Well, things really have really taken a turn on The Bachelor. Last week's show ended with a teary Sarah defending herself to Clayton after Mara told him she wasn't ready for marriage. This week, Sarah is very quickly outed as a villain, who has been secretly manipulating all of Clayton's frontrunners into thinking they should just leave the show. Then she's sent home when Clayton realizes she's crying without tears. And that's all thanks to an Austrian psychoanalyst and fellow contestants successfully unionizing. So, yeah, a lot happened.
During this week's group date, Clayton takes five of the women—Genevieve, Sarah, Teddi, Gabby, and Rachel—to see a psychoanalyst in Vienna, where they're staying. Because, hey, what better way to find out who you should take to the hometown portion of your reality dating show than by having a professional check' em out. Genevieve, who does not want to be analyzed by a professional on national television, because that's weird and she hasn't even had a one-on-one date, is let go by Clayton pretty quickly. Their connection wasn't there. This was inevitable.
Everyone else opens up to the psychoanalyst about their relationship with Clayton and how they're feeling. While Sarah is with the therapist, the three other women talk about how they've all separately come to the conclusion that Sarah has been manipulating them for weeks by telling them "intimate details" of her own relationship with Clayton. They say this has made them feel like they have no point to continue with the show, because Sarah has made it sound like Clayton's already choosing her. Basically, the entire time we were focused on Shanae and her shrimp, Sarah has been a secret villain!
At the end of the session, the therapist tells the group that one woman was being "performative." During the evening part of the date, Clayton is determined to find out who the therapist was talking about. Teddi, Rachel, and Gabby all admit to Clayton that Sarah made them doubt their own relationship with him and consider self-eliminating, because of the information she was planting in their heads.
So, Clayton confronts Sarah, who gets choked up (or, "gets choked up," I guess) and defends herself at length. But while her voice is breaking as if she's crying, no tears come out. "I’m just going to be real with you, like, it really felt like you were trying to fake cry to me," Clayton says when she stops talking. This is the guy who kept Shanae for such a long time despite multiple warnings, so this level of confrontation is shocking from him. Sarah responds that she has "no tears left" as if that's a real thing and not an idiom. And with that, Sarah's dunzo. "I'm sorry, but I just don’t believe you, and I think we’re done," Clayton says. "I just cant move forward with you."
In the car ride away, Sarah denies that she was manipulating the others and says that she wouldn't even want to be with Clayton if he believed that.
It's hard to know exactly what went on here since so much of it happened off-camera. On the one hand: Teddi, Rachel, and Gabby seem trustworthy, Sarah did cry without tears, and a psychoanalyst said she wasn't honest. (That's a lot of evidence!) On the other: Maybe Sarah really was just bragging about her own relationship with Clayton, but not purposely trying to destroy her fellow contestants psychologically. Because that's too wild, right? Right?! Either way, she goes down in Bachelor history as one of the most short-lived and intriguing villains ever. If the entirety of The Women Tell All is about this, that would be just fine.
Image: ABC