Married At First Sight, in which credulous young strangers are smushed together for Australia’s collective amusement, continued its hugely popular run overnight, and gave the reality TV-loving public (us, and let’s face it, you, because you clicked on this) exactly the kind of awkward almost-wedding that we’ve been dreaming of.
Last week featured a strong showing from control freak Clare in the form of a pre-wedding flip-out – “I didn’t ask for roses … why do they fuck me over on everything?” – but overnight, we got a new contender for most riveting character in the form of Zoe.
Her character description tells us “strong-minded” and “career-driven” and her eyes, scanning the chapel for an exit and refusing to look at her new man Alex, tell us she wishes she never signed up for this.
On the face of it, Alex and Zoe are a fairly mismatched couple. She’s a digital marketing executive who doesn’t want a man to complete her; he’s a tradie-slash-man child who has an eyebrow ring and still makes his mum wash his jocks.
There’s no way any sane person would put these two together, unless … wait, is Married At First Sight deliberately trying to engineer some kind of drama? Well played, reality TV show, well played.
So how did their special day (technically a commitment ceremony rather than a marriage, such are the requirements of Australian law, but let’s not let that spoil the fun) go down?
We arrived at the chapel, to find Zoe’s super-judgey friend wearing this super-judgey hat:
Single (but not by choice) Alex wore this rictus grin on his face for pretty much the entire time, remaining upbeat about his choices:
Zoe said that she was hoping for “a dark and handsome Spanish guy – like Ricky Martin but straight.” Something told us she maybe wasn’t feeling Alex:
Yeah no:
We could have done way more of these but let’s just leave it here:
This was everyone’s face:
Zoe spoke to News Limited before the episode aired, and revealed a somewhat healthy scepticism of reality TV, saying she’d never considered signing up for a show like this until, apparently, she did.
“To be honest, I don’t really respect a lot of reality TV, it can be staged, there’s a lot where you’re characterised, it’s predictable … this is rough, this is raw” she said.
“We spent a lot of time with the experts. There were a lot of meetings with them, phone conversations with them, they came in and opened all of my drawers, went through my fridge.”
“I opened up my house and my heart for them to do their job so it was quite an intimate time,” she continued. “It was extreme and by the end you were thinking it better work, you’ve invested a lot and given a lot of yourself.”
FWIW, she also said that she and Alex had a “sexy and romantic” honeymoon at the Great Barrier Reef, and “jumped into stuff quicker than either of us would have expected,” so we have that to look forward to.
What else happened last night? Roni and Michael totally didn’t bone on their honeymoon, Lachie and Claire totally did. Meanwhile, new girl Michelle said that she was surprised by how quickly she connected with new guy James.
In a possibly related development, James displayed the following rig while exiting the water:
As we mentioned in our last one of these, Australia does not yet have marriage equality, but we remain committed to the notion that trashy reality TV and same-sex marriage can comfortably co-exist in the one society.
Instead of less Married At First Sight, let’s have more fair and equal treatment, like our mates in Ireland. In a fair and equal society, gay men and lesbians should have just as much a right to humiliate themselves for the TV-watching pubic as their straight counterparts.
We can not wait to see where this nonsense takes us next.
Images via Nine Jump In
