It's Over

This is probably the most spoiled season finale in Bachelor history, so there really wasn't any intrigue going into this episode.  Even local Girl Scout newsletters had details about Courtney's eventual victory complete with snarky comments.  Nonetheless, it's something that a lot of us had to see to believe, or in my case, appreciate.  As you know, I've been a dispassionate viewer and perhaps even erring on the side of being a Courtney defender given how well she was able to navigate the landscape.  If you keep in mind that this is nothing more than an elaborate game show with pleasant cinematography and an enormous travel budget, it's easier to make better judgments and not look like a reactionary dimwit after a few weeks of sober hindsight.  This wasn't about spawning outrage, it was more about the depths to which one man could delude himself.  And it turned out to be on par with the Marianas Trench (are you paying attention, James Cameron?).  What I found especially interesting is how he brought his mom and sister down with him.

For as much as ABC would like to maintain the illusion of suspense, the only suspenseful element was just how he was going to let Lindzi down and how he was going to justify it to himself.  I've personally struggled with how to characterize Lindzi.  She's obviously someone that has desirable attributes (i.e., she's hot), but this whole narrative of having some kind of perma-guard up is just exhausting even for the casual viewer, especially in someone that is 27 with one whole significant relationship under her belt.  Nonetheless, it's hard to fault Ben for shelving her.  I think we also have to admit that the whole horse deal was a net negative.  Maybe not baton aficionado bad, but pretty bad.  I kept imagining Lindzi's room at her parents' house festooned in pink/purple and filled with endless displays of Breyer collectibles.  Maybe even an "autographed" pic of Zenyatta?  "Hay there, Lindzi!  Best wishes from your favorite mare, Queen Z."  I guess we could have gone with Rachel Alexandra instead.  I really only know what Google tells me on this topic.

In sitting down with his mom and sister, Ben is already poisoning the well.  He's made it abundantly clear that he wants them to rubber stamp his choice of Courtney.  Here we are at the finale and Ben has maybe a few days tops before he has to decide, and he's telling his family that he might need "more time" with Lindzi to figure out if she's right for him.  More time?  That's not even a clever euphemism.   He may as well have said "I don't really like the other one, so can you just affirm that the model is better so this isn't awkward at Thanksgiving?"  Ben's poor dead dad even got pulled into this mess.  What did he ever do to deserve this kind of shabby treatment?

I'll say up front that I'm a little peeved that the "family interviews" didn't get more air time.  What's more compelling TV:  seeing Lindzi spill food on herself or watching Courtney read from her fake scrapbook?  We got about five total minutes of grilling from Julia and Barb when it should have been more like 20.  Makes no sense.  You budget 90 minutes of actual run time and only like 6% of that is spent scrutinizing the final two?  It's not like they had Ashley's psycho extreme couponing sister there grandstanding in front of the camera or anything.  This was nothing like that debacle.  No, we had genuinely well-meaning yet obviously judgmental family this time.  I was really rooting for Julia to make a mess of this, but boy what a letdown.  Of course Lindzi didn't exactly go the extra mile, but seeing how Emily died on the table after going after Courtney, maybe she was just playing it safe.  "We're just very... different" wasn't going to get it done.  Lindzi had to know that she needed a game changer.  Better would have been, "Courtney is probably schizophrenic, but she might merely be bipolar.  Our resident epidemiologist wasn't exactly sure which."


"C" sort of vowed to be on her best behavior, which got a hearty yet uncomfortable chuckle from both her and Ben.  Maybe she is crazy.  Would she implode?  Did anyone really believe that she would?  The only thing shielding ol' Jules and Babs from Courtney's ire was that they weren't part of the competition.  It would have been fun for them to see ten weeks of episodes leading up to their meeting in Zermatt, but sadly all they got was some tepid rumors about Courtney not doing her dishes in the mansion or sharing her Paul Mitchell apple-scented conditioner.


Julia just plain whiffed in her one-on-one time with the Courtinator.  For being a no-holds-barred protective sister, it basically boiled down to her saying, "well, I have to believe what you tell me."  Great stuff, Jules.  Way to sleuth that one out.  Courtney found Ben's mom to be an even easier mark.  Just shower her son with endless compliments, and you're in. "He is the best."  Best what?  We've all seen Cream Dream, Barb.  Your boy "Storm Horse" might have created a video sadly worthy of a Tosh.0 web redemption.


I was hoping that "the edit" happened to cut all of the good exchanges and that we were going to get some kind of critical analysis of Courtney as a non-game show contestant, but instead Julia was "blown away" with how "amazing" she is.  Maybe we've underestimated Courtney's skills, or overestimated Julia's.  Or both.  I knew that Courtney was pretty adept at messing with slow-witted Bachelor contestants, but I honestly thought she'd at least hit a speed bump with Julia.  Another possibility is that the family is just going along with it (likely), but "blown away?"  Just think:  that's out there for posterity.  If ever someone wants to assess Julia Flajnik's ability to judge character, someone can just pull up the YouTube clip of her slathering affectations on Courtney Robertson in Zermatt and say, "whoops."

