Reality Hit List, June 17: Fiacres and Fiascos

Last week on For Love or Money: Shut up, Paige.

What? You want more? Sigh. The things I do for you people.

This is one of those shows like Joe Millionaire that has what I call a "Cat's in the Cradle" opening. By the time you get through the preamble, the opening credits, and the recap of the last episode, your newborn infant is going to be asking you to borrow the car for prom.

Remember last week how it ended with an anonymous Captain Obvious declaring, "Yesterday, I had a one in fifteen chance of winning a million dollars! Well, today I have a one in ten chance!"? That turned out to be Paige. Color me surprised. We also learn from another anonymous Rhodes Scholar that when less people are in it, the house seems bigger! You know, forget Mr. Wizard - this show will teach your kids all they need to know about math and science!

The voting to see who would be denied an excursion with Rob was fun in that the women were forced to reveal their votes to the entire group. "But-but-we like our pettiness, grudges, and backstabbing to be covert!" you could practically hear some of them thinking. Kelly got fully half the votes, which she shrugged off with sarcastic bravado - which I have to say is a lot more refreshing than the usual round of "They don't like me blah blah not fair yak yak I'm misunderstood blee blah cry yak" confessionals we get in most instances. A tie between Melissa and Paige was broken when Paige got the Heart-Marked Breakfast Plate Of Decision and chose to let Melissa go on the date instead of herself. Obnoxious little suckup - I mean, how selfless and noble of her! "I was being considerate of someone else and not being selfish so somehow it'll come back to me in a good way - but I hope can hang out with him alone!" she whined. "She's mercenary that way," nodded Joe Millionaire's Melissa somewhere in the world.

Besides, even if I liked Paige, I'd still think this was an absolutely stupid move. Whether you want love or money, the object of the show is to get the guy to choose you in the end, not to get the other women to vote you Miss Congeniality. How are you going to do that if you voluntarily remove yourself from a chance to spend time with him? Before anyone can mention it, "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" only exists on cross-stitch samplers. In reality dating shows, it's all about "Love the one you're with."

Also - can we please add "threat" to the growing list of Verboten Reality Television Words? Thanks.

I said last week that I thought this show was produced by macro. {Alt}{j} = Contestant Who Becomes Upset When They Realize That The Person For Whom They're Vying Is Being Affectionate With The Other Contestants = Christina. How dare Rob invite Laura (despite having the same names, I don't think anyone would confuse them for the Petries anytime soon) below deck after he and Christina talked, the bounder? "I guarantee you he's going to end up making out with five different people!" she snitted to Melanie back at the house. Well, yeah, probably. You know, I lost all sympathy and caring for this line of thinking right around the time of The Bachelor 2, which now seems like a couple decades ago given how many shows of this ilk have sprung up since then. Look - whoever's doing the choosing is going to spend time with the others. He or she is more than likely going to kiss the others, if not more. It's going to happen. It always happens. Why does this still come as such a shock to some people? Furthermore, why would it come as a shock to her that Laura might be upset if she heard herself being gossiped about? She then declared, "Laura, at first, I thought was a friend. At this point, I feel as though Laura is not my friend." This is coming from the same girl who announced last week, "I'm here to meet my future husband - not to make a bunch of friends," mind you. And why is she no longer your "friend" - because she called you on talking about her behind her back? "You know how insecure I am - oh, I can't even talk..." Christina continued. Oh, puh-LEEZE. First of all, what does this have to do with the price of venti nonfat nondairy no whip double shot iced chai tea in China? Secondly, it gives those who actually do have some legitimate insecurity issues a bad rep when it's trotted out as a dodge, crutch, or excuse like this. "She plays the martyr very well. I'm not buying it - the whole insecurity talk is getting a little tired at this point," Laura informed us. Amen.

I don't really blame the women for balking at the vintage costumes... they did, for all the world, seem just about one step away from looking like they'd been purchased at a fire sale at the Olesen's General Store. Still, though, Stacey was right when she said you may as well have fun with it. I would have had more fun with Rob's behavior on the date, though:

Stacey: "So, how often do you work out?"
Rob: "I play soccer."

