Gooood morning Bachelorette Bracket!
Tuesday we had not only the Bachelorette, but Election Day! And while I hope everyone got out and voted, we got ANOTHER type of result in today’s email: our rankings for the bracket! Please keep in mind that a bunch of people forgot to fill out Week Two (myself included) so we are allll over the board, but unlike New Jersey who at the time of this draft still couldn’t call a winner, it’s anyone’s game.
The evening starts with a bunch of dudes talking about the previous week and making references to the fact someone spread some lies to Michelle about there being chatter in the house. The guys are prompted to talk about it with one another, most likely to see how willing Jamie is to commit to pretending he didn’t say anything. And while I care about this inevitable spiral to sniff out the rat, I am more concerned that I still don’t know most of these dudes. Like I got Nayte, Jamie, Joe, and Rick. And Romeo because I like him best. But everyone else at the start of this? Nope. Nada. Nothing.
Kaitlyn comes in with the first date card and we kick off a Top Gun themed date which bares the question – did ABC pay Top Gun for them to come out and promote the movie / make them look cool, or did Top Gun pay ABC to come out and promote the movie?
Glen Powell (from Set It Up, a Netflix romcom everyone should watch) and Jay Ellis (from Insecure, a TV show I need to watch) are actors from the new movie (as is Miles Teller but would on the street is he SUUUUUCKS so didn’t miss not seeing him) and take the men through a series of challenges that people who want to be fighter pilots have to do during training.
Keep in mind – Powell and Ellis are ACTORS. They are PRETENDING to be fighter pilots. They are not fighter pilots. They can’t fly planes. There is very little chance they have gone through this type of training before. But apparently, they are EXPERTS at what is required to be a real pilot, which makes me wonder if they’ve just gone deep on the method acting or if actors are able to fool themselves into thinking they have the skills they pretend to have.
The first important part of the date is assigning nicknames for the men. We have Martin as Frosty because of his questionable choice in hairstyle, Peter with Doughboy (which apparently is a tough nickname and instead reminded me of the Pillsbury Doughboy) and Will gets Lil’ Willy. These will not be important for the rest of the date, excepting the fact they keep referring to the men as their call signs and not by their actual names BUT I STILL DON’T KNOW THEIR ACTUAL NAMES SO I CAN’T GRADUATE TO A NICKNAME.
Now that the essentials are taken care of, we move onto the actual hard part of the date: a G-Force Simulator, which in my notes I titled ‘Vomit Machine.’ Basically it twists you around until you can’t twist no more. But to make it even harder, the guys are asked to focus on something other than not puking on Michelle: declaring their love for her!
A bunch of guys do it and all I guess are fine(?) but what apparently counts as ~spicy~ drama is Peter declaring his love for Michelle in Italian and then a few men later Will (who called him a narcissist in front of a fifth-grader last week) declares his love for Michelle in SPANISH. Gasp. What a copycat. I’m sure this will make a huge impact on who Michelle ultimately finds love with.
To hit home the fact that Will and Peter don’t like each other even more, we have a dogfighting section where the guys just try to kill each other. Very standard Bachelorette fare, although I feel like I was cheated out of an appearance from my favorite Bachelor Nation staple, the ambulance. Instead, Will beats the living daylights out of Peter and ends up winning the date and (shockingly this will be relevant later) a jacket.
We say goodbye to Powell and Ellis (the truest tragedy) and move onto the evening portion of the date.
The night starts with a cut to Clayton contributing absolutely nothing, because somehow this man is the next Bachelor even though there are a dozen more men more interesting right around him and we need to try to force a personality on him before January.
Shockingly next on the list of activities is Will and Peter having a fight. If you could even call it that? They basically just throw insults at each other about pizza? It’s unimaginative at best. While I stand by the Bachelorette being better than the Bachelor, I will say the women on the Bachelor are more creative in their fighting. Yes, sometimes it gets nasty, but at least they have two brain cells to rub together to actually be hurtful and make an impact.
To give us a much needed break, we have Martin having some one on one time. During the date he had taken Michelle aside and checked in on how she was feeling with all the weirdness of the house the previous rose ceremony and she is overwhelmingly impressed. How thoughtful. How kind. This kids is what we call doing THE ABSOLUTE BARE MINIMUM. Oh one of your boyfriends noticed you were upset last time he saw you and – COULD IT BE TRUE?? – asked you about it? He REMEMBERED and ASKED YOU A QUESTION??? No shade to Martin because it appears he was the only one(?????) to do this, but c’mon people, we have to have the bar at least an inch off the ground right? Right?
