The Year Bachelor in Paradise Made Constipation Romantic

This season, Bachelor in Paradise has traded “Will they or won’t they?” for a very different high-stakes question: Will Sam poop?

The reality show, currently airing its ninth season, transports single men and women who failed to find their happily ever after on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette to a beach in Mexico, with the goal of finding a new match among the other castoffs. Sam Jeffries, a 28-year-old occupational therapist who originally competed on Clayton Echard’s season of The Bachelor, probably went into the season with normal expectations: Maybe she’d meet someone, or at least increase her Instagram follower count. Instead, she ended up airing her struggle with constipation to the entire country. Coming just weeks after Drake announced that he’s planning to take time away from his music career to focus on his stomach problems, troublesome tummies have never been trendier.

Let me stress that this show is not usually about bodily functions. The show is mostly a scramble among contestants to match up with someone of the opposite sex so that they can receive a rose at a “rose ceremony” and get to stay in paradise another week. Some couples leave engaged, and along the way there are always love triangles and petty dramas. It’s unclear if this poop thing counts as a petty drama, but the producers seemed to know what they had on their hands, because the show has been teasing this ridiculous plotline for months, ever since a trailer aired for the season in August.

Most of the action played out in last week and this week’s episodes: After a pretty standard first couple weeks, in which Sam arrived at the beach and started vibing with a contestant named Aaron S., she revealed in Episode 3 that she hadn’t had a bowel movement the whole time she’d been there. “I’m going on nine days with no pooping,” she said in a talking head confession, which editors helpfully juxtaposed with some evocative footage of a turtle’s head gradually emerging from hiding in its shell. “I sit there and sit there and wait and try, and nothing. Took a couple laxatives and nothing.” She tried a stool softener, and despite leaving her drenched in sweat during that week’s rose ceremony (“I’m literally flexing my core trying not to poop my pants”), she still couldn’t go.

At this point, the show introduced us to its medic, Dr. Kelly Tenbrink, and he made an on-camera appearance to talk to Sam about her options. “Constipation is not an uncommon thing here in paradise, but nine days is not good,” he said. “I’ve seen things get pretty bad. I’ve seen patients have to go to the operating room and actually be sedated and literally have to bring almost like a poo baby out.” From here on out, the term “poo baby” was thrown around a lot. Dr. Kelly set a deadline, telling Sam that if she didn’t go No. 2 before sunrise the next day, they’d have to consider more drastic options. In the meantime, he encouraged her to try more laxatives, an enema, or even digital stimulation, but she didn’t seem enthused about any of those routes.

If you aren’t familiar with Bachelor in Paradise, it’s much less earnest than the main shows in the Bachelor franchise. Unlike those shows at their worst, Paradise usually has a sense of humor and at times it can even be campy, and that made this poop storyline perversely perfect fodder for the show. If there’s any show that was going to do a silly poop storyline right, if you think about it, it’s not surprising that it was this one. Later in the same episode, Sam sat at the bar, sharing her woes with Wells the bartender, and he knew exactly what to do: It was one-liner time. “You’re like Cinderella, but instead of a glass slipper, it’s a big dookie,” he said. To the camera, he quipped, “She’s going to have to evacuate her bowels or she’s going to have to evacuate paradise, which is sad, and also the weirdest way anyone’s ever left here I think.”

But the show recognized that the poop baby thing had romantic stakes, too: If Sam had to leave early, she wouldn’t get to explore her budding romance with the aforementioned Aaron S. I would have been on a plane home several days ago rather than share any of this on national TV, but Sam mustered the courage to talk to Aaron S. about her stomach issues. He was admirably cool about it (probably helped along by the fact that if Sam went home, that would leave him high and dry in the competition), planning a date to encourage some bowel activity: “Just remember one thing: It’s not your poop baby. It’s gonna be our poop baby. I’m gonna get it out of you, I promise!” he said, before bringing out a “pu pu platter” of food and drinks for Sam. “Here’s to making shit happen!” he said. (Did the producers feed them all these lines? Because they were actually pretty clever.) All the while, a little countdown to sunrise displayed in the corner of the screen. The episode ended on a cliffhanger very explicitly framed around the question of whether Sam would poop.

In Thursday’s thrilling conclusion, they milked the storyline for every ounce it was worth. “Can Sam deliver her poo baby, or will she have to leave paradise alone?” dramatic narration announced. The show added Dr. Kelly to its trademark old-school sitcom-style credits sequence. As the episode began, overlayed text announced that it had been nine days and 23 hours since Sam had pooped, and the countdown clock was back, as was suggestive footage of an animal emerging into the world, this time a crab, and just about every euphemism for poop you’ve ever heard. Other contestants gossiped, sometimes gleefully, sometimes mournfully, about Sam’s constipation. “Sam is so little,” Olivia remarked, wondering where the poop could be hiding.

Ultimately, after another conversation with the doctor, Sam decided to go home. She rounded up everyone to make the announcement and had a by turns tragic and absurd breakup with Aaron S.: “You’ve been such a special person,” she assured him. What’s going to happen to Aaron S. now? His love interest leaving because she couldn’t poop is going to have actual reverberations on his time on the show and may well mean an exit for him too. I’ve seen so many girls leave this franchise crying while sitting in the back of an SUV, as Sam did, but I have to commend everyone involved here, because this really was something new.

Potty humor aside, stomach issues are a mundane human experience. Compared with the Bachelor franchise’s typical over-the-top, glossy take on romance, this was relatable, and maybe even romantic in a way we rarely see: Rose ceremonies aren’t a thing in couples’ real lives together, but GI issues definitely are, and working around them is a sign of true intimacy. Sam herself also deserves praise for being a good sport about letting poop dominate her storyline and probably her Google results for the rest of time. Though people on Reddit are criticizing her for not just doing an enema, sharing that personal a story on reality television takes, er, guts.

And the story is not quite over yet, actually. After Sam left toward the beginning of Thursday’s episode, the show’s host, Jesse Palmer, announced at the rose ceremony at the end of the show that he had an update about her: She still hadn’t pooped. It’s now been several weeks since this was all filmed, and Sam is still living, so presumably she has figured it all out by now, thank God. But I don’t mind the producers stretching out this plot for a little longer—it’s good shit.