Hunks are powerful in many forms. A strutting hunk tells us the hunk knows he’s a hunk and dares us to want him, and we usually do. A coy hunk drives us nuts because he’s acting like he’s not a hunk but he has to know he’s a hunk, right?? And that doubt makes him all the hunkier. A happy, dopey hunk makes us want to tousle his hunk hair and gently guide him off toward some private place. But a sad hunk? That may be the most powerful hunk of all. 

Look to one Robert Kelley Wilson Rauch, hunk of renown from the daggum city of Florence, Alabama, home of the fightin’ Falcons, a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and all manner of other wonderments situated on the silty banks of the Tennessee River. Out of that clay and sediment came ol’ Rob, he of the doe eyes and crooked smile and genial disposition. Alls Rob likes to do back home is wrassle with his snakes and maybe have a hot night out in Nitrate City (a real town located near Florence, where there is a place called Farmer Boys Tomato House—a place I thought they closed down after the accident). But he’s since found himself becoming a bonafide reality TV star, chasing the muff around the pool on Love Island—two seasons running!—and now he’s all the way in Scotland, Europe, in a castle with all sorts of strange folks, pickin’ ‘em off one by one. 

Rob has been a very good traitor, I think. No one is on to him (except maybe Ron there at the end, but oh well, too late) and everyone seems to like him (except maybe Lisa there at the end, but oh well, we’ll see). There is, even with the disruptions of this week’s episode, a very solid chance he makes it to the end. (That is, if Lisa doesn’t totally blow up his game in a fit of vengeance, which she is certainly capable of doing.) You’d think that Rob would be sitting pretty and riding high (just how they like it down at Farmer Boys Tomato House). But no. No, no, no. Poor sweet Rob is sad. He has become Sad Hunk, complete with gingham shirt tucked into bootcut jeans, and it is making me feel all kinds of things.