Bachelorette 15 - Hannah Brown - Media - SM - *Sleuthing Spoilers* #9

“This seems staged,” said Sarah Trumbley, the voice behind FLARE’s Bachelorette live tweets, as we watched Luke P.’s unwanted return to The Bachelorette.

In theory, Luke P., season 15’s villain, was kicked off the show last week after sl*t-shaming Hannah for going on Fantasy Suite dates with other contestants. We thought we were finally done with this dude. Turns out we were wrong. This week, the Men Tell All—which is typically a recently recorded live-to-tape interview show with Hannah and the men she eliminated prior to the finale—started with a scene from The Bachelorette‘s filming. Back in Greece, we watched Luke P. once again prove his inability to understand that “no means no” by returning to The Bachelorette set after being eliminated to try to “get closure” and “clarity.” It was infuriating to watch, and during the Men Tell All interview that followed it was clear that Luke P. needs to do some serious reflection on his attitude towards women. That said, he isn’t the only one we should be raging at.

“I think any contestant who watches this show knows what Luke went through, but for the average fan, 100% the blame goes on Luke,” says Bachelor Nation blogger and expert Reality Steve. And that’s not to say Luke P. doesn’t deserve the blame. He said a whole lot of garbage in that clip and on the Men Tell All last night. But if that stint in Greece revealed anything, it’s that the show’s producers facilitated and fuelled his misogyny for their own gains—because, let’s not forget, this is not real life. This is a reality show and therefore a very tightly controlled environment.

“As a contestant on the show, you don’t get in a car by yourself and say ‘take me to where they’re filming,'” says Reality Steve. “It was all done with the help of production.” (We reached out to Warner Brothers and ABC, but did not receive an official response.)

Reality Steve explains that Bachelorette staff would’ve organized transport back to set, provided the camera that Luke P. used to shoot his own selfie-style ITM in the car and allowed him to literally walk into the Rose Ceremony unobstructed. According to the contentious contestant, even the ring was planted. “I was not ready to propose the producers gave me that ring to show Hannah how serious I was, I had zero intention of proposing,” wrote Luke P. in a now-deleted “truth bomb” posted to his IG story on Monday.

So, really, Luke P. wasn’t the only one ignoring Hannah’s wishes. The production crew did that too. “It happened because they allowed it,” says Reality Steve. And this speaks to a much larger issue with the show.

The idea of showing up as some kind of grand gesture in an attempt to save the relationship is one we’ve seen before on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. (See: Demi sneaking into Colton’s bedroom and Jed showing up outside Hannah’s window.) “I had to go back and fight for her, I believed in my heart she was making the biggest mistake of her life based on what she was telling me, I wanted her to know that we could get through this and I was here for her,” Luke P. wrote in a lengthy Instagram post detailing why he showed up at that Rose Ceremony. These “surprise” appearances are a staple on the show.

However, women’s rights activist Julie Lalonde points out that this story device is problematic and one that’s seen beyond the confines of the Bachelor mansion. She says that within pop culture and our mainstream understanding of romance, persistence—say, someone being determined to win your heart, often with a grand gesture, despite a lack of reciprocation—is typically framed as romantic. That’s a narrative that shows like The Bachelorette perpetuates, but it needs to stop.

“It’s really dangerous for us to keep repeating these tropes, even in circumstances like this, where the Bachelorette has put her foot down and is being assertive and she’s being applauded for it online—she shouldn’t have to do that,” says Lalonde. “And I don’t think that her affirming her right to a boundary negates the danger of him being on the show and getting this much of a spotlight.”

And yet, as Bachelor alum and FLARE columnist Sharleen Joynt points out, not only was The Return of Luke P. facilitated by producers, his actions were also likely encouraged by them. “Hell, he was likely instructed to stand in the Rose Ceremony line-up, to insist that all he needed was five minutes of Hannah’s time to redeem himself and possibly their relationship,” she wrote in her most recent Bachelorette recap.

