The Bachelorette NZ episode 7: Steve Braunias on blast from past Jesse and a smooth criminal

Blast from the past: Last season's Jesse returned to this year's show last night.

OPINION:

No. Not that guy again.

Tonight's episode of The Bachelorette, a show about a pack of drongos and their lacklustre quest for the hand of an eligible marketing executive - introduced a new contestant (which is to say they dragged out one of the contestants from the 2020 season).

I wouldn't have minded seething sailor Drongo Mike or kumara farmer Drongo Michael or even that old horndog Drongo Glenn, but it was that outright Drongo Jesse.

"He's volatile," I wrote about him last year, "always giving someone a bit of grief, and there's something bitter about the way he curls his lip."

Drongo Richie put it another way: "He's bad news," he warned Hottie Lily. Jesse got very close though and made it to the final rose ceremony.

He doesn't seem to have changed. There he was again, striding across the grounds of the show's Queenstown mansion, as giggly and confident as ever, and still with that revealing line of his upper lip.

There are some men who develop a turned-down mouth. It's an advertisement for some kind of disappointment or failure. Jesse's mouth expresses something else, something maybe a little bit kind of mean.

But to give him his due, he rocked up to Hottie Lexie and started talking to her like he's known her all his life. Drongo Josh and Drongo Damien talked to her like she was an alien species. Both of them barely made a lick of sense and both were marched off the show last night.

There's no nice way to tell a date that they're toast but certainly there are many patronising ways.

"I've been laughing since I met you!", Hottie Lexie said to Damien, as she instructed him to get lost. And then, to camera: "I wanted to hug him on the way out." Ugh.

There are now seven contestants left. Two of them, Drongos Paul and Joe, have already kissed Hottie Lexie. Drongos Todd and Jack might be next, Drongos Aiden and Matt surely don't stand a chance in hell, and as for Drongo Hamish, what's with that guy? For a while there, he went around being called "a smooth criminal". He was happy, relaxed. But now he seems to be falling to pieces.

"It makes me wonder," said Hottie Lexie, her rising vocal inflection soaring to the heights of Coronet Peak, "if he's overwhelmed in general?"

There's so little tension on The Bachelorette that I'm grateful to Hamish for his apparent nervous breakdown.

But I hope he calms down and revisits his smooth criminal past. He's one of the nicest guys on the show and besides, the golden rule for viewers of The Bachelorette is surely ABJ: Anyone But Jesse.

* The Bachelorette NZ screens Monday-Wednesday at 7.30pm on TVNZ 2