‘Love Is Blind’ Enters Its Trainwreck Era In Season 5

Love Is Blind has been riveting train wreck TV from the moment it debuted in 2020, the train-wreck-iest of years. But however disastrous Love Is Blind seemed, whether it was Giannina going full Runaway Bride or Bartise freaking out over hypothetical weight gain or SK re-proposing to Raven while cheating on her, that train wreck has always been more controlled than careening. For four seasons, Love Is Blind pulled off some of the wildest, rawest reality TV imaginable (Zainab’s vows, honey). It’s like the producers were getting this train to pop wheelies or drift. But all that changes with Love Is Blind Season 5. As of the season’s second week, Netflix’s premier reality show has flipped off the tracks and lies on its side, ablaze and smoking.

Granted, if you pay attention to entertainment news, you probably clocked the trouble a while back. There have been lawsuits, divorces, and very public complaints from past cast members. That’s not even mentioning the Season 4 reunion disaster that unfolded live on Netflix, when it was airing at all. Note that Love Is Blind creator and showrunner Chris Coelen has responded to many of these claims.

Aside from the reunion kerfuffle, all of that was happening off screen (actually the reunion was happening off screen too). Season 5 is the first time that it feels like all the behind-the-scenes drama has caught up with the show itself. Instead of being a show about strangers falling in love sight unseen and then learning how to merge their lives, oftentimes chaotically, Love Is Blind Season 5 finds the show itself thrown into a completely unexpected identity crisis. It’s like the Pod Squad has wrested control of the train from production — even though precisely zero of them are conductors.

In retrospect, things were off from the beginning of the season. The first batch of episodes were defined by some classic Love Is Blind drama (love triangles, rectangles — all the angles) and one moment of soaring WTF-ery that the show will forever struggle to outdo. But something just wasn’t sitting right. Every season has started with a pod romance that felt deeply explored and totally earned — like Tiffany and Brett in Season 4 or Cameron and Lauren in Season 1. They were there essentially as evidence that this truly bonkers ritual could yield real results in real time, especially in comparison with some of the more… doomed… couplings (Mark and Jessica, Shaina and Kyle, Zack and Irina).

Season 5 does not have that couple. Season 5 had two potential pairings that could have filled that role in Aaliyah/Uche and Johnie/Chris. Both of those couples had the deep connections and big, personal reveals that usually go along with an early season proposal and a comparatively stable journey to the altar. In Season 5, however, all the participants said, “No thank you!” Johnie chose Izzy, who responded by dumping her. And then Aaliyah and Uche’s blossoming relationship was torpedoed by quite possibly the most chaotic person to ever appear on Love Is Blind: Lydia.

The fact that Lydia has emerged as the lead character of Love Is Blind Season 5 is nothing short of wild. It’s like if Lara Flynn Boyle’s character took over as the lead of Wayne’s World. We’re still along for the ride, but mostly because the truck is going 100 mph and the adrenaline has kicked in. I’m going to benefit-of-the-doubt here and say that there’s probably a more charitable edit of Lydia somewhere in all of the pod footage, but we sure didn’t see it. Instead, we see Lydia portrayed as essentially ready to fully marry two different men — first Uche, who she used to date, and then Izzy — before she finally sets her sights on Milton, a man, who she calls a “nerd,” six years her junior. For the first four episodes, it seems like every time we see Lydia she’s either prepping to say “I do” in the pods or saying “no one has ever loved me” in the living quarters.

The moment that Love Is Blind goes off the rails completely comes in Episode 5, the first episode of Week 2. After spending almost 4.5 episodes in the pods, the longest amount of time ever spent in that phase of the show, we are left with three couples to travel to Mexico. Three! That is fully half the number of couples that normally emerge from the pods (and even more are usually edited out completely). With half as many cast members, what will the show, uh, show?

