This post reveals “plot” points of episode 10 of The Bachelor season 21.
According to the manufactured lexicon of The Bachelor, the show’s characters aren’t participating in a mere television dating competition. They were brought together, instead, in an emotional adventure that the show unfailingly refers to as “a journey.”
The Bachelorthe insistence of its vague Campbelliness it is ironic for many reasons. The biggest thing is that, while the show offers a kind of momentum – things proceed week after week, Rose Ceremony after Rose Ceremony, with romantic tensions inevitably rising – its participants, for the most part, do very little in his own. development There are characters, yes, but very few arcs. The Bachelor or Bachelorette in question might learn a few things as the season progresses, of course; for the most part, however, the competitors are who they are, and will remain who they are. The tensions do not come as those competitors grow and change, but instead as their different facets are systematically revealed to the Bachelor (ette). Different sides of their personalities are seen; people are kept around or kicked to the curb based on the facets of themselves that manifest as the Journey continues. The Bachelorbasically, it’s a show that offers a lot of movement, but little evolution.
That made Monday’s episode particularly surprising. First, because, at the Rose Ceremony at the beginning of the episode, Nick “said goodbye” (another term for Bachelor art) to Corinne Olympios, the nominated villain of the season. Corinne, who is dramatic and weird and materialistic and Good TV in human form, had long been a front-runner despite and because of her antics (like SB Nation summarize Earlier this month, “Oh God, Corinne is going to win this whole thing, isn’t she?”). Her ouster on Monday, just before the Fantasy Suite dates, came as a shock – to viewers of the show including, but definitely not limited to, Corinne herself.
What was doubly striking about Corinne’s departure, however, was that she used the show’s elaborate farewell ritual to contradict The BachelorDynamic stasis of: While broken by Nick and, by extension, Bachelor Nation, Corinne proved that, against all odds, she had grown. Like a person! Sort of! (I use another one Bacheloris there, but of course, for this kind of thing, there is no one.)
The Bachelor’The traditional departure scene of the woman, crying alone in a limousine, typically involves the farewell party crying, wiping the tears from the mask, and discussing how much she wants – really, how much ready she is – to “find love”. Not so Corinne. The woman who had spent the season defying the show’s long-established norms had another trick up her faux-fur-covered sleeve. Corinne, Weeping Alone in the Limo, told the show’s unseen cameras not about how sad she was, but instead about… how much she had changed. The villain of the season, the cipher and the punchline and the living, breathing conspiracy theory used its final moments in the Bachelor spotlight to talk about what he had taken away from his experience on the show. He used them to talk not about The Journey, but about himself.
It went like this: Nick didn’t call Corinne’s name at the Rose Ceremony in New York City. He led her out to the limo. “I’m sorry,” he told her, as they hugged. “I’m sorry if I ever did anything to make you angry.”
He replied: “You never did! Listen, you never did anything wrong. Ever. You have nothing to regret. You have nothing to guess. Look at me – nothing. Not one thing. You need to know that. well?”
Corinne gets into the limo. The traditional departure rite begins. She cried, as mournful piano notes surrounded her. “Saying goodbye to Nick,” she told the camera, “is like, I feel like my heart is like, literally like – it’s never going to be fixed. I just want to feel loved – the way it should be, like the normal mode.”
It was all standard issue Bachelor things, until the invocation of “the normal way” … until things – as so often when Corinne is involved – took a turn. “I’m trying to, you know, say things that men think are appropriate,” she said, her tears giving way to a slow smile. “And you know what? I know.” done. I try to show my men how much I adore them and love them and care for them and support them. I need that! So if it feels that way to me? They can come and say. And they can bring a ring to go with it.”
Was she… a feminist? Sort of? It was also infused with Corinne’s characteristic self-absorption and materialism, yes – and the likely result of some liberal editing, with that quick switch from crying to grinning – but still. Corinne, with this, rejected the stuff of all those Cosmos stories that offer advice How to please your man— and the stuff, for that matter, of a culture that tends to assume that women, and women alone, should do the work of making sure men feel supported, loved, and, indeed, “adored.” Corinne had spent her season The Bachelor myopically, even manically, focused on Nick. She had been, in BachelorEse, It’s There for Nick and It’s There for the Right Reasons and It’s Not There to Make Friends. And in the end, if the goal is to be the woman in front of whom Nick “gets on one knee”, everything has failed.
Corinne took all that and then did something that is rare and almost rebellious inside The Bachelor‘s gauze borders: He learned a lesson. He took the truisms of the show about the couple and turned them into other clichés: Corinne, he suggested, from now on, Focus on Herself and Do It for Herself. Corinne will do Corinne. She will do it Make Corinne great again. “It’ll be me,” Corinne told the show’s invisible camera as her invisible piano played her. “And what happens, happens. But I will never kiss a man again in my entire life.”
