I should note that I’m not the most experienced watcher of The Bachelor/ette. I haven’t been in it since the beginning. Really I only got into it during Ali’s season because she kinda reminded me of Jessica Simpson somehow (??) and one dude got a tattoo that had a shield adorned with “11 studs, for the 11 studs” still on the show at the time. That’s right, he got a tattoo while there were ELEVEN contestants left on the show. They left that dude (Austin, I think) on an iceberg, by the way. Later that season a guy in a cast tried to storm off-set by climbing over some moderately high wall or something. It was glorious. I was in from that point on.
So I’m not an expert, but for those of us who have watched for some time, there’s an ebb and flow to every season. There’s something comforting about the way Chris Harrison says The Most Dramatic Season Ever… every single time, a gentle lie that he and we both need to get us by. All of this brings us to our first false flag of the episode, and it’s a big one:
We Didn't Come Here To Make Friends 