That’s why when Chris Harrison looked at the camera at the outset of the Men Tell All and set up the clip of Luke P.’s return by saying “It’s something we’ve never seen on the show,” it felt more like a clue than an earnest intro. The show is always looking for scenes or incidents that they can sell in promos as “the most dramatic ever” or something completely novel. “These people have a job to do, and they do it well. It’s why the show has been on for 17 years and 38 seasons,” says Reality Steve. “But these people are morally corrupt and I don’t think they care. They care about putting on good television and getting paid.”

And constructing a narrative around a villain is a longstanding staple of The Bachelorette franchise. I mean, remember super-aggressive Chad Johnson on JoJo Fletcher’s Bachelorette season or Lee Garrett, with his history of racist tweets, on Rachel Lindsay’s season? Those contestants were not there by mistake. The Bachelorette has time and time again overlooked contestants’ history of violence and carefully selected toxic men to help their show compete for ratings under the guise of competing for love. “They have to have a villain. They’re not going to go a whole season with a whole cast living together and everyone getting along. That would be way too boring,” says Reality Steve.

Yet the people who literally create that narrative are often shielded from the backlash. For instance, last night we saw Luke P.’s views and attempts to justify his unjustifiable actions repeatedly shut down by Hannah, Chris Harrison, the other contestants and nearly everyone in the Men Tell All audience. The show’s Twitter account was filled with memes of Hannah’s mic-drop moments and RTs of fans reiterating that “no means no.” But, again, The Bachelorette team somehow doesn’t seem to get the irony that they too ignored Hannah’s wishes.

“A villain very often gets put in their place. That doesn’t ameliorate the fact that the show created that villain and gave that villain way too much space to begin with,” explains Jennifer Pozner, who researched The Bachelor and The Bachelorette for her book Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. With that in mind, she says it’s predictable that the show is all hands-up-in-praise emoji for Hannah’s actions “without any acknowledgement that they created this mess—specifically, intentionally, gleefully put this women in that scenario.” According to Pozner, the show has a history of deeply entrenched misogyny, which stems from creator Mike Fleiss, who started his career in reality TV with the deeply misogynistic show Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? He was also recently accused of violently attacking his pregnant wife. “Everything in that franchise is aimed at reinforcing extremely regressive, gendered tropes,” she says, attributing this ideology to Fleiss.

To be clear, I’m not trying to lift any blame from Luke P. That guy needs to check himself. Rather, this is just an effort to ensure that the producers, who could’ve easily filmed a standoff between Luke P. and security rather than allowing him to face Hannah, aren’t able to escape the same public scrutiny that Luke P. is now facing.

“I absolutely think that the production company needs to be held accountable for this,” says Lalonde. Unfortunately, given the show’s history, it seems the best we can hope for is that Luke P. doesn’t show up on the beaches of Bachelor in Paradise.

It’s funny how some episodes can stand still in terms of plot development yet provide an abundance of new information. Meanwhile, other episodes advance things rapidly, tying up one loose end after another, yet provide no actual intel. Last night’s episode was an example of the latter—a ghost of an episode.

On one hand, Hannah axed three guys (Connor S., Mike and Garrett). Seven down to four is a pretty huge cut and it feels as though we should be barreling towards a grand finale. But on the other hand, what did we really learn? Not a whole lot. We knew Connor S. wasn’t going to make Hometowns; we haven’t seen any of him over the last five episodes. We knew that, while Hannah genuinely seemed to like Mike, there wasn’t any believable romantic affection on her end. We knew that Luke P. would absolutely be getting a Hometown date, not only because a pattern of him scraping by has been established, but in large part due to the spoiler-ific previews that have been gracing the end of the last few episodes. On that note, I get wanting to tease us and ensure we continue to tune in, but there’s such a thing as too much information. I’m not usually one to put any stock in this show’s previews as they’re almost always littered with red herrings. That said, I’m having a hard time visualizing any scenario in which Hannah does not send Luke P. home on the date—which is presumably a Fantasy Suite date—after he shames her for having had sex. I wish we hadn’t been previewed even excerpts of that conversation. I don’t want the Coles Notes of a juicy book before reading it.

Last night, during the 3-on-1 date, as soon as Luke P. began telling Hannah his story about finding his faith, we all knew the competition between him and Garrett was over. Luke P. has used their shared faith as an instrument to get his way with her before. While Luke P. just barely scraped by for the last several weeks, I’d say this was the one week he didn’t. And that’s my main issue with this episode, and Luke P. and Hannah’s story in general.

