Know a Bachelor-lover? A Bachelor-hater? Grant them the sweet release of snark by passing along TATBT. If this XXXL recap is clipped by your email server, just click the headline to read it all on jodi.substack.com!
Wow. You let The Bachelorette go on without recaps for three little weeks, and the whole thing goes to hell in a Chris Harrison-shaped handbasket.
That’s a truly heinous image, and I apologize for it. I also apologize for leaving the franchise at such a vulnerable time in order to pay some attention to the politics of a non-Bachelor nation, and also to descend into deep, dark madness while watching one Vanessa Hudgens chloroform another Vanessa Hudgens who was pretending to be a different Vanessa Hudgens in the soon-to-be-seminal sequel, The Princess Switch: Switched Again.
But anyway, I'm back now, and I'm mortified to report that The Bachelorette...worked??
Anyone who’s read TATBT for a while knows that I have one kink, and one kink only: watching Chris Harrison have to work for his seven-digit paycheck. [Ed. note: To newer TATBT subscribers…yes, I’m so sorry, it’s always like this.]
So, how do I feel about this season where Chris Harrison has been forced to stay within the confines of La Quinta Resort & Used Mufflers, and do his job every single day… this season where Chris Harrison has had to break up with men for Clare, and tell men that they have to propose to Clare, and stare into the eyes of 20 sad bros slowly going insane inside La Quinta Resort & Karaoke Bar, and tell them that Clare really doesn’t want to go on any dates with ever…
This season where Chris Harrison has singlehandedly negotiated 2020’s ONLY SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION OF POWER???
Yeah, I feel good about it. But it’s not just the mental, emotional, and sexual gratification I get from watch Chris Harrison transform from psychologist, to dad, to friend-who’s-pretending-to-cry-because-that-seems-like-the-supportive-thing-to-do in a single conversation that’s making this season an unprecedented (drink!) success.
It’s that we’re not even halfway through, and we’ve already gotten two Bachelorettes, a group of men who are more than ready to share their emotions with their Bachelorette and with us—and by god, we may have already gotten a successful love story too.
I wrote an extremely long recap of Episode 3 that my computer lost because, while my corporal body lives in 2020, my utilization of technology exists permanently in 2006 [ed. note: as always, this recap’s screenshots brought to you by Microsoft Paint, don’t @ me]. Just know that Clare canceled, like, every group date that Dale wasn’t on, and dry humped in her suite during every group date Dale was on.
Then Clare broke up with all of her boyfriends in order to get engaged to Dale 12 days into her season.
Then, via some questionable quarantine math, Tayshia arrived to pick up the remaining pieces of of The Bachelorette and nurture these sad men back to life with her fun personality and, as one man says, “her big ass eyes.”
Chris Harrison will tell you that Clare blew up The Bachelorette; that she threw a wrench in the season with her disregard for the typical process, and her sole focus on Dale. But riddle me this—did Clare not achieve the oft-stated goal of this show: to find love? Did Clare not simply do it faster than anyone else ever because, to Clare, finding love is a practicable sport, and being the Bachelorette was her Olympics? I ask you this…
Are you not entertained???
If the goal is to find love, Clare did it. If the goal is to get engaged, Clare did it. If the goal is to give everyone an even shot at your hand in marriage by pretending that you’re equally interested in 30 different men…well, Clare did a very bad job at that. A very bad job.
But The Bachelorette can’t have it both ways. They can’t say that the goal is to find fairytale love, and then continue to use “unprecedented” as a dig against the one person who managed to use their broken little system to actually do it. Sorry it didn’t take as long as usual, but Clare’s got things to do…
And we also have things to do. Since I’ve let quite a few episodes get past me, today we’ll be recapping the Good, the Bad, and the Best events of episodes 4 and 5:
THE BEST: Clare falling in love on Instagram
There is no more transformative — but also no more obvious — twist in in Bachelorette history than the reveal that Clare fell in love with Dale on social media.
The entire construct of The Bachelor(ette) is designed to starve the contestants of access to any part of one another that exists outside this romantic bubble that’s been created by a sea of malnourished Bachelor interns, earning their Belvita Breakfast Biscuits by draping Persian rugs over couches, making up sports that have to be played in Speedos, and planting hot tubs in the middle of deserts. All so that Kennedy M. can fall in love with Zax in a setting that feels like a fairytale…
But Kennedy M. can’t really fall in love with Zax if the moment that she leaves the Bachelorette bubble with a ring on her finger and stars in her eyes, she then lays those starry peepers upon the fact that Zax is the type of guy who gets into arguments about the legitimacy of Keto inside The Rock’s Instagram comments.
