The Half-Blind Leading The Blind

The Client

Mike, of Sterling Heights, MI.

The Beloved

Kristen, of St. Clair, MI, around forty miles away; they've been talking for three and a half years, and first said "I love you" a month into their non-face-to-face relationship.

The Clues

She says her last name is "Parkers," with an S, which is clearly fake. She's sent him "suggestive photos," but none of them show her face. She lives forty miles away and won't agree to meet.

The Excuses

They haven't videochatted because he's "not a computer guy." Right before Kristen and Mike "met" by chance on Facebook, she was in a terrible car accident that required her left eye to be removed; Mike thinks she won't meet him in person because she's too self-conscious about her prosthetic -- or, as he calls it, her "fake eye."

The Investigation

Max and Nev call the beauty school Kristen supposedly attends to see if she's enrolled; they do have a Kristen, but she has a different last name, and the receptionist doesn't know if their Kristen has a glass eye. Searching Kristen's phone number turns up someone named Hillock. Googling Hillock in St. Clair reveals an image of a farm that may have a horse barn; Mike has said her family has horses. Apparently a Kristyn Hillock, age fifty-seven, lives there. But a MyLife search finds that there is also twenty-two-year-old Kristyn Hillock, and a call to the beauty school confirms that she is enrolled there. A straight Google search reveals one photo of Kristyn's tattoos (scissors, which scans since she's in beauty school), and then a Facebook page with photos that she's wisely kept private. Here's what we don't see them look at and/or search: any of the Kristen photos Mike has given them; the name "Kristyn Hillock" and local newspapers from 2009, the time of her alleged car accident; the Facebook page that was the means by which she met Mike in the first place.

The Presentation Of Findings

Mike is pretty discouraged based only on the fact that Kristen Parkers is actually Kristyn Hillock, even though everything else he knows about her (that Max and Nev checked) actually seems to be true. He declares that this alone is enough for him to have closure, but because there's still more than a half-hour of air time to fill, Nev finds out that if they go to the St. Clair Historical Society, they can check out old yearbooks from the local high school. So they take a drive out there, look her up, and compare the photo they find to one of the ones Kristen sent Mike.

Screen: MTV

I don't know, I feel like those girls look PRETTY similar. Around the nose? Mike is still convinced that this is all about to go south, and clearly wants to meet her just to call her out on her lies. Nev calls; Kristyn does the old Catfish dodge, but almost immediately backs down and agrees to meet Mike the next day when he bullies her into it on the phone, saying she owes it to him and to herself: "I know you're scared. We can be scared together." Max and Nev, for some reason, think Mike is being a prince about all this.

The Confrontation

Kristyn comes out of her house, and instead of looking like this...

Screen: MTV

...she looks like this.

Screen: MTV

The first thing she says to Mike is "I'm sorry," because she knows he's a shallow asshole and that he never loved her for what's on the inside despite everything she said. She points out (futilely) that the only things she lied about were her name and her appearance, and Mike is highly indignant because the latter is more important than anything else. She says she wasn't trying to play him: after her accident, she needed a mask, and the support he gave her kept her from killing herself. Mike's like, "Well, goodbye forever," and won't even hug her. In the car, Nev asks if he'd talk to her again, and he says no even as he's in the process of deleting her contact information from his phone.

The Post-Confrontation Confrontation

So Max and Nev go to talk to Kristyn on their own. After the accident, her whole life went to shit, pretty much. Her boyfriend, who'd been driving the car when it crashed (and was fine), didn't come to see her until two weeks later, whereupon he made fun of her eyepatch and then dumped her. The steroids she was prescribed make her gain 130 pounds. Allegedly, she was kicked out of school due to all her treatment, which is the only sketchy part of her story. Nev tells her, "I don't see any reason why anybody wouldn't accept you," as though the "seeing" part isn't the climax of almost every episode of this fat-shaming show. Then she takes her prosthetic eye out for Max and Nev to inspect.

Max and Nev then return to Sterling Heights, where Mike has assembled his Algonquin Roid Table of bros. One guy pointing out that Mike did legitimately like Kristen's personality falls on deaf ears. Mike has recast their whole relationship as her selfishly using him to boost her self-esteem. "Everything that you did was the right thing to do," says Nev. Up to turning on her as soon as he found out she was fat, that is true.

The Aftermath

Two months later, Mike is still single. Good. He has talked to Kristyn again since their meeting, though. Gosh, he is a prince! Kristyn has a boyfriend now (in real life? We don't know), who's moving with Orlando to her and her family. At least she's moving from one state sponsor of online fraud to another.

The Life Lessons Learned

If the person you're talking to lives an hour's drive away and won't meet you, something's up. Mike is a pig. Michigan is still full of liars.