The Bachelor: where time and space stands still and we continue to blame everything on Mel Schilling. Source / Channel 10
WARNING: Graphic language
The Bachelor mansion has been pummelled by a vulgar C-word scandal that has ended in a disgusted walkout by the man himself and left audiences searching Urban Dictionary to figure out when exactly the oddly specific insult became a thing.
Get ready to sign your online petitions people because The Bachelor *goes there* tonight.
Where exactly is it going? The gutter. It's joining us all in the gutter.
Waltzing down a path well-trodden by Married At First Sight earlier this year, The Bachelor has decided to detonate its own C-bomb.
Will Australia be outraged at such language being broadcast repeatedly in prime time? Will people care less because it's a woman saying it about a man? And, more importantly, will we all end up somehow blaming Mel Schilling for everything again? All valid questions.
Perhaps this is just a sign of changing thresholds and tolerance. It seems the once-controversial word might not carry the same offence it once did. By the end of the year, Alf from Home And Away is probably going to take a shine to the word and use it to put a new spin on his current catchphrase of "Stone the flamin' crows!"
It's the same drill as last time. With Married At First Sight's C-word scandal, the entire recap was basically just lines of asterisks to censor the language. So, to make things easier, we replaced the C-word with the word "cantaloupe". To ensure the asterisks button on my keyboard isn't broken from overuse tonight, we will adopt the same replacement.
Tonight, cantaloupes are hurled around like crazy. Throwing cantaloupes around is a dangerous game. I mean that both literally and figuratively.
Now, that's a joke I just copy-and-pasted from the old MAFS cantaloupe recap and I promise I won't re-use any more gear.
Hang in there, ya buncha cantaloupes.
Tonight's episode opens and it appears we're still at last Thursday night's rose ceremony because time and space does not exist in The Bachelor mansion. Matt and Osher have left and all the girls are now slumping around the couch while drinking and bitching about how Abbie kissed Matt earlier in the party.
It's clear they all want to throw their tacky red champagne glasses at Abbie but this isn't MAFS. Or is it? Producers stole the big dirty cantaloupe out of the MAFS production handbook, so a mild glassing could be imminent. But that's an issue for later. Let's focus on the present, which happens to be six days ago.
When you sign up to The Bachelor, you're basically allowing yourself to become a mole person for three months. But these mole people bust out of the bunker and go where everyone goes when they're trying to evade Osher: the NSW Central Coast.
Abbie gets a single date which is convenient because she has a secret she'd like to share with Matt. Apparently, after their kiss at the cocktail party, she overheard Monique cutting sick about it and hurling cantaloupes.
She pledges to tell Matt. But she won't let it destroy the romance just yet.
"I feel like a potato," she sighs and, honestly, same.
Obviously Monique is super calm and rational about Abbie getting the date.
"I am absolutely livid at Matt. I am fuming," she spits at us.
We run off to find Abbie and Matt to see what their boring Central Coast date entails. It involves drinking foot juice and, no, I will not be providing any context on this.
Despite Abbie's foot juice breath, she gets a pash and scores a rose. Then they flop-dive into a spa because that's what drinking foot juice always leads to.
Now, drunk on foot juice, Abbie decides to reveal to Matt what Monique said.
"After the cocktail party ended, I told a few girls that we had a kiss. And they were getting upset with me because they didn't think it was appropriate. And some girls were saying some things about you … Monique in particular was saying things about you … there was a phrase that was said that I want to tell you and I don't want to upset you …" she meanders.
"Just say it!" we yell while kicking water in her face before swimming off to the pool bar.
Abbie pauses and stares down into the chlorinated water. The hum from the kreepy krauly pool vacuum fills the silence.
"Ok, so … she said that you're a dog c**t. And a disrespectful pig," she blurts.
Matt … well. Matt looks like he's just been hit in the face with a cantaloupe.
Yowza. A dog cantaloupe. It's quite a unique spin on everyone's favourite swear word.