I estimate that not having access to your future fiancé’s public persona is 95 percent of the reason that 85 percent of these Bachelor-forged relationships don’t work out. I mean, I could never marry an “lol” man, but will absolutely pounce on any “hahaha” man — and how am I supposed to know that fundamental difference if we’ve never even texted.
There are so many parts of a normal relationship that are never exposed on The Bachelorette, and I find it absolutely hilarious that introducing just one real-world aspect — Instagram, of all things — created the actual fairytale love story that this franchise has been trying to shill out for decades.
Clare tells Chris Harrison that during the unexpected quarantine, she started following the men who were already announced for her season on social media. It was there she first discovered that Dale had also lost a parent at a young age, and started to fall in love with the person Dale appeared to be, only to have those feelings confirmed when she actually met him. Clare and Dale only knew each other for 12 days, but by getting a peek at those sweeet, sweet Instagram Stories, Clare left the show probably having a firmer understanding of her fiancé than, say, Hannah did with Jed, or Becca did with Garret.
I’m not saying that makes Clare and Dale’s resulting engagement totally reasonable. I’m just saying that a week alone with an iPhone and a refrigerator full of sugar-free Red Bulls might not be the worst addition to “the process” if The Bachelor(ette) actually cares about the longevity of any of their future relationships. Which let’s be clear—they super do not.
THE GOOD: Clare and Dale
Okay, yes, I’m rooting for these two insufferable weirdos. I can’t help it!
I know I’m probably in the minority on this. I know DeuxMoi has reported Dale spottings all over New York City without Clare. I know it’s embarrassing to see Clare thinking 20 steps head of Dale at all times…
But the ultimate feeling I got from their final episode — y’know, once they’d crammed a one-on-one, a Fantasy Suite date, a Neil Lane Emergency FaceTime, and a proposal all into two days — is that Clare and Dale might just be perfect for one another. Now that they’re together, it feels like, if Clare didn’t have someone like Dale, she might collapse into herself like a dying star, exhausting more anxious energy than one human body can handle. And if Dale didn’t have someone like Clare, he might just keep smiling that Cheshire cat smile and talking about crystals, and never actually get anything done.
But together, I fully believe that Clare and her Kris-Jenner-energy could have Dale wearing a gorgeous dress on the cover of Vogue in under two years. And that maybe Dale could help cut Clare’s median monologue time down from five minutes to three minutes because of all the alleviated stress over not dying alone. I’m not saying these are two fun people for other people to be around, but I do think they make sense together. This is how it happens:
After Clare has cancelled like six cocktail parties, and refused to give out a group date rose because none of the men were Dale, Chris Harrison has to step in and give Clare a stern talk. Frankly, I did not like how much he cursed.
He wants to know if Clare and Dale had any contact before the show. And once Clare swears on her father’s grave that they never spoke to each other, and it’s been proven that she is a good enough girl to continue on with the blessing of the franchise.
Chris Harrison tells the men that the Cocktail Party and the Rose Ceremony have been cancelled, and then pulls Dale outside to tell him that Clare wants a one-on-one date with him…
Boy does she. Sis busts out her finale dress because as far as she’s concerned, it’s all over. She’s going to tell Dale that he loves her, and she hopes he feels the same way.
And you guys, he fucking does. Or he says he does. It’s really hard to tell what’s going through this guy’s head, because I think it’s mostly wind and tomorrow’s HIIT plan. But there also seems to be some Clare mixed in there. The most magical and/or alarming moment comes when Dale asks Clare about her parents’ relationship, and she tells him how they met one time, and then her dad hitchhiked to her mom’s house because he had to see her again, and they were engaged three weeks later. So…that’s making a lot of sense for Clare being the way that Clare is.
Then our guy Dale very calmly tells Clare that his dad also hitchhiked to see his mom after they first met, and they got engaged quickly after.
Then he just laughs that laugh of his that’s way too goofy for his giant, gorgeous face, and stares at Clare like maybe she’ll share one more fun fact about hitchhiking, as though their matching parental love stories haven’t just put the final nail in the coffin of Clare’s time as the Bachelorette.
Dale is so nonplussed about their matching stories, that it’s almost like he’s never told this story about his parents before… almost like he’s never even heard it before. Almost like he heard that Clare’s parents fell in love via hitchhiking, and so he just parroted it back to her, which is generally what he does with her, but it’s much more notable when this very specific instance of hitchhiking-for-love is involved…
Almost.
But maybe Dale really is just this calm—so calm that he thinks their parents’ matching love stories make perfect sense because he and Clare make perfect sense (ahem, and not at all because he’s a sociopath).