Well, of course! I mean, I write columns as often as when I was in third grade, my teacher's name was Mrs. Stewart. This was topped by one of the funniest sight gags I've seen on this show yet - Stacey asking us in voiceover, "Is this guy the million dollar man?" as we see Rob running around trying to catch a grape in his mouth like a seal. Gee. Decisions, decisions... Still, though, Alima's there for Rob and not for the money! Well, she's not there period at the end of the episode, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The women cook dinner for Rob, and Christina, still bucking for first place in the Self-Righteousness Without A Cause Derby, sniffs that Kelly told them what to do and everything had to be Kelly's way! And? You have a voice - if you don't like what Kelly's planning, say so and offer an alternate suggestion! Sheesh! Then Rob took Kelly out of the kitchen for some one on one time because she'd been voted out of the dates and she went, the fiend! Again - if you're bitching about Kelly taking over, how is it that you're then completely lost without her? Melanie sent Paige to go break it up, and Paige didn't really want to interrupt, which is no doubt why she was beaming like a Junior Miss Pageant contestant walking down the hall. Then she and Rob kissed, and it was wonderful and perfect and oh, shut up already.

Much has been made of Rob's behavior at the house after dinner, but really, the squickiness started earlier - on the group date on the boat. Rob taking a digital picture of himself and Laura kissing and leering, "Look at that, baby!"? EW. I mean, like I said, it's inevitable that he's going to be kissing different people, but I draw the line at said kissing becoming part of someone's photo collection! Then, of course, there was the much-talked-about "take off my boots" sequence, in which Laura won my heart by snorting, "Not in this lifetime!" I mean, seriously - could we get any more demeaning and chauvinistic here? Take your own damn boots off! Not our problem if you weren't paying attention during Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood! What's next - slapping the little filly on the keister and asking her to fetch you a brewski? Ugh. For once, Christina actually had something to bitch about. I have to admit I thought it was cool that the women all decided to stick together and go for the money - as Melanie put it, "A million dollars is a nice parting gift!" (Not that she would know, but again, that's getting ahead of ourselves.) All the women except for Paige, who was busy yakking to Rob that the other women are all talking about him and he'll "get the farthest with [her]," which completely clashes with her simultaneously trying to be so sweet she'd make Snow White look like a chainsmoking alcoholic. "I have had THE BEST NIGHT EVER!", she gushed. "He kissed me! [Huge heaving sigh that even Joan Crawford would have considered over the top] My breath is still taken away!" Oh, shut up. Seriously. SHUT. UP. Then the other women crack me up by going around the room and rattling off one word to describe Rob: "Player" (Alima); "Disappointment" (Lauren); "Tramp" (Kelly); "Typical" (Stacey); and so on. St. Paige, however, protests "I'm sleeping!" in a manner so cloying even Snow White would tell her to cram it sideways.

Rob showed up the next day and apologized; he was painfully shy growing up and he's scared of commitment yak yak oh cry me a river. The women seem to forgive him, which would normally have me screaming, "You idiots!" but hey - why shouldn't they go for a million dollars if the guy's an ass? Not that they'll be getting that million dollars in the way that you or I or any other reasonable person would expect - the fine print in the credits reveals that "the prize, which totals $1,000,000, is payable in a financial annuity based over forty years, or the contestant may choose to receive the present cash value of the foregoing annuity." So in other words, they can either get a piddly amount for FORTY FREAKING YEARS, or they can get a lump sum that will deprive them of possibly as much as $800,000 of the million. Yeah, this show's a real class act, alright; about as classy as its leading man. Aside from his behavior in this episode, as David Bloomberg previously reported, he was kicked out of the JAG program in the military for groping a female officer and booted from his law office last week in the wake of this episode and the past military scandal. So hey - faced with dealing with a jackass or getting an (alleged) million dollars, I'd go for the money too! How often do you get a chance to not only make someone who treated you disrespectfully pay for it, but profit from it as well? Even $200,000 would be better than nothing. If that sounds really crass, tough - at this point I'm firmly rooting for one of the remaining women whose name isn't Paige to walk away with the cash. (And as far as love goes, I still say one of them should go for the host. Cheesiness and melodramatic pauses aside, he still seems like a much better catch than Rob. Then again, at this point, so do the squirrels I saw frolicking in Union Square.)

After it takes Rob a good fifteen minutes to dismiss five of the women with his patented "fill in the blank" speeches, we're left with Erin, Kelly, Laura, Lauren, and Paige. Three guesses as to which one I wish would have been booted and the first two don't count. I would have much rather Melissa stayed; not only did I like her, but she honestly seemed to have the most chemistry with Tool - er, Rob. On second thought, maybe it's a good thing she left now. I also kind of liked Melanie, but again, it's kind of hard to be sad about the women entering the Secret Room and [falling into a bottomless pit and being devoured by the Loch Ness Monster] "ending their journeys," because in a lot of ways they're much better off.

Want more proof this show's a class act? It ran at least five minutes over with no warning. It was a good thing I was home or I would have been left wondering whether Stacey or Lauren got booted. Thanks a heap, guys.

