Nick Viall's group date to the island of St. Thomas was basically an unmitigated disaster. It's not clear from the editing of the episode exactly what went wrong, but somewhere in the middle of a friendly beach volleyball game, everyone quit pretending to enjoy themselves at the exact same moment. This, of course, spurned a plethora of Bachelor volleyball group date memes during the St. Thomas trip, which perfectly captured how quickly the date went off the rails.
Kristina snagged the one-on-one date in St. Thomas, and both Whitney and Danielle L. got cut on their two-on-one. That left six women for the group date, which is actually a pretty reasonable number by Bachelor franchise standards, but the women were just feeling too frayed at this point in the game to enjoy themselves. Even though they were on a romantic tropical vacation — free from cow mucking, farms, swamps, public acts of dancing, and any other unsavory threats — the women were clearly struggling. Nick was expecting it to be a fun date, considering all he had planned was a day at the beach, day drinking, and maybe a casual beach volleyball game. Unfortunately, the three-on-three match turned into a Bachelor protest real quick.
It began with Jasmine getting a little drunk and playing rougher and rougher, even knocking Corinne down at one point. (For what it's worth, Corinne laughed it off.) Then, all of a sudden, cutaway interviews began with each woman, one by one, complaining about how frustrated and fed-up they felt with the group date format. They were obviously all craving solo time with Nick and feeling extremely fatigued by smiling their way through group activities. Even on a beautiful private beach with all the alcohol in the world available to them (and Nick really tried to turn it around by passing out shots), the volleyball game fell apart, with each woman walking off to be alone on a different corner of the beach.
It was basically the beginning of the end of the St. Thomas trip, with Nick eventually dumping a still-drunk Jasmine later that night after an extremely awkward fight. Then, he sent both two-on-one picks home. At this point, Nick definitely seems to be suffering a crisis of faith in ~the process~ and — even if it's totally unlikely to happen — there's at least a part of him that wants to bail altogether. Who knew that beach volleyball could have such a domino effect?