Moving back to people who lower the bar so much you couldn’t even trip over it, Peter! He puts on Will’s new jacket to the amused horror of the other men. He walks off looking like chaotic evil and decided the next reasonable course of action is to throw it in the pool. Because of course.
Will naturally comes back and the guys let him know what Peter did. And like any reasonable person, Will breaks down in tears. To be fair – if I was on this show and had no form of entertainment, was locked in my room until told otherwise, and was fighting with a man who calls himself a Pizzapreneur, I would probably need only a light breeze to burst into tears also. BUT. WILL. C’MON. IT’S A JACKET.
Will does the bigger man thing however and doesn’t tell Michelle that Peter is the equivalent of the NYC Subway Rat, pizza in hand, which is pretty impressive considering how easily these men snap. But somehow he manages to keep his feelings inside and goes later to fish out his jacket from the pool.
When it comes time to get the rose, Michelle gives it to Martin, probably because he was the only person actually shown having any type of meaningful time with her. They end up going to a string concert while the other men go home and I’m starting to weirdly be into Martin’s wannabe hipster vibe. I shall speak to my therapist immediately to self-correct.
Surviving one group date, we get to move onto a one-on-one with Rodney, Mr. I Don’t Know Anything About Apples. The date overall is super cute – they have a Truth or Dare date that includes eating food blindfolded, handcuffing themselves to one another and doing a somewhat obstacle course thing, and then sharing some personal moments. And then because we need to hit both violence and nudity in one episode, we have got Rodney stripping down and running around the hotel while everyone watches because reasons.
Hating on the date aside, it seems like a lot of fun. And weirdly the most normal, despite everything I just listed? Like they are just goofing off together and actually talking to one another?
AND AND AND on the evening portion of the date after Rodney opens up about how he grew up he asks Michelle a question about her previous relationship and why it failed. Which, for the record, might be the only time I’ve seen a contestant ask a lead a question because it comes up naturally in conversation and not because they were prompted to from production. I don’t know why ABC doesn’t lean into this kind of stuff. I just want to watch people have actual conversations and connections. And yes, some violence and nudity too. But mostly real conversations that can convince me these people might actually maybe kinda sorta fall in love at the end of this!
Rodney obviously gets the rose because he’s a cutie who cares.
Next up is the final group date! We have a spoken word poetry date led by Rudy Francisco. I won’t lie, despite reading a ton I know little to nothing about poetry, but Christopher looked like he was meeting his celebrity crush so I have nothing but respect for how well renounced Francisco likely is.
The guys are asked to write and perform their own slam poetry, because obviously. Brandon goes and does well, Romeo (my fave) gets a small feature and does well, and no other men are shown.
But then.
Jamie.
Shockingly this does not go well.
Jamie gets up there and decides that rather than reading a poem from his notebook as assigned he’s going to tell a story – nay, a parable – no, no, give a TedTalk – about who even knows what. It’s incredibly weird and not even like he deviated to then tell Michelle his love for her. Instead he just kinda rambles about a little girl getting lost off a path like he’s trying to recite Aesop’s fables in a way that tells me he hasn’t read a fable in years.
Michelle however is kind and we skip over making fun of him for it. And because Michelle is lovely she performs her own poetry talking about being a Black woman growing up in a predominantly white town. Considering none of the men’s poems were nearly as good, I standby Michelle being too good for any of these fools.
But whatever, time for the evening portion of the date.
Brandon gets time with her first and talks about how her poem made him feel, being a light-skinned Black man growing up. He talks about feeling like he had to pick between the white friend groups and the Black friend groups and how it made him feel like there was nowhere he actually fit in. Michelle affirms his feelings by talking about her experiences also and YET AGAIN, THIS IS WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO HAVE DIVERSE CONTESTANTS. The quality of this conversation alone could carry me through minimum two episodes of pure trash.
We then fast forward through a whole bunch of randos who talk about nothing, including Jamie. But because they’re all boring we move onto the awarding of the group date rose, which goes to Brandon. Brandon is very clearly smitten with Michelle and I’m here for these guys being in love with her after two conversations max.