After Clare admits that she’s fully fallen in love with Dale, he calmly tells her that he’s falling in love with her too: “My heart is open, I’m not gonna fight that.” And then he says those five little words that every girl dreams of hearing one day from the person she loves:
It is what it is. While Clare can’t believe that things are working out just as she always dreamt they would, Dale has never even thought about how they might work out. He merely accepts what comes his way, seeming to have no idea that this all highly unprecedented (drink!) inside and outside of The Bachelor universe.
After their date, Dale and Clare spend the night together, and the next day Chris Harrison informs them both that “the next step is a proposal.” Clare has no questions…Dale has no questions. I honestly don’t think he thinks about it. He just—and get this—SHOWS UP at the proposal podium.
All this time that Clare has been talking about wanting someone who “shows up,” there was no deeper meaning. She just wanted a dude that she loved to be where she expected him to be. And in the case of Dale, that place is at the proposal podium, with a ring shit directly into a box by Neil Lane not two minutes before.
A lot of people may think that Dale doesn’t seem nearly as excited as Clare. But can you imagine anyone being as excited about anything as Clare is about the idea of getting married. I’m not going to say that I loved the fact that Clare’s entire pre-proposal speech is about how she’s never had a man who would be there for her like her father was, but in Dale she knows she’s found someone who will never leave her, who will never run away. That feels like Clare is setting herself up for an absolutely tragic recap reel at After the Final Rose should Dale not live up to those expectations…
But then Dale basically says the exact same thing about Clare in his speech. That he’s never had someone who would be there for him unconditionally, that he knows that Clare will be, and that was all his mother ever wanted for him…
So if it’s all just a delusion, I honestly believe it’s a shared delusion. I’ll leave you with Clare and Dale’s final words as they celebrate their engagement, which I feel tell you absolutely everything you need to know about them as a couple:
CLARE: “We so saw this coming. I just felt it!”
DALE: “And I accepted it.”
CLARE: “I knew it!”
DALE: “And I accepted it.”
THE BAD: “Congratulations, you [really did not] just blew up The Bachelorette"
Once Clare has decided that she loves Dale, but before they get engaged, she has to break up with her other 20 boyfriends, who have basically descended into throwing feces at each other and eating their own hair after being trapped inside La Quinta Resort and Lampshades for five days with absolutely no updates on where Clare or Dale are.
It is totally reasonable for these guys to be upset that they’ve been left in the dark. And when you’re the person doing the breaking up, like Clare is, you just have to accept that you’re the one causing the pain, even if you have a good reason — and especially when you’re the one returning to a 6’4 sexy sock puppet that you love, and the people you’re breaking up with are going back to the La Quinta Resort & Snow Globe Museum’s cabana of sadness…
I would say Clare’s one mistake in the way that she handled this unprecedented (drink!) ending, is not just coughing up an apology to these dudes. And I know—I can tell—that her resistance to doing so comes from the sticky idea that women should apologize less.
WRONG—men should apologize more!!! Women don’t need to conform to the traditional standards of men to be taken seriously!!! [Ed. note: I can also use as many exclamation points in professional emails as I want to, I am an exclamatory person!!!!!!!!!] Sure, women shouldn’t apologize when they have nothing to be sorry for, but causing someone pain, whether it was intended or not, is worth apologizing for. And after a little pushback, Clare does get around to saying, “I’ll apologize if I wasted your time, I’ll apologize if I hurt you, but I’m not going to apologize for love.” I think she really only needed the middle one.
Oh, Jason. He’s the one who’s most hurt by Clare’s departure because he’d developed the deepest feelings for her — and for that very reason, he’s the one who most understands her fast-tracked feelings for Dale.
I really do feel bad for these guys. But I will not stand for the the constant suggestion from a few of them that Clare has “wasted their time,” when the alternative was that she wasted 30 more days of their time and then broke up with them when they really had feelings for her. That is the much worsescenario that they were all actively participating in when they signed up for a 1-in-30 (potentially 0-in-30) chance at love.
Kenny complains later that they started with an uneven playing field because Clare already knew she liked Dale from his social media. To which I say—Kenny, my guy, do you not have an Instagram?! She looked at yours too, she just wasn’t into it! But Kenny got a bunch of Franken-bites during this episode, so I won’t go too hard on him. Who I do briefly have to clown within an inch of his life is Blake, who clowned himself first.
Blake got a little special attention on night one, and clearly saw himself as a frontrunner. Unfortunately, realizing that he was not a frontrunner was an especially slow journey for him.
First, Blake spends a lot of time convincing himself and everyone else that just because Chris Harrison canceled the rose ceremony and then pulled Dale from the group doesn’t mean that Clare is choosing Dale.
He thinks they’re all such great guys, so Clare will definitely want to keep dating all of them…
And they are great guys! That does not make a difference. Clare loves Dale.
