At last, after ten episodes, 29 women, and about 38,239 instances of watching Arie Luyendyk Jr. describing someone or something in this world as "amazing," the 22nd season of The Bachelor concludes tonight. Will the world’s most famous race car driver-turned-RE/MAX agent at last find love with Lauren B.? Will he opt instead for Becca K.? Or will he leave with no one, as a brokenhearted shell of a man off to live out his remaining days on this earth staging McMansions in Scottsdale?

In the event that nonstop Olympics coverage caused you to consume a bit less Bachelor than usual this winter, here is everything you need to know about this season before Arie reveals his choice tonight.

Why haven't you been providing more regular Bachelor updates?

Two reasons. First, as I've argued and/or proven beyond the shadow of a doubt before, The Bachelorette is a far more enjoyable show than The Bachelor, since the latter inevitably portrays the contestants who appear on it as ruthless, histrionic backstabbers willing to do anything for a sham engagement to a replacement-level dude they’ve known for all of two weeks. This dynamic isn’t less relevant on The Bachelorette, of course—it’s just that the genders are flipped. But watching a bunch of overenthusiastic CrossFit bros engage in a low-stakes thirst-off can be enjoyable in a way that doesn’t make you feel complicit in the perpetuation of some ugly gender stereotypes in the process.

That’s the first reason. The second reason is because this season’s lead is Arie, who, when asked during the premiere to list three things in this world that he finds “exciting,” began by earnestly listing "excitement,” an admission that cause me to emit a noise that fell somewhere between a gasp and a sob. He favors solid-color dress shirts that look like the ones sold with a matching tie in plastic boxes at TJ Maxx. He has a damn “24601” tattoo on his wrist.

I am sure that Arie has gorgeous eyes and is a perfectly nice person. But there’s just no way that 29 women yearned to marry this American-Eagle-assistant-manager-ass doofus and go live with him in Arizona forever. Even for a show that depends heavily on its audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, the premise of this season was a little too farfetched to take seriously.

Who are the contenders for Arie’s heart?

In one corner is Lauren B., who appears to have the charisma of a houseplant. Each episode in which the two appear on-screen together seems to feature at least one agonizing sequence during which they stare vaguely into middle-distance and try to think of something to say. Lauren B. is, however, beautiful, which has resulted in something like four straight weeks of Arie trying to convince himself that there are deep and complicated and myriad reasons for him to like her, even though he has proven hilariously incapable of articulating any of them. Here, watch as his sister asks whether he can have a “real conversation” with one of the two women to whom he might propose, and he responds by staring mournfully at the sky.

Your other finalist is Becca, whose finest moment came when she responded to a surprise appearance from a longtime ex-boyfriend pleading with her to leave the show and come back to him—a standard-issue producer-staged gimmick in Bachelor world—with one of the most ruthless fuck-your-feelings rejections ever broadcast on network television.

ROSS: Where I go and what I do—my head and my heart, they always come back to you. Nobody compares to you. The intention was to win your heart back, and do something big, and let you know that nothing could stop me from getting to you and loving you.

BECCA: [bleeped-out expletive]

ROSS: I wanted to marry you, Becca. That was my intention in coming to you. I came here for us. And I thought that, like, it just needed to be something big.

BECCA: That’s the thing—I feel like you live your life in a movie, and you think it’s going to work out like The Notebook.

ROSS: I do. I do think that.

BECCA: [laughs in his face]

That seems like a rather underwhelming pair of finalists. Are these really the best two contestants out of the entire cast?

They are not! Among the individuals Arie rejected this season are Kendall, to whom he repeatedly referred as “quirky” because, I guess, she is a normal person who has hobbies and a personality; Tia, a delightfully-accented Arkansan who enjoys double entredres about her hometown of Weiner; Bekah, the 22-year-old professional nanny and amateur marijuana farm explorer whose age, once revealed, was gravely discussed by everyone on the show as if it were a prior murder conviction; and Jacqueline, an aspiring clinical psychologist who basically dumped him after he worried aloud that she was too smart for him, which, spot the lie.

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As a rule, this show is best when its stars are the contestants, not the lead. And on the whole, this season featured a really good cast of compelling, smart, and accomplished women who did a ton of work to mask Arie’s obvious shortcomings. Somehow, the man is still about to choose between plain- and vanilla-flavored froyo.

What dumb things did Arie do in order to make this, according to ABC, the most shocking finale in Bachelor history?

Oh man. Oh man. Okay, during last week’s fantasy suite date, he told Lauren B. that he was in love with her, a move that used to be against the rules, but that the producers are letting slide because, one would assume, they’re desperate for anything exciting to take place. He went on to encourage her to “feel like it’s over” because, as he put it reassuringly, “I think it is.”

I cannot stress enough how strange it was to hear Arie proclaim his love for a woman with whom he appears to have nothing in common other than a mutual need to breathe oxygen.

With that date in the books, Arie then spent the night with Becca and told her that he loved her, too, and in a way that’s going to be really, really hard to walk back. “At this point, I don’t see my feelings changing for Becca,” he confided to the camera. “I see us together at the end of all this.” He went on to express a desire to “end this now” and propose in the middle of the date, prompting my horrified wife to wonder aloud whether Arie understands that his words are being recorded, and that whoever he chooses is going to be able to see all of this.

It’s like Crank, but if instead of boosting his adrenaline levels in order to stay alive, the main character needs to tell as many women as possible that he loves them.

Is it absurd that Bekah’s alleged immaturity at age 22 ended up being a major storyline, given that the show featured two (2) 23-year-olds whose readiness to enter into a marriage with someone they met on a television show was never seriously questioned?

It is.

Are we going to talk at all about how Arie’s baffling infatuation with Lauren could perhaps be explained by the fact that she bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Emily Maynard, the Bachelorette lead on whose season Arie finished as the runner-up in 2012, and who he has said is the last woman he would have considered marrying?

We are not.

Who is going to be the next Bachelorette?

If it isn’t Tia, we riot.