SPOILER ALERT: major, major spoilers for the finale of The Bachelor to follow. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know.
Every season – heck, every week – producers of The Bachelor promise viewers the Most! Shocking! Rose! Ceremony! Ever! It's gotten to the point that the show has become the bachelor who cried wolf - but it appears that, this time, they may be telling the truth.
Bachelor executive producer Mike Fleiss has been promoting this season's finale like crazy, promising an ending like no one's ever seen before. It's so shocking, he says, that they actually filmed a second "After the Final Rose" special, sending fans of the show into speculation overdrive. But reality TV blogger Steve Carbone has reportedly uncovered what went down and, ooh, it's a doozy.
Are you ready? Here we go:
In the finale, Carbone says, bachelor Jason Mesnick decides to break up with Molly Malaney; he then proposes to fan favourite Melissa Rycroft, who happily accepts. Kisses and romance and eternal happiness to follow, right?
Except… not so much. In the first "After the Final Rose" special, filmed several weeks after the proposal, Mesnick then breaks up with Rycroft and begins dating Malaney again. Yikes. It's a harsh enough move, but to do it on national television moves it right into "jerkwad" territory.
But that's not all. Sources close to the show told Carbone that Mesnick had always planned to pick Malaney, but producers convinced him to go through with proposing to and then dumping Rycroft for the sake of ratings.
"ABC will present this whole scenario as Jason just changed his mind after thinking this over long and hard. I'm here to tell you I have every reason to believe he didn't," Carbone wrote on his blog. "This was all set in motion from the very beginning that there would be a storyline of: 'If you want to be with Molly, then you have to pick Melissa. We will have a breakup on the "ATFR," where you'll dump Melissa, and say you want to start dating Molly.'"
The second "After the Rose" ceremony is assumed to be an update on Mesnick's new relationship with Malaney.
ABC has refused to comment on the reports, but Carbone claims to have obtained email correspondence between Mesnick and Rycroft that took place after their breakup. In the emails, Carbone says, it becomes clear that Rycroft had no idea about the plan and that Mesnick had simply gone along with the producers' wishes.
If it's true, it's a pretty butthead move for Mesnick, who was dumped by DeAnna Pappas in the season finale of The Bachelorette. But hey, Rycroft may be heartbroken and humiliated, but at least ABC won't need to look far for their star of the next Bachelorette.
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