By ROSIE WATERLAND
This is it, you guys. We’re finally here. The final episode of Bachie.
We’ve watched as our hero made his way through 30 women in tight, sequin dresses. We’ve watched him struggle to let more and more of those ladies go; cursed by the strict monogamy rules set in stone by the cold-hearted Sandra Sully of Network Ten.
We’ve seen Osher’s glorious hair reach heights we never thought possible. We’ve seen accidental feminist Laurina be crowned the rightful queen of Dirty Street Pies. We’ve seen Gushica confuse Bachie’s peen with her slow-blinking forehead sex and Canadian Horse Killer Girl cry about not being able to change how awful she is as a person. We’ve seen Bachie TOUCH HIS EYE.
And here we are.
Update: Read this morning’s breaking bachie news about why Channel 10 cancelled post-finale interviews here.
After really connecting with each other on this incredible journey of love, the end is finally in sight. And the show that forced multiple women to compete for a man’s love by riding a mechanical bull is finishing things up the only way they know how:
WITH AN EPIC FINAL FIGHT TO THE DEATH
IN THE EXOTIC WILDERNESS OF AFRICA.
It’s Sam vs. Lisa, and one woman is going to walk away tonight having successfully completed her life’s proudest achievement: Beating 29 other women for the love of a man who dances at Hen’s Parties on the weekend.
Let’s do this.
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The Quicky
Top Comments
I've thought about this all way to much, and after all the dust has settled, I kind of think that it ended in a pretty fitting way.
They hyped the ending as something no one saw coming, but did they really mean the proposal, or the fact that Blake dumped Sam more or less immediately afterwards. Because I saw the proposal coming a mile away, but I didn't guess the dumping part. That was a genuine surprise.
But in a way, it actually makes perfect sense. In retrospect, it seems clear that Blake was always deeply disconnected with any authentic emotional reality, and was instead acting out some narrative that was determined by I don't know who: maybe the producers, and/or his abstract vision of what all of this was supposed to be like in his head.
And there were increasingly weird warning signs. One was when Laurina complained about the fact that he and the producers were effectively screwing with her on the street pie date. Instead of admitting "yeah, we were a little bit, I'm sorry if your feelings were hurt by that; I do see how it kind of implies this one-dimensional image of you, etc.", he is totally unapologetic, and insists that she is in the wrong for not being "in the moment" enough or whatever.
Things got worse and worse toward the end, when he started to obsess over whether the girls had "let go" and "opened up" enough, which meant making these weird unreturned declarations of love, to him, while completely ignoring the fact that he was still also dating these other women and pressuring them to make similar declarations. What is the point of this? It's a bit freakish, as Rosie ably pointed out.
So what do we learn in the end? That Blake was so deeply confused and empty throughout the process that as soon as the cameras switched off, he was totally lost, and no longer felt anything compelling about his chosen one, Sam. In a way, it's more satisfying to see him exposed as the broken man that he always was, than to continue believing (or at least suspending disbelief about) the "fairytale" narrative, in which he is actually this wonderful, romantic guy, who deserves all the attention that he got from these women, and happily ends up with the most beautiful, desirable one, etc.
I've only watched this one iteration of the Bachelor (never the American ones, though I am American, and not the first Australian one), but I think in a way that this is the most perfect of them all. Because it forces everyone to acknowledge the depth of the fraud involved, which in many of the other cases we are still aware of but are tempted on some level to gloss over.
Rosie, please review Outlander.