What Awkward Horror Greeted the Virgin in The Bachelor's Fantasy Suite?

On Monday night’s episode of The Bachelor, we went to the Fantasy Suite. This episode is always endlessly hyped but is always endlessly disappointing: it’s not like you actually see anyone have sex or have deep conversations. At bare minimum there’s some vague chatter and some kissing; at most there’s some heavy petting. What the episode is is a huge tease for what you do know and what you don’t know about these characters.

Allow me to speak broadly: The brilliance of The Bachelor is that almost every single moment that is worth seeing is aired. Anything juicy, anything dramatic – they’ve taped it! Because of this, the show’s most frustrating moments come when something dramatic happened and they don’t have it on film, so it has to be vaguely recapped by cast members. The Fantasy Suite is where this happens the most. Sometimes details come out later, but there’s no real proof that anyone did or said anything.

This is also the episode where you actually start to believe that these people actually have real feelings for each other, so the timing of not being able to see the moments when they get the closest is the most frustrating, leading to even more boundless speculation than viewers normally participate in. On Monday night’s episode, in a somewhat shocking twist, Chris sent home fun-loving Kaitlyn and kept Becca the Virgin, despite the fact (or because of it) that Becca and him had an intense conversation during their night in the Fantasy Suite. Kaitlyn was very confident Chris was sending Becca home. Even Becca herself agreed, telling Whitney she thought it would be her.

But maybe it’s all that talk that made Chris and Becca stick. Until the last few episodes, we’ve seen very little of Becca, while Kaitlyn has been around since episode one, and Whitney has at least been consistently lurking in the background. We can speculate that Chris’s intense conversations with Becca, instead of separating them, bonded them together. But we can only guess.

On Ellen Monday, before the episode aired, Chris broke down his final three this way:

Whitney: She looks like a mother. She is a mother. (Ellen: Is that a good thing?) I would like to have kids, so yeah.

Kaitlyn: She’s a firecracker… [Though] firecracker’s can be mothers, I think.

Becca: [She’s] kind of just the total package. Great family, great morals. You know, she’s just a great person, lot of fun.

We have our guesses as to what all this means, but that’s all we have in these final days. It’s strange how as the show goes on, things become less clear. Even though there are fewer women running around and the depth of the relationships that remain increases, in an intangible way, they become harder to track. On paper, last night Chris picked a girl who has never been in love, has “intimacy” issues and that he hadn’t slept with, over a girl who was fun, had opened up to him despite her hesitations and probably had sex with him. On paper, he’s now choosing between a woman who has told him she loves him, who will move to his tiny-ass town for him, quit her job and have babies, and a woman who isn’t sure whether she wants a proposal or if she is doing more than “falling in love” with him. On paper, this looks insane. What are you doing Chris? Picking the possibility of what could be over the reality of what is yet again?

Even Chris’s dad isn’t sure. In the promo for the finale episode, we see him say, “I think Whitney’s a sure thing, but I think Becca’s who Chris wants.” All we can do is tune in to find out if he’s right.