The Bachelor Finale Recap: Not a Top-Seller
Though the man is supposedly canceled, this week’s episode is still heralded by Chris Harrison’s voice promising us an “explosive” finale, in which Rachael will be questioned on her Antebellum party habits and the next Bachelorette will be revealed by Chris’s “temporary” replacement on After the Final Rose. I commented on Chris’s cancellation a couple of weeks ago mostly because I felt I had to, not because I was terribly interested in what said cancellation said about Our Historical Moment or because I have any interest whatsoever in wading into this “debate.” But the situation has continued to balloon over the past couple of weeks. The revelation that Chris would be absent from our upcoming season of The Bachelorette and the public disclosures from the increasingly central Rachel Lindsey about just how poorly the show has handled this year’s “racial reckoning” or whatever we want to call it have continued to paint a picture of a television program that has deliberately tied itself to toxic worldviews on race and gender. More relevant than this fact, which should have been obvious to anyone who has ever watched this show, is that said toxicity is leaving the realm of subtext and becoming text as the show finds new and more troubling ways to implode.
So what we get here is a final episode that feels like an afterthought as we wait for the inevitable disclosures of After the Final Rose. That it turns out to be slightly more engaging than I expected going in is, I guess, a credit to the form of the show, which remains difficult to master even by the closed-off, by-the-book Matt James. It begins with Michelle and then Rachael meeting Matt’s mother and brother. The brother, John, is great. He literally looks identical to Matt but with braids and a grill. He questions Michelle and Rachael about their past relationships and whether or not they have experienced true love with deadpan unreadability and the private smile of a man who knows he’s better than this. He says he’s not looking for anything concrete in these conversations but rather “more of a vibe.” It rules. Matt’s mom says “it’s exciting to see you so happy and animated and expressive.” If this is Matt “animated and expressive” then I don’t want to know how he is under normal circumstances, because the man seems about as animated as me after 2 hours spent watching this life-draining show.
Both women seem to basically hit it off with the family. Michelle is hard not to like, and Rachael lays on the God stuff real thick with Matt’s mom, calling back to his opening prayer and fake-crying about God’s plan and everything. This works like a charm. After the basically uneventful meetups, Matt and the fam debrief. John and Patty are basically like hey just to be clear, you don’t have to get engaged right now, and Matt’s like oh shit, I never thought of it that way. This is a pretty typical, not to mention reasonable, line to hear from families at this point in the show (or on hometowns), but it seems to have more of an effect than usual on Matt, much as it did on Canadian Serena a few weeks ago. It is almost as though he’s been sleepwalking through this entire show, studiously not putting any of himself out there, and now when the rubber meets the road he’s completely emotionally unprepared to commit the rest of his life to someone. Funny how that works.
This encounter sends Matt spiraling into uncertainty, which he chooses to address by having a conversation with Chris Harrison, who is, you guessed it, still here. Matt tells Chris that he’s not completely sure if he’s ready to get engaged to one of these women. Chris does not like what he hears. “This is not the guy I was talking to last week.” Matt’s like “my mom said that love doesn’t always last.” Chris says “what kind of greeting card is that” and Matt says “not a top-seller.” This exchange articulates this show’s ethos and the problems that arise when stubbornly human individuals fail to adhere to its ethos better than I ever could.
Matt’s shook and he’s got a full day of hanging with Michelle to get to. They spend the day rappelling down the side of a building. Said rappelling seems a little bit rocky, much like the sky-diving incident with Rachael, and there’s a lot of talk about leaps of faith and so on. It’s whatever. The main event comes when Matt goes to spend the evening in Michelle’s hotel room. Michelle has some Champagne and gifts prepared for Matt, and the moment she starts talking to him he looks cosmically uncomfortable. She presents him with matching basketball jerseys that say Mr. and Mrs. James and she tells him he’s her person and so on. He does a lot of deep, hard exhaling and says he has doubts. She asks him to tell her where he’s really at and he says he can’t get there with her. He leaves. They cry.
Matt’s breaking down on his way out of the hotel. He sits down on the curb to cry, and who should approach but everyone’s good buddy Chris H. “Hey dude,” he says as he walks up. Matt starts to get up and Chris is like, “nah bro, stay down there, we can chill.” Matt is crying, and Chris does his best look of faux-concern. “That was brutal” he says. Dudes rock. Matt basically reiterates that he’s having a hard time and a lot of doubts about whether he’s ready for an engagement. Chris is like “damn, dude.” He’s physically present but he’s bringing less to the table than ever.
The next day is theoretical date day for Rachael but we know at this point that there’s gonna be a major snafu. Rachael’s all giggly like “I can’t wait to see him,” and then Chris shows up at her room and she’s like “hiiiiiiiiii!” Chris takes as long as humanly possible to tell her that Matt doesn’t want to see her today. She’s hurt. “He’s never expressed any kind of confusion or worry or concern. Not once.” Maybe this was a red flag? She seems to be real-crying.
Back at his place, Matt is brooding and doing talking heads about how his mom said that feelings change and how this means that actually this proposal might be a bit rushed. Who should show up to assuage his doubts? The only person more qualified than Chris Harrison. You guessed it…there’s his music…it’s NEIL LANE. Matt’s like getting engaged sure is a big commitment. Neil Lane’s like my boy, how enlightened you are. “How many people really understand that? Love is not easy, commitment is not easy.” Matt’s like I’ve got a baaaaaad feeling about this. Neil’s like, “It’s extraordinary that you have the clarity to think about what you’re doing.” Extraordinary. Matt agrees to look at rings despite his fragile state. Neil points out features of the various rings: “This little jewel represents your heart. It connects to people.” Matt selects a ring and he’s like “I’ll hang onto this” and Neil’s like “go forth my son.” We get more talk about doubt. If I hear the word doubt one more time, etc.
