What Happened At The Hotel, Ivan?

On Bachelor in Paradise, the cameras are usually around to capture any drama or sparks between contestants, but due to a tropical storm briefly shuttering Paradise mid-filming, it seems like some action may have gotten missed. In the promo for the September 28 episode, Ivan Hall and Wells Adams have an intense chat where it's suggested that Ivan may have advanced his relationship with someone while the cast was locked down in a hotel waiting for the storm to pass. 

"Ivan do you have anything to tell me?" Wells asked. "I shouldn't have gone around the system," Ivan replied. "You know, love makes you do like weird crazy things." Cut to: Chelsea Vaughn, whom Ivan was certainly cozier with post-storm. The promo is edited in a way that suggests something may have happened at the hotel between Ivan and Chelsea while the cameras weren't around.

It would explain a lot. When Aaron saw the two of them kissing, he seemed taken aback by their sudden closeness. "He's never talked to her one day in his life until today," Aaron said. Perhaps Ivan took advantage of the time the cast spent away from the beach to progress a relationship with Chelsea.

When the cast was being rounded up and evacuated during the storm, Joe Amabile made it sound like the men and women were staying at separate locations. He gave Serena Pitt a kiss goodbye and even lamented in a confessional that he didn't know when he would see her next. But if they were in the same hotel, just in separate rooms, Ivan was able to sneak out and meet up with Chelsea — or someone else. After all, it hasn't been confirmed that Ivan was talking about Chelsea in the promo. She joked on Instagram that even her mom was confused about the insinuation. Chelsea shared an image of a text from her mother that simply read, "Wait what are they talking about that happened at the hotel?" 

But let's say that Ivan did use his time during the evacuation to try to make a connection with one of the women left on the show — he called it "going around the system," but it's not the first example of that this season. Pieper James and Brendan Morais were seeing each other before Paradise even started and yet they both came on the show to further their connection, gain followers, etc. All of these people know each other outside of the show, so it's way too easy to ignore the "system" and take matters into your own hands.

How is what Ivan potentially did any different than on The Bachelor or Bachelorette when a contestant goes to talk to the lead outside of prescribed dates? It's long been permitted for people to take matters into their own hands and find the Bachelorette or Bachelor in their hotel room for a private chat. If the cameras had caught Ivan and Chelsea at the hotel, it probably would have been nothing more than a cute storyline.

The point of Bachelor in Paradise is for people to come in and find love. Ivan seems to have found that, according to what he told Wells about how "love makes you do like weird crazy things." If he did so outside of the typical constraints of the show, that may not be ideal from a production or editing standpoint, but it's still getting him to the show's end goal: the more couples, the better. It really shouldn't matter how any of them were formed, so long as they're genuine. But the producers likely learned a valuable lesson for any future evacuation hotel plans — keep the cameras rolling.