The Bachelor Recap: Sex Panthers, Twin Tears & Olivia Loses Her Funkadelic Mind

Did we just witness the downfall of a news anchor or the birth of a star?

By Lauren Piester Jan 26, 2016 4:16 AMTags
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What a roller coaster of an episode!

Things were up, they were down, they were hot, they were cold. It was like an actual Katy Perry song, complete with unexpected comparisons to jungle cats.

For a minute there, we thought we were about to witness the quickest downfall in recent Bachelor history, and we do think we saw the beginning of it. Olivia has revealed herself to be one hell of an insecure mess in a way that we only partly feel OK making fun of her for.

Basically, we need the women on The Bachelor to stop being sympathetic humans because it's so hard to make jokes when we totally get what they're feeling.   

Like Lace's desperate creepiness that was just covering up some severely low self-esteem, Olivia seems to have developed a level of extra-extreme confidence to mask her own insecurities. Last week, she cried about cankles and blogs and toes and legs like a woman in the vaguely public eye (she's a news anchor, remember) who's had to deal with a lot of awful crap from internet commenters. She felt great about popping out of a cake wearing nothing more than a lot of red sequins, but when nobody praised her for being brave or even slightly skilled at popping out of a cake wearing red sequins, she went into total breakdown mode.

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The night's big group date was bit of a mess as a whole bunch of the women displayed their greatest talents on a Las Vegas stage. Jubilee played the cello pretty well, and Haley and Emily did a pretty skilled River Dance routine, while other girls dressed like clowns or chickens and jumped on pogo sticks and juggled and generally lost their minds.

The date got kind of derailed when Olivia ended up in a panic attack (that didn't even sort of rival Kelsey's panic attack from last season), but it could have been a fun time.

After the date, the women had a little bit of time to talk to Ben. He described Caila as a "tigress, like a sex panther" and got incredibly distracted by the cute little face of Lauren B, who then got the date rose.

Becca's date was up next, and it was a little different. First, Becca had to put on a full wedding dress so Ben could get down on one knee and ask if she'd like to help him marry some other people. Ben had apparently gotten ordained, so he and Becca performed a few quickie marriages in a little chapel.

Afterwards, they visited a neon museum, and Ben had a lot of questions for and about Becca.

"Can she love? Can she feel?" he wondered. Later, he told her, "It's good to feel. I want you to feel."

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After engaging in some real talk with mom, Ben decided that Haley was the one to be eliminated, and she and Emily both cried about it. We should have known this would be the end of at least one of the twins, since they were featured earlier in the episode walking on the same treadmill at the same time, to show how creepily close they are.

At the rose ceremony, Amber and Rachel were sent home, which made sense given the fact that we don't remember hearing Rachel speak, and Amber really showed an ugly side last week with Jubilee.

One thing that we're absolutely sure of as of this week is that Ben might be the most thoughtful Bachelor ever. He's got something nice and constructive to say to every woman, no matter how erratic they're acting, and he probably did the smartest possible thing when it came to genuinely considering the twins and not treating them as a novelty (like they've kind of done to themselves a bit by not even trying to distinguish themselves from one another).

Either he's doing this exactly right, or he's a bit of a methodical psychopath. Or both. Maybe you have to be both to survive this show? We may never actually know.

The Bachelor airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on ABC.

Watch: 'Perfect' Ben Higgins Finally Reveals His Bad Boy Side

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