To be honest, I've never heard that particular phrasing before. When Abbie first said the phrase, I thought it was a weird and unexpected Netflix reboot of the '90s cartoon CatDog.
"It really hurts coming from Monique because of how I feel about her and how amazing our date was. Um, yeah it hurts," he sighs.
Matt is in shock and stays up all night thinking about it. Dogs and cantaloupes are now haunting his dreams. He really likes Abbie, but he wants to get to the bottom of these claims. And apparently the only way to do that is by staging a dramatic confrontation of Monique at the cocktail party before conducting individual interrogations of all the girls.
Ugh, if only this was a reality show with a camera crew and we could just review the footage of what Monique allegedly said.
Oh well.
"How ya doin?" he says casually to Monique while dragging her over to a bench in the garden. "I need to chat with ya about some stuff. It came up that you had some fairly flowery language to describe myself."
Monique: "Flowery?"
Matt: "Flowery."
Monique: "Flowery?"
Matt: "Flowery."
Monique: "Flouuuuu-waaah-reeeee?"
The word flowery has now forever lost all meaning.
Matt cuts to the chase.
"The turn of phrase I heard was "disrespectful pig" and "dog … C U Next Tuesday," he states.
Monique does that thing you do when someone accuses you of doing something you absolutely did but you have to act shocked by the accusation.
"Whoa. No. No. I would never, ever say that. I don't speak that way at all," she replies, pretending like she's never heard any of those words before. "I'm genuinely shocked, I'm genuinely confused."
And we're genuinely not believing her.
Matt decides to bring Abbie over and it basically ends with Abbie screaming "you said it!" and Monique employing the tried and true defence of "she's fake!"
We all find out that Rachael was apparently with Monique when she said it, so Matt springs up and runs back to the patio to interrogate the new key witness.
Rachael is best mates with Monique but she really drops the ball with the alibi.
"We were by the pool and she said it in a joking manner to me. She said it as a joke," she tells Matt. But Monique denied saying it at all! Ha! Busted! We feel exactly like Ling in Ally McBeal.
"Now to me, it sounds like Mon's lying. It's all starting to sound like bullshit to me," Matt gasps to us.
It's almost as if producers set themselves the challenge of getting everyone to hurl a cantaloupe tonight.
"You were calling him a dog cantaloupe! You were calling him a dog cantaloupe!" Abbie yells at Monique.
All the girls start running around the garden, sharing their own witness accounts. Everyone has a different version of events.
"I didn't hear dog cantaloupe but I think I heard giraffe cantaloupe. Maybe it was elephant," one girl stresses.
"I heard it but they're bogan," Sogand tells us. My gosh, Sogand, you should be a lawyer. That defence is bulletproof.
The controversial refrain is whispered over and over until the censor just holds her finger down on the bleep button for an entire 90 seconds because she's having to dodge rogue cantaloupes left and right.
Monique goes into damage control and starts trying to get support from girls she's never even spoken to.
"Abbie told Matt that I've called him a dog cantaloupe," Monique snips to this random girl who's just psyched Monique is talking to her.
Matt can't take it anymore. He walks into the middle of the backyard with his hands on his head. Battered and bruised, he demands everyone drop their cantaloupes.
"To me, tonight's been a tremendous waste of time. It's done my head in. So that's it," he barks.
And then he walks out.
Is Monique innocent? Who knows. But someone needs to go tonight, so we sacrifice some chick named Julia instead.
Monique is sharp as a tack and really knows how to read a room.
"I don't believe this. I don't even use the word pig," she bitches to Rachael. Oh Monique. It's not pigs we care about.
"No one uses that word. It's 2019, babe. No one uses that word. Bitch. F**king trash. Go home you f**king piece of sh*t," Rachael snips about Abbie.
Expect to learn many more fun new words when the curious case of the canine cantaloupe continues.
• The Bachelor Australia airs every Tuesday and Wednesday on Bravo at 8:30pm.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.