On every season of The Bachelor, there is a “crazy” contestant. Whether acting of her own accord or (more likely) prodded by invisible producers, she provides the drama for the first few weeks, until the bachelor’s dislike for/fear of her becomes too painfully obvious for even the most optimistic of audience members and he is allowed to send her home. This season, her name is Lace.
Last year on Chris Soules’ season, a woman named Ashley S. spent significant amounts of time slurring and hunting for onions in the courtyard. No one on camera seemed particularly alarmed; I personally wondered if she was being fed psychedelic drugs. Ultimately, the real crazy came from Kelsey, a widowed schoolteacher whose one-liners were easily edited together to make her look downright insane (“Isn’t my story amazing?!” she said of her dead husband.) This season, Lace is less concerned with vegetables or being a widow than with the apparently insurmountable task of controlling her violent id, who is also named Lace.
“It kind of concerns me that Ben didn’t get the first impression of who’s Lace, what’s she really about, and he kind of got a different Lace that I didn’t want him to see,” Lace explained during a group date, regarding that moment during last week’s premiere when she berated Ben for not making eye contact with her during the rose ceremony.
Over the past two episodes, Lace has spent most of her time with Ben apologizing for her behavior and then interrupting him with random, frantic words as he tries to politely respond to her apologies. He loved it! Their group date conversation went like this:
Lace: “I want to apologize for last night. I didn’t mean to come off negative or whatever I came off as, so first and foremost I wanted to say I’m sorry for last night.”
Ben: “Well I appreciate you saying that. I did feel a little bit like I was being attacked, but I also think—”
Lace: “Crazy, right?”
Ben: “Um, well, I just think that as I processed it and thought about it—”
Lace: “I’m glad I’m aware of it!”
Later in the episode, the situation intensified. Everyone who competes on The Bachelor comes armed with a sob story—divorce, single parenthood, a traumatic injury, the death of a close family member, or, in Lace’s case, a bad childhood haircut, which she brought up after a failed interaction in which she responded to Ben’s “This was all overwhelming for me” with “Do you understand that some people get more overwhelmed than the other?”
“I have reasons for why I am the way I am, I have a very bold personality,” Lace informed Ben. “I’m very, you know. I’m a lot to handle. I was very dorky looking when I was a kid, can I tell you one picture? One picture I had these double bangs, my dad was like ‘Roseanne, Roseanna-Danna!’ okay? My brothers on the school bus would be like, ‘Oh, you’re not my sister, I don’t know you’…so, this is a lot for me to tell you right now.”
This didn’t go well. “The insecure Lace came out, and the Lace I promised myself that I would not be came out,” she wept later in an interview, certain—and perhaps, somewhere deep inside, hopeful—that both Lace and Lace would be sent home.
