see what I see and I believe what I see, that's all good," Ian tells Meredith lovingly. The duck flies at midnight. Spy.
The happy couple strolls down the cobblestone streets of old San Juan, Ian offering an "Hola, Señor" to a delighted native. Nice try, Spyro Gyro. We can hear the Berlitz inflection of your learning your first two Spanish words on your flight from L.A. "Hola, Señor" is like walking into a hotel lobby in Paris and dropping the "Bonjour!" bomb and then getting mad that no one will talk to you in English. In a confessional, Meredith indicates "strong feelings for Ian," but says she intends to use this date "to find out if he stands out above the rest." They stand under some enormously phallic tower in the middle of some town square, Ian handing her a flower and asking, "Will you accept this rose?" Just like on that TV show! She laughs and smooches him, sharing with us, "The only person I'd want to walk through Old San Juan with is Ian." Ain't that just the reality-television jaunt through the tropics for you? Puerto Rican marriage, Haitian divorce.
"I invited Ian over to a mansion in Old San Juan," Meredith tells us as we're treated to shots of Ian walking up to Meredith's door. Oh, stop implying all of this autonomy, for crying out loud. You didn't invite him to anything. "I'd just seen him, but I missed him already." A short-term memory like that and this new couple is going to be doomed to having their first date...fifty times! Cue "Hey Ya" and a vomiting walrus and Rob Schneider getting poked with a pointy stick. The end.
A gaudy live-action pink flamingo in a Meredith costume pulls open a giant wooden door behind which is usually a hunchback mispronouncing "Dracooooooooolya." But behind this door is the answer to why Meredith isn't often seen in bright colors or feathers or ice-skating costumes from primetime ice-skating specials enjoyed by our grandmothers and slightly gay uncles. What the hell is she wearing? Ian asks the same question, but in a much more please-sleep-with-me kind of way, noting through poorly concealed horror, "Wow, look at you." Dude, she must be feeling self-conscious enough already. Don't rub it in that you get to wear your own drab street clothes and she's product-placing for a lawn furniture retailer on Daytona Beach.
"Being with Meredith here in San Juan is the best of the best," Ian says, a real stickler for the dialect of the words "Sahn" and "Hwon," the latter of which blows me backwards off my chair like a strong gust among otherwise light tropical breezes. He and Meredith retreat to an outdoor deck, and as they sit down to dinner, Ian speaks of their "strong connection." Can we have a thing where if someone busts out with one of the Bachelor/ette buzzwords, I get to skip recapping the whole scene?
The end.
Dang. That was good, albeit somewhat short-lived. Anyway.
Ian: "Well, the only thing that worries me is that one conversation we had early on -- your first day on this journey -- what were your expectations at the end?" That didn't make any sense, didn't start off as a question, and used the word "journey." But Meredith's one sip ahead of him, so her sweet, beautiful drunk talk takes the form of, "I just didn't expect, y'know, you," because they do have chemistry and Ian is the winner. Ian reminds us in a confessional that he's totally falling for Meredith, but wants to make sure the moment is right. Right, like The Hand Of Non-Commitment on which he's going to be slipping the ring? "It's not my way to do things publicly," Ian tells Meredith, just to make sure that we're set up for the reasons that the end of this season is romantic, even when Ian is declared the winner and declines to pin the pin on because he was too shy. "I want to have my private life," he declares on television. "It's gonna be private." They gaze for a maddeningly long time and the audience is charmed. Except for one person who, somewhere in Vail, mumbles a put-out "Gimme the remote, fire-boy; that blond boy said a word I didn't understand." But all of the things that make Meredith so uncompelling also make her so damn real, and so she tells us, "You have to have love first before you have the ring. I don't want the ring just because. Both would be nice but, y'know, what's better than love?" Maybe nothing, but not having to watch Ian and Meredith trade a Caribbean Sea's worth of swapped spit comes in a real close second.
