‘The Bachelor’ Episode 1 recap and power rankings: We meet 28 girls, a mini horse and some chickens

Hypothetically, the end goal of The Bachelor is to help its star -- you know, the bachelor -- find the love of his life. To demonstrate that goal, this season’s premiere opened with Ben, this year’s Bachelor, discussing how to handle himself with three former Bachelors. These three had found love, and now they’re teaching Ben how to do the same.

Just four guys, drinking water and having a normal, unforced heart-to-heart!

One problem, though: In the 19 previous seasons of The Bachelor, only two contestants are actually still married to someone they met on the show. One, Sean Lowe, married the winner, the other, Jason Mesnick, married the person they chose as runner-up. So to make the show’s overall concept seem plausible, the show’s producers had to track them both down.

They’re joined by last year’s Bachelor, Chris Soules. Chris ended last season of The Bachelorette by proposing to his winner, Whitney Bischoff, in a barn. Not his family’s barn, just a random barn, but still, a barn. They sat together and watched the sunset.

Two months after it aired, they had already broken up. The camera zooms in on Chris nodding awkwardly in silence while Sean and Jason disclose their tips; eventually, he says something about how he could’ve done better with the whole process.

If The Bachelor is a spouse-finding show, it’s doing a terrible job. Luckily, that’s not why we watch it.

You don’t win The Bachelor by winning The Bachelor. About 90 percent of the time, winning The Bachelor means a sad realization that day-to-day life with your apparent soulmate is significantly less perfect that life spent jet-setting the world on ABC’s dime.

No, The Bachelor is sports, and the true winner is the one who plays the game for the smart reasons. It’s the one who is intriguing enough to hang around, getting free trips and free booze. It’s the one who racks up enough Instagram followers to get paid taking pictures with various products. It’s the one who makes us love and/or hate them enough that they get invited back to future seasons of Bachelor TV shows, like The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise.

With that in mind, we introduce The Bachelor Power Rankings. Each week, we’ll be ranking the contestants not by how much we expect them to end up with Ben, but by how much we love and/or hate their character, and how likely they are to win the real competition.

In our first glimpse of Ben, he’s shooting hoops on the side of a barn on a farm in his hometown of Warsaw, Ind.

It’s storybook as hell. We can picture young Ben in these cornfields, spending hours perfecting his jumper against this very barn.

It turns out this is also just a random-ass barn. About three minutes later, we see Ben hanging with his parents at what seems to be their actual, very-much-not-a-barn house.

Ben isn’t a farm boy. He’s actually just a super-boring guy. He’s very, very handsome, but when it comes down to it, he’s aggressively normal. Despite what I’m sure will be many attempts to romanticize Ben, this is a show where 30 beautiful women fawn and fight over a dude who sells software for a living.

He seems like a nice guy without many other defining personality traits. That’s pretty perfect, though. He’s about to be plopped down with a ton of women with more than enough personality traits. Ben’s job is to be handsome and noncontroversial. I think he can pull that off.

The first episode of any season of The Bachelor is a parade of women jumping out of limos trying as hard as they can to show those personality traits. Of course, the ones who seem least sane are eliminated right off the bat.

We have Maegan, who shows up with a dang miniature horse:

Huey the miniature horse is the runaway star of this episode. He wins the show for me when he gets his silly clip-clop hooves stuck on a girl’s cocktail dress and refuses to let go, because he’s a freakin’ horse and he doesn’t realize what dresses are and he’s gonna clomp mud on your dress with his hooves because he’s a horse.

I genuinely don’t think Maegan says another word after introducing us to Huey. My guess is she got hauled off by security guards while yelling “IT’S NOT A PONY! IT’S JUST A TINY HORSE!” at Chris Harrison.

There’s Tiara, whose listed occupation is “chicken enthusiast.”

Tiara gets eliminated. So we lose a miniature horse and a chicken enthusiast right off the bat. Note to future Bachelor contestants. Cut it out with the livestock. It’s not good first date material.

We have Breanne, who tells Ben that “gluten is Satan” and smashes a piece of bread against a rock:

Breanne gets eliminated.

Izzy shows up dressed for a sleepover:

Sadly, she doesn’t get to sleep over, because she gets eliminated. It’s a bold move, assuming that a guy can look past a non-sexy outfit to see that you’re different in hopes he’ll value you for your personality. Later, Ben will give a girl who may or may not speak English his rose instead of Izzy.

We’re supposed to feel bad for the girls eliminated on the first night. One of them even cries, dumped by a man she met about three hours before. I guess it’s a pretty big bummer to drop everything in your life, only to be told you’re not good enough, but hey, look on the bright side. You got a free trip to LA and got to be on a TV show for pretty people. That’s good!

Anyway, now we’re going to pretend those people never existed.

Leading the rankings this week: LACE.

Every year, the first episode of The Bachelor needs a character who isn’t quite used to being presented with unlimited alcohol who gets a bit too drunk. Lace happily volunteered for this role.

Normally, the end result of this is a contestant who maybe says something funny and gets a reputation as a silly person. Lace opted to be petty, say everybody else was less pretty than her, try (and fail) to be the first person to make out with Ben, become deeply self-conscious of her failed decision to try to make out with Ben and then confront Ben about the fact that he didn’t make individual eye contact with her in a ceremony involving 28 women.

Ben didn’t seem to enjoy that much, so she might not have much time left. But it was really quality time! I highly recommend her for whatever Bachelor spin-off is next.

2. Rachel

SHE IS 23. UNEMPLOYED. HOVERBOARD. SHE’S GOT IT ALL.

3. Olivia

Olivia gets the first impression rose, which means she’ll stick around for a while. She also busts out the quote of the year thus far:

4/4a: Haley and Emily.

They’re TWINZZ!!!!!!!!!!

Every other woman has a job description. Theirs is merely TWINS. This is because their job seems to be being twins. They are not just twins. They are the creepy twins who say things in unison.

5. Shushanna

We never hear Shushanna speak English, just Russian.Not even acknowledging you speak the same language as the person you’re wooing is SUCH a power move. It works! She even accepts Ben’s rose with a “da.” