KerleyQ

I so hope that Cory is just playing along with John. He has to know that John isn't going to forget him throwing him in. And I'm fully shipping Wes/Nany now. Their interview after elimination was so damn cute. And Nany renounced her friendship with John. If she takes away Nicole's makeup, and has a gentle "less is more" conversation with her, she'll become my favorite. (I swear, I still have moments of "wait, who is that?" when they show us shots of her without her full makeup. She looks like a completely different person.) I'm bummed that Jamie is gone. I would have loved watching a Jamie/KA/Wes/Nany alliance taking down John/Vince. But, as soon as we saw that Jamie/KA were drawing second, I knew they were in. I missed two episodes while on vacation (although given this season, I'm not sure how many, if any, elimination games I missed in those two), but I haven't seen the couple picking first go in yet. And it's always all three white skulls drawn 1, 2, 3. I'm still on the conspiracy theory train there - that black skull looks smaller than the others.

This week feels like they have just decided to re-set stuff. We had what Thomas did to Caroline re-framed as something less gross and a seeming path to a Thomas/Caroline pairing. We need Ridge out of the way of that, so he's apparently headed directly back to Brooke, who he hasn't had an ounce of interest in since the first time he found out Brooke had slept with Bill while he was married to Katie. To clear the field for them, we have Bill instantly renouncing his affair with Brooke and seemingly all about Katie again, and Katie is instantly cured of her alcoholism by two words, "I'm home." And with Quinn, we're seemingly going to forget her obsession with Liam and she's just happily sexing up Eric now, with no build-up of that relationship and no winding down of her "love" for Liam or her relationship with Deacon. But, never fear, I'm sure the great love story of Zende and Nicole will live on and avoid the re-set.

I don't have a super long history watching this show, but, from what I've gathered from the soap magazines over the years (I have this OCD habit of reading them cover to cover, even for the shows I wasn't watching at the time), it's not really out of character for Eric to allow himself to be blinded by some readily available, pretty younger woman, is it?

I was so pissed when they ignored the clear chemistry between Diego and Maxie in favor of pairing her with that bland cop, Jesse.

The good thing there is that you aren't stuck with the terrible partner the whole show. You know his partner was like "just one more round of questions and I'm done with him," while Sherri's partner was thinking "No! I don't want to switch!" Side note: when Sherri is the preferred partner over you, you know you've done wrong, Anthony. She is such an airhead, but, at least she was focused and trying to help her partners, instead of making it all about her. And I generally like Anthony, but this was not a good fit for him. He's right in thinking people want the humorous moments, but he's wrong in thinking that they should be the focus. If he had cut his shtick down to less than 50% of what he was doing, he would have been fine. But he was just too much "look at me! I'm the life of the party!!" and not enough trying to help his contestants win.

The description for today's episode in my program guide contains the following: Jason gets knocked unconscious. I won't even pretend I didn't laugh for a solid five minutes. At this point, I'd imagine that all of the brain activity you'd find if you do an MRI of his brain is a tiny, blank-faced Steve Burton, wearing a tight black t-shirt and blinking. Everything else has been knocked right out of action up there.

So much this. The bottom line is that Caroline was not able to consent that night, and, on the multiple occasions when Thomas made it clear he was interested in sex with her, when she wasn't incoherent on booze and pills, Caroline never expressed a reciprocal interest and often stated how much she loves Ridge. Taking advantage of the inebriated state of a woman who wasn't accepting your overtures while sober is rape. The show can re-frame it all they want, but I know what played out initially on our screens. That was a woman who was out of it. She may not have physically passed out before he started the deed, but she was out of it nonetheless. Add in her not remembering what happened the next morning, and the level of her inebriation incapacitating her is pretty clearly spelled out. On the incapacitated spectrum, there is a range of states between "capable of giving consent" and "passed out." Caroline was very clearly portrayed to be somewhere in that range that night.

Alec being good at this was not surprising to me. If there's one thing he's good at, it's the whole improv thing, which really lends itself to hosting any game show, but, especially, this one. And I think his "apparently the judges will accept anything in this region" comment on the lotion/lube thing. If I was the girl who lost the first round, I would have been so pissed about the question that won it for her opponent. Hickey was clearly the only real possible answer for that one. As soon as the contestant answered "hickey," I knew she had it won. I would have been shocked if she didn't, at minimum, tie, but the win seemed given unless one of the panel overthought their answer. Of course, she was in the lead after the first round due to some generous judging on her first round (again I bring up the lotion/lube thing). So, I guess she can't really complain too much about getting a lucky break there. And guy who won the second round, come on, how did you not know that Springsteen would be the number one answer? Thought the panel was great. And, seeing Rosie on this back to back with her on Pyramid, she's definitely up there in best celeb game show contestants. I'd be willing to bet that, like me, she grew up on game shows. (I play a mean game of Wheel of Fortune.) I loved how she told the first woman she's getting a free cruise after they failed to match. And it didn't surprise me at all coming from her. It just seems like such a Rosie thing to do. Other than the hickey answer, I would not have done well matching this particular panel, though.

