George Burns/ABC
Am I the only one who thinks this season of The Bachelorette feels a little off-kilter? Aside from the dubious ways that the producers handled the topic of race this time out, the hurry-up-and-wait pacing is throwing me off more than in previous seasons. We’re past those early episodes where everyone’s kind of goofy and then a half-dozen guys are cast off at a time. Now we’re in the thick of what feels like the neverending schlep towards the end. The drama has been cranked up to “all the feels.”
Our guy Peter is still hanging in there, having nobly suffered the slings and arrows of an outrageously fortunate “hometown” episode: starting off at Monona Terrace, he takes Rachel on quick spin through the Dane County Farmers’ Market. Do they eat the spicy cheese bread or sample some cheese curds? Nope. “Two honey sticks, please,” says Peter. I’m not gonna tell you how to live your life, dude, but let’s get our priorities straight here. Honey sticks in hand, they wander down State Street and choose Cask & Ale as the place for Peter to show Rachel off to some of his friends.
Embracing my dubious role as Isthmus’ reality TV correspondent, I opted to watch the hometown episode at, where else, Cask & Ale. Posting up at the bar a little early, I watched as one booth after another filled up until there was nothing but standing room. The demographic was exactly what you’d expect: groups of moms and co-eds, along with a few dutiful boyfriends mixed in for good measure. Rosé was the special of the night, for obvious reasons. The energy spiked palpably every time Peter was on screen.. Everyone whooped it up when he walked her into this very establishment. It was a little surreal to be at the bar, not 10 feet from the booth where Peter’s friends, both black, make fun of him for having played his “8 out of 10 of my friends are black” card with her. Me? I just think he should have accurately reduced that fraction to 4 out of 5, but I’m a stickler, I guess. Anyway, the rose ceremony came down to Dean and Peter, with Rachel pausing for what felt like a full minute before offering the rose to Peter — and causing the whole bar to absolutely lose their minds. I documented it for posterity:
All season Peter has seemed like the frontrunner by a country mile, but recent developments seem to have put him at a sudden and unexpected disadvantage. You see, Peter made the great error of admitting that if he is the last man standing, he might not drop to one knee and pop the question. This is obvious cause for concern with this show, since the whole thing is supposed to build to exactly that wildly romantic moment. What Peter’s doing is looking back on the few dozen cumulative hours he’s spent with Rachel and very rationally saying, “Oh boy, maybe we should take a breath before going and doing something this... impulsive.” This sort of sensibility makes perfect sense in the real world, but in the Bachelor/ette’s world of amped-up amore it’s the sort of thing that can, and very well might, punch his ticket home.
Getting this far means that Peter gets to meet family. Meeting the parents is a stress test for any burgeoning relationship, but if you fail to make a good impression here, you very likely won’t get another shot. Thankfully, Peter knocks it out of the park — for the most part. At the moment where previous contestants have typically asked for permission to propose, Peter breaks with tradition and tells Rachel’s mom that he’s still not sure how he’s gonna play things if it gets to that point — but that he definitely sees things as having some excellent momentum. Mom contemplates it for a moment before saying that she really appreciates his approach, even if what Rachel wants is the security that he’s ready to pull the trigger with those four little words.
Rachel’s apprehension about Peter’s intentions keeps on bubbling under the surface all the way to Spain, where the two take a tour of a winery. During dinner the argument over proposal semantics rears its ugly head yet again, and we get a “to be continued” cliff hanger before Rachel even has a chance to offer Peter the key to the fantasy suite. By this point she’s already taken the overnight plunge with another beau, so the pressure’s on and there’s a very real sense that our guy might not get the green light.
What are Peter’s odds at this point? Of the three dudes still in the hunt, Peter still seems to stand head and shoulders above the other two. Eric and Bryan both seem woefully under-prepared for a serious relationship with Rachel. But man oh man, Rachel really has a burr under her saddle about wanting to know for sure that whoever she picks is gonna stick the landing on a proposal and Peter is just not willing to play that game and it’s creating a ton of static between them. Will it be enough to derail the whole shebang? We’re one week from finding out!
This week, though, we get the Men Tell All episode, which will probably be a catastrophic mess and do little more than dredge up all the least enjoyable garbage aspects of this season. On the upside, we’ll very likely find out who the next Bachelor is gonna be... and... it miiiiiiight be Peter?! It would be unorthodox to cut the legs out from under a finale like that. But Rachel was announced as Bachelorette while she was still in the top three of that season, so it’s certainly not unheard of.