I mean, do enough people know this show well enough that it could sell as a pitch for a fiction screenplay? Because it's so formula it could be so easily slotted into the rules of a Hollywood script: girl meets boys, girl eliminates some boys, girl and boy consider an invitation to spend the night together in the faaaahntasy suite. I mean, the language doesn't even change from season to season. Only the names change. To protect the imaginative: "Dear [insert names of talentless reality-show participants]: I hope you're enjoying your stay in [insert picturesque, often tropical city]. Should you decide to forgo your individual rooms, please use this key to stay as a couple in the fantasy suite." Anyone interested in hazarding a guess as to who the "I" is who has written this personalized letter? Oooh! Maybe that can be the hook of the screenplay. The "fantasy suites" are really chambers of torture where the mysterious, Agatha-Christie-inspired "I" is a killer who keeps offing reality-show contestants! And the movie can be called Fantasy Suites, the number of movements in the suite reflecting the three-act structure of the common Hollywood screenplay! Nah. Actually, I think I'll just call it Key Party.
Fantasy Suite, Interior. Night. Ian and Pink Flamingo kiss at the door of a room festooned with romantic cues, including candles and wine. The couple raises a glass. Ian: "To you and me. Me and you. And not holding anything back." No. Sorry. My dialogue wouldn't be as shitty as that.
Back at the big bounce, Chad climbs over a boat to meet Meredith on the other side. Meredith hands him a "passionfruit mimosa" which, after frangelico and sour mix, contains 2000% of the USDA recommended daily allowance for super-gay casual drinking. But in the good news column, it also has niacin!
The big-ass yacht takes...well, not sail. It takes motor. They jet across the water, each of them now in the middle of another drink entirely, Meredith slurring that she wants people to know she's sincere. Oh, she's nothing but. Really. Nothing. Chad awkwardly tells her how "exciting" it is that it's "so normal" between them, and I'm sure she'll curl up tonight with the knowledge that Chad is attracted to her, which he expresses right here in no uncertain terms. He celebrates in a confessional that this date saw the two of them becoming more "kissy" and "touchy-feely," using words in a lexicon indicating that if one of the many empty wine bottles they've generated today should spin in Meredith's direction, they'd get to spend "seven minutes in heaven." I mean, "kissy"? Act your age, mama. Not your shoe size. Oh, wait. Your shoe size exceeds your age by, like, fourteen. Do your shoes also still live with their mother?
Nighttime now, they part to change for dinner, Chad's off-the-rack Chess King purchase making its final, salmon-y TV appearance. While he sets about finding a shirt where the hanger marks haven't dented the shoulders (which actually happens to me all the time, but it seems like it would be endemic to Chad's dorkiness...sorry, but it's true), Meredith confessionalizes, "I shall eliminate him without care or remorse." Whatever. That's what it means in Spanish.
La di da, we're at a hotel called "The Water Club" (2 Tartak Street, Isla Verde, which is, like, a suburb of San Juan, PR ) in an upstairs lounge called "Wet." Yes. Fine. I looked it up on their website. Shut up. Over two frothing, brightly-colored gaytinis (give these men a beer, for Chrissakes), Chad makes a toast: "Here's to a good beginning, a fantastic middle, and a great ending." Just like the script to Key Party! Or a bit like a Snickers Bar, what with that undeniably delicious creamy nougat center. Chad leans in to kiss Meredith in a very chaste fashion, and then tells her, "I think we should have, like, a first, like, kiss, kiss, romantic kiss." Uh-oh. He's freakin' out. Abort! Abort! Meredith tells him to "just do it," and then sits up all put out at his hemming, berating him, "I know it's hard, but just, like...." He stammers onward that he wants it to be the right time because they're both seventeen and the subject in question is "sweet, precious virginity." Honestly. You're both over thirty. But it's too late, because the mood is already lost. Jesus. "Y'know, we know we can be jokesters together," he says, apparently in an effort to save his rapidly shattering ego. "But, like, a kiss can tell a lot. I feel like there's a time and a place and a moment to do that." There is a time! IN YOUR TEENS! Get it over with!
