After all that we’ve been through, the premiere of The Bachelorette in October has brought both a sense of normalcy and a much-needed distraction to today’s difficult times.

With 39-year-old Clare Crawley tasked with whittling down 25 men to 1 husband-to-be, the show rented out an entire resort in Palm Springs to quarantine and test participants while creating a “bubble” for contestants to engage in activities and group dates resembling those of previous pre-pandemic seasons.

This season has been advertised as the most dramatic, shocking season yet – as are all seasons when they debut – so here are my predictions of what will happen this season. It is based on days of research and teasers from the premiere that foreshadow future episodes.

The host of the show, Chris Harrison, teased that Crawley “blew up The Bachelorette” with how she ran her season.

In my experience watching Bachelor Nation shows, the designated Bachelor or Bachelorette never expresses a favorite contestant in hopes of preserving the mystique of who will be chosen as “the one,” unless it’s with the 1st impression rose, which is awarded to the most impressive candidate on the 1st night of the show.

However, from the get-go, Crawley continuously restated her infatuation with contestant Dale Moss upon meeting him. “I think I just met my husband,” Crawley said multiple times before she eventually gave the 1st rose to Moss.

To include this statement in the 1st episode is very off-brand for the producers of the show. Crawley so expressly proclaimed her favorite already, defeating the fun of the audience making predictions without much to go on aside from a few clips of interactions.

Even during Colton Underwood’s season of The Bachelor (which had arguably the most obvious outcome), the shows were edited in a way so that the audience didn’t have actual confirmation from Underwood that he was going to choose who he did until the tail end of the season.

The entire fun of sitting through a mildly demeaning, over-dramatized season of watching dozens of men begging for the attention of a woman on live TV is that no one truly knows the winner until it’s proclaimed.

Crawley leads me to suspect that something will be amiss in this season, as has the hint that Crawley leaves the show at some point, leaving all the contestants wondering where Crawley went. This implies that Crawley potentially leaves the show, but this would be an awful end to her story, which is based on the fact that she hasn’t been able to find love for so long.

But, when I watched Crawley’s interview on Entertainment Tonight, she claimed she “didn’t quit anything,” leading me to my prediction of this season: I still feel that Crawley leaves the show early on, already expecting to marry Moss. Technically, she didn’t quit the show in this manner, she just completed her season early on. But this leaves a large number of male contestants in the dust, and to avoid a lawsuit or unhappy campers, I feel that the producers may bring in a 2nd bachelorette mid-season to pick up where Claire left off.

This way, the producers still get enough air time to take up the entire season and they can advertise this season as the most shocking season ever.