After leaving one man jilted, Married At First Sight's runaway bride has now stolen the thunder of a set of identical twin brides, as the search for her whereabouts overshadowed their spectacular double wedding on Tuesday night.
When the identical twin sisters signed up for this show, they thought they had the upper hand with the novelty factor - assuming they'd score more airtime and viewer interest with that ol' Parent Trap razzle dazzle. Never in their wildest identical dreams did they think their big double wedding would be overshadowed by a runaway bride from Cronulla.
Lauren ran out of her own wedding on Monday night and right into the twins' wedding episode, with the hunt for her location taking away any interest in their big day.
While we begin Tuesday night's episode with Lauren still at large, intel is soon received that leads us to some random apartment where she's been hiding out for several days.
And yes. She's eventually smoked out of her rat hole.
But first, we find Andrew where we left him: still looking tired and confused on the hotel couch.
"I've got absolutely no idea," he says, noting that Lauren left all her stuff behind in the room. "She's, like, literally bailed out. I just don't get it. We were having laughs all the way through the night. She grabbed me and she was giving me kisses constantly throughout the end of the night. She was definitely having a good time."
Coming back to their hotel room following the reception, they decided to kick on with the night and go out for another drink.
This is when Andrew decides to retrace his steps and takes us to the scene of the crime like they do on A Current Affair. Only, this story is bigger than a dodgy plumber or a dodgy car dealer. It involves a dodgy bride and I'm not sure Tracy Grimshaw could handle this kind of exposé.
RIPPED OFF: Innocent Aussie bachelors and the crooked brides who prey on them.
Out the front of a bar on the main drag of Bondi, Andrew relives the moment his wife - whom he barely knew - smoke-bombed out of their marriage.
"We'd made plans to go out. Down the elevator. Out the front. Turned around to see where she was. And she was completely gone. Literally gone," he recalls.
"Walked across the road ready to go into this pub. Turned around, there were two cabs there. She's got in a cab and just gone. I don't get it."
I don't get it either. Who takes a taxi instead of an Uber? Clearly there are a lot of questions that need answering.
It's at this point producers try to interest us in another novelty wedding involving a set of twins. We tell them, 'No thank you may we please go back to that lady that ran away," but despite our politeness they make us watch this other circus.
Meeting twin sisters Michelle and Sharon, it becomes immediately clear having two people who look identical in the one reality show is going to make things very confusing.
Michelle and Jesse and Sharon and Nick are pretty much interchangeable.
The producers ignore my earlier suggestion to just pair the twins with one really dumb guy and swap them in and out to see if he notices. Instead, they pair the girls with two separate guys. Shannon gets Nick, who proudly dubs himself "the biggest bogan". And Michelle gets Jesse, who looks and sounds all of 14-years-old and works in his dad's grocery store.
Jesse says there are mad perks to working in a market - the main one being the opportunity to flirt with female customers using fresh produce as props.
"What you want is the nice red ones - almost as sweet as me," he says while holding strawberries up to a lady, and it seems like a really big missed opportunity given that ample bananas and eggplants are also within arms reach.
On the morning of their big joint-wedding, Michelle starts sulking because she doesn't look the same as Sharon. She seems to have forgotten that Sharon is her identical twin and today - in their matching white dresses and undereye masks - they look more alike than ever before.
"I'm only applying a nose pore strip if Sharon does."
Returning to Andrew's hotel room, we find the jilted groom attempting to phone Lauren again. He gets more and more annoyed with every call he makes.
"I haven't heard from her at all. The more I think about that the more p*ssed off I get," he says.
His anger then spirals into some internal self-esteem issues.
"I don't think I was Lauren's type, I think it was as simple as that. I feel rejected," he shares, not realising that, if anything, it was probably that embarrassing song he sang at the reception that made her reconsider things.