But Blake just doesn’t see it working with Dale and Clare! Doesn’t matter — Clare is actively boning Dale for the first time while Blake is convincing himself that she doesn’t like Dale.
But Blake bought a book to help him understand what Clare is going through with her mom! That’s very thoughtful, Blake — but it won’t make her not love Dale.
Then Clare tells the men directly that she’s in love with Dale, and Blake tries to convince her that she doesn’t know Dale well enough, and he’s afraid she’ll get hurt.
He says if Clare really wants someone to marry her, Dale is not the way to go.
Then it’s revealed that Dale did ask Clare to marry him and they’ve left the resort together, and poor Blake is just straight up out of ways to pretend that Clare loving Dale is a personal affront on him because he is actually the superior man who typed in amazon-dot-com into his browser to buy a book one time.
And then ,it’s revealed that Tayshia will be replacing Clare as the new Bachelorette…
And Blake is somehow able to move on.
THE BEST: Meeting Tayshia, meeting the men
To be fair, the moment Tayshia arrives, it is easy to forget that this madness with Clare ever happened. And it’s not just because Tayshia is maybe the prettiest person I’ve ever seen, and it’s not just because she arrives wearing a backless dress that threatens a li’l buttcrack at every turn, and it’s not just because she has the spunky, supportive energy of Miss Honey fused with your favorite camp counselor…
It’s because when Tayshia arrives, The Bachelorette really starts in earnest. We don’t get to know much about the woman herself just yet, but all of the sudden, we’re meeting these men that we’ve been staring at for a month, who we haven’t learned a single thing about because they weren’t Dale. Like, did you know that Riley is a medical malpractice defense attorney?
Well, he is! He also becomes my new favorite person when he innocently asks Tayshia what she does for a living…
Girl, I thought you were a phlebotomist?! Apparently in the time since we last saw Tayshia she has fully transitioned away from veins and into “the beauty and lifestyle space.” And honestly, she deserves it.
Tayshia’s first night also sees the arrival of four new men, one of whom, Spencer, rubs all the men the wrong way, but manages to get Tayshia’s first impression rose with such impressive topics as…
Riley further endears himself to me when he informs Spencer after a run-in during their group date, that he may be off-base about him being a little shit, in which case Spencer can let him know: “But if I’m on-base, and if you wanna fuck with me, then we can go.” Spencer visibly gulps, and I’m not normally into invitations for aggression, but I will tell you that Riley’s voice dipped into a sort of Denzel situation here, and… all the sudden, I saw Riley.
Tayshia’s arrival brought a new energy into the group immediately, but then she cancels the Rose Ceremony because she wants to keep all of the men — which we call and Inverse-Clare — and I just know that every single one of them fell in love with her right then and there. Which makes it kind of refreshing that sweet Rhode Island loaf of man, Jason, just cannot get himself there. He realizes that he developed real feelings for Clare that time she performed three hours of intensive therapy on him, and he expressed his true emotions for maybe the first time in his life.
Unfortunately, Jason’s confession triggers an insecurity Tayshia has been trying to keep at bay: that some of the men will be disappointed she’s not Clare. Jason assures her that all other 19 men left are there for her, and have completely forgotten that the mean blonde woman who wouldn’t love them. So now it’s time for Tayshia to find her Dale…
THE GOOD: Brendan and Tayshia
Okay, hear me out. Brendan is a sweet Boston baby, and everything about him is perfect. From his dedication to turtlenecks in July, to his curly hair, to his goofy personality and lack of awareness that while he isn’t the hottest man in the house, he is, in fact, the most beautiful man in the house— he’s perfect.
The fact that Brendan was nervous to tell Tayshia that he got married young and has since gotten divorced (and was super respectful to his ex-wife in the process), only for Tayshia to reveal to him that she got married young and has since been divorced, and that they both really want to be parents — brought-tears-to-my-eyes-perfect.
Brendan giving me this screenshot that I’ll have forever
Perfect.
The only thing that is bumping Tayshia and Brendan’s first one-on-one date from “Best Thing” to “Good Thing,” is the fact that at the end of it all, Tayshia says that she feels like she could marry Brendan…
And I could practically feel every producer’s butt-clench in that moment. Because that’s what got us in this situation in the first place, and I don’t think they have any third-string Bachelorettes available. Lord knows no one from Peter’s season could quarantine for two weeks without freaking out and running tongue-first into the nearest Revolve party.
So, let’s just hope a few more dudes reveal themselves to be as delightful as Brendan so that we’ve got ourselves a competition for love and not just a successful journey to love. Because if Clare-I-mean-Tayshia’s season has taught us anything, it’s that love is not The Bachelorette’s final destination — it’s just a sometimes accidental byproduct.
See you back here next-ish week for episodes 6 & 7!