Promotional consideration provided by the makers of this sweet hat.

I know that most of you will think the line of the show was Lindzi saying "call me," but you're wrong.  The line of the show was Ben saying, in all seriousness, "there's depth" in referring to Courtney.  While I think she's a high aptitude contestant and surely had her way with just about everyone on the show, "depth" is not a word that should enter into the lexicon.  In fact, I'd go in exactly the opposite direction and choose "surface."  The repetitive nature of her act is a dead giveaway.  The constant hair touching, the facial gestures, the eye rolling... it's all consistent with someone walking a fine, phony line.  Had anyone bothered to push her around a little bit, they would have seen it.  Ben chose to ignore it.  He seemed more interested in rubbing peoples' noses in his pick.  That's fine, but four months later, how's that taste now, Ben?

"Ben is sooo funny. Seriously."

Your guess is as good as mine as to why they have dates during the finale.  As if something's going to change.  Anything in a post Fantasy Suite world is going to be a massive letdown.  Working from my newest controversial premise that Lindzi is possibly a virgin, having a private marshmallow roast in a gondola isn't really going to work any miracles.  It's safe to say that she started to act a little desperate and was throwing out more indicators that she "liked where this is going," but the whole thing was starting to look a little embarrassing and on an eight week time delay.  I mean, Courtney was bearing the goods in the Caribbean forever ago and Lindzi is still talking about walls being up.  Not exactly the horse race this could have been.


There is this sort of unwritten rule about the lead not reciprocating with their true thoughts in the interest of suspense, but given that, conservatively, six billion people already knew the outcome of this show weeks ago (welcome, Macau readers), I really don't see the point anymore.  If you're feeling it, for the love of god just say so already.  While the past 15 Bachelors (we count Brad twice) have been all kinds of terrible at perpetuating this quasi-falling-for-you state, Ben is setting a new standard of awful.  He comes across like Lindzi's therapist as he thanks her for finally opening up.  No one has ever showed less emotion than this guy toward someone that he's supposedly falling in love with, and that continues right on through to the mechanical dismissal which was more fitting of a Week 3 send off.  I suppose we can say that he's been the most consistent Bachelor ever, if that's worth anything.  Being a dry bore has been a hallmark of this guy ever since his nascent days as a glimmer in Ashley's eye.  Inexplicably, this franchise is nearly bomb-proof from ruin, yet they seem to be hell-bent on testing that theory all the time.  If Next Entertainment ever comes calling, you'd better believe I'm on board, but I'd need sole creative license because I'd knock things sideways.  Think Jerry Seinfeld running that video cam operation for bootlegging new releases.  I'd need some serious headsets.


At this stage, I think the helicopter dates are a cruel inside joke that the staff keeps running out there just to set people off.  Or maybe it's a tribute to all of the Bachelor drinking games out there.  If so, touché.  That aside, if helicopter rides were somehow correlated with healthy relationships, I'd see the point of all of this flight time.  Then again, this isn't a show about love.  It's about putting people in the most preposterously unlikely situations to foster the hardest most painful love hangover that can be captured on camera.  Well then, to paraphrase Tom "Viper" Skerritt from Top Gun:  "Keep sending them up."


You've probably wondered about Ben's insistence that there are two Courtneys:  the one that everyone else knows, and the Courtney that only he knows.  I've wondered about that too.  Is he really convinced that people can cheerfully exist on two planes simultaneously?  If so, is this remotely a good idea?  Isn't that some kind of condition? Usually you don't see any static between the final couple until well after the show is over, but these two have shared substantial conflicts already.  This leads me to believe that Ben honestly has no earthly idea what he's doing in a relationship of any kind.  He so casually dismisses obvious warning signs and acts as though things "can only get better."  Name one occasion in this show's history where that's been remotely true.  Go on, I'll wait.  From what I can surmise, even if you are madly in love with someone at the end, you have about a 1 in 30 shot of sustaining that relationship for more than a year.  Hell, even Ali and Roberto gave up, and they seemed about as ideally suited as two people could be on this show.  Ashley and JP admitted they were just now talking about marriage in a year or so.  And moving to Jersey.  Yeah, wow.  Again, this isn't a show about love, folks.  You get married in spite of what goes on here.  It's kind of like meeting someone at the DMV and getting married.  In fact, the odds are probably a lot better there.  Now serving:  358.