One of those couples is JP and Taylor — and they are barely even speaking to each other! At first Season 5 wants to present JP (a firefighter) and Taylor (a kindergarten teacher) as the typical deep-fried, “All-American” couple that it so loves to pair up — like Amber and Barnett or Colleen and Matt. There’s just one tiny problem: JP apparently doesn’t know how to talk to a woman who is wearing makeup, which is a problem considering that Taylor — a 26-year-old woman living in Houston, a city home to the second most Sephoras in any one city — likes makeup. This proves to be too much for JP, who is both mad that Taylor wears makeup and mad that Taylor isn’t taking “you’re prettier without makeup” as a compliment. This ends their relationship.

We are halfway through Episode 6 and there are only two couples left standing.

One of those couples is Lydia and Milton, and the other is Izzy (29, insurance agent) and Stacy (33, operations manager). They have the energy of a Love Is Blind couple that could go either way, like Raven and SK or Micah and Paul.

Stacy has the distinction of being one of the most cutting people the show has ever had. Her first confessional includes fatality level reads of some of the men in the pods (“I am dying to know what Carter looks like. Anything-In-A-Can Carter. Cheap Beer Carter. He is a country bumpkin, but I just feel like fee-fi-fo-fum. That is what I’m picturing for Carter”). Izzy is also there — more like Izzy is swept up in Hurricane Stacy, as he meets her wealthy family (to quote her dad: “sometimes love wants to fly first class”) and somehow survives Stacy’s reaction to learning that he, a straight bachelor, stocks paper plates and red Solo cups in his kitchen.

That’s it. That’s our cast for the rest of Love Is Blind Season 5: Lydia and Milton, the calmest, tallest metamorphic rock enthusiast on Netflix… and Izzy and Stacy, the couple you only hang out with once every few months because you can’t handle the stress of waiting for them to get into a tense, public fight. That’s who we’re spending time with for the next 4.5 episodes!

Oh — yeah, this season is fully two episodes shorter than last season and the producers are still trying to fill time. With zero remaining couples to really invest in, and with no other couples to take up screen time, Love Is Blind becomes — maybe for the first time ever — dull. It turns out that Love Is Blind is at its best when you have some buy-in on these kooky couples. And with just two couples in the cast, the show takes a wild swing.

The producers, presumably after combing through their Netflix agreement to see if they can just chop two episodes right out of the episode order, come up with an idea: what if they turned Love Is Blind Season 5 into an all skate event? Suddenly we’re catching up with Uche and Aaliyah, who met face-to-face for the first time. They… do not get back together. Bye, Aaliyah! And then in Episode 7, the show throws a reunion party for all the pod people looking for camera time and boy, do they get it.

Love Is Blind always has these intentionally awkward pod get togethers, but they’re never as intense as this one. For a hot second, the lead character of Love Is Blind Season 7 is Uche, someone who isn’t in the cast anymore.

We find out from Uche that while they dated, Lydia would snoop on Uche’s friends’ Instagram stories, she would drive past his house and send him photos of it, and also Lydia might have known about Uche being on Love Is Blind when she went through casting. Lydia is one of the four main stars of the season, and she maybe orchestrated her involvement in the show as a hail Mary to win back a guy she already dated. All of this is madness.

So much of Episode 7 is spent re-litigating the pod dynamics, as Uche confronts Lydia and Johnie (who’s now with Chris, Option #2) confronts Izzy. Never before has the show devoted so much time and energy to people who aren’t engaged. But on the other hand, it’s a smart move because Uche and Johnie deliver the exact brands of chaos that the season is missing. The show comes alive during this reunion, thanks almost entirely to people who aren’t part of the show’s central, infamous premise.

In previous seasons, the couples are usually having their second meetings with each other’s parents and trying to undo whatever damage they did the first time. By the end of Episode 7 this season, we’re not watching Love Is Blind. We’re watching Love Is Somewhere Else Entirely. Is it good television? I don’t know. Is it entertaining television? Absolutely. Is it Love Is Blind? That’s the name on the Netflix screen! Whatever it is, Season 5 is without question Love Is Blind’s train wreck season. Don’t look away — no, seriously, you need to keep eyes on Lydia at all times.