By Daniel | Season 9 | Episode 3 | Aired on 06.10.2013
It’s actually not bad, watching the bachelor idiots getting pelted with dodgeballs, and then Harrison shows up to announce that the men are going to be split up into teams and fight for Desiree’s maidenhood or something. It’s the usual deal: The winning team gets to continue the date, the losers don’t. The teams are: One Bunch of Idiots versus The Rest of the Idiots.
And then the men are dressed in red uniforms and blue uniforms and we watch them stride in slow motion towards the dodgeball … field? Pitch? Cage? Which is set up in public, so I expect at some point one of the bachelors will yell, “Are you not entertaaaaiiiined?” at the crowd. Desiree laughs her ass off when she sees the men in their tank tops and shorts looking deadly serious.
The game starts, and Michael tells us the crowd was going so crazy you couldn’t hear the ball whiz by your face. By the crowd “going crazy” he appears to mean “sometimes some of the people who had nothing better to do than watch this clapped sometimes.” Red and Blue each win one match, and then Brooks hurts his finger in the opening ball-grab of the tie-breaker, and Desiree frets about Brooks going to the hospital without her there. His Red teammates talk about winning this “for Brooks” like the guy died. And then Blue wins away, after a pitched battle between Chris and Zack K. winning it by knocking out Chris. And then — and not for the first time on this stupid show — Desiree says both teams get to continue the date. She explains to us that it’s early on, so she needs time with all of them. Well, except for Brooks, who is, as we speak, getting his finger amputated.
Oh, wait. I was only kidding, but when we come back from commercial, we get this gritty hospital reality show starring Brooks, who is swimming in and out of consciousness while getting his finger attended to. Well, I bet he’d be comforted to know everyone back at dinner is toasting him.
Anyway, Brad wants to tell Desiree about his past — do we know what this is yet? And he gets her alone — and tells her that he has a three-year-old son named “Maddox.” Yeah, nice to refer to your son as “your past,” champ. “He’s my whole world,” Brad tells her. Oh, wait — there’s more. He’s raising him by himself, because — he says — he was arrested for trying to stop his drunk babymama from driving, and there was a restraining order against him. You know, the automatic kind that’s put into place when you’re charged with domestic violence. “Thankfully,” Brad notes, the charge was dismissed. Which I hate to point out isn’t exactly the same as “I didn’t do it,” but I doubt Brad will be around for too much longer anyway, despite the fact that he seems pretty confident that opening up about the time he was charged with domestic violence will earn him a rose. If he thinks he’s getting it over the guy who competed hard enough to land in the hospital, he’s crazy.