-While Clayton isn’t told exactly what to do in every situation and told who to keep and who to let go, he is HIGHLY persuaded to go in certain directions with storylines and contestants. And when you’re the lead of the show, and all these people around you are there filming a show about YOUR love journey, and they suggest things, you follow orders. You follow orders or people die. It’s as simple as that. (Ok sorry, that was from “A Few Good Men”). But you get my point. You’re not gonna be a lead and just sit there and push back on every single thing a producer tells you. You’ve developed friendships with these people. Or, so you think. You’ve opened up to them. You’ve become vulnerable to them. So it’s only natural when they suggest or nudge you in a certain direction, you’ll go with it. Ask ANY former lead. They’ll all admit to the same thing. No, I wasn’t forced to do anything (which, I still think is a lie and there have been certain situations where they were absolutely told a certain thing was going to happen whether they liked it or not), but I just went along with it because I didn’t want to let people down. No different for Clayton.
-The irony in all of this is this show is supposed to be based off finding love for Clayton, right? It’s all about Clayton and putting him in the best position to ultimately fall in love, make the best decisions he can, and get engaged at the end. Well, isn’t production the ones sitting in the ITM room with her seeing her say all things she’s saying? They know this. They’re the ones feeding into it. They’re the ones LOVING the TV gold she’s giving them with her one liners and boasting about how she tricked Clayton, etc. Are they now going back to Clayton and relaying this information so he can make the best decisions possible? Of course not. They’re letting him twist in the wind and get unwanted hate from America thinking he’s the biggest dumbass in the world for keeping Shanae over Elizabeth, which then results in him having to release that apology online. You know what could’ve prevented all that. Production not allowing it to happen. I don’t listen to any of the Bachelor Nation podcasts, but please, let me know if ANY of them even touch on the topic this week of productions role in all this. Pretty sure I already know my answer.
Holy crap, I haven’t even gotten to the rose ceremony part of last night yet ha ha. Well, here we go. Gabby, Sarah, and Eliza safe with roses. Clayton: “Tonight was frustrating…doesn’t feel like continuing on with the night…100% felt like a waste of time..decision felt like the right one…and frankly, we have an inordinate amount of shrimp that needs to be consumed and Shanae can scarf that shit down by the pound, so I’m keeping her…”
Marlena, Teddi, Rachel, Mara, Sierra, Susie, Jill, Serene, Genevieve, Hunter, and Lyndsey.
“Ladies, Clayton, it’s the final rose of the evening. When you’re ready. Please keep Shanae. She’s giving me Trish vibes from my season and I kinda like it.”
Shanae gets the final rose because of course she does. This show isn’t stupid.
There honestly isn’t a whole hell of a lot to say about Rachel’s 1-on-1. It was about as straightforward as you can get. He’s obviously way into her, she’s into him, and you can see now why people were emailing me last night saying he picked her. But we get that after every 1-on-1 date. I got that after Susie’s as well. And I’m sure I will after Gabby’s 1-on-1 in Toronto in 2 weeks. You have a 33% chance of being right saying Clayton picked Gabby/Rachel/Susie. I don’t know why all these people seem to think they’ve stumbled upon something spoilery. Nothing has been spoiled 100% for sure on social media or on the show. Anyone can make any narrative they want to fit their argument that Clayton picked one of the three.
The only thing comical about the Rachel date is clearly the family BBQ they stumbled upon was pre-planned and of course the family knew they were coming, yet the show makes us think it was completely organic. Really? They sure do treat their audience like morons, don’t they? So two randos just ride horses into someone’s backyard in the middle of small town Texas with cameras in tow and the family just plays it off as any other day? Uh huh. Sure they don’t. And shoutout to whoever emailed me last night that that family on the show owns a BBQ place in the Houston area. Forgot the name or I would plug it, but I do remember receiving that email last night. They gave me the link to their IG page of the restaurant. Oh well. If anyone has it, send it again and I’ll post tomorrow.
Rachel got a rose as we knew she would, and one thing that I’ll say about their talk is that yet another contestant talked about a previous relationship and how bad it was. Rachel isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last, but has ANYONE on this show ever had a past relationship that went great, but things just didn’t work out. I mean, how many freaking times do we hear someone on this show tell us about their ex that wasn’t supportive, was abusive, cheated, wasn’t nice, etc. I’m not saying they’re lying at all. It just the way contestants talk about their exes to the lead in seemingly every single 1-on-1 date we ever see, it’s like these people have never been in a good relationship in their lives. Or maybe they’re just told to talk about the shitty ones. Hell if I know. But yeah, it’s all we ever hear when anyone talks about an ex on this show was how bad the relationship was, and the ex was seemingly always the reason. Just something I noticed last night.
I’ll touch a little bit on the football date in tomorrow’s column before “Reader Emails,” so get those in, but I feel like I gave almost two pages of thoughts on Shanae and her antics for today, so that should be enough. Talk to you tomorrow.
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