I’m having a difficult time reconciling my respect and admiration for Hannah with her rollercoaster of a relationship with Luke P. Hannah has proven to be very shrewd. She sees through facades, a word she herself used when describing Luke P. She doesn’t buy into the bullsh-t he regularly serves, something that, in an environment practically subsisting of smoke and mirrors, has duly earned my respect. She’s also not an actor, a factor that I deeply appreciate. I don’t believe she could manage faking it with Luke P. because of a producer’s suggestion to keep him around.

Are we missing something in the nooks and crannies of her relationship with Luke P. that could explain her undue faith in him? So many of their conversations resemble arguments, which begs the question: How do they conclude? More specifically, last week, what happened in between Hannah telling Luke that their relationship did not feel “on the tracks” and her decision to give him a rose at the Rose Ceremony? Did she really fall for his gaslighting, believing she had simply misunderstood him when he had shamed her for bungee jumping naked? This week, when Luke P. used his Group Date 1-on-1 time to launch a diatribe about how the guys had been mistreating him, I thought for sure Hannah would see right through it. (I would have thought she’d be surprised if it were the other way around!) But instead, she wondered why the men couldn’t be kind to him. Having been on the receiving end of his antics, she of all people should know precisely why.

Rather than wondering why there’s so much smoke surrounding the fire that is Luke P., she somehow found a way to blame Garrett for being “fake nice” and not outwardly being rude to a guy he didn’t like. (As if Hannah wasn’t polite to Caelynn’s face last season.) For someone who implored the guys not to get involved in her other relationships, she sure was quick to do that with them, making assumptions about Garrett without knowing the full story. Further, Luke P. had done precisely what bothered Hannah about the other guys just two weeks ago: trash talking each other under the guise of being worried for HER. Wasn’t it Hannah who said she could figure it all out for herself?

If this episode had a name it’d be “Blind Faith”; Hannah is blinded by her shared faith with—and subsequent faith in—Luke P. It has translated into limitless tolerance for him, yet disproportionately strict standards for the other men. Is all of this just an enormous (and enormously complicated) veil over the fact that she simply has great chemistry with Luke P. and is thinking with a body part south of her brain? Even then, is their chemistry really THAT much better than it is with Peter, Jed or Tyler C.? Guys with whom she doesn’t need to have formal, painstaking sit-downs in order to establish the most basic of mutual understanding?

I like Hannah a lot. She’s candid, goofy, and completely herself. I dare say one of my favourite leads of all time. But there comes a point where the “fool me once” adage must come into consideration. We have two choices here: either we assume we’re missing crucial puzzle pieces to help us see—even if we can’t understand—why Hannah keeps throwing Luke P. a bone, or we have to assume we’re giving Hannah herself too much credit. Those puzzle pieces would work in her favour, as right now it’s hard not to lose some respect for a woman who routinely makes excuses for a guy who so obviously manipulates and mistreats everyone around him, including her. Her inability to heed his red flags is a red flag in and of itself.

1. Jed, 25

Rather shockingly, Hannah told Jed this week that she’s falling in love with him. This was unprecedented in how early in the season it fell; never have we heard a lead utter these words before Hometowns. These two shared another 1-on-1 where the emphasis was again on their ease and effortlessness. Honestly, right now their story feels almost too easy and effortless, in a way that makes me still wonder about Tyler C. pulling ahead. I also can’t forget that we never heard actual conversation between these two on Night One; all we got was—shocker—Jed serenading her. Nonetheless, Hannah’s ILY (or IFILWY?) confession must be heeded, keeping Jed sitting very pretty at the top of my list.

2. Tyler, 26

I was a bit distraught to see Jed pull so far ahead this week as Tyler C. continues to be my unabashed favourite. It’s hard not to root for a guy that seems to truly see and understand Hannah, support and defend her, all while managing to consistently make her laugh. Tyler’s been laser focused on Hannah in a way that has allowed him to keep pretty private about himself. However, this week, and with a little coaxing, he did finally manage to “open up” the way Hannah needed from him, keeping him firmly towards the front of the pack.