But because we love mess, we see Jamie pull a producer aside to talk shit. And because we want Jamie to be not just the villain but THE VILLAIN, we get to hear his conversation! He talks smack on Brandon, says that he can’t stand by and lose to men like him when he’s clearly so much better, and says Michelle is on spring break mode out here with all the guys and it’s a turnoff.
First of all. Jamie. Whatcha doing. You signed up for the Bachelor you ding dong. Of course she’s going to be in “spring break mode” if “spring break mode” means making out with a bunch of dudes and assessing her options. (I went to Northeastern where we didn’t have spring break in case that wasn’t clear from my likely very incorrect assumption of what spring break is). But regardless! Even if she was out here acting inappropriately – which she obviously is not – get out of here with your incel vibes. His entire little rant had misogynistic vibes and while I was anti-Jamie already, there is anti-Jamie because he’s a rat and anti-Jamie because he makes me think he doesn’t actually respect women.
But we don’t have time to unpack that because we have a cocktail hour! Michelle comes out looking FIIIIINE as always and Nayte immediately steals her away. They, being the absolute cutest, talk about how they wish they could run away together right now which ends up with Michelle taking her shoes off and then the pair of him running out of the hotel giggling. It’s adorable and if this franchise hadn’t already melted some of my cold dead heart this would have done it. They talk about how right it feels with one another and make out.
Unfortunately though, we have to circle back to this Jamie nonsense. Rick during his one-on-one says to Michelle that he needs to emphasize to her that while he respects her feelings from the last Rose Ceremony, it shocked him to hear she thought people were doubting her because everyone he talked to hadn’t heard that and to him it’s so obvious all the guys are obsessed. Michelle, the absolute icon, tells Rick that Jamie was the rat and she too is starting to feel like something is fishy. Rick ends his conversation on a high but is READY to take this information back to the masses.
Rick starts talking shit with Nayte and some other dude (Casey? Christopher?) and Nayte full-on goes – maturely, boooo – instead of talking behind his back why don’t we ask him.
This is when it becomes clear that Jamie has LITERALLY never taken one second to think of what he would say if asked about it. Which confuses me, you have nothing else to do?? Like what else are you going to spend your time on? Obsess over your story you idiot.
But he does not and talks in circles, all but screaming guilty. He then stalks talk about how everything will look in terms of episodes and what about the views to which Nayte says “fuck the viewers” which, as a viewer, I looooved. The first rule of reality TV, you can’t acknowledge you are on reality TV. Gawd Jamie, you should have read the book Ryan from Night One wrote out about the show.
Michelle then decides to address the group, which has a weird energy because everyone is gossiping about the Jamie situation and trying to figure out what was going on. In true teacher form, Michelle asks Jamie to explain himself in front of everyone which is absolutely genius because he needs to lie in front of everyone now. Hard to say everyone was talking shit when you’re in front of everyone who were, in fact, not talking shit.
Michelle takes Jamie outside to end his public humiliation and basically asks him why he sucks so bad. Not in so many words, but is basically like why would you say something that isn’t true with the intention of making me look bad, to which Jamie blinks a lot as he tries to come up with something other than “screen time” and “insecurities.” Not having time for this nonsense, Michelle cuts him on the spot.
Michelle comes back in and essentially tells the guys that if they try to manipulate her she will destroy them. I mean, more realistically, she says that trust is important and that she won’t stand for people who break it. But those are basically the same thing on this show so. I stand by it.
She cancels the rest of the party because we have had our drama intake for the night and she’s likely talked to all the guys she cares about by now.
Skipping to the Rose Ceremony we have Rodney, Brandon, and Martin with roses already. Added to the safe list are Joe, Rick, LeRoy, Nayte, Casey, Chris G, Chris S, Clayton, Olu, Romeo, and Will.
With minimal fanfare this means that Peter the Pizzapreneur was cut! We truly have to thank Jamie for self-sabotaging so professionally, otherwise you know they would have forced the Will/Peter drama for another week and let’s be real, no one wants that.
What do we want? For everyone to fill out their brackets for next week! Next week’s email might be delayed a bit since it’s a holiday weekend (sorta? Veterans Day is on a Thursday this year so I feel like everyone should just also take off the Friday…) but I’ll figure that out next week and keep you all posted.
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