Instead, dinner. Meredith asks Chad straight off where he is in his life, and Chad chooses to kick off his reply with, "When my father died...." Meredith shoots him what I can only interpret as a reproachful look and barely stops short of shooting back, "I meant why ain't you got no job, deadbeat?" Maybe he's too busy, like all of you, looking for a day job that allows for six weeks of chill time while you run off and participate in a reality dating show? Who among you has a job, I wonder? Chad tries to talk himself out of this one, saying that his "company" asked him to relocate and then closed three weeks later. Yeah, well. Selling Amway can be a tricky business proposition. It's hard to get to the top of the pyramid when the pyramid's just a scheme. Chad admits that he was worried when Meredith was coming to his hometown, where she would learn that he was thirty-one, unemployed, and living with his mother, and Meredith confessionalizes that she was surprised to find out that he didn't have a job. Maybe because of the words "Pharmaceutical Sales" plastered under his name every time we saw his doughy mug for the first five episodes.
Meredith yanks out the faaaaaaaaahntasy suite card to shut Chad the hell up already, and she asks what he thinks about going. Chad reads, "Please use this key to stay as a couple in the fantasy suites." In a misbegotten attempt to reclaim his severed manhood, now found at the bottom of his pink-ass drink, Chad steps up and insists, "I'm taking you to the fantasy suites." It's just one suite, Chad. You're not a fantasy real estate mogul. You have to give them back at the end of the night.
The Fantasy Suites. Meredith lies on the couch wearing body language that supplants the need for a bumper sticker slapped across her bra strap that promises, "I'd rather be reading. Fuck all, I'd rather be anywhere." They toast with glasses of champagne, and Chad goes in for the kiss just as Meredith sits up, all of this taking place in one fluid, slapstick move so Three's Company it looks totally staged. Chad tells Meredith of his "wild side," which she doesn't believe exists, and she asks him if he considers himself "a sexual person," which he answers in the affirmative, like, nine thoughtful hours later. He finally gets the kiss, and he has to move Meredith's arm from off the couch to around his back. In his final confessional, like, ever, Chad tells us that he thought the date couldn't have gone any better, promising, "That last rose is just right around the corner." I think "just over the horizon" would have been a better "futile spatial relation" metaphor, but whatever.
Look! The sunny, white-sand beaches of Puerto Rico! AGAIN! Today, we learn, we're meeting Matthew. On a white, sandy beach. And there he is. He runs right up to Meredith and hugs her big. He puts a flower in her hair. He bemoans the fact that it's been "a long time." Real couples are separated for business trips longer than the two of these people have known each other. We find them on lawn chairs sipping tropical beverages out of coconuts, because Meredith has been marooned for so longer on this island that she's gone a little mad and has fashioned drinkware out of island fruits and smelted some silverware and named a volleyball and grown a beard and read Life of Pi, the worst book ever. Matthew asks her what's on her mind, and she just tosses back, "You." Matthew gives her a raucous high-five and shouts "Good answer!" with the same exact inflection The Geek used to bellow, "Nice manners!" Oooh, that reminds me of yet another thing I wish I were doing with my time right now.
"I've never seen eyes like yours," Matthew croons, a clear indicator he's spent his alone time leading up to Meredith's arrival canvassing bars and other singles locations and asking the local color, "Speak to me the most cheesy line of your most Latin lover." Meredith, not convinced, shoots back the intellectual "Are you joking me?" That's not an expression. She goes further: "In what way?" This corners Matthew into having to back up that claim, and all the background generic guitar scoring doesn't distract from the reality that he's not really telling her anything new about her eyes besides their color. He's all, "Um, well, they're green. And then hazel. And oooh, is that some umber I see? And, there, right on the edge, is a color called Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown, a color that is the result of Crayola's 'Name the New Color Contest' to celebrate the company's ninetieth anniversary in 1998." Wow. When did the dude learn so much about crayons?
