Then Chris Harrison comes out to talk to Brad, who talks about how undeserving he is to have all these beautiful women here. Harrison asks if his wife is among them, and Brad says she "absolutely" is.

Cocktail party! The woman are skeptical, despite Brad being "smoking hot." "If he doesn't get a wife this time, he's going to have to go in a cave," says ... look, it's not like I'm going to know their names already. Let's just say it's "Keltie," because who knows how long I'll get to mock that name?

Outside, Harrison and Brad are flirting with each other while they talk about the first-impression rose, and then Womack heads inside to the cheers and toasts of the bubbleheads inside. For some reason, being greeted by unconditional adulation makes him nervous. He thanks them for being here, and then he rehashes the beaten-dead-horse of his previous season, and assures them that he wouldn't put himself or them through this if he weren't here for "the right reasons," and the constant abuse of that phrase has ruined an otherwise amazing Jayhawks song for me. And he gives all of them the chance to leave if they're doubtful of him and of course no one does because we have the usual gang of idiots competing. And then he leads the women in a toast, and we get yet another woman expressing her skepticism, and then another.

And then there is a woman making crazy eyes at him as she tries to make him promise that he's not going to break her heart or whatever, and he says something about a "life lesson," and then there are women talking about whether he is ready to commit, and now he says "soul-searching" again, and this is unbelievably tedious. It's the same stuff over and over and over again in an endless loop. It's kind of like a montage in a movie of events that happen over several months, only this is just the same cocktail party. The overall impression is that this show is trying to beat its audience into submission. Brad tells us that the women are not pulling a single punch. Yeah, it's like the fucking Nuremberg trials in there, you poor baby. He whines about being through the wringer and how he's terrified, and it takes a million years before we get a commercial break.