Next episode: Laura and Kelly alarm me by showing signs they may be falling for the lummox. Go Lauren. Go Erin. And Paige sets herself up for a million punchlines by declaring, "I'll get what I deserve!" If it's a good swift kick to the rear, I and countless other viewers would be only too happy to oblige. Then she sniffles, "But sometimes I don't!" I buy stock in Pepto-Bismol and assign "Shut up, Paige" to {Alt}{Shift}{s}.

I swear, I have this knack for liking shows at the opposite end of the quality spectrum. The two soaps I follow right now are Passions and Ryan's Hope, and as far as reality shows, I swing from this trainwreck to another excellent episode of The Amazing Race. It's like night and day.

So Jaree tells us, "Tian blames everything on me," and she ain't just whistling Dixie. Remember how last week I said they seemed to balance each other out? Well, sometimes I cringe at how incredibly stupid I sound in retrospect. This week, welcome to The Wonderful World Of It's All Jaree's Fault! Tian even went so far as to stomp after Jaree on the train and order her to lighten her pack. (Keep your eyes on Kelly & Jon, who are usually nearby - they're practically breaking out the popcorn when these two go at it. It's hysterical.) Really, though, they started in fourth and they finished in fourth, so Tian could stand to take it down a notch. She still reminds me uncannily of my ex-roommate, but now it's the side of her that would yell and swear at the top of her lungs as she was running late for work yet again.

So do you think Jon & Al are circus clowns? Sometimes I get that impression but I'm really not quite sure. Maybe hearing it a few thousand more times will help cement it in my brain. I'm also a little fuzzy on whether Monica & Sheree are married to professional athletes; you think?

It was nice, albeit not necessarily smart, of Jon & Al to miss their train to stay to help Millie with her asthma attack. But really, it proved to be irrelevant as all the teams had to wait until 8 am for the sewers to open once they got to Vienna. Speaking of which, some of the incredulous reactions in the sewers cracked me up. "It stinks like ass!" bitched Josh. "Is that potty water?" asked a disgusted Kelly. I mean, hello - it's the sewer, not the Botanical Gardens.

Monica & Sheree really impressed me this leg. First, they bonded with Reichen & Chip because as the two "black girls" and two "gay males," they were the "two minorities." The two teams, along with Kelly & Jon, were the first group to make it in the fiacres, but Monica & Sheree were the only ones who got to hold onto theirs because unlike the other two teams, they read the directions completely and pulled off the tag. Also unlike other teams, they didn't wait around for Reichen & Chip, and switched to working with working with Tian & Jaree instead. They then misdirected Jon & Al (who need to be told that The Marriage of Figaro is not the same as The Barber of Seville) to give themselves an even further lead - but did it in such a way that Jon & Al probably didn't know until they saw this episode! In the end, they finished second - first out of all the teams who didn't use the Fast Forward - by hauling ass in the final footrace from the Gmunden station. They really did pull it together - well done!

Here's Reichen: "We don't want to come across as arrogant; we just think we're going to win." Gee, there's a surefire way to come across as humble. These two may have finished third, but couldn't catch a break from the other teams along the way. Jon & Al kicking them out of the fiacre was definitely their own fault; they should have followed the directions better. The second round of Fiacre Follies is a lot fuzzier to call. The CBS official recap states that Chip pushed Millie out of the way first. Miss Alli at Television Without Pity, whose opinion I respect and generally agree with, swears that when she TiVo-ed it, it looked like Millie made the first contact. I myself had to opt for the cheapest hifi VCR possible last year when my old one broke down; therefore there's no variable speed on the slow motion and it's really impossible for me to say for myself. I can say for certain that whoever made first contact, it happened really quickly and it was a mutual shoving match from that point on. I'm almost inclined to favor Chip just because when he went over to apologize to Millie, with his lip bleeding, no less, she seemed awfully snotty to him in return. Then, a couple of extras named David & Jeff (well, they may as well be for how often we see them) started complaining to them because they had had an agreement that Chip & Reichen would score fiacre tags for both of them while David & Jeff "distracted" the other teams. First of all, how stupid of an idea was this? All the teams are going to be pretty damned focused on getting the next fiacre - what were David & Jeff planning? A rousing game of tiddlywinks? Secondly, before Chip had barely had a chance to breathe, Chuck & Millie and Jon had snagged the other two. Therefore, I had little sympathy for David & Jeff's huffing - if they needed the tag that badly, they should have made sure one of them was running after it themselves.