Meredith drags us screaming into a confessional and tells us that the two of them initially had "a day full of activities" planned, but that she decided to bag them so that they could spend the whole day together, like, just hanging out. That deafening sound you hear is the incredulous groaning of a thousand production assistants angrily muttering, "Fucking cancel the hot-air balloon guy, then, I guess. I got up at 6 this morning for WHAT reason, exactly?" Meredith asks Matthew what he wants out of this experience, and he tells her that he's there to learn if they can spend their lives together. Meredith echoes those words almost verbatim in a confessional, telling us, "That's exactly what I want to hear!" And, according to your crack production staff, that's apparently exactly what we wanted to hear. Twice. Music strum strum strums along strummily while they cuddle in silence, and Meredith whips out (don't get excited...nothing good is about to happen) the faaaaaaaantasy suites card right there in broad daylight. But don't you worry: by the time Matthew finishes sounding out all of the individual syllables making up the card before them, it's night. Six months later. Meredith asks Matthew if they should stay as a couple, and Matthew says he'll leave it up to her. But when she says they should, he hilariously throws out a quick "Okay I agree." stop, thuddingly boring make-out talk in the faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahntasy suite. Matthew tells Meredith, "You got me good, Meredith." In subtitles. She tells him, "I know what you're saying." In subtitles. Could you guys speak up? Or, as my mom would say, quoting her favorite ever line from her favorite ever movie, Whoopi Goldberg's Jumpin' Jack Flash : "Speak English, Mick!" She says it a lot. So don't you be mumbling around my mom.
"You're the kind of guy that I push away," Meredith drones on, reinforcing my long-standing and repeatedly proven belief that if you listen closely, your mate will tell you exactly how he or she will break your heart and disguise it as insecurities about themselves. It's not an admission. It's a warning. She continues on, "You're right in front of my face. Sometimes, I don't know what to do," and then confessionalizes, "Matthew is the kind of guy you take home to your family." The sum total of those comments, along with pretty much everything she's ever said about Matthew, means, "I should like you. A lot more than I do." Ever know that guy? Who was so, so nice that you wished you liked him more? Whose shimmering heart of gold glows through his shining armor? Who makes you want to turn on your heart light and let it shine wherever you go? Ladies, meet Matthew. Ladies, choose Ian.
We check in for the first time this episode with Chris "Not A Strand Of Movable" Harrison up in the Gloom Room. He kicks it off by asking Meredith about her week, and she responds that she's found some "clarity" in the form of "two men I that I can definitely see myself falling in love with," continuing on that it's "two different paths...I'm not sure which path I want to go down yet." So, to be sure (and who didn't know at this point?), the Chad Path winds around Loserdom-on-Hudson and ends...at his mom's house. So, basically, Meredith will not be planting her hiking stick in that path ever. So let's dispense with the unmanufactured non-drama. Why ever watch the video messages? Why even do it? Chris picks up the plate where Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin were mixed together in All of Me and heads downstairs to meet the men, while Meredith makes her way over to the video messages screen and already knows whom she's picking.
"Well, each time that you and I get together things seem to get better and better," Chad chirps happily, adding that he enjoyed their lunch on the boat and also their romantic dinner. He wants another rose "so [they] can expand on these great experiences." Downstairs, Chris welcomes Chad into the bottom floor of the manse, and Chad lumbers in like the most docile gorilla that ever lived in the zoo. In a cage with its mother.
Upstairs, Ian's video message unspools. He welcomes Meredith as "babe," which is what you call a pig in a movie and not a girl on a date. He continues that he really enjoyed their "magical day" in "Sahn Hwon," celebrating in particular what happened when he got "this card." He holds up the invitation to the faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahntasy suite. And, downstairs, Chris accompanies Ian into the house. Ian doesn't tell Chris anything about himself because he's very private, but not too private to reassert constantly just how private a guy he is. I guess if he really wanted to communicate himself to Chris, he'd have to kiss him full on the mouth. To Ian, with saliva comes also knowledge.
