Love in the Wild – Ep. 7: The Dirty Half-Dozen

Bare Down: The final 3 couples battle to win that trip around the world...and look good doing it.

This week the three remaining couples met Darren not in the jungle but at the beach in their skivvies.  He then told them to swim for it by which he meant a boat anchored maybe 50 meters offshore.  No problem, right?  No, none – except that Miles from Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes, didn’t know how to swim.  Fearing that he might drown, he was outfitted with a life jacket and training wheels.  Having retrieved a map from underwater, all three couples started paddling like mad (on paddle boards) in a race to find five coin-filled bags and deliver them to an oddly named gentleman at a place called Coco’s Bar in town (Ed. Note: In Cahuita, for those curious).  While Mike was smacking Samantha in the head with a paddle, Skip, stoked by the sight of Teresa’s rear end staring him straight in the face, rowed his team into an early lead.  Meanwhile, Heather was doing her best to keep Miles from ending up face down in the kiddie pool.  Having been first to retrieve a fourth bag at the pier, Skip and Teresa were feeling pretty good about themselves at this point in the adventure. The only thing between them and the win was recovering the fifth bag and delivering it to that dude at Coco’s.  But, then the unthinkable happened. Teresa lost the fourth bag somewhere between the pier and forever.  And just like that their lead completely evaporated.  Yes, they backtracked, crossed paths with a mapache, went back into the water at the pier, but it was all for naught.  They were toast.  It was a two-team race after that.

THE BIZARRO BEN

Remember Ben, Mr. Tact?  Boy, imagine if he’d been Teresa’s partner and she’d screwed up like she did, he would have been all over her like a cheap suit in a house fire.  He might have even tried to drown her in shallow water.  But, Skip, he was a mensch about the whole thing.  Although he admitted being upset, he made it clear that he wasn’t mad at Teresa but at the situation.  They were a team, he said; they won as a team, and they lost as a team.  Pretty classy.  His patience with Teresa would be tested one more time, too, at the Couples’ Choice Ceremony.

MAMBO NO.5

Mike and Samantha arrived at Coco’s first and immediately started yelling “Mambo! Mambo!” like a couple of crazy people.  Then Miles and Heather showed up, and they too started yelling “Mambo! Mambo!”  No, they weren’t trying to get the barflies to dance.  They were looking for a guy named Mambo!   Although the place was packed to the gills, none of the humanoids there could, or wanted, to help.  When the camera fixed for a sec. on a cute little beagle, I even wondered whether Mambo wasn’t a dog.  Finally, a Rastafarian-looking chap seated in a nook admitted to being the mysterious Mambo.  Per instructions, Mike and Samantha handed him the coin-filled bags in exchange for the secret phrase “amor salvaje.”  Committing it to memory, they then regurgitated the phrase for Darren at the finish line, thus winning yet another trip to The Oasis that night and a romantic sailboat ride on Lake Arenal the following day.

THE NEW, NEW NEWLYWED GAME

Since nobody was going to be changing partners so late in the competition, it was decided that the best way to weed out the couple least likely to find love in the wild was to play The Newlywed Game.  Well, sort of.  While keeping his hair in check, Darren divided the couples by gender and asked each a series of questions to see how well they knew one another.  Having been given two points to start thanks to their first place finish, Mike and Samantha were the first to five and a spot in the next week’s final.  Just a point behind at the start of this elimination round, Skip and Teresa stood a good chance of beating Miles and Heather if they could just answer one extra question correctly.  Both couples got the first question right, but when Darren asked Teresa who was more adventurous when it came to intimacy, she answered “both.”  Poor girl didn’t realize that that was an illogical answer since it was an either/or question. Guess all that make up she wore had finally penetrated her frontal lobe and caked up the synapses.  Skip couldn’t believe his ears,  grousing under his breath, “What the !#!$! are you doing?”  That made the score 3 – 1.  And, when Miles concurred that her gluteous maximus was his favorite part of Heather’s body, the finals match-up was set.  As we watched Skip and Teresa remove their bracelets and saunter off into an uncertain future together, he gently asked her, “Both?  Really?”

THE BIGGEST BONEY EVER

Periodically awarded to contestants guilty of especially boneheaded moves, this week’s boney – the biggest ever – goes to Teresa.  First losing bag number four, and then answering “both” to an either/or question was, considering the stakes, beyond boneheaded. It was catastrophically boneheaded!

Skip applauds his girl Theresa for winning this week's Boney.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

• The more I hear Miles’ voice, the more he sounds like an extra from the movie Fargo, “We’re making pretty good time, eh?”
• Guess Darren got the memo about remembering to comb his hair before arriving on the set.
• Bob Eubanks should have been the host at tonight’s Couples’ Choice ceremony.

Having watched the show now for seven weeks, I see that all the snark has been misplaced.  It’s a sweet show, a harmless show.  Thus, please be advised that next week’s final post in this rather tedious blog will be sans snark.

-Nick Silver blogs weekly for The Tico Times on “Love in the Wild.“

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Tags: cahuita, cocos bar, costa rica, darren mcmullen, love in the wild, newlyweds game, skip, theresa

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