I've written at some length about the perils of handmade gifts, but Courtney's scrapbook was obviously something the producers put in her hand to gin up some emotional appeal, so it really doesn't count.  Remember Blakeley's attempt at something like this?  I'll forgive you if you don't, but it was horrendous and obviously her own work.  Courtney had pics shot of them atop the Mayan temple.  What, did she hire a tour guide to surreptitiously snap photos from the ground?  Whatever.  I don't know why the production staff is so heavily invested in us believing how genuine Courtney is.  On the contrary, I think the show benefits if she's a huge phony.  Things like this only distract from our amusement.  There's this curious ongoing myth building in reality TV world that you have to manipulate results to maximize audience interest, but I think that's a false premise on its face.  You can't teach Lindzi to drop her fork.  Twice.  Sure Courtney was "in it to win it," and that's fine, but less is more.  If you want to launch a show about love, go for it.  This is The Bachelor we're talking about.


The best moment of insight into who Courtney is was on display during her last night together with Ben.  For whatever reason, she voluntarily brings up her issues with the other girls and whines to Ben that his mom and sister mentioning it made her uncomfortable.  All I can say is, good luck with this one, bro.  This is the exact opposite of accountability.  Not only is she not taking ownership, but she's actually accusing you and your family of giving her a hard time.  If you think that's bad, fast forward about a year and imagine how comfortably she'll be in dictating every aspect of your life.  Neither of you are people that are used to compromise or not getting your way.  Put that in a blender and you're going to get a mixture of shit.  But in the interest of preserving the sterling record of disaster that this show has produced, by all means ignore every conceivable warning sign that comes up.  It's not you, it's everyone else, champ.  The world doesn't get it.  You're the only one that knows anything.  Trust me.  This is going to work out so awesome for you guys.


So now that Ben is about 60% sure that Courtney is the right woman (and 150% sure that Lindzi isn't), it's probably a good idea to shop for $100k rings.  Neil seems to have initially forgotten that Ben did this last season given his goofy "I'm Neil Lane!" greeting, but he cleaned it up a bit with his "not your first rodeo" comment, so I think we're good.  It's great that Ben really appreciates Neil donating a free ring.  Again.  I think he should have to give Courtney the ring he picked out for Ashley as punishment.  You're trashing Neil's good name here.  One of these days this poor guy is going to get to sell ABC a wedding band too.  Maybe we should go with Kay Jewelers for a while until things get back on track.  That schlocky "Open Hearts" collection from Jane Seymour is much more in line with how things are run here.


As tempting as it is to drop a compulsory Cruella De Vil reference in, I think I'll pass (see what I did there?).  Though I will mention that Lindzi's feathery number was eerily reminiscent of Chantal's goose dress the last time this went down (seriously, see what I did there?).  I think we can officially say that anything even resembling plumage is a bad harbinger.

Where's the funeral?

I genuinely do fell bad for the woman that gets shot down.  Really I do.  Lindzi is no exception.  Sure, she knows she's going to lose, and no amount of jibber-jabber is going to fix that, but that doesn't stop her from trying.  I guess every second counts in her mind.  She does seem like someone who truly loves the guy, although no one is quite sure why.  I'm not sure she knows either.


For whatever reason, Ben tells Lindzi that he's fallen in love with her, BUT she still loses.

"I love you!"

"LOL, J/K."

Deftly handled, Ben.  That just seems unusually cruel in a violates-the-Constitution sort of way.  Better yet, after a solid 15 seconds of explaining himself, he wants her to leave.  Well, that certainly was... efficient.  Stranger still, Lindzi seemed surprisingly calm about the whole thing, maybe out of shock but more likely because she knew what was coming.  Yes, "call me" was a touch pathetic.  This whole exchange just seemed casual and weird.  But then, Lindzi was a little weird.

Ben channeled a few seconds of Brad Womack with his well-timed "but..." with Courtney, but in the end she got the hardware.  Winning indeed.

"Aww.. I want it with the inscription 'suck it, bitches.'"

It was good to see Harrison giving Ben and Courtney a hard time which is more than he's ever done in all his years as host.  I suppose it's hard to avoid what everyone is thinking, but there were a few moment where I was like, "whoa, dude.. ease up a bit."  I'm not sure why he characterized Ben as cutting and running, but I did get a kick out of it.  I'm sure Courtney was just a peach during that whole run.  And to be clear, Chris, Ben wasn't kissing some other girl.

Not Courtney.

See?


Well, now that they squared that away, I'm sure these two will be next in line for a big Chris Harrison-officiated wedding.  I just hope I'm invited.


I think Emily's Bachelorette season has just commenced filming in Charlotte and will premier on May 14th.  Excited?  Yeah, I dunno either.  I just hope she's willing to forgo her individual room a lot.  It has to be more interesting than watching Ashley, right?  Not a high bar.


Bachelor Pad 3 is on the horizon for mid-summer.  Mark your calendars for that mess, and don't forget, you could be a part of the action.  I seem to remember something like this on Paradise Hotel or one of these other defunct franchises.  If you do happen to land a role, please remember to be entertaining and always ask yourself:  what would Courtney do?