The Golden Bachelor, ep 5

Sorry for the delay! Happy Halloween. I have long since left dressing up behind, but if you wanted a group costume you could do worse than four septuagenarians doing synchronized swimming/some kind of demented Witch Circle in a swimming pool, which is how this episode starts. They’re bobbing in place and chanting in a foreign tongue and the sactifice is complete. One of you will not survive the Hometown Dates.

Faith gets the Solo Date this week and they’re going for a helicopter ride, yawn, except it’s the “craziest thing she’s ever done” which I guess makes sense if you were born before the advent of powered flight. They cruise around and fly over the Bachelor Mansion and push out Kathy’s lifeless body OH WAIT SORRY that’s Argentinian Bachelor. Anyway they execute a Yacht Landing and have champs and mack in the hot tub.

Faith wants to know what they have between them and I’d say about a century and a half but Gerry says “the warm soft look in your eyes” which doesn’t make any sense. Hold the phone, Faith grew up as a homless teen with no mother or father! Faith has a website and says she was “born and raised in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California,” which means she would have been a homeless teen in Santa Cruz in the late 70’s! Wild. Anyway she gets the trauma rose and there’s more making out in the hot tub.

Meanwhile back at the Mansh Leslie is once again in crisis because someone else got to go on a date. Later, Faith returns and tells her tale and Leslie is of course SO MAD.

Group Date at the Santa Monica Pier. Gerry is hopped up on Starbies and Metamucil and wants everyone to know that we will have FUN, ok get this through your fucking head, it’s going to be FUN. They play Whack a Mole which is not actually “fun.” Theresa throws herself at him on the roller coaster and Sandra wants to expand her daughters’ families with “hopefully your family” but I mean, any family, please? My daughters. They are so lonely.

You’ll never guess who’s freaking out. It’s Leslie. She gets some time with Gerry and promptly loses her shit. She’s “crazy about him” - this is the episode BTW when every single one of them says she’s falling in love with him, it’s like clockwork - but I don’t know if my man wants Leslie, who we called in law school an eggshell plaintiff and looks like she cries at Frosted Flakes commercials.

Ellen, meanwhile, can see him as a “permanent fixture” like a bigass sink that would be tough to remove without damaging the joists. She’s coming across a little desperate honestly, and Gerry’s so verklempt after the life-changing experience of the Santa Monica Pier that he can’t bear to give out a rose right yet.

OK Rose Cer. Only 2 to give out! Leslie, long pause. Theresa enters some kind of fugue state, she’s babbling senselessly to herself. Finally she gets it, Ellen is out. Ger escorts her to a sit-down where he offers the super helpful “stay positive.” Ellen basically tells him FOH and in the non-crying SUV says she has new confidence! Go Ellen? Talk to Leslie, my girl.