Texts, Tears & History-Making Television: ‘Bachelor In Paradise’ Season Finale Recap

Kayla Kingston
Contributing Writer

Six weeks of love, romance and tears finally came to a close on Sept. 17 on the “Bachelor in Paradise” (BiP) finale. BiP is the amazing reality TV show where host Chris Harrison takes “losers” from past seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” and puts them on a Mexican beach with an open bar, hoping that some of them find love and end the summer with an engagement. As one can imagine, this leads to several weeks of intense drama that makes my Monday and Tuesday nights more enjoyable.  Because what’s more fun than laughing over someone else’s demise and crying over someone else’s happiness?

To start the finale off, three of the four remaining couples (Hannah and Dylan, Katie and Chris, and Demi and Kristian) headed off to Fantasy Suites, which is just the classy way of saying that they allegedly left to “get it on.” 

However, one couple – Nicole and Clay – were left out of the fun night and quickly broke up the following morning when Nicole asked Clay, “Do you love me?”

“I’m not there yet,” he responded.

Was this really a surprise to anyone?  Half the season was spent harping over the fact that Clay was still hung up on his stunning ex-girlfriend Angela. And, let’s be honest, Nicole could do way better than a man-child like Clay who clearly can’t get past his obsession with his own muscles to be able to properly express emotions.

The weird part was that this was the last we heard of Clay and Nicole for the entire three-hour episode. What happened to them, and why weren’t they interesting enough to feature during the live reunion?

Luckily for BiP fans, their expected breakup gave way to three beautiful proposals in later parts of the episode. (Well, mostly beautiful.) Katie and Chris had ups and downs all season, and even though Chris’ proposal seemed sweet, their engagement clearly hasn’t been a fairytale. But more on that later.

I was personally just dying to see Dylan and Hannah get engaged.  Although their relationship started off rocky with Dylan acting like an obsessed puppy and Hannah eyeing Blake, their relationship blossomed into something truly genuine —  definitely the kind of love that everyone hopes will come out of BiP. While Hannah expressed concern that Dylan had yet to meet her family, that didn’t seem to matter in the end.

Then, fans got to see possibly the most anticipated proposal in BiP history: Demi and Kristian.  Demi, a fan favorite from Colton’s season, came on the show looking for love but soon realized that she couldn’t get the woman she left behind off her mind.  So, in true BiP fashion, Chris Harrison brought Demi’s boo, Kristian, onto the beach so they could further explore their relationship.

BiP received a lot of backlash for this relationship, most because people believed the franchise was capitalizing on the queer community.  Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand this argument and agree with it for the most part. But I personally think BiP did a fantastic job normalizing same-sex relationships and showing some of the difficulties the LGBTQ+ community faces. Plus, Demi and Kristian are just too cute for words, so I have to support it. 

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Moving away from Demi and Kristian, we finally got to see a showdown between Blake and Caelynn that was one for the books. When the season started off, Caelynn accused Blake of sweet-talking her into sleeping with him at Stagecoach and then “silencing” her afterward by saying that she couldn’t tell anyone what happened.

I have a lot of feelings about this drama. First of all, Blake might not be the best guy around, but is it really that bad that he slept with multiple people at Stagecoach? Second of all, I think Blake had every right to defend himself because Caelynn’s allegations were pretty serious.  Maybe he shouldn’t have revealed their private text messages, but if that’s the only way he could prove that he isn’t a bad person, then so be it. The texts are proof that Caelynn was lying, so if anyone is in the wrong, it’s her.  

Maybe I’m just biased because I dislike Caelynn. However, it does make me really happy to see her and Dean thriving together. Traveling the world in a van sounds ideal to me, so I definitely wish them the best moving forward. 

Now, back to Chris and Katie.  Katie sat down to talk to Chris Harrison and tearfully discussed how she couldn’t even tell if her fiancé Chris liked her anymore. Plus, she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring. Yikes. After a heart-wrenching conversation between Chris and Katie, they decided to stay together and work it out. How do I tell Katie that she could do better?

Once all the drama was over and my glass of wine was empty, the season ended with the extremely unsurprising reveal that Pilot Peter is the next Bachelor. 

While I’m not exactly excited that it’s Peter, I’ll still watch his season with the same passion that I’ve watched every other season. After all, there’s nothing that makes me feel better about myself than watching other people make a fool out of themselves in their failed – though sometimes successful – attempts to find love on reality TV.

Cover photo courtesy of Wikipedia