‘Bachelor’ recap: During a polar bear plunge, icy Tierra cracks

Oh Canada, oh Canada!

So pretty you are, with your hypothermia-inducing lakes and open fields, where one can be pelted with ice and snow. Our Bach, Sean, kicked off the second night of this week’s two! night! extravaganza by taking in the sights and walking over what appeared to be a beaver dam by Lake Louise.

Sean isn’t “feeling so great” due to his tough time in Montana, where there was a lot of Tierra dramz. Is his wife still out there, somewhere amid this upstanding crop of lady folk? He looked at the pretty blue water and fretted.

But he had to soldier on with his journey toward love, and so Sean invited Catherine on the first one-on-one date of the episode. She showed up to a field in the middle of a near-blizzard wearing no jacket. Cue Sean, who pulled up driving some sort of “Ice Explorer,” which looked like a school bus with monster tires. The two headed for even snowier weather, where they decided to go sledding on a hill with a minimal incline. Despite how un-fun this appeared to be, the pair had a grand ol’ time, laughing and making snow angels.

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“This is what I want from a wife,” Sean told Catherine. “To totally erase the moment and have fun.”

Oh yeah, he went there. She could go All! The! Way!

Later that evening, it was made even more apparent that Sean was seriously feeling Catherine when he whisked her away via horse-drawn carriage to an ice castle that had been built specifically for their date. (That job has to suck, right?)

“We’re sitting in this insane ice castle just surrounded by ice,” Captain Obvious said.

As is required on any one-on-one, Catherine knew she had to get to her tragic backstory ASAP. Except her’s was actually really, really bad. When she was 12, she was walking at camp with a friend and a tree fell on her friend and killed her instantly. And Catherine witnessed the whole thing. Um, traumatizing much?

“I realized that things can be taken from you very quickly,” she explained, getting serious.

Er ... on to lighter topics, like Tierra nearly dying of hypothermia.

After forcing the women to battle each other in roller derby and drink goat’s milk straight from the udder, Sean decided it was time for a polar bear plunge! You know, that thing you do at summer camp at 6 in the morning when it’s really cold and everyone runs into the lake anyway? Except that it’s supposed to be summer -- not snowing in Canada in “glacier-fed” water.

Though Selma did legitimately believe that there could be sharks in Lake Louise, she somehow appeared to be the only rational one and decided not to participate in said plunge.

“He was like, ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s not. I could come back and do this any time,’” Selma explained. Holla, gurl.

So the other chicks ran into the water, dunked and ran out screaming and being really proud of themselves. Everyone seemed giddy except for Tierra, who suddenly started gasping for breath and clawing at her chest. I know a lot of you guys probably think she was faking, but I don’t know -- that moment did seem kind of terrifying to me.

Paramedics arrived on the scene for the second time -- remember the whole falling-down-the-stairs-in-the-mansh thing? -- and wrapped her in warming blankets. She looked really bad, but maybe the mascara smudges under her eyes just added to the effect?

Back in her room, after some poor EMT had to put socks on her feet and fed her a hamburger, she seemed pretty OK. When Sean came by to visit her, she made sure to put the oxygen tube back in her nose and look really pathetic, and he seemed to pity her because he kept using the cloying phrase “oh, bless your heart!” like he was her grandmother.

Sean left Tierra behind and returned to the group date, where Sarah brought along some pictures of her family to show Sean. It was really deep and stuff, until Tierra showed up. Surprise! She powered through her hypothermia battle and was even wearing heels on her frostbitten little toesies!

Poor Sarah, however, remained on Sean’s mind. Those family photos hit him hard, he said, and he realized that it would be cruel to keep her around any longer when he wasn’t feeling a connection with her. Sarah cried a lot, and I felt really bad for her, because she was right -- girls are always told when they’re broken up with that they’re amazing and special and someone is going to be so lucky to have them. If she was that amazing and special, you would have fallen for her, bro. Amirite?

For the last one-on-one of the trip, Dez met up with Sean in Banff National Park, where the two went hiking and took in the scenic views and then cruel, mean, horrible Sean told her they were going to repel down a sheer rock cliff.

“I want to show her that if you commit to something, you can make it work no matter what,” Sean said, because NOTHING can just be an activity on “The Bach.” It must. be. a. metaphor.

Just as she had chugged the goat’s milk like a champ, Dez faced the challenge with little trepidation. When the pair reached the bottom of the cliff, they even decided to climb a couple of trees and Sean called Dez his “little cub.”

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In the serious portion of the date, the two cuddled up by a fire inside of this awesome teepee, replete with dangling dream catchers and fuzzy blankets. It seemed like the perfect setting for a date ... until Dez revealed that she often lived in a tent growing up because her family never had a lot of money.

“I opened up about living some of my life in a tent, and here I am falling in love in a teepee,” she said following the evening. Hey, at least the girl has a sense of humor. Dez is quickly emerging as my fave. She doesn’t seem as blindly obsessed with Sean as some of the other women are, and also doesn’t think that sharks live in lakes.

As for Miss Selma: Predictably, she decided to throw her whole moral code out the window at the cocktail party and kiss Sean on national television.

“This is a huge shame to my family,” she said. “I hope my mom forgives me!”

She’d soon find out her mom’s reaction, because Sean sent her packing only hours later. Awktown. Daniella also was sent home -- an event she described as shocking.

“But whatever, I’m keeping a straight face,” she insisted, her face decidedly un-straight as she cried.

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