Normally I’ve got nothing but praise for the editors behind The Bachelor franchise, who take hours and hours of women sitting around braiding each other’s hair and spin it into gold. While the producers get most of the attention from viewers of the show due to all the manipulating they do to the contestants in real time, its the editors who have to make those heavily influenced plot lines a reality. So while I can’t say for sure what happened behind the scenes between the various departments responsible for creating Monday night’s episode, I can say that whatever they were aiming for ended in a flop.
Part of the problem going into this episode is that the show is out of sync, format-wise: several episodes in a row have ended on cliffhangers (meaning they haven’t ended with a Rose Ceremony, where a few women go home). This means the next episode must start with the Rose Ceremony that wasn’t aired, creating a time crunch. Last night’s episode had to include the end of Taylor going home, a Rose Ceremony, a one-on-one date, a group date, and a two-on-one date. That’s a lot to cram into two hours.
This, as well as decisions the producers have made regarding which storylines they want to push this season, resulted in big chunks of things that happened being cut out of the episode, which meant that it made no sense. For instance, the volleyball group date ended suddenly with no conclusion. Rumors have been circulating as to what exactly happened in real life, but the general consensus seems to be that the volleyball date was supposed to end with the winning team getting more time with Nick. Instead, it ended with just a bunch of women sitting alone on the beach staring into space. Reading between the lines of what they didn’t edit out (a lot of women talking about not getting time with Nick and being really upset about the game), the next scene featured all of the women who were on the date having drinks with Nick, some of whom then also made comments to him about being upset about how the date went.
There was a lot of Nick talking a lot about how things went badly on the date, but because we didn’t see how it ended, it was hard to figure out exactly why, making his comments contextless. We did see Jasmine confronting him about how little time she’d gotten with him in general over the course of shooting, which he did not take well, resulting in him sending her home. But we really didn’t hear much from her after that—and according to Reality Steve, there was a lot we could have heard:
But yet again, a major part of this storyline was left out as Jasmine told him after he let her go that she previous had hooked up with one of his friends in the past. Not sure why she said it, exactly what point in the conversation it came out, what Nick’s reaction was or what, but it was definitely brought up by her. I’d say that would’ve been a nice little juicy nugget to get from Jasmine as she heads out the door, no? But then again, they’ve not shown quite a few things this season that did happen, so I guess we can just chalk another one up to them being weird and something we’ll never get an honest answer to.
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We also didn’t see that group date rose going to Raven, and only heard about it in a voiceover the next day. The episode ended on a bizarre tearful statement from Nick to the remaining women about how he’s not sure this is going to work for him. But by then, the whole episode was so cobbled together it was difficult to say what was going on, and so his outburst felt even more strange. It’s one thing to be shaping a narrative for the purposes of creating good television, but as last night’s episode didn’t even accomplish that, what was the point?