The Bachelor, which has spent its 20 previous seasons figuring out what audiences really want from “reality,” is tantalizingly opaque about all of that. In a show that has long derived drama from its villain edits, Corinne offers a newer kind of character, based on a newer kind of trope, based on a newer way of teasing viewers. Corinne Olympios, “business owner” and nanny-haver, is getting the conspiracy edit.

Take her antics on the show. One the one hand, they come from Corinne herself—from the camera’s observations of her behavior and of the commentary she freely gives in the show’s confessional booth. The business owner (and model?) regularly turns on the “sex charm” (so often and openly, in fact, as to prompt Fox News to ask, of the show’s “raunchiest season ever”: “Has The Bachelor gone too far?”). She removes her bikini top while in a pool with Nick. She dresses in a trench coat with very little underneath, to surprise him with 1) herself and 2) a can of whipped cream. Later, on a date at a dairy farm with Nick and the other women, Corinne expresses her distaste for the rustic setting by declaring, “I want to be at a spa, being fed a nice taco. Preferably … chicken.”

But. Corinne’s Corinne-ness has also been enabled—and amplified—by the show’s producers. Last week’s episode of The Bachelor found Corinne surprising Nick, during the pool party he threw for the women to celebrate his birthday, with an enormous bounce castle that had been installed in the mansion’s driveway. Yes, the kind you might see at a kid’s birthday party or a county fair. She took credit for the “surprise.” And then she bounced, in a bandeau bikini top that required censor-blurring from the show’s editors, with Nick. When they fell down, she straddled him. More censors. More sex charm.

And then, just as suddenly and magically as the bounce castle appeared at the Bachelor mansion: The other women got wind of its presence. They left the pool to watch the scene unfold between Corinne and Nick, disgusted with her (and with Nick for indulging her). Nick, meanwhile, told the cameras how much he appreciates Corinne’s sense of fun—fun, he said solemnly, being a key component in any lasting relationship.

What drama, all in all! But of course: If you know anything at all about the behind-the-scenes workings of shows like The Bachelor, it is that the contestants—even the “business owners” who have nannies—have basically no power, within the constraints of the show, to do things like order bounce castles to appear on the mansion’s driveway. The contestants on The Bachelor are, on the contrary, systematically detached from the outside world: They don’t have their devices. They don’t have the internet. They don’t have magazines. (Indeed, one Moment of Drama on JoJo’s season of The Bachelorette came when Vinny smuggled in a contraband issue of InTouch to show the other men.) The castmates have each other, their Moroccan lantern-lit mansion, and whatever little treats—foodstuffs, booze, more booze—the producers see fit to provide them while they live in isolation. It’s an environment meant to put people on edge, for drama-devising purposes; it’s also an environment in which a bounce castle will appear only if a producer decides that a bounce castle should appear.