The Bachelor Revived The Two-On-One Date & It Went As Poorly As You’d Imagine

After two seasons free from them, the dreaded two-on-one date is back on Peter Weber's Bachelor season. Even worse? It was a surprise, mid-cocktail party two-on-one. Mykenna Dorn and Tammy Ly were chosen for the dreaded, cruel date because they're the latest two women in the house to bicker and a two-on-one exists solely to pit contestants against each other in order to create a big final blowout. Great.

The cruellest twist of this date format is that one of the contestants is guaranteed to go home. And while the drama they create can be "iconic" as ABC’s Vice President of Alternative Programming Rob Mills once put it on the Bachelor Party podcast, it's never very much fun for us to actually watch. Yes, The Bachelor is inherently about women competing against each other for the affection of one man — a truth most female fans have trouble wrestling with — but the two-on-one is the absolute worst display of that.

The past two seasons of The Bachelor and Bachelorette with Colton Underwood and Hannah Brown, respectively, didn't have two-on-one dates. It seemed like maybe, just maybe the franchise was stepping away from them. But apparently, the show was just waiting for the right contestants to force into a face-off. Having producer-fed drama with another contestant is almost a guaranteed way of getting sent on the two-on-one, so Tammy and Mykenna never stood a chance. It happened to Ashley Iaconetti and Kelsey Poe on Chris Soules' season, during which Ashley was left sobbing in the desert. It happened on Ben Higgins' season with Olivia Caridi and Emily Ferguson and ended with Olivia left on the island while the Bachelor sailed off. Now that Tammy's come after Mykenna for her age and supposedly being too into hashtags (a real accusation that happened on this show), the producers and Peter, who seemed almost eager to mediate the drama, pitted them against each other even more dramatically by bringing back a surprise, last minute two-on-one. Tammy was eliminated, and Mykenna got to stay, only to be asked to sit through a rose ceremony in which she was not chosen.

Even more frustrating is the fact that Mykenna already tried to remove herself from the ongoing argument and the emergence of date effectively took away the agency she displayed by forcing her back into the situation. During the initial confrontation, after Tammy called Mykenna "immature" and told her "you act like a child," Mykenna got up and left the room, refusing to further engage. "I wasn’t going to allow her to take me down," Mykenna explained in a confessional.

Instead, Mykenna had to work to prove herself to Peter and defend herself against a slew of accusations — the exact thing she was hoping to escape. It's an icky situation all around, and it only made a tough episode that much harder to watch. Before the two-on-one even occurred, Peter had already questioned Hannah Ann Sluss' qualifications to be in a real relationship simply because she hadn't been in love before, and he badgered Victoria Fuller when she questioned her feelings for him. And all of this is happening just two days and one episode after Tammy shamed Kelsey Weier for her drinking habits and called her mental health into question.

It's been a pretty gross season to watch on many levels. There's really no one to root for, not even Peter. And now we've suffered through a contrived date created specifically to cause further damage to two women, one of whom continually asked to remove herself from the situation. Absolutely nothing is okay right now.