Jo Thornely recaps The Bachelor 2016 episode 15: the final three

DESPITE having no success for the past two months, Olena finally got Bachelor Richie to take the hint. Here’s how it went down.

Roses are red,

Surfing is gnarly;

Predictable outcomes

Can happen in Bali.

We’re almost there. We’ve come so far. There have been so many ups and downs in this romantic whirlwind, but some things have remained comfortingly familiar.

Richie still works out in the morning.

This move is called ‘The Intense Up Yours’

Nikki is still adorable.

Alex is still a busy mum.

And Olena is still here, despite her increasingly robust attempts to get herself eliminated. Her new single Hey Remember When My Dad Punched You is available now on iTunes.

Before we even have time for a sweeping shot of Sydney Harbour or a scripted empty cup of tea in the Womansion kitchen, Richie’s hopped a plane to Indonesia. We suddenly have to get used to a whole new bunch of establishing shots, like this one of Richie enjoying a healthy snack.

Oooh, girls love stubble

Wistfully, Alex waits wistfully for him, having applied her wistful face as she looks wistfully into the wistance.

Ooooh, men love a quick wisty.

Richie, having mastered the Indonesian word for “ha ha”, takes Alex for her first drive around Bali. Alex helps him drive past a very big statue. “It’s massive!” she cries.

Just don’t put it in reverse, love.

Having not quite mastered the Indonesian word for “Ubud”, the couple swap transportation methods for a bike ride through rice paddies in search of something they can use as a couch. Finding a suitable mound of earth, they settle in for a conversation full of words and sentences selected carefully from every conversation they’ve had before. They talk for a while, but I’ve consulted some social anthropology specialists and summed up the conversation below:

Save for future reference.

“Every time I’m with him I feel like the only woman on the planet” says Alex, in an island nation with a population of over 200 million.

“That I’m the most beautiful woman in the world” says Alex, grandly disrespecting her fellow contestants.

“And that I deserve the world” says Alex, with a sudden surge of megalomania.

At the very least though, she deserves a pash in a wet paddock.

Bags not eating any of the rice within a one-metre radius

Realising that Alex hasn’t used up her stash of I Wuv You and OMG You’re So Funny faces, the pair repeats the entire conversation again on a different couch, overlooking a leafy valley, with champagne.

Also Alex has a son. Just. You know. In case you forgot.

The next day Richie meets up with Nikki, and look I’m not saying that she’s the favourite or anything, but he doesn’t just take her into the middle of a sodden field to sit on a lump. Oh no.

THEY TOTALLY GO IN THE SKY AND EVERYTHING

After a frankly delightful beach pash, the couch section of Richie and Nikki’s date involves hand-holding, drinks, and a dude called Bruno lighting a blessing on fire.

Here’s to a long life full of dudes called Bruno.

“In the deepest depths of my imagination U couldn’t have even dreamt of him, y’know?” says Nikki, causing deep concern for the very terrible state of her imagination. She talks about how excited she is about her and Richie being a team, and he says they fit together so well and he could just slot into the family at Christmas time, and oh my GOD just pick her already, Rich. You just KNOW she’s the only girl who brought an extra tube of sunburn cream for you in her handbag.

We haven’t completely blown the playsuit and violin-heavy music budget yet though, as Richie picks Olena up in a motorbike sidecar to take her surfing.

Despite having no success for the past two months, Olena continues to try everything she can to turn Richie off.

She hints that her mother has concerns about them ending up together while they wax a surfboard (the Indonesian Tourism Board suggests strongly that this is the best time to do that).

She doesn’t even attempt to stand up on her surfboard, dashing Richie’s hope that she’d bust out a goofy-footed aerial.

In Ukraine we do not cowabunga, dude.

Back on the beach, Olena slugs wine as she tells Richie that her mother and father aren’t all that cool with the idea of the two of them getting together.

Look at the love just oozing out of this picture.

She refers to their situation as “a huge mess” and says she’s “trying to figure out if I’m going to be happy at the end of the day”, both such typical statements for the swooning young debutante in the passionate throes of new love.

As evening falls, while they eat an extremely ill-advised outdoor tropical heat cheese platter, Richie wonders aloud if he’ll be a bald 50-year-old still trying to figure out how Olena feels about him. He tells her he’s starting to become frustrated. She uses the word “hassle” and makes this face.

That lukewarm triple-cream brie isn’t sitting well at ALL.

They spend the entire date gently arguing. “OIena’s incredibly hard to read” says Richie, not understanding a bold, italic, underlined, mutual nope.

Look, if there’s one thing we’ve definitely learned from watching these three dates, it’s that Richie’s hair did not look good in any of them.

Finally we make our way into what we suspect will be the most predictable rose ceremony of the last three hundred episodes.

See no natural fibres, hear no natural fibres, speak no natural fibres

Nikki’s emotional voice-over mentions the word “love”.

Alex’s emotional voice-over mentions the word “love”.

Olena’s voice-over includes the phrase “I got everything off my chest”.

Osher enters, sweating in a converted Balinese-canoe suit, and justifies his airfare by briefly introducing Richie and using the word “journey”.

Richie’s emotional voice-over includes the phrase “The decision I have to make is not a difficult one” while acting like someone who has a difficult decision to make.

Dear God, please make this decision extremely predictable.

Richie takes three minutes to deliver the first rose to Nikki. There are long shots of people being quite tense. There are staccato strings. There is a moment when we realise that Alex’s underpants are one hundred per cent visible through her skirt. And then, in a decision easily seen from a lead-lined suitcase hidden under a burnt-out car chassis in the Tanami Desert, Olena is sent home.

This face is the Ukrainian word for ‘duh’.

Bye, Olena. We’ll miss your mystery, and your hotness, and your mysterious hotness, and your hot mystery. We’ll miss how you rhymed “crazy ride” with “by my side” in your last hot, mysterious words to Richie.

We’ll miss how Richie totally dissed you by saying “saying goodbye to Olena wasn’t that difficult”.

And we’ll miss how long it took us to realise that you like tennis.

Jo Thornely doesn’t get enough attention at her day job, so she writes for various outlets, takes up way too much bandwidth on the internet, and loves it when you explain her jokes back to her on Twitter. Follow her @JoThornely or check out her Bachelor podcast.