The Golden Bachelor Recap: The Telltale Fart

As any anthropologist will tell you, “The Women Tell All” is a folk practice of great importance. The ritual must be completed every season so that we may worship as our reality-TV ancestors worshipped before us. It’s also not totally unlike that part of Midsommar when all the women cling together and collectively wail … if Midsommar were also a clip show.

We’ll get to the conclusion of the cliffhanger that was last week’s rose ceremony (oh boy, will we), but first let’s go through the highlights of the contestants’ onstage reunion:

But now the fun and games are over and it’s time for our marquee event: the much anticipated post-hometowns rejection.

We pick up with Gerry where we left off last week — namely, with him doubled over and crying. Leslie already has a rose, and there’s only one remaining. Will it go to Faith, to whom Gerry directly proclaimed his love, or to Theresa, whom Gerry told only the camera he’s in love with?

I actually gasped out loud at my computer screen when he called Theresa’s name. In fact, I am so surprised that I momentarily think, Wow, it’s weird that he said the name of the person he’s not giving a rose to for once. For their part, the in-studio audience members and the women alike all look equally aghast (tag yourself — I’m the guy with glasses mouthing Wow).

Gerry, my brother in Christ. You straight up told Faith — a woman who has confided in you about her history of romantic trauma, no less — in front of her entire family (and probably the ghost of at least one of her expired horses) that you were in love with her, at no one’s urging, like 36 hours ago. All along, it was really you who should have zipped his lip.

(Discussion question for the class: Do we think the hometowns were necessarily filmed in the order we were shown them? All we know for sure, textually, is that Faith didn’t come last because someone references him having to leave for the next one.)

She handles this blindsiding with grace and dignity, if only because she is “numb.” Was this all in her head? After putting up walls for 30 years, she was ready to marry this guy. How did they go from where they were to “literally nothing,” as if they were strangers?

Cut to Faith, crying onstage, obviously and understandably devastated. The Gatch soon joins her, appropriately contrite. He tells her that his love is genuine but that one of the other women is just more “right” for him.

To Gerry’s credit, it’s clear that he truly feels terrible and that he had no malicious intent. Nevertheless, I think it is correct for him to feel at least a little terrible. They agree they are better people for having met each other and embrace, incomprehensibly sob-mumbling into each other’s shoulders for a while.

But there’s no time to waste: Gerry is off with Leslie and Theresa to Costa Rica to canoodle (to whatever degree of canoodling) in the Fantasy Suites and — at least in Gerry’s case, based on the preview — sob over various picturesque balconies. ¡Hasta luego!