We’re four weeks into the most drama-fueled season of The Bachelor Australia to date and the cracks in the unfertilised ovum are beginning to show.
The third week of McWomb’s Daughters provided the goods in terms of surprise relatives popping up to add fresh plot line to the show, but it also cracked open the inevitable can of fresh slut-shaming to remind Australian women that their place is in the passenger seat of an expensive sports car, pretending to be impressed by a man who can’t drive a manual.
Here’s what happened this week on I’m A Strong Independent Woman, Get Me Out Of Here.
Episode 7
The first episode of this week opened with Matty explaining that he’s “made some really strong connections with a variety of wombs”, as if he’s at Kikki.K shopping for scrapbooks, which is why he feels it’s time they meet the most important woman in his life. Unfortunately, his family OBGYN is interstate on work, which is why he’s invited his pregnant sister to sniff out the best potential mothers with her ‘fertility radar’.
Sister Kate is barely across the threshold of the mansion lounge room before the girls shout ‘INTRUDER’ and fly kick her into the pool. Once Osher appears and explains that Kate’s a direct relative of Sperm Man, they all animorph back into struggling actresses and Jen starts audibly complimenting Kate’s physical features as a deranged sort of peace offering.
After Matty explains that Kate is sticking around for the whole day to collect hair follicles and DNA samples, Leah immediately starts crying and it quickly becomes clear that this entire episode is about to board the party-planning train to Daily Mail shame. It also quickly becomes clear that construction management and architecture student, Leah, obviously thought she was enrolling in a third bachelor degree when she applied for the show.
Kate then uses her pregsray vision to weasel the truth out of Simone and Elora who basically throw Leah under the bus, and reverse back over her, all in the name of a love and a 4-5pm time slot on KISS FM.
Single Date
Meanwhile, the single date is yet another opportunity for Matty to flaunt his light commercial vehicle license and make fun of someone else’s motor skills. After he forces a deep tissue massage onto Alix as a reward for not drowning in the lake, Matty tells the camera that if she can’t pash her way out of the friend zone, then she’s not ready for the challenges of motherhood. He then smacks her on the bum, gives her a rose and tells her to practice her hand eye coordination.
Group Date
At the group date, Matty has paid some underprivileged school in regional New South Wales to give him the lunchtime detention kids for an hour so he can test the wombs’ maternal instincts under the guise of ‘testing the wombs’ maternal instincts’. As usual, the reward is eight seconds of eye contact and some finger guns from Osher.
Jen spends half of the date telling the camera that kids are the best judge of character, while also referring to Elora as ‘the scum of the earth’. Meanwhile, Leah shocks everyone by not treating the date like an immunity challenge and Laura gets ostracised by a group of six year-olds.
At the end of the date, Matty praises Laura for ‘getting the kid to stop hating her’, takes her out on a boat, convinces her she needs children to feel whole, and then throws her a pity pash for surrendering to her maternal instincts.
Cocktail Party + Rose Ceremony
Back at the mansion, Leah reveals that she’s Facebook stalked all of the girls and now has enough dirt on each womb to blow the whole thing wide open. Michelle tells her to GTFO and Leah then storms outside to look for an immunity idol.
Kate finally confronts Matty with the knowledge that Jen is a literal psychopath, but Matty is more concerned about the fact that he has to kick Leah to the curb without making himself look like a sexist mole, so the producers tell him to go for the ‘she didn’t tell me truth’ angle. After a while Matty starts repeating everything Kate says because there’s still seventeen minutes left of air time and they’ve run out of plot because Leah is busy disassembling deck chairs to use as kindling for the tribe’s fire.
Matty finally arrives at the rose ceremony and drags Leah off ‘for a chat’ where he confronts her about failing to disclose her ‘exotic’ party planning career on a national television show where one man pashes a dozen different women a week with no immediate consequences other than featuring in a Woman’s Day centrefold spread.
Before the rose ceremony can even begin, Matty asks Leah for another ‘chat’, at which point she’s about seven pinot grigios deep and has to carried out to the driveway where Matty pats her on the back, scolds her for ‘hiding the truth’ and throws her in the back of a Kia while Leah slurs empty threats from the sunroof.
Episode 8
Single Date
Since Leah was voted off at the last tribal council, the other wombs have been crocheting matching pillow slips and tattooing each other’s names on their underboob, but the newfound tranquility lasts all of four seconds before it’s then revealed that Elora has secured her second single date of the season and the wombs are bloody livid. Resident geriatric, Michelle, is very conscious that her body clock is ticking, meanwhile Jen’s forty minutes into a monologue and Sharlene’s seething about repeatedly being mistaken for a catering assistant.
It soon becomes clear that Elora has successfully advanced to the second round of IVF because Matty’s stopped trying to impress her with wanky forms of modern transport. After walking around on a mountain for a bit and touching each other’s shoulders, Matty takes Elora to a picnic spot by a lake where he physically takes her breath away, forces her into ‘swimmers’ and tries to drown her. Elora is absolutely smitten with Matty and hasn’t quite figured out that the producers have selected her as the beard that’ll unsuccessfully mask the fact that Matty and Lisa already have three kids, a house in Glen Iris and a Toyota Kluger.
They then throw fuel on the fire by announcing that it’s the first ‘overnight date’ even though both Elora and Matty stay in separate buildings, like they normally would when they’re back at the mansion, but Elora’s brain is so fried from a lack of real world exposure that she doesn’t even notice.
Group Date
In the laziest group date this season, the producers throw the remaining girls in a couple of Ubers and send them up the mountain to Matty and Elora where Osher explains that they blew the budget on dismantling the cyclone-proof shelters that Leah built around the mansion and have to play another compatibility-based homemade board game. The wombs are bloody stoked though because they’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel joy.
Straight off the bat Jen tells the camera that she’s going to push Elora off a cliff, Elora tells the girls to keep their greasy mitts off her man, Tara shows off her new cornrows and Flo cheats her way through to some time alone with Matty, who has decided he no longer cares so much about deceitfulness, as long as the womb was never a topless waitress.
Cocktail Party + Rose Ceremony
The cocktail party kicks off with everyone giving Elora the stinkeye for having the nerve to be chosen for a second single date with Matty, through no control of her own, and Sharlene decides she’s had a goddamn-nuff of Matty ignoring her baby maker and starts rehearsing potential jokes she might use as ice-breakers.
When Sharlene finally gets the chance to make eye contact with Matty and exchange her first full sentences of the season, he cuts her off, tells her he doesn’t see a potential relationship forming between them (because he’s already married to Lisa) and tells her to pack her Michael Kors handbag and get out. Sharlene goes full Harry-Potter-and-the-Prisoner-of-Azkaban-werewolf crazy and tells the other wombs that she’s decided to leave because Matty doesn’t share her love of pugs, martial arts, and musical theatre.
All of a sudden the rose ceremony swings into action and Matty starts handing out his multi-vitamin-laced fertility roses to the biggest wombs. The producers have made him give Lisa the last rose in another attempt to preserve a ‘surprise ending’ even though she’s clearly in her third trimester. Unfortunately, the IVF treatment ended there for both Steph and Alix, who couldn’t hold a candle to the other traditionally spelt names in the mansion.
Power Ranking
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Image credit: Channel 10