The ‘Bachelor’ Recap: Christina Mandrell Is Confused
Tackle football returns, Zach and Aly turn skydiving into an obvious metaphor for love, and a raging case of main character syndrome disrupts a pool party
This is exactly why boring leads matter. Zach can just sit back, relax, and let the Christina Mandrells of the world shine—or self-destruct on a Spanish tile staircase worn bare by the brokenhearted footsteps of literally thousands of young, hopeful charcoal toothpaste influencers over two-plus decades of The Bachelor. Whichever comes first.
It’s impossible to enjoy watching The Bachelor without taking some amount of pleasure in embarrassing displays of human behavior, and Episode 3 of Zach Shallcross’s season was a veritable feast of embarrassment. Mostly at the hands of Christina Mandrell’s raging case of main character syndrome, but everyone on-screen takes their share of the pie at some point. For example, all of these women repeatedly elongate Zach’s name to “Zachary” in their attempts to flirt with him, which feels a lot like the adult version of stealing a boy’s hat in middle school. Which is to say: embarrassing but effective.
Less effective are Zach’s somehow increasingly frequent proclamations that he has come to the Bachelor franchise not just in search of a wife, but in search of a best friend. With each new time he says it, it feels less and less like he’s equating a wife with a best friend and more like he’s just really interested in the idea of having a friend at all. After exiting his third mandatory filmed shower in as many episodes, Zach announces to no one in particular that he “needs to give his friend a call,” at which point he dials up Sean Lowe—a man he has only feasibly known for weeks at this point—for the second time this season to talk about his dating life. And that’s the problem with waiting to find your best friend until you find your wife: You have no one to talk about finding your wife with except your sort of loosely associated coworker who clearly hasn’t even sprung for the fiber internet package to accommodate all your FaceTiming needs. Zach is Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man, and if we don’t get a Jason Segel in here to slap the bass with him soon, I’m concerned that Sean Lowe is going to have to file a 1099 for the amount of work he’s putting in this season.
But, of course, all of those concerns pale in comparison to whatever is going on with Christina Mandrell in this episode …
Christina Mandrell is the living embodiment of that feeling at a concert where you’re like, “Wait. … Out of the thousands of people here, is this guitar player falling in love with me right now?” Then you snap out of it because that’s absurd, and the lighting situation in this venue wouldn’t even allow it. But Christina Mandrell has never snapped out of anything—she is never not making eyes at a metaphorical drummer. And truly, what else could explain what’s happening here?
When I filled in on recapping Zach’s premiere episode, I found myself with hundreds of screenshots of Christina’s face during the group gatherings but had nothing to do with them because she was ultimately pretty inconsequential to the premiere’s story line. But now I understand why I was so fascinated with how she was behaving in these group settings: because first-name Christina, last-name Mandrell thinks she’s been starring in her own show this entire time, and everyone else—even Zach!—is an unpaid extra, just happy to get some experience and access to craft services.
She spends this entire episode talking about how she’s the only person who’s been on a one-on-one so far. She doesn’t even know what a group-date rose looks like. Are they different than one-on-one roses? Are they uglier? Are they made of garbage? Sharp metal and sticks?
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And good for Christina Mandrell, I guess! The blissfully unaware way she walks through life feels almost aspirational … riiight up until the moment that all the bit-role players in her movie betray her and she finds herself sobbing atop various surfaces in the Bachelor mansion.
Night at the Abstinence Museum
The first one-on-one date that is not Christina Mandrell’s one-on-one date from last week goes to Kaity, who is—my guess—Zach’s future best friend, if not his future beloved. She is gorgeous, she is a nurse, she is giggly as hell, and he just gave her an amazing date: a night alone in a natural history museum. You better believe someone is touching a T. rex rib.
I have yet to enter a museum in the last 20 years without thinking, “OK, but what if I Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’ed this joint right now?” and if Zach gave me that opportunity, hey, I just might fall in love with him too. That’s exactly what seems to be happening with Kaity as she wanders the museum’s halls with Zach, pointing at some dinosaur bones and telling him confidently, “The long necks are the really friendly ones.” (This is information she absolutely got from The Land Before Time, and I’m fine with that because she’s right, and she should say it.) Kaity says she has never done anything romantic in her life, and now, after being presented with all these kindly dinosaurs, she is absolutely brimming with voice-quavering gratitude toward Zach.
