Week 8, The Girl

Okay, I admit it. This week was - if not the most dramatic - than certainly the best in many, many years of Bachelor history. Sure, there were hometowns and more than  the requisite amount of Clare and Nikki dithering over their misguided "feeling," but Andi's actions - her post-coital regrets, her manipulative and ultimately awesome video made this whole terrible season totally worthwhile, not just for me, but for the entire franchise.

We all fell a little in love with Andi this week, we peered, fleetingly but magically into the depths of her soul and found it was not wanting. We felt all the feelings for Andi that we now know Juan Pablo is incapable of feeling and our connection with her is now so much stronger than what we have with the other girls. We're ready now, if not to propose, than certainly to make her the next Bachelorette. It was everything we've always wanted out of a night in the fantasy suite, and I am shocked by the depth of the things Andi has taught me about myself. Here's why:

It was Utterly Banal.
So, I'm the first to admit, when it comes to this program, I pretty much crave drama (which is odd as when it comes to my life I pretty much crave sweat pants and avoiding canceling my subscription to Sports Illustrated). I keep my fingers crossed for boyfriends back home; catty bickering makes me squirm with uncomfortable delight, hell, I've even been writing some pretty gruesome fan fiction about Danielle's stint as a black market organ harvester and Cassandra's suspiciously missing kidney (technically fictional fan fiction). So I was surprised to find what delighted me most about Andi's flight was that it was just so normal. It wasn't a mysterious secret that Andi "hid" from the producers from all those tense weeks or a vague and undefinable sense of not being ready. Andi got to know the guy better and figured out her was a bit of an asshole. It's refreshingly relatable to see Andi not only go through something that everyone who has ever dated outside of a John Cougar Mellencamp song has encountered but also to put voice to to what the rest of us were thinking. And as I suspect - given the talent pool they pull from - it's something that happens at least once every season, it was amazing to actually see it play out on screen.

Yes, Nala will choose to forgo her individual room

It was about the Guy, not the Process.
Look, I'm as skeptical about the process as the next guy (it ranks somewhere between people finding gluten-free cupcakes delicious and intelligent life on other planets on my believability scale), but if Andi had gone the route of Brooks before her and had said she just wasn't feeling the love (answering the age old question posed from one young lion to another under the starry Sahara sky), then Juan Pablo wouldn't have gotten the comeuppance that he so richly deserved. I don't think appearing in a TV show that takes a page from bigamy is the best way to find everlasting love, but Andi didn't need to evaluate its potential merits because with Juan Pablo, it would be impossible. Legions of Bachelorettes have shown us that simply wanting it isn't enough. But wanting it enough to make something even resembling an effort is certainly necessary.

It wasn't about Intelligence.
I think it's probably pretty safe to assume that, like Sharleen before her, Andi is smarter than Juan Pablo. However, throughout this season, the language and cultural barriers have acted as something of a shield for the man, making it rather hard to go on the offensive against his relative level of smarts. Though the "default" debate was a bit of a distractor from an otherwise brilliantly executed fight (especially since saying she "barely" made it rather than she made it by "default" is both more accurate and frankly, a bit meaner), for the most part Andi didn't go there. And I think that's pretty great because while it isn't entirely fair to judge a man's intellect in his second langauge, there's no intelligence threshold or baseline verbal SAT score needed  to be a pretty massive dick.

She's Shaped what's Yet to Come:
I don't have a really solid understanding of how The Bachelor works in terms of filming schedules and airing the actual show (and am scared to google it because of stupid Reality Steve's pernicious and spoiler-y presence), so I can't speak with any authority on what ABC knew about how the season's ending when the story of Juan Pablo's homophobia unfolded. But I will say, if they didn't already know about what went down with Andi, didn't set him up themselves as the first yellow brick on the road to dirtbag-dom, than I am certain they must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when they heard the charges Andi brought (also, probably if they could hear the metaphors that I'm mixing given they literally plan at least three dates a season based solely on their love of metaphor and vicious prejudice against subtlety). For ABC, "this guy's a jerk" is a much better storyline than their process just not working and you caould see Chris Harrison set the wheels of the spin machine in motion as he patronized Juan Pablo into understanding the difference between like and love (you film a super awkward ad segment for a movie that no Bachelor-viewer would ever want to watch together and you think you know a guy...). Now, rather than subjecting us to the agonizing proposal that we were never going to believe in anyway, they get to treat us to a finale, the subtext of which will be, could this douchebag actually have the gall to go through with it all (totally kidding - ABC doesn't believe in subtext!)? And rather than air a sheepish mea culpa of a next season with someone lovely and gentle like Renee, they get to return gloriously with a heroic and until-this-week ideally generic Andi.