"Yeah, I don't have a clue what to do at the moment. The thought of having to leave after being so hopeful about the whole experience is a rough thought. I don't wanna go. I was geared up to meet someone and try and form a really great relationship."
"Also do you have WhatsApp because these txts and calls are getting expensive cheers *eyeroll emoji*
Lauren left her bags behind in the hotel room under Andrew's eyes.
Back over at the twins' wedding, the feelings Sharon and Michelle have for their grooms are not identical.
Sharon and bogan Nick are stoked with each other. And one metre away, Jesse thinks he's hit the jackpot with Michelle. But the feeling isn't mutual.
Despite Michelle's visible concern, she pushes through with the wedding.
"So, the kiss was nothing, really," a distressed Michelle tells us. "I'm a little bit worried. The sexual chemistry is not there. I don't know what to do."
She decides the best thing to do is to pull a Lauren and smoke-bomb on Jesse - leaving him to pose for their wedding photos alone.
"You can use this as your LinkedIn profile."
After an uncomfortable amount of time, Michelle is finally located and dragged down to the lake to have her photo taken with her husband she doesn't like.
This could be Sharon just filling in for Michelle, I'm not sure.
Giving Andrew some alone time, we return to the Bondi hotel room to find he's still there several days after being dumped. He's still waiting on the couch, hoping Lauren will just walk through the door, clink her keys down on the kitchen bench and moan something about the line at the 24-hour Maccas taking forever before giving him a kiss and tossing him a box of chicken nuggets. Chicken nugs can fix anything - even a broken marriage.
But that doesn't happen. There's no Lauren and there's no nugs.
"I'm a bit sh*tty at this point," Andrew admits, several days into being holed up in the hotel room. "(It's) Been a couple of days now since the wonderful wedding. I haven't heard from Lauren at all. Not a word, not a text," a clearly bruised Andrew spits.
"She better have a f*ckin' good reason. To be honest, there's no reason. There's no excuse for what she did. I've put a lot on the line for this. I put work, hobbies, passions, personal lives, friends, on hold. Wondering what to do next. I think I've got to pack up and leave."
As Andrew begins to pack up his suitcase and come to terms with the idea he may never know what happened to his scientifically-matched wife, producers receive some intel. Lauren has been tracked down.
Huddling out the front of some random apartment block, we wonder how we're going to smoke Lauren out of her rat hole.
It's like Charlie's Angels. I'm Drew.
It's not clear if it's her apartment, a friend's apartment or the home of a complete stranger who just has no idea Lauren's been hiding out in one of their cupboards for four days.
One of the producers knocks on her door.
"Hey Lauren, are you there? We just need five minutes," they nervously call. Three seconds pass. And then the door is slowly pulled open.
"Hi guys," she says, looking relaxed, yet put together. She acts casual, as if she doesn't know exactly why producers have stalked her and left a million voicemails.
In the most frustrating moment of the episode, this is where we leave Lauren for the night. Producers know we're frothing to hear what she has to say and they're not going to give it to us until tomorrow night. While the other couples' are on their honeymoons in various island locations, Lauren will be dragged to a warehouse to face the psychologists and the husband she ditched without warning. Her interrogation will, again, eclipse everything else in the episode.
Producers finally tracked down runaway bride Lauren.
While we'd rather be at Lauren's, we head back to the twins' reception, where Jesse is still unaware his new wife isn't into him even though she's barely spoken to him.
Forced into some alone time with Jesse, Michelle's taken by surprise when he gifts her with a crappy charm necklace. She accepts it and says he's growing on her.
Jesse is still oblivious to the rollercoaster of - mostly negative - emotions his new wife has been going through, and is optimistic about their first night together.
"Maybe there might be a bit of a spoon!" he says hopefully.
While Michelle has come around a little bit, I can confidently assume there will not be a spoon. And definitely no fork. And he's just an idiot if he thinks he'll be getting a spork.
Married At First Sight Australia is on Monday-Wednesday at 8pm on Three.
