Do Derek And Heather Really Hate Each Other, Or Are They Just Playing To Married At First Sight's Cameras?

"You don't have to offer apologies, because you are who you are"?

WRONG, PASTOR CAL. Tom is right to be embarrassed about his "home" situation. If you're going to live in a bus and your actual career is outfitting luxury yachts, try to bring those skills to bear on your LAND YACHT and fix that shit up! But also: don't try to bring your stranger of a wife home to live in your bus! In fact, DON'T LIVE IN A BUS!

Does Nick think Sonia is sexy?

He says so this week, in so many words, but I don't really see it. To me, he seems like she terrifies him -- or, at least, that he's remaining very wary of her. Both Nick and Sonia are certainly very enthusiastic about making their trip fun for one another and trying to smooth over any awkward moments, but they still come across less as healthy young persons getting to know each other with the eventual purpose of engaging in sexual congress than like a couple of co-workers trying to make the best of a Wells Fargo team-building retreat.

Can we cool it with all the segments on adventure sports?

Anyone who was on a honeymoon after marrying a non-stranger would, I feel, never plan this many sporty excursions, because they would be fucking. So I get that these idiots -- particularly the ones who, unlike Tom and Lily, are not sleeping together -- would need to look for activities to fill the time. That doesn't mean that, if nothing untoward happens and they just have fun, we need to watch them do it. Touristy adventure sports are the wedding prep of the honeymoon episodes. Chuck up a logo sign to fulfill whatever product placement deal you made and get back to showing us some fights. Speaking of which....

Do Derek and Heather really hate each other as much as they seem to, or are they just playing to the cameras?

I guess what I'm really asking is whether producers are nudging them into fights, since neither Heather nor Derek really seems that calculating. But I also can't quite believe two people who just met could be finding this much fault with each other already. I was with Derek last week: he was, for the most part, fighting more fairly about his smoking than she was, and seemed like he was trying to hear her, whereas she just kept making the same points over and over again in an obvious attempt to wear him down. This week, he seems like he's trying to balance the scales of their relationship by being as big a dick as she was -- or maybe more. And/or the producers interviewing him are planting doubts in him about the marriage by pointing out how Heather let the instructor take her hand during their surfing lesson whereas she's still, according to Derek, resisting all contact with him. But is he really that jealous about hand-holding?

At least, that's how I feel about the first half of the episode, because there comes a point where Derek blows his resentment about the surf lesson out of proportion to such a degree that not even a producer could hope: it becomes clear not just that Derek is pissy, in the abstract, about Heather paying sex-adjacent attention to a man other than Derek, but that he's specifically getting upset that Heather won't do "romantic husband-and-wife-type things" with him. If Heather were to put her disapproval of Derek's recreational "smoking" on hold and bone him, would he be able to talk about her in interviews without saying he's not attracted to her either, and that while men age like wine, women age like milk, and that she's 180 years old to him? (BTW: she's three years younger than he is.) It was easy to take Derek's side after the last episode, but his shittiness this week makes that kind of impossible as he spits out line after classic line from the "So A Woman's Rejected You Sexually" chapter of the fragile masculinity playbook. Prediction: next week he guesses Heather's a lesbian.

Even given all that, Derek and Heather had to take separate cars home from that cave?!

What a couple of drama queens!

"I wanted to be married so badly, but what's happening? Why is there so much turmoil?"

Seriously, Heather? Look at all the individual words in those two sentences. You "wanted to be married so badly" that you went on a cockamamie reality show and let a panel of strangers pick out a fourth stranger for you. You abdicated your choice of partner, and it's becoming clear what a mistake that was. All of this is dumb, but your shock that shit's not working out is, for sure, the dumbest.