After spending what must have been an agonizing 24 hours waiting to hear from Matty, Rachael receives an ominous-sounding letter asking her to meet him at the lake for some answers. We get some cross-cutting of them getting dressed up and riding in cars to the rendezvous point and Matt talking about biggest moment of his life and so on, stretching the “drama” as far as it could go. She gives him a spiel about being there for him and stuff. He refuses to propose but asks her to leave with him and continue dating. It’s anticlimactic, as we’ve come to expect. He says he loves her and that “I do see you as my wife.” But do you? Anyway, they sort of act like this is a happy ending, that the pair will ride off into the sunset, that these Antebellum photos don’t exist and that Chris Harrison is still the host of the show.
After the Final Rose punctures this all rather swiftly, as we knew it would. It also finally introduces us to lift in a post-Harrison world, and if it’s bizarre and stilted, it’s also probably significantly more interesting than these things usually get the chance to be. Emmanuel Acho, a former NFL athlete, is on hand as a replacement. Though he’s not quite as smoothly disingenuous as Chris, he’s more than capable of delivering questions cynically designed to elicit maximum discomfort, and he’s actually, you know, capable of raising questions about race without eliciting pure disbelief. The set is empty except for Acho and our three characters, which adds to the discomfort that he promises to incite.
Michelle starts off and gets asked some questions about the whole Rachael business and the Chris Harrison business and gives some pretty warmed-over responses, though she does cop to being hurt by Rachael’s behavior, which is entirely fair. It cuts a little more when she reveals that she tried to have a conversation with Matt to get some closure on the sudden dumpage and that he refused to speak to her. They have a confrontation that’s pretty uninteresting except for when she roasts him for his bad kissing and his limited vocabulary, which we all can appreciate.
Matt and Emmanuel have a conversation about the pressure of being the first black Bachelor. Matt talks about the challenges of having to represent his entire race in front of the viewing public and the desire to be on his “best behavior,” which of course could at least partially account for how bland he’s been this season. He then reveals to Emmanuel that he and Rachael are broken up following the revelations about the Antebellum bullshit. He’s pressed pretty hard on the whole “it was three years ago” thing, but admirably refuses to make excuses for Rachael. He basically articulates that it isn’t his job to teach Rachael about race, and it’s refreshing to see him stand his ground like this. He says that if she didn’t understand why those photos were a problem, then she simply can’t understand him, and there’s some real catharsis in this statement, though any positivity or empowerment is dampened by the sorrow and resignation with which he expresses the sentiment. It illuminates both the fact that the show’s fairy-tale logic is ill-equipped to deal with these kinds of hard emotional realities and, as ever, reminds us that the friction of the human against the network is what makes this show compelling, if indeed it ever is.
They bring Rachael out for a one-on-one to defend herself, where her line is basically that she didn’t know what the Antebellum party meant but that she knows now that it was wrong. This is, quite obviously, a pretty wide load of bullshit, and the fact that the show, as evidenced by several of Acho’s pointed questions, clearly wants us to believe it, makes it especially grotesque. I’m not really sure why the show continues to insist on demonstrating to us that Rachael is fundamentally a good person who just needs reform. If you have been watching this show and you don’t have a pretty firm grasp of the type of person that Rachael is then I don’t know what to tell you. The show wants to walk a line between appearing woke and not pissing off the sizable portion of their demographic who probably believe, like Chris Harrison, that Rachael is being unfairly canceled by the mob. Ultimately, it just ends up looking like Matt is being hung out to dry.
Rachael’s confrontation with Matt is the first and only genuinely powerful moment this season. Rachael offers some vague justifications and expressions of hurt, and Matt expresses a non-desire to be “emotionally responsible” for her. On that stage he is starkly, profoundly alone. He responds to Acho’s prompts for reconciliation, head hung, with silence. Matt, such featureless blank slate all season long, finally, with his silence, communicates the burden of the position this show has put him in better than his inarticulate talking heads ever could.
The Bachelor is just the latest cultural institution that’s been forced to reckon with the various inconveniences posed by the past year. That a show that peddles inherently conservative fantasies of traditional heteronormative fidelity has been adversely affected by both the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement should come as no surprise. This was already well on its way to being a bad season after the first week or two, but in the past few weeks it’s gone from being a bad season in the sense that Tayshia’s season was bad to being a BAD SEASON that makes one question whether this is a show that’s destined to survive this particular cultural moment. The short answer is yes, it is destined to survive, because a staggering number of people still watch it and they’ve already got an extra season of The Bachelorette lined up for this year (miss me with this Katie bullshit though). The long answer is that I’m not even sure why the fuck I’m watching this show right now, let alone writing about it. For the show to be bad is one thing, and for the show to be toxic is another. For it to be really bad and really toxic at the same time feels like a tilt over the edge.
I think what’s especially knotty for me about where the show is now is this: the show is extra-toxic right now precisely because of the very fact that it’s gesturing at being less so. The show cast a black lead and somehow seems more racist than ever. Seeing the toll that this season has taken on Matt, and hearing Rachel Lindsey talk about the way she’s been treated by the show and by its fans, drives home the point that not only is this show not prepared to deal with serious conversations about race, which is how I’d always thought of it, but also that the show is actively hostile towards the black people who participate in it, and so by extension the black people who watch it. I’ve often invoked the friction or tension between the human participants and the lab-like systems of the show as being the driving antagonism that keeps me interested in this show. This is the first season in which it felt like that tension became too much to bear.