What racist comments did Anthony Anderson make? I don't remember any. Kathy and Rosie were great partners. If I was ever to go on a game show with celeb teammates, they'd be at the top of my list. Their half of the show was so much better than the first half. To Kathy's partner in the second round, honey, bees. Bees sting. Wasps, hornets... She really got stuck on the "ray" train of thought and just could not grasp the most obvious examples.

Did the Pickler family get the vapors over every single question? And Kellie? I don't know who taught you the old "pretty girls can't be smart" BS, but they did you no favors. She may genuinely be as dumb as a box of rocks (sorry, box of rocks, that was uncalled for), but I get the impression it's all a big old act, because she thinks being a brainless ditz is somehow charming. It's not, honey. And, Pickler family, I know that, generally, it's considered proper to include the celeb in Fast Money on CFF, but, just this once, no one would have judged you for slapping a muzzle on the celeb and sending in any other two people to handle it. How did anyone genuinely expect the girl who kept asking "has the clock started?" to actually get all five answers in before time ran out? I felt bad for the Bass family. It had to sting to get so thoroughly spanked by the Picklers, of all families. Apologies to anyone who genuinely enjoys her, but, Nene Leakes - why? Why is she famous? Why?? I wish they would have matched her up opposite the Pickler family, so I could handily FF through half the show. Loved Ernie's family, and they absolutely killed Fast Money. And, yes, they clearly decided to just go for it with the "adult" questions after people complained about the mature content last time around. They went for it right out of the gate there.

That shit was so insulting to those of us who have actually had miscarriages (and to anyone with a basic understanding of how babies are made).

Carly, you might want to skip talking about men who shot Michael's father while sitting at a table with Michael and Sonny.

Jenna has tragic taste in men. She could probably use some therapy to deal with her apparent self-esteem issues. She's a pretty girl who actually seems sweet (and more intelligent than she lets on). She could do so much better than the meathead assholes she keeps choosing. Add in that the family member she chose to bring along as her bloodline last season was a cousin who has apparently made a habit of hooking up with Jenna's boyfriends, and she seems to be way too open to letting people treat her like shit. I figured the leaning thing was more an issue of not leaning back on the bigger boxes as they stepped down to the smaller ones. Because I could imagine that leaning back against that big box while on the middle one would be far easier than having to completely stand up. They seemed to be letting pretty much any contact between partners go, even though there are many ways contact could help keep a partner upright.

Yeah, I don't care how much chemistry BH and RoHo have, that hair is an even bigger hurdle to overcome than all of Franco's past. Someone needs to be fired for that shit.

And the way he worded it "I've never even choked a girl." Like that's like a normal thing that guys do, and he should get some kind of brownie points for managing to exist this many years on Earth without choking a girl. That little spiel made my skin crawl.

Seriously. When there was that quick little shot of him standing behind her on the box with his arms around her, I had a moment of "aww, how cute are they?" It's weird, but I like it.

I'm amazed at exactly how much I'm loving the Wes/Nany pairing. I normally cannot stand Nany, but they're absolutely my favorite pairing on this season. I'm halfway to shipping them, with the side benefit of John's head exploding when one of his former side pieces becomes all about Wes.

So does everyone know that Nik is alive now? Or is he hiding out and Ava is somehow involved?

It got to the point where we were afraid to turn on our TV or look at any social media when we got back to the hotel room each night. Our last night there was the night that poor boy was grabbed by an alligator. We were on a bus headed back to our hotel (the next one over from where it happened), and I saw some helicopters and knew, given how the week was going, it was going to be something really bad. It's kind of surreal being in this "happy" family vacation spot and just getting hit with awful news stories in the area one right after the other. You start feeling kind of guilty heading out to the theme parks to have fun. I may try to catch the Liz hospital scenes and check out NuTempNik. I figured it was likely, given how the show's been, that I didn't miss anything important or, you know, good.

OK, so I've missed about a week and a half (mostly vacation, which I spent in Orlando for what turned out to be the city's worst week ever). Did I miss anything important or any scenes I'll want to seek out to see?

I'll love her forever if she the person she kills is Steffy.

Scanning through MB's Twitter feed, I have to wonder if he doesn't genuinely dislike CD. It seems like he enjoys doing that passive-aggressive "I'm just kidding" picking on Chad thing. He'll say things like "Morgan and Dante, my two sons!" in response to a picture of CD, DZ, and BC. Just looking over the past day or so, I found a couple instances of that, and, judging from some of the fan responses, it sounds like he does it regularly (none of them were calling him out for it, more like "oh, haha, he's always joking with Chad like this!"), which seems kind of passive-aggressive to me.

Agreed. It's especially concerning that we're watching this play out, and we're reading those comments from BB while, at the same time, there's a real life story where a judge is going easy on a rapist because "prison would have a severe impact on him."

It looked to me like Farkle overheard that part of the conversation. I was expecting to see some moment where he, at least, got over being mad at Riley, because she was (at least partially) right.

Exactly! They didn't have to write in Caroline taking that pill. They didn't have to write in her getting incapacitated. They could have had her simply buzzed enough to make a poor choice, but still with it enough to actually make that choice. This wasn't Rick drinking at the cabin and then having sex with Maya when she showed up. Why introduce the medication to the story if they simply wanted it to be an ill-conceived drunken hook-up on Caroline's part?