The Pick Up Artist 2: Make Out Club
It's down to the final four: Rian, Greg, Simeon, and Matt, also known as Crybaby, Plant, Yikes, and Jew. I don't really think Greg is a plant, I GUESS, but I do feel like it would be way easier to take a comfortable, relatively handsome young man in a graphic tee and a graphic blazer and temporarily transform him into a dweebish science nerd with long hair and a Large Hadron Collider t-shirt than the other way around, if you know what I'm saying. I'm saying that it would be easier to pull off the transformation required to make you think he was a nerd at the beginning of the show than the transformation he has supposedly gone through if he had actually been a nerd. Matt on the other hand started the show as a Jew and is going to end the show as a Jew, no matter how many strippers he fucks on the way.
This week begins at the grocery store, because the one true test of a pick up artist is if he can get a girl's number at the free chocolate fountain sample table? What was that all about? I've been to dozens, literally dozens of grocery stores in my lifetime, many of them with free samples, but none of them had a chocolate fountain table. You know why? Because a) it is difficult to keep chocolate fountains up to health code standards, and b) because no one buys chocolate fountains. You rent them for a bar mitzvah or a baby shower for someone at your office. The end.
To be fair to the boys, if you set aside the inherent discomfort produced by knowing it's someone's goal to BECOME a pick up artist, then you do have to admit that it kind of IS the ultimate test of one to get a girl's number at the grocery store. And if we want to be really generous, we'll even allow that it's the ultimate test when the store has been packed with young women who've signed release waivers. Except that as with everything on this show, there is such an obvious difference between being so confident and unhurried about chatting people up that you're naturally able to strike up conversations in public places under fluorescent lighting, as opposed to using pre-written patter generated by a garbage clown in a Cat in the Hat hat that instantly makes your feet sweat. It's genuinely painful when Greg gives a girl the rehearsed "False Time Constraint" that he's "got to go in a second." GO WHERE? TO THE DAIRY AISLE? But the worst crossover use of Sad Nightclub Banter Gone Wrong is in Simeon's "gambit" (I'm in too deep! Donnie Brasco!) in the produce aisle:
Although, despite Simeon's produce failure, I think in the end Rian had the saddest game.
No one who gets a girl's number by playing patty cake deserves to be so smug as they boast about "number closing." In fact, let's just say NO ONE should boast about "number closing" if they actually call it "number closing."
But what do I know. Rian wins the challenge. Which makes him feel "a little bit like a pimp." Ugh. First of all, playing patty cake in front of a chocolate fountain at a Phoenix grocery store is NOT how pimps feel. Pimps feel more like "I'm going to use the threat of real violence to continue exploiting your demoralized sexuality for money in order to fund my crack habit." But also ugh because it's the clearest sign we've had yet that all of these boys are on the fast track to being the absolute worst. Achieving the ultimate goal of having non-committal sex with a sad girl from the bar is less unbearable than being the type of guy who translates his emotions into rudimentary frat boy speak from 2002.
This week's lesson and challenge are about wingmen. In order to successfully isolate a target in the field and raise your DHV spikes enough to initiate kino escalation so that when you bounce them to a second location for an instant date their IOIs are powerful enough to give you the confidence to kiss close, you're going to need a wingman. And a 20-sided die. It's kind of like a classic high-low, where your buddy crouches down behind the girl while you push her over. Onto your mouth/penis.
Because he won this week's grocery store challenge, Rian is allowed to choose his wingman, so he picks Greg. The other team will be Simeon and Matt, a pairing that Matt compares to "Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks." Perfect. He's going to get so much pussy with his 2,000 Year Old Man-themed negs. Or not:
Somehow almost everyone successfully completes the task of making out with a random girl at the bar, which is kind of incredible considering the cringy flame outs most of them have been having all season. Good for them. Good for them, except for Rian. Because despite his propensity for crying and wearing Dirty Rotten Scoundrels costumes, he still manages to get two girls to fight over him but can't seal the deal beyond nervously pecking one of them awkwardly on the lips. Obviously under normal circumstances with human beings that would be fine and not worth giving someone a hard time about, but these Club Robots from Planet Huh wanted to take Ryan's man seed back to their galaxy, so it's a total fail.
Later, at the elimination ceremony, he will claim this as a complete victory because he "doesn't even kiss his family." Oh, ok. That's not a weird explanation that makes everyone uncomfortable. Matador tells Rian that he's using a lot of backwards rationalization to explain away his failure, and then says "We kiss, man, that's what we do." FAIR ENOUGH. Which is why Rian is eliminated. Because we kiss, man.
Next week it's down to the final three. Even Mystery seems to be getting caught up in the nervous excitement. His goggles are all fogged up.
He's like, seriously, you guys, I take this show way too seriously. Don't believe me?
"See? I'm like a clown." - Mystery.
Posted by Gabe at 12:45 PM in Reality TV
Tags: Mystery | The Pick Up Artist
You are apparently correct about Greg:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2598949/
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noooooooooo! i sort of knew it was true, but i didn't want it to be. my heart is crushed.
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I knew he was a ringer!!! When he showed up with long hair and glasses, I could already imagine what his "avatar" would be like. Sure enough, dead on. And then when he should have been booted several weeks ago, but wasn't, I was certain he was a set up.
I question Matt's sincerity as well.
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Still though, that voice. Yikes. I couldn't sit though a feature film's worth of that. Is he faking that too?
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Did you notice how in the grocery store they didn't do the whole "This is a real grocery store with no actors." Did they think that we'd forget and assume they were real people, in this real grocery store?
Even though Matt and Simeon might have been better wings, I thought it was awkward with Simeon stopped making out with his girl to get down on the floor and pat Matt on the knee telling him how awesome he is. Really? Does that happen?
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those foggy goggles just made my week!
i will miss rian, his awkwardly spelled name and his compelling captions ("still sleeps with stuffed animal" is my favorite.) his goofy sweetness actually justified the heretofore inexplicable use of "somewhere only we know" over every goodbye montage.
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also, it was glossed over in the show, but how sad is it that rian's first kiss with a woman, EVER, was a peck in a nightclub, with a skank, on vh1?
tragic.
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You forgot to mention that his first kiss with a woman was at the age of 28. That adds to the sadness.
PS Why does Mystery think it's necessary to have BOTH a soul patch and a labret?
PPS I totally LOL'd when Matador was all like, "We kiss, that's what pick up artists do" and Mystery was all like, "we pick up"
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"needs the pull the trigger" - nice fancy editing!
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i meant "needs to pull the trigger"
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To me, his soul patch has always seemed like an unreachable/ungroomable patch on his face, like when one mows the lawn and is too lazy to bust out the weed wacker to trim that tall, unruly patch by the mailbox.
That or some hairy infection brought about by the piercing.
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To me the soul patch means "Chris Gaines
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did anyone notice everyone was wearing blue wristbands at the grocery store?kinda weird huh
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