Kelly tells us she's tired of feeling like two percent of their team; unfortunately, her first time completely in command she screwed up royally. They needed to find one of several houses Beethoven lived in - one of the most obscure, no less - to drop off some sheet music. Jon seemed to grasp that Beethoven might have lived in more than one place, but Kelly snapped, "Jon's just doubting everything!," "You're wasting time!." and, most hilariously, "Are you retarded? How many Beethovens in the world do you think there are?!?" Jon finally got through to her on the train when he asked a local for help and pointed out, "She said which house, Kel." "Oh," replied a chastened Kelly. BWAH! After further comedy of errors, they wound up finishing eighth, but these two are definitely growing on me - Jon in particular is proving to be have much more personality than I initially thought. Kelly, by the way, is probably ready to kill me for comparing the two of them to Flo & Zach, considering that on their exclusive video footage on CBS.com she emphatically stated that her golden rule for the Race was "No [acting like] Flo! No Flo!" Ah, Flo. Six months after winning the Race, perfect strangers are still holding her up as an example of what not to do.

Another fun Fast Forward - at least from the perspective of watching it. I know enough from my (brief for a reason!) days of waiting to know that Steve & Josh weren't carrying the trays properly - you have to hold them from underneath with one hand - but as they were so full and they weren't actually serving drinks off of them, I don't know that it would have made that much of a difference. There was just something so... surreal about Demolition Waltzing.

The bungee jump would have been great... for my teammate if I were on the race. (I'm deathly afraid of heights.) Most of the teams got through it with little fuss or muss and the requisite "Woo!"-ing, but why did Millie make a big production out of wishing she had her asthma inhaler when she was the one who insisted on doing the Roadblock? Chuck said he'd be fine with doing it and she snotted, "But I get to do it!" Plummeting off a tower hundreds of feet high wouldn't seem to be the wisest idea if I'd just had an asthma attack (and I did have them when I was younger) - or really, doing any Roadblock for that matter. Next week, Chuck has a panic attack from claustrophobia. This team has some issues. Wouldn't it be funny if all this turned out to be psychosomatic expressions of their fear of commitment?

Questions from the beginning of the episode that are absolutely hysterical in retrospect: "Will Steve & Dave be able to maintain their lead despite lingering pain from the knee injury Dave suffered on the first leg? Will Cindy feel more a part of her team with Russell as they work to get to the front of the pack?" The correct answers, in hindsight: "Are you kidding me?" and "Sure, when pigs fly."

Steve & Dave had an absolutely wretched leg that had very little to do with Dave's bad knee. First, on the advice of a local who didn't seem all that sure, they sail off on a train to Padua without bothering to check if Padua had any trains to Vienna. Sure enough, it didn't, and they had to go all the way back to Venice and start over. Not that this hurt them - they were saved by the aforementioned megabunching at the Vienna sewers. Sometimes this sort of bunching can add to the excitement of the Race; other times, like this instance, it's frustrating because teams can make huge mistakes like this and it doesn't matter, which almost kind of unfairly rewards them. (Still, though, teams can't count on bunching, so it's not like they get to coast.) They ended up in last place again, and followed bad advice to the wrong train station again - although at least this time they were still in the same town. It was sheer luck that another team screwed up and finished behind them. These two just aren't racing well at all.

Speaking of that other team, here's Cindy: "For three years I was thinking [Russell & I] were the best partners; now, after four or five days, I'm going, 'Wow, I'm not so sure!'" I'm not so sure why she even spent five minutes with the arrogant prick. Seriously - this guy made Wil look positively respectful of Tara. When he wasn't calling her a dumbass or dismissing her out of hand, he was rolling his eyes or doing other covert displays to signify to us that he thought she was an idiot. That display of grimacing he pulled at the Vienna West train station when Cindy was trying to straighten things out with the ticket agent alone deserved a good swift kick in the ass - especially because it turned out Cindy gained them some time by doing so! I'm only sorry they were eliminated in the sense that I liked Cindy, but I'm almost relieved for her that she won't have to spend any more time being treated like a particularly slow two-year-old.

Next week: Teams accuse Reichen & Chip of pulling the wings off butterflies, and it's all Jaree's fault! See you then!

Brian James is an actor/writer/singer in New York City. An avid reality show, Passions, early Ryan's Hope, retro music, and Internet discussion board junkie, he can be found holding up "Will Snark For Food" signs in subway stations as he continues to search for that elusive "day job." Brian would like to stress that his writings are based solely on what he sees in each episode, and realizes that there may sometimes be more to the story and that people may behave quite differently under normal circumstances. Comments and cybertomatoes accepted at brianjamesrno@earthlink.net.

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