Last week's Bachelor promo gave fans our first view of Colton Underwood ready to propose in the season finale, but just one thing was missing: the engagement ring.
The 27-year-old former football player opens a ring box in the teaser as he gushes about getting down on one knee, only to have eagle-eyed fans spot a big old NOTHING in the ring box. ET's Tanner Thomason sat down with Bachelor host Chris Harrison as he filmed his upcoming cameo appearance on Single Parents on Thursday, where he addressed the phantom ring, joking that it could be missing for a myriad of reasons.
"What does that mean? Does it mean that Neil Lane didn't give us one this season? Could be. Could it be that Chris Harrison stole it? I have a whole chest of rings," he said with a laugh. "People wonder where the old rings go. At night, I just put them all on."
While Harrison wouldn't really reveal what happened to the ring, he's confused by another Bachelor mystery: why Underwood hasn't asked any of the tattletales which woman isn't here for the right reasons. "The end of this season, there's a lot going on," the Bachelor host said. "Fans watched the philanthropist freak out at the end of Monday's episode after a third woman told him that a contestant still remaining in the competition wasn't ready for marriage. Instead of asking her who she was talking about, he stormed off."
"How did Colton not stop her and go, 'Can you just whisper it in my ear? Can I get names?'" Harrison asked. "It's funny to me that he never said, 'Hey, Sydney or Demi or whoever, who are you talking about? Like, help a brother out. You're leaving, so it doesn't matter. Burn Rome down, let me know what's going on.'"
"He never asked for that, which is very odd to me. That would be the first question I would ask," he shared. "Or is it sour grapes at the girls, they're just bitter that they're leaving?"
"One thing I will say, and this happens for The Bachelor, and it happens for the women: you don't know what's going on. You don't know what's going on with Caelynn or Cassie or Hannah B. or Hannah G.," Harrison expressed. "You don't know what's going on with their relationships, and you kind of have to understand that when you watch the show later, a lot of times, when you come back to the Women Tell All, you're like, 'Oh, I see it now. I didn't get to see that date. Now I see the love, I see the affection, and I realize, my relationship I thought was good, was nothing compared to theirs.' So it does help them to watch the show back."
The father of two said that moment of realization is "partially why I don't tell [the cast] a lot of things." "People go, 'Why didn't you warn them?' The reason I don't is because that is real life. You need to figure things out for yourself," he said. "Colton needs to find out who is there for the quote-unquote right reasons."
That inner struggle all leads up to Underwood's season finale, which he already told ET will be "unlike anything else."
"Inevitably something's going to happen we've never dealt with before, and I never know what that is when we go into a season. It always just finds its way," Harrison explained. "From the fence leap on, the show is turned upside down."
"What you have to do as a producer is realize it's a very fluid situation, and you gotta go with it. It's a scary way to produce a show," he continued. "You hope it ends in a proposal, but you don't know. And you're standing there with these two individuals who are looking at each other, hoping, and you don't know. Same thing with Colton. When things go sideways, you try to put it back on the tracks, but you also have to let it go."
Single Parents airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT and The Bachelor airs Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC. Join ET's Bachelor Nation Facebook group here.
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