This Might Be the Best 'Love Is Blind' Episode of All Time

608: "Clinging To Love"

Jimmy and the back of Chelsea’s head in season six episode eight of Love Is Blind. Photo: Screenshot. 

There are only a few truly perfect episodes of television I can think of off the top of my head that are part of my personal canon. None of them are bottle episodes or even really standalones, but they all feel distinct from their seasons and memorable by the way their drama doesn’t unfurl but rather balloon. The Sex and the City episode “Easy Come Easy Go,” is brimming with plot: Carrie starts cheating on Aidan with Big, but Samantha dates the guy with the funkiest tasting spunk, and gives a monologue about oral sex that should be taught in schools. Girls stuffed Marnie singing “Stronger” and Adam Driver dancing to Fiona Apple¹ and Hannah’s whole Q-Tip thing into a half hour of television. I love Station Eleven’s third episode “Hurricane,” and how it paints the desperation of trying to make a relationship work with such texture and moodiness. The adult sleepover episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta has a series of so many disastrous escalations, people are fighting without knowing why. I could go on.

But Love Is Blind season six’s eighth episode has entered my canon. There is no episode of Love Is Blind better than this episode of Love Is Blind. Baby-voiced Jessica or squinting Shaina and the Natalie-Shayne love triangle? They’re not touching this episode. Whatever was going on with Sal and Mallory, whatever went on with Aaliyah and Uche and Lydia and Milton? They cannot compete where they do not compare. This episode of Love Is Blind made me laugh so hard I cried.

“Clinging to Love” starts inauspiciously. Chelsea and Jimmy tour each other’s apartments. AD sees Clay’s house, and they compare vision boards. Jeramey gives Laura a tour of the allergy clinic he calls a home — I would call it immaculate, if it weren’t so bare and clinical.² Ken and Brittany go through the motions of touring Ken’s apartment too, but he’s on his phone the whole time. 

Chelsea’s friends come over to meet Jimmy, who is upstairs working. Chelsea explains what happened in the pods with the Chelsea-Jimmy-Jessica love triangle, and how things ended with her other pod connection, Trevor. It’s the first scene in the episode that has murmurs of greatness: Chelsea, in that conversation, returns to how she’s found Jimmy inattentive … that one single afternoon. (The way she recounts in detail how she was in two love triangles, but glosses over everything that went down in the Dominican Republic … but she’s obsessed with only having been kissed once that day … well it’s certainly something.) Her friends are reassuring, and Jimmy is convincing. He gives a more realistic version of their relationship where they talk through problems (not really) and make decisions together (again, not quite). They seem happy-ish.

“The most compelling arc in this show's history ever,” a friend texted me after watching “is the ‘ppl say I look like Megan Fox’ arc.” Everything about presentation and expectation and the “blind” part of the Love Is Blind experiment get bundled together in one woman’s anxious self-image. (Chelsea’s friends confirm she has been told she looks like Megan Fox before, but that mostly she gets Carrie Underwood.) Chelsea and Megan Fox look alike in that they have narrow small noses small mouths and are both white women. But it doesn’t matter if Chelsea looks kinda like Megan Fox or that “People say I look like Megan Fox” conjures a very specific image of a very specific pinup — Transformers-Megan Fox, GQ-Megan Fox, aughts male fantasy-Megan Fox — that even the real Megan Fox does not match. But everyone has opinions about it and can react to it. This is like in Oppenheimer how one reaction sets off a hundred more (can’t stress enough that I don’t know how that science works). The Megan Fox-of-it-all has ramifications that ripple throughout the season.

“Clinging to Love” is not done. Back to back, we are given three of the series' best and most puzzling arguments. Johnny and Amy fuss about birth control. Desire I Want To Turn Into You, say Kenneth and Brittany. Chelsea and Jimmy.

Johnny and Amy finally give me a reason to remember their names: Johnny doesn’t want kids yet, and either doesn’t want to wear condoms or doesn’t think condoms are failsafe birth control. Amy doesn’t want to start oral birth control, but has spoken to her gynecologist about it, and says it’d be “ideal.” The couple is at an impasse, unless Johnny, at Amy’s suggestion, gets a vasectomy. “I don’t think we’re going to wait [to have sex] until marriage, but I feel like Johnny’s really scared. I feel like using protection, like, that’s not enough for him.” Principal Kenneth better open those schools: contraception is not usually understood to be limited to either oral birth control or vasectomy. 

Instead he’s on that damn phone. Kenneth and Brittany have a late-night conversation about how lunch and a hair appointment made him arrive home at 1:30 in the morning. I’m genuinely at a loss with this conversation and I have watched it no less than six times: it sounds like Brittany is saying that their relationship lacks any palpable desire, that she has listened to “Church Girl” wants to let go of this body at least a little bit. So why does it seem like Kenneth has already decided their relationship isn’t working, and he’s presenting a deck that ends with him announcing that they’re no longer together? 

Brittany is too busy to ever invite intimacy, Ken says, and rejects his affections. (Like at 1:30 in the morning when he wanted to do some kissing, but she wanted to do some snoozing.) “When we talk about why are certain things not progressing, we have to be introspective about the parts we are playing too in that role.” But he says that, having already decided on the introspection Brittany isn’t doing. “And right now, being transparent, I don’t feel as if you are being introspective about the role that you have played for me, as a man, in regards to that level of intimacy.” It escalate to the greatest breakup in Love Is Blind history, better than even Jackie saying she won’t give Marshall his ring back. Kenneth asks enough leading questions and directs Brittany to conclusions he’s already reached. We are witnessing a breakup via the Socratic method.³

Things are going well when the show cuts back to the Chealsa-Jimmy apartment after the visit from Chelsea’s friends. “[My friends] all told me they really liked you. That makes me happy because today I was worried about you babe,” Chelsea says. “You had me really worried.” An incomplete list of what worried Chelsea that day: Jimmy did not ask her how her eyebrow appointment went. He spent his workday as a workday, and not hanging out with her around their apartment. He kissed her once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Jeramey showed Jimmy Jessica’s Instagram, and Jimmy immediately told Chelsea about that conversation to show how little it mattered.

There’s an almost comic double-speak to the conversation. Chelsea complains about not getting enough affection, claiming she received none, while acknowledging that maybe she did get between one and three kisses. There is some kind of amphetamine in the moment where Chelsea talks over Jimmy to announce that she’s a “huge nurturer.” I had a big stupid smile on my face. The little bit of sense Chelsea had was released from her body. A stupid fight is suddenly a devastating one. Chelsea wants constant reassurance from Jimmy knowing that’s not his preference. She’s asking him to go through the motions and say words mindlessly, just to appease her.

And then Jimmy calls her clingy. I thought I would levitate off my couch and through my ceiling. “The first thing out of your mouth is that I’m clingy?” she deadpans.