3. Peter, 29

Peter’s in third place because he’s the only man in my Top 3 to have only had one 1-on-1 date. And a recent one at that. I feel like if Hannah were super into Peter, she’d have found a way to have given him more. For him to head into Hometowns with so little time under his belt doesn’t bode well; it means Hannah hasn’t prioritized him the way she has others. I still think Peter’s a major frontrunner, but I don’t see him catching up to either Jed or Tyler C. at this point.

Luke P., 24

Though Hannah has proven me wrong time and time again when it comes to Luke P. going home, it’s hard to imagine him lasting much longer. I’m betting on their date from the previews coming sooner than later, if only so they don’t spoil so much of remainder of the season. Plus, watching Luke P. is really getting old, so consider this wishful thinking.

It’s no secret by now that I love Tell Alls. I say it every season: there’s nothing like watching how contestants choose to behave in the “now,” having seen how America responds to them. What will they say in a situation where they have the most control over their edits they’ve had all season, and which contestant whose name you can’t remember is going to disproportionately stand out? There’s a whole new level of potential analyses!

Unfortunately, last night’s Men Tell All on The Bachelorette was fairly lacklustre. First, as someone who enjoys these, I already feel Tell Alls are on the short and rushed side—more often than not, I’m left wanting more. So, while I get wanting to keep us on the edge of our seats with last week’s Rose Ceremony cliffhanger, it ate too much into valuable, only-once-a-season time. Further, while it was entertaining from a karmic perspective to watch Luke P. get re-kicked off the show, part of me felt a bit icky about it. After all, there’s no chance he wasn’t encouraged to return, supported in his belief that Hannah might have had regrets. Hell, he was likely instructed to stand in the Rose Ceremony line up, to insist that all he needed was five minutes of Hannah’s time to redeem himself and possibly their relationship. Yes, the guy is god awful and possess zero self awareness. But it certainly doesn’t help when he has a miniature devil on his shoulder, encouraging him to do things and behave in ways that will only make him look worse.

Heading into the Tell All, things only got worse. The show paraded Luke P. out first, knowing full well he’d learned no lessons and hadn’t changed in the slightest. (Again, I’d be surprised if he wasn’t supported in not learning lessons and not changing; he was likely told to stick to his guns and not allow himself to be “misunderstood”.) Literally, an entire half of my precious Tell All was The Luke P. Show, including long bouts of silence where everyone sat and waited for him to piece together sentences defending himself. As a recapper, it’s irritating. Recapping Luke P. at this point is to sound like a broken record: How many times can I call him manipulative, delusional narcissist? I’m out of words to describe him and his actions.

In keeping up with my Tell All tradition, here are my top three most memorable moments:

3. Strength In Numbers

There was no better example of there being fire where there’s smoke than in the men banding together against Luke P. last night. You would have to be crazy to think Luke P. was somehow done wrong by his edit based on how many guys got involved. With villains at Tell Alls, there are usually one or two contestants who (sometimes surprisingly) come to their defence, revealing friendships editing never allowed us to see. (A perfect example of this is was Casey defending super-villain Courtney Robertson at Ben Flajnik’s Women Tell All, proof that she wasn’t as friendless as she seemed.) Luke P. had no such support, the ultimate sign that what we saw really is what you get with him. But what I especially enjoyed was how surgically the men involved took him down.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t actually think it’s possible to truly take down Luke P. since he clearly doesn’t process or absorb feedback; he just alters his reality so that he’s never in the wrong. But the men still deserve credit for not only criticizing Luke P., but for identifying what makes him a worrisome potential partner. Mike, with a chilling sentence because of how accurate it is, predicted Luke P.’s future wife would be “a prisoner” of his if he doesn’t change. Connor S identified one of Luke P.’s biggest issues being the fact that his actions never matched his words; they had waited for the change he’d promised but it never came. Garrett pointed out how Luke never apologizes until after the fact, caught with his “hand in the cookie jar.” Grant jumped in to emphasize that no means no, a concept with which Luke apparently struggles. Jonathan correctly pointed out that Luke projects his faith onto others. Finally, Dylan, with perhaps my favourite contribution of the evening: “It’s 2019, man… you can’t talk to a woman like that.” It was a rousing segment with confident, well-spoken men who respect women, and was a bittersweet reminder of how much goodness we missed out on thanks to Luke P.

