overnights

Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After? Finale Recap: Bachelor/ette

Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?

What Happens in Vegas…
Season 1 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating 1 stars
BEN HIGGINS

Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After?

What Happens in Vegas…
Season 1 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating 1 stars
Ben Higgins. Photo: Ronda Churchill/Freeform

Have you ever wanted to watch the same 20 people have the same conversation six times? Then boy, do I have the season finale for you!

The time has come for this funeral dirge for a relationship between two pale-faced simpletons to end. This season, we got to watch a blonde woman realize she hates her fiancé as all of her dreams fell apart. Nickname TBD is the Betty Draper of her time, but instead of realizing that her partner was a massive liar, she just realized that her fiancé was kinda dopey. Nothing he said ever excited her. She was ready to get married and have babies because that’s what you do. That’s what good women do. Oatmeal seemed like he could provide her a life she could only dream of. You know, jet-setting off to Pig Island and Indiana. But O! O, how little she knew. Oatmeal was just a dude. He was just some dude who lived in a house and had a job.

So what are we left with? How must we feel after watching this woman slowly learn to despise her fiancé? What can we hold on to as we hurtle through space toward an uncertain future?

A fucking Las Vegas bachelor/bachelorette party.

Oatmeal and his non-bride are riding in an Uber toward Sin City for their combined bachelor/ette party weekend. They love the Vegas sunshine and they’re going to celebrate their … wait, what are they celebrating? They haven’t told their friends that they’ve called off the wedding, and I guess all those deposits on the suites and activities were non-refundable, so they’re just going through with the party. In an Uber with the most patient woman driver in history, Nickname TBD reveals that she was held overnight in a jail cell at a music festival. Thoughts on what she was caught doing? My bet is she talked back to a police officer when she tried to bring in those hair-growth gummies and they thought they were THC gummies. Oatmeal reveals that all the testicle surgeries he had as a teen might have left him infertile.

He asks Nickname TBD: On the first night of the The Bachelor, would she have stayed if he told her that he might not be able to have kids? She answers with a shrug and goes “Ehhhhhh, I don’t know. Would have sped the whole process along.” I mean, that’s a fair answer. Totally fair, but a shrug in the backseat of an Uber from the airport? Yikes.

They’re staying at the MGM Grand. Promotional materials provided by the MGM Grand. They go upstairs to their suite provided by the MGM Grand to meet 20 of their friends and family and ABC-mandated acquaintances. They’re going to play a fun party game where one person is a werewolf, one person is the wizard, two people called off their wedding, and everyone has to figure out who is who! The Twins kept trying to drop hints to reveal that Oatmeal and Nickname TBD called off their wedding, but dropping hints requires a cunning and a wit that The Twins just ain’t got. Instead, they just keep saying, “I think they’re calling the wedding off?” and looking around as if a ghost really said it, like, “Oh weird, who said that?”

Also, would it kill these people to make a goddamn brown friend? Twenty of their closest friends and it looks like the crowd at a Maroon 5 concert. Christ.

The first activity for the guys? A FERTILITY TEST. A nurse comes in with a bunch of sample cups and tells the men to MASTURBATE into the cups and takes them away to be tested. While that happened, Freeform played a really gross montage of hoses, bottles of Champagne popping, sausages being stuffed, and hands rubbing seasoning on a hunk of meat. Let me repeat what happened here: A group of men at a bachelor party decided that to get their night started off right, they should all go into the bathrooms and bedrooms in a hotel suite and masturbate while a bunch of other men waited. Is this what white men do when they’re left alone? Is this what we have to look forward to during the Trump presidency? Mitt Romney forced to prove his virility before being offered a cabinet position?

This is a weird party.

Two parties sprawl across the MGM Grand and Las Vegas. The girls party by the completely empty pool. The guys do a whiskey tasting. The guys go play golf. The girls head to the spa. This episode manages to do something that almost no piece of media has ever managed to do: It makes Las Vegas look boring. My actual real-life boyfriend (hey bae) grew up in Las Vegas. He couldn’t believe that these two groups of people managed to have a mediocre time there. I understand that it’s Freeform (formerly ABC Family) so they couldn’t get wild and go to a strip club, but c’mon. They didn’t have a rollicking wild time that only happens in Vegas. They basically had a really good day off in Myrtle Beach. They do know there’s fun stuff to do in Vegas. They could, like, touch a dolphin if they wanted to. If you told me they went to the Disney Boardwalk for their bachelor/ette party, I would believe you. They do almost nothing that’s Vegas-specific. Also, they missed a branding opportunity to have the fertility specialist be Evan.

Instead of anything fun, they all sat at tables and talked about Oatmeal and Nickname TBD’s relationship. Tanner is at the bachelor party and instead of being a charming scamp, he manages to shit on Oatmeal and Nickname TBD by comparing their relationship to his and Jade’s. If you have any doubts as a couple, he says, you’re doomed. Meanwhile, Nickname’s bland blonde friend tells her that she’s the most level person she knows. I think her friend has confused “being devoid of human emotion and empathy” with being “level-headed.”

Eventually, Oatmeal and Nickname TBD tell their friends that the wedding is off and everyone does a collective shrug. Well, so much for a dramatic moment. Instead, one of Oatmeal’s friends — let’s call him Chet because even if that’s not his name it’s close and you know it — says that it’s time for their last surprise. If you’re at a bachelor party and your friends say they have “one more surprise” and it’s not hookers or a rare drug imported from Qatar, you’re at a shitty bachelor party. Nickname TBD’s friends tell her the same thing and they march her out to the strip to watch a montage of her and Oatmeal’s relationship on the big screen in front of the MGM Grand.

A couple things: There’s no sound on those big screens, so they were watching a silent montage. Also, IT WAS FOOTAGE FROM THIS SEASON. There’s no way that stuff was on the screen. So Oatmeal and Nickname TBD were probably staring at a blank screen or, best-case scenario, a slideshow of themselves and ABC told them to look thoughtful.

This is a very weird party.

The night ends with everyone dancing in a club while our couple promises to keep working on their relationship. Oh, and Oatmeal finds out he’s not infertile. At least something in this relationship is viable.

Too mean?

Ben & Lauren Finale Recap: Bachelor/ette