The Bachelorette 2, Episode 5: You’re Going to Like This Recap – Whether You Want To Or Not

Oy vey… what a night… and what a slam of emails I got from everyone after this episode. It makes me think that you people actually… dare I say this… you actually CARE about Meredith? You actually are concerned for her well being?

Are you people mad?

Seriously now… what has happened to you? We had this great thing going where I would comment on those hideous turtlenecks of hers that made her seem like… well, a turtle! But no… you are all getting lovey dovey with her and it makes me just wanna puke. I thought we had trust built up between us. I thought we had a mutual tongue-in-cheek, “Ha! Ha! Look at what she has to go through this week” vibe working here. But no… you’ve all sapped out on me.

But I… yes I alone will walk the lonely path of snarking. Even on family visit day… yes… I walk the path alone.

First the viewer mail-bag was flooded after last week’s episode telling me that Chad and Meredith went to Newport BEACH, California, and not Newport NEWS, Virginia. Okay, I admit that I can be a little dense and slow, and maybe shaving my head zapped a certain amount of intelligence in there, but I swear I heard them say Newport News.

So here we go, family visit episode and for some reason, they really gave Meredith a screwed-up itinerary that just doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. She’s going to Texas to see Matt, then off to New York to see Chad, followed by Ian, and then back down to Texas again to see Lanny. I mean I know Lanny lives in a small town but does it really take him that long to get home? It sounds like that episode of The Golden Girls when Rose was crowned St. Olaf’s Woman of the Year and they had to take a plane and then a shuttle and then a train, and then ride on the back of a horse-drawn cart. I mean… come on. Whoever did the travel arrangements for this episode really got it all wrong.

Wrong I say! Wrong!

Of course, what really cracks me up is that she packs one tiny little bag for four trips. It’s so Sound of Music that I’m also half expecting her to be carrying a guitar case and bell-kicking her way through a rousing chorus of “I Have Confidence” (the Thunderpuss 2000 remix at that). Okay maybe it wasn’t a tiny bag, but for FOUR separate plane trips, you gotta have a lot more to wear than what she packed away that’s for sure. Hell, when I went for a ski weekend (mind you that’s about two days), I had packed like nine t-shirts, three pairs of jeans, four sweaters, and way too much underwear. And I wore like a third of it. Yeah. Explain that one!

Of course through all of this Meredith, is just waxing poetic about her men and wondering who is going to open up and tell them about their secret lives as wooden shoe makers for Dutch midgets or that they tape The Young and the Restless on a daily basis because they just can’t get enough of Nikki and Victor’s marriages, or that they play Dungeons and Dragons on a regular basis with the computer geeks down the hall or maybe they have all of the episodes of The Love Boat on tape and regularly watch then – especially the episode with the fashion show and Lauren Tewes waltzing down the runway. I mean come on, Meredith can you be a little more specific than just “open up”?

Now when Meredith says that she’s going to have to open up more as well… I don’t think that we need to go anywhere or comment on anything to let you know where my dirty, filthy, nasty perverted mind went on that one.

First up is Matthew at the family homestead in Friendswood, Texas, and sure enough there’s Matthew to greet her, sitting on the front porch flanked by two dogs. I wonder if Meredith has a residual fear of dogs left over from her childhood days, and I’m kinda cracking up too because she has this abject look of horror on her face. Meredith, they are dogs. Sure, they have sharp teeth that could rip your face to shreds if you ticked them off, but they are just dogs.

With that, it’s solo time with Matthew as they have a nice picnic lunch under a tree where they eat and then make out because everyone knows that’s what happens on these shows. We have to have her make out at least three times. If there were a hot tub nearby it would have to be in the hot tub because you just can’t have one without the other. But sadly, there’s no hot tub and we just get Matt goofing around on a swing while Meredith gushes that he’s so right for her. Oh that’s like the kiss of death that even if he makes it past this round, he’s still gonna be a goner at some point.

With this we get to meet Matthew’s parents, Ray and Carol. Now, these two are divorced, and thankfully this isn’t a bitter relationship between because then it would really be a tense dinner. Imagine eye daggers being shot across the table as Mom talks about commitment while the philandering Dad sits across the table with this new wife (and former secretary) who is twenty years younger, fifty pounds lighter, eight shades bonder, and three hundred IQ points dumber than his former wife. Now that would be a fun dinner wouldn’t it?

But no… these people kinda still dig each other. Now at dinner, Mom decides that since this is, after all, The Bachelorette, that we need to have a Ryan Sutter Poetry Moment. Actually it seems that all dating shows nowadays require some little moment of culture in the form of a Ryan Sutter Poetry Moment. So here is Matthew’s mom doing her best version. For this rendition, we have the vocal stylings of Ms. Rue McClanahan performing this bit… please prepare to be enthralled…

What a joy to see
He brought home a girl
What a fast start you had
I’m glad he gave this a whirl
Heartfelt wishes for future happiness here
If he’s not married soon we’d have thought he was q - uh stupid