Thanks to Arie, tonight is totally Chris Harrison’s night to shine with the explanatory monologue. It’s also the obligatory express-your-premature-undying-love-for-Emily night.  And side note: how is it already the week before hometown dates? This season has gone delightfully fast. But I digress–let’s begin.

This week brings us to Prague and further away from Ricki….Who,  might I add, is a notably uncute child, so I’m really not missing her presence, and I’m pretty sure the dudes don’t mind her being out of the picture while they try to poke mommy either.

Arie gets the first one-on-one card and gets to explore the city with Emily. The producers really don’t waste any time this ep and get right to the good stuff. Commence reality TV hard-on: Arie has a major secret that he is keeping from Emily.

Apparently, Arie briefly dated show producer Cassie Lambert like a million years ago and didn’t tell Emily. Emily and Cassie have a casual conversation about how this is “real life” (chyah, about as real as Emily boobies) and not “production” stuff (Whhhhat. Are you saying this is a….staged show?) and how Emily feels stupid that no one mentioned it to her.

Instead of immediately confronting Arie, Emily plays the consummate female and tries to pry it from him by leading a mind-f*cking conversation about the importance of honesty and not keeping a single secret from your spouse. Ever. Lest she cut your weenis off.  Seriously. He still doesn’t give up the information, so they have an off-camera conversation, and then everything is fine and they kiss and make up. Like kiss a lot. Because Emily just loves kissing Arie’s giant head.

Then Arie tells Emily he loves her while they are floating on some sort of raft. Chill out dude. If I was Emily, I’d be swimming to shore.  Since he is the first one of the episode to do it, he comes off a little Stage 5 Clinger, but by the end, we get used to the sentiment being word vomited onto her face.

The next one-on-one date is with John. On this date, we get to hear Emily painfully recite more memorized elementary school history facts like she’s taking an oral exam.

It is unclear at this point why she decided to keep him last week for any reason but pity, which is confirmed when he tells the world about when a woman broke his heart by turning off her phone and cheating on him. (In her defense, I’d probably cheat on him too.) He was so worried he called every hospital and prison (really, guy?), while she was probably out getting finger blasted by some rodeo Joe/”doctor dude.”

John goes home and tells the guys he feels like the date went really well. Chris looks at him like he clubbed his puppy…Chris is obviously getting his period this week.

During all the post-date chaos, Sean goes into a Emi-frenzy and embarks on a completely unstaged rat race to find Emily by running “Taken” style and yelling her name through the streets like a drunk lunatic. He finds her conveniently wandering in a random alley definitely alone, so they out-southern each other’s accents for a little before swallowing each other’s faces.

On the group date, the four of them go on a horse-drawn carriage ride in the rain, which I bet smells really good. Doug turns into a nonfunctional robot again when he sits down with Emily for some alone time. Seriously, what’s wrong with this guy? He is a mental midget, like a total man child who freaks out every time their clothing brushes.

Finally Emily has enough with his social shortcomings and basically tells Doug that he’s the tortoise and she’s the slutty hare, and he’s never going to catch up with her–in a last stitch effort to win her affections, Doug swoops in and hits her with a nice lip-smacker while she’s talking, winning the awkward award of the night. Doug himself says it best by saying his girl radar is completely broken.

If you had to ask whether he cries, then you don’t know how tucked up his nuts are. Yes, Doug cries in the limo

Back at the house, Jef is stoked for his one-on-one. Obviously, because why would he pick any other word to describe his emotions?

On his date, Chris comes out swinging and is pretty much ready to punch Emily if she doesn’t give an adequate explanation for why he didn’t get a one-on-one date.

Then, when he doesn’t get the date rose, he looks like he’s about to scalp her and wear her hair as a wig. CHRIS ANGRY.

Jef was steadily becoming the most tolerable bachelor, until he and Emily got their hands on a couple of marionette puppets on their one-on-one date. Jef and Emily found their way were led by producers into a beautiful library, where, like all normal twenty-somethings courting each other, they decide to put a highly uncomfortable puppet show about when they met. Do other humans do this or just Bachelorette humans? Jef starts to use this as an opportunity to semi-profess his feelings through puppet-speech, and then the puppets sort of hump a little. Way to use the dolls are a crutch, dude.

Jef and Emily have some sexy time laying on the floor of the library and talking about baby making, and then Jef totally wins some points with the dirtiest dirty talk Emily has heard in months, possibly years, when he says, “I want to date you so hard and marry the sh*t out of you.” Okay, Jef wins, we can all go home. Emily’s sex-deprived vajay was probably singing out to the heavens at this one.

Finally, we’ve made it to the rose ceremony, and John-Wolf just won’t shut up about how confident he is, which definitely means he’s not getting a rose.

Emily shows up looking like a mermaid wrapped in cellophane. Chris, on the other hand, looks either like he’s been crying for days or just huffed whippits for three hours. Here’s my beef with Chris—dude is the youngest on the show, meaning he should be at his sexual and swag peak out of any one…and he’s just totally losing his sh*t.

Emily decides to skip the cocktail party, and Chris has a meltdown in the middle of the rose ceremony and requests a private chat with Emily. He ends up getting the rose that John thought he had locked up and John is TOTALLY shocked…and is definitely the only one in America who feels this way.

Hometowns next week look totally emotional and juicy.