Over dinner, Zach tells Kaity that—and you’ll never believe this—he’s looking for his best friend, and he wonders what she’s looking for in a potential partner. Kaity says she was in an on-again, off-again toxic relationship for seven years, and now she’s looking for “just the basics … a man to treat me right.” This seems to break Zach’s little robot heart, and he tells her that she deserves way more than just the basics; she deserves five-star dates with dinosaur bones and invitations to spend the night together.
Sorry, roll that back. Did Zach just ask this woman to spend the night on the first date, and without even the assistance of a Jesse Palmer–penned note? Yes he did! And yes, Kaity did accept the invitation without hesitation! But don’t worry—Zach and Kaity’s night-at-the-museum setup is ultimately revealed to include matching dinosaur pajama sets and two twin beds, continuing the general theme of this season, which I would define as: “Absolutely no one fucks.”
Bachelor Bowl V
When Jesse Palmer announced that the group date would be Bachelor Bowl V, I said out loud, “There have been five of these?!” Apparently, yes: The preceding Bachelor Bowls were on JoJo’s season, Becca’s season, Colton’s season, and Clayton’s season. Per my recollection, they all went terribly, because asking a bunch of people with CrossFit muscles but no idea what to actually do with them to play full-contact football is a really bad idea ...
But physically speaking, the date actually goes fine. Sure, Genevie has an arm sling on at the rose ceremony, but apparently that doesn’t need explanation. There’s too much going on at the group date after-party, where only the winning blue team (chosen name: the Ball Zachs) gets to attend. This includes Christina Mandrell, who throws her legs over Zach the moment they sit down because they are boyfriend and girlfriend, and if this man wore a hat, she would absolutely steal it. Christina Mandrell tells Zach that her favorite part of winning was the feeling of being included in the group and then immediately walks back out to said group and starts talking about how much more special her connection with Zach is because she had a one-on-one. She asks how everyone feels about the group-date rose, and when they kind of shrug it off, she says, “Oh, it’s just that I haven’t been on a group date yet, so I don’t know how it feels!”
This woman did a semester abroad in Paris, and now she’s wearing little neckerchiefs and acting like she has dual citizenship—it is so embarrassing. Way more embarrassing than what happens with Bailey (Bailen), which I actually love, when she approaches Zach and says she weirdly feels like their relationship has been regressing since the first night when he kissed her, and Zach is like, “I totally agree. Let me give you a big hug and walk you to your car.” Honest communication—what a wonder! I mean, Bailey doesn’t love it, seeming to think that she’d get some validation from Zach instead. But it also didn’t seem like she liked Zach all that much, and you know what they say: “In the morning … Bailen.”
After Bailey’s departure, Zach solemnly approaches the remaining women and gives the rose to Charity, a gorgeous, giggly children’s therapist who he seems fully obsessed with. But something about that is not clicking with Christina Mandrell. The thing that’s not clicking is that Charity isn’t her, and it’s a mathematical impossibility for anyone to be obsessed with someone other than Christina Mandrell when Christina Mandrell is listed quite clearly at the top of her own IMDb page. As the other women congratulate Charity, Christina Mandrell says, “I’m confused,” at increasing volumes until the group finally has to acknowledge her. When Charity asks if she did something to confuse Christina Mandrell, Christina Mandrell says no, it just seems weird that she didn’t get the group-date rose: “I mean, duh.”
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of women announce that they’re not here to make friends (something Christina Mandrell also says in this episode) and seen a few women be rude after not getting the group-date rose, but I’ve never seen someone look another woman in the eye and tell them it is illogical—incomprehensible!—that they would have gotten the rose. After Charity starts crying and the other women point out that Christina Mandrell manages to make every situation about herself, Christina Mandrell asks, even more confused: “Would it be better for me to not be truthful?”
