After a great third episode, the rest of The Ultimatum’s first season is mostly a drag. None of the couples — either the ones who entered the show that way, or the newly created partnerships — are worth rooting for, except perhaps for Jake and Rae, one of the experimental couples, if only because they’re both low-key and seemingly kind, normal people. Now that the last two episodes have dropped on Netflix, Rae/Jake stans will be excited to see them choose each other in the finale, with Jake proposing a trip together anywhere in the world — cute! But the only potential couple to have traded out their partners in the experiment ultimately don’t end up together, either, we learn in the following reunion episode; Rae explains they didn’t take the trip after all, and we learn from her original partner and now-ex Zay that, after the show wrapped, the established couple had again tried to make it work. Now both Jake and Zay are single and Rae is dating a woman she’s very happy with, having recently embraced her bisexuality. I’m sure many fans will be disappointed that Rae and Jake didn’t work out, but how likely would it really have been for someone to find their perfect match this way?! I’m glad they didn’t try to force it, and that they’re figuring out who they are apart from each other.
The couples who’ve lasted, all original pairings, paint a darker picture. After Madlyn told Colby, straight up, that their relationship wasn’t going to work — following reports of him texting other girls outside the show and seemingly hooking up with at least one of them, which Colby insists he did benevolently, for Madlyn, somehow, to “make it real,” by which he means, I guess, to force her to face the prospect of losing him — she arrives at the reunion aglow with pregnancy, Colby at her side. She’d accepted his proposal in the finale, then married him on the spot. Good luck, you crazy kids! I think you’re gonna need it.
Shanique and Randall also got engaged during the finale, but in the reunion, Vanessa Lachey points out that Shanique isn’t wearing her ring. The couple reveal that they broke up for six months after filming the show, which Shanique calls “the hardest time” of her life, and now they’re back together, but no longer engaged: “We’re honestly just trying to figure it out,” Randall says. These are good-looking young people with their whole lives ahead of them, and I just can’t imagine the familiarity and comfort of staying in this relationship could be worth all the heartache they’re putting each other through. It’s not like either person is the villain here — sometimes, most of the time, relationships don’t work out, and it’s no one’s fault, and that doesn’t make the relationship, or any of the individuals in it, a failure.
But of course, if everyone became more comfortable with the idea that every relationship doesn’t have to culminate in marriage and kids to matter — that people will always come into and out of our lives, enriching them and teaching us things about ourselves in the process — then what would we have to watch on television? ●
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/shannonkeating/the-ultimatum-finale-netflix-what-happens-review