2. Clapback Queen

It’s incredible to remember the Hannah we got to know on Colton’s season, the self-conscious woman who could barely articulate the most basic of emotions, who struggled to make a toast. There is real confidence and quick wit in one’s ability to talk back and defend yourself in the moment, and especially to do so in mic-drop fashion as Hannah routinely does. I don’t know if it’s her upbringing or what, but Hannah has mastered this unique skill. From how she refused Luke P.’s pleas to “just talk” at the Rose Ceremony (“I’m not going to let you rewrite what you said the other night”), to her rightfully calling him a narcissist, to her putting him in his place about Fantasy Suites (“Fantasy suites aren’t just used for sex—you may not know that because you haven’t had one”). But best of all was the emphasis on her hard learned lessons, her realization that the very thing that had brought her and Luke P. close together—their shared faith—had been “weaponized” against her. This crime was something we’ve watched unfold for weeks, but I would have remained unsatisfied had Hannah herself not realized and labelled this abuse correctly.

Even her apology to Bachelor Nation at the end of the episode, while unnecessary, showed a true awareness of her having enabled Luke P. She also proved how different she is than him by her ability to own her responsibility in that. Hannah is easily one of my favourite leads, male or female, of all time, and her Tell All showing was every bit as gratifying as I could have hoped (and expected) it would be.

1. The Host With The Most

This show’s venerable host, Chris Harrison, is often a source for humour for me. It sometimes feels like the franchise is outgrowing the need for his champagne glass clinking, his report that there won’t be a Cocktail Party, his comically useless announcement of there being one rose left. And although we’ve had decent sit-downs between him and Hannah this season, those chats too feel like they’ve had the potential to be discontinued, as though the footage gained isn’t worth his paycheque. However, last night showed just how deft Chris Harrison is as an interviewer.

Interviewing Luke P.—a veritable shapeshifter who has no shame (or even awareness) in contradicting and creating new realities for himself—is not for the faint of heart. It requires sticking to the scent and not allowing Luke P. to, as Hannah said, rewrite his own words. On this front, there were several fantastic Chris Harrison moments. He managed to avoid becoming the bad guy in Luke P.’s eyes yet consistently put him in his place in spectacular fashion. At one point, Luke P. said all he’d wanted was to have been heard by Hannah, to have his say, and Chris Harrison responded with, “You had your say. It just went poorly, so you wanted another say.” When Luke P. said a Bachelorette who’d had sex in another Fantasy Suite was “not something he would have wanted in a future wife,” Chris Harrison responded with, “Respect that. That’s your choice. In this particular case, Hannah did make that choice and that doesn’t jive with you. I’m a little bit surprised you didn’t just walk away.” There was a laugh-out-loud moment when Luke P. admitted to having been prideful and arrogant and Chris Harrison matter-of-factly added, “She called you narcissistic.” Luke P. mentioned having felt like he was on “a rescue mission for Hannah,” to which Chris Harrison sharply responded, “To me that means, in your mind, she needed to be saved.” At that point, Luke was quick (and wise) to backpedal. The host also laid down a solid Men Tell All foundation by asking Luke P.—before any of the other men arrived—if he felt he’d made mistakes. (Luke P.’s answer, as per usual, would come back to haunt him.)

In general it seemed Luke P. had arrived with a script of talking points and defences for himself, but several times he was rendered speechless by the host’s piercing—but completely fair—questions. It’s easy to underestimate Chris Harrison’s role in all this, to miss how smoothly Luke P. was given one opportunity after another, how elegantly he was put in his place by an impartial third party. But it takes discernment and satire, yet subtlety—not to mention an impenetrable straight face—to do what Chris Harrison does, and last night gave me new appreciation for it.

Alanna wrote:After all this sh!t with Luke and Jed and Haley, I don’t think Hannah would be humiliating herself further (look I’m a cute lobster like the kind Tyler catches hint hint!!) if she didn’t have a pretty solid idea what Tyler’s answer would be regarding a reconciliation imo.