The answer is, of course, yes—you do not have to say every single thing you think out loud, especially when someone is crying. Or as Brooklyn puts it more succinctly:
All the Pretty Girls Fly Like This
We probably don’t even have to discuss Aly’s one-on-one date because it was such straight-down-the-line Bachelor fodder that the same AI bot that wrote Zach likely created it. Zach and Aly went skydiving, they made analogies about skydiving being just like love, and then they drank wine in a freestanding wooden hot tub where there’s nothing to do but make out. But, Aly did create one of my favorite moments in recent Bachelor history when Zach attempted to compliment her for how confident she is, and she basically replied, “Lol, that is an act I have carefully cultivated for your benefit.”
What she really says is, “I fool a lot of people,” and she then explains, with the help of what sounded like years in therapy, that she attempts to control her own circumstances in order to avoid pain, but during their skydiving date, she was unable to do that, and yet she still felt safe with Zach. And now that I’ve heard that word mentioned on every single one of Zach’s one-on-one dates, the appeal is finally becoming clearer: Zach is safe. I’m still unclear on why they make him film all of his showers, though. That does not make me feel safe.
Help Me, Help Me, Help Me
There are a lot of nonsensical things said in this episode of The Bachelor, but perhaps nothing is as preposterous as Jesse marching into the mansion and happily announcing that they won’t be having a cocktail party tonight, but “The good news is that Zach wants to have a pool party.” First of all, no one over the age of 16 should be saying “pool party” with that much glee in their voice. Second of all, there has never, in the history of the Bachelor franchise, been a successful pool party, and these women should know that. Everyone is all too happy to get sun-drunk, let their guard down, and become just relaxed enough to forget that they’re actually participating in competitions from Squid Game, and Zach is that giant doll moments away from blinking them to death (in this case, death is being eliminated before hitting a six-digit Instagram follower count).
At this particular pool party, Brianna is slowly unraveling while everyone else is hot-tubbing and chicken fighting. It’s not just that Brianna thinks Zach might not like her, as she did last week; now, she’s realizing she probably doesn’t like him that much either. Brianna pulls Zach aside and tells him that she doesn’t think their connection is there, to which he once again replies with a nonplussed “Totally agree. Let’s get you into that nice, warm SUV, sweetheart.” But Brianna isn’t quite done—on her way out, she’d like to throw one large grenade into Zach’s fun little pool party. She tells him that there’s one woman in the house who is purposely making other people uncomfortable and making them feel like they can’t open themselves up to him. I don’t know if I totally understand that last part, but I do know that Brianna throwing Christina Mandrell under the bus is a net positive because …
It results in a physical comedy for the ages. Christina Mandrell is the Lucille Ball of tossing herself around on staircases. When Zach confronts her about what’s been going on in the house, she throws herself onto the steps outside and begs him to believe that it’s all just a misunderstanding. When he says he needs to take some time to think through everything, she absconds to a second staircase to weep over the plight of being misunderstood by people who have very specifically told her how her actions are being perceived on multiple occasions. Finally, Christina simply collapses onto the floor like a rag doll so that when the women come inside to get ready for the rose ceremony, they have no choice but to step over her or stop and see if she’s OK.
All the world is a fainting couch to Christina Mandrell, and once again, I have to respect the effort of consistently casting herself in the role of Lady Gaga campaigning for an Oscar on this dating game show right down to the bitter end.
Since Zach does most of his eliminations à la carte these days, there’s only one person not receiving a rose at this rose ceremony. And when it all comes down to Christina Mandrell or Mercedes, Christina Mandrell leans over to the person next to her and pitifully says, “Fuuuudge,” attempting to solicit sympathy during this, her time of greatest need. That person? It’s Charity—the woman Christina Mandrell could not believe got the group-date rose over her. Christina Mandrell is unbelievable, and now, she is gone. Though her body language after the rose ceremony suggested that she fully expected Zach to give her a longing, regretful kiss on the mouth on the way out. Never change, Christina Mandrell—we want to see that delusional fighting spirit in Paradise, and we want to see it yesterday.