"I want to meet your family. Your brother, your mom and dad, everybody." Trust us, Matthew. We've met them. You're wrong.
Retreating back to the Gloom Room, Meredith's voice-over tells us that she has to do "some soul-searching," seeing as there are "a couple of guys [she's] confused about still." That confessional was recorded in a century before yarn was invented. She's not confused now. She said she knew which two guys she was going to pick. I have no understanding of anything besides that. Downstairs, Chris puts down the boutonnière tray and sympathizes with Meredith's "difficult decision." He wishes them "all the best" and retreats to get Meredith, who is searching her soul for a good place to get some fries. Because she ain't got nothing else on her mind.
Realizing that they'll never win this episode so they might as well concede and just concentrate on the one (when did this show start being produced by the DNC?), even the promos are already hung up on the and will she say yes? question, hardly realizing that Chad is just lingering around the edge of the set, being all, "Um, excuse me, still here. Little help?" Chris accompanies our Bachlorette down the winding staircase, and she immediately kicks it off: "Tonight is very bittersweet for me." Like a Special Dark Hershey's Miniature? Poor dear! "I don't want to say goodbye to one of you, but on the other hand...." On the other hand, one of you lives with your mom.
Angsty reaction shots abound.
Matthew, will you accept this rose? He will. He will, indeed. He curries further favor by asking Meredith, "Are you okay?" She's fine. Who's supposed to be asking the questions here?
Ian, will you accept this rose? They both laugh in an our-relationship-has- already-eclipsed-this- bullshit-rose- accepting-thing kind of way, while Chad seems...well, not to quite get the joke. Chris steps forward and spiels that Chad should probably buzz the hell off, and after exchanging hugs with the other guys (awwwww!), Meredith accompanies him outside. It is kind of sad to watch someone in the throes of heartbreak. But it would be kind of more poignant if he knew the person also.
Chad and Meredith walk down the steps together hand in hand, Chad warning, "Not too far. I don't know if I can walk." Meredith faces him and tells him that she's falling for both of the other guys, and felt that she and Chad "weren't at that point." Because this is a job interview that yielded no job, Chad actually solicits feedback: "Is there anything that, like...?" He trails off, because he remembers that he and Meredith don't actually know each other. "Please don't going away from this thinking it was this or it was that," Meredith says. Yeah, isn't it enough for her just not to like you? Chad goes on saying that he thought they had a good time together, and Meredith says that there were "too many questions." Chad admits that "it hurts," and she sighs her first emotionally invested word of the season, which should never, under any circumstance, be the word "Chaaaaaad." She continues, "It wasn't anything about you. It's about me." "It's not you it's me"? She really gave him "it's not you it's me"? Dude. Chad invented "it's not you, it's me." Out of necessity. Because, you, see, it's always him.
Chad steps into the limo and they use some sort of weird effect I'll just call SadScope, where he makes his way across the seat in kind of a slomo but not really. It's hard to explain. And I'm just so sleeeeeeepy. Chad tells us how hard it's going to be to walk away from this "empty-handed and broken-hearted." Where is that car driving him, through the suburbs of Promo City? He's just speaking the show copy! I'm surprised he doesn't go on, "Y'know, that was the most shocking rose ceremony ever. I mean, like, it really makes you wonder if he'll propose. And if she'll say yes. I live with my mom." But what he mournfully intones instead is, "It just doesn't seem fair." He thought they would end up together. He was wrong. He notes that Meredith feels stronger about the other guys, but he can't imagine her sharing the "connection" they had with those two other scrubs: "You look your whole life for that right person. And then you think you met them and everything is cool. And it's pulled away from you. And you never see that person again." You'll see her at the reunion special.
Back in the house, Meredith toasts to "the two of [them] meeting [her] family. Finally." week. In Fantasy Suite II: Room Service OF DEATH.