We Need To Talk About The Bachelor’s Alex & The Very Weird Touching Game

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Published

August 25, 2016

Last week, Keira left our Bachelor TV screens. This was a national tragedy, and should be respected as such.

I do think out of respect for Keira, everyone should be wearing her chokers as black armbands. #TheBachelorAU

— Jo Thornely (@jothornely) August 24, 2016

Sadly, it wasn’t, but The Bachelor producers gave us another villain as some kind of token apology present: Alex, losing her shit.

And what a glorious villain she is!

Last night, she got extremely – how do we say this nicely – unsportsmanlike in a televised game of ‘love’. The group date this episode appeared to stretch the limits in what is legally considered ‘okay’ on national television, and a large part of this was down to Alex.

First, all the girls in the mansion took part in a game where they answered banal questions like ‘Are you a cat person or a dog person?’, and if their answers matched Richie’s, they moved a step forward… towards Richie.

The entire purpose of the game was supposed to test their compatibility which Richie, but the probability that some girls were playing untruthfully and merely trying to guess Richie’s answer is ‘absolutely fucking certain’.

(What about Richie says ‘I’m *not* a dog person’?? He is the human equivalent of a Labrador.)

But the real creepy bit came when the winners of that lil’ exercise moved forward to the next round, where they played a fun game of touching a blindfolded Richie on his body bits. (I mean, did anyone else think that he was going to have to try and guess which girl was which, and the ones he got right would be through to the next round? But no. The girls touched him up all over, and he decided whose touching he liked the best.)

Just to make it weirder, the competing girls NOT feeling up Richie were watching the whole thing unfold via a TV screen in another room, not to mention Osher and Dating Specialist Barbie looking on from 10 feet away.

First up was Faith, who until this episode I hadn’t really paid attention to, but now realise she is the most adorable human on the planet and the only one who seems to have any *actual*, two-way chemistry with Richie. She is just delightful. During her turn she took Richie for an awkward kind of waltz, does this grabby kind of thing with his pecs, and ends with a hug. Cute!

Steph strokes his chin. Steph is not comfortable with bodily contact.

Kiki and Noni have a bit of a laugh, Rachel approaches him like he’s got ‘FRAGILE’ stamped on his forehead, and finally it’s Alex’s turn.

Here’s the thing about Alex’s turn: she is very clearly playing along to a romantic movie in her head. While we’re seeing the product of a well-oiled and highly profitable dating reality show machine, she is seeing the library scene in Atonement. And you best believe there was only one Keira Knightley in Atonement.

So Alex waltzes up to Richie with a determined look in her eye. She strokes his hair, she grabs his hands, places them 30 centimetres away from her butt and goes in for a hug so sexual, if this was The Sims they’d be Woo Hoo-ing, married, and pregnant within the day.

“Oh my god it was so full on,” said Sarah, watching from the other room. “She’s all over him!” said Noni. “This is television!” said Australia.

BUT THEN IT GOT WEIRDER.

Alex grabbed Richie’s hands, put them on her face, and stroked her lips with his thumb. She then did the same to his. ‘Remember these lips,’ she seemed to say. ‘We kissed with these very lips. I have a clay models of both of them at home’.

Obviously this is an extremely intimate move, one that is usually reserved for a) after sex or b) erotica of the ‘trembling bosoms’ sort.

So watching it unfold in the utmost of public is just… uncomfortable.

“I don’t know how I feel about watching this,” said Sarah. “It’s so awkward,” said Steph. “TELEVISION!” said Australia.

Noni obviously summed it up best: “It’s like a car crash. It’s horrific, but you can’t look away.”

Damn, I’m gonna miss you, bacon girl.

Throughout the whole thing Nicki looked like she was about to burst into tears.

Oh Nicki. He’s not worth it.

When it came time to selecting which two girls would progress onto the final round, Alex was (naturally) one of them. Of course she was! Who would humiliate someone on national television by deeming their erotic lip-thumbing not good enough?

The other girl was Faith, who in a truly incredible move managed to draw out one of Richie’s most ‘real’ moments the entire season.

“You like the boob grab?” asked a giggling Faith, once she’d been revealed as girl #1.

“It rated high,” said Richie, and he was actually laughing. This was no ‘haha’. It was an actual, honest-to-goodness chuckle.

So Faith and Alex were put to the final test, whereby a blindfolded Richie drove a golf buggy round a driving course and the girls each instructed him though it. During the course they had to complete tasks that are presumably taken straight from what the life of Richie’s girlfriend would be like, such as dropping off his dry-cleaning, picking up the dog from the groomers, going to the bottle shop, and reverse parking!!!!! See it’s funny, because women can’t reverse park.

Faith won, probably b/c Alex took the fake game way too seriously.

She and Richie went on a single date, and it was actually glorious. They have what appears to be a genuinely fun conversation about what it would be like to be married. They giggle. They ~lean in~. Chemistry!

PEDESTRIAN.TV would now like to formally place all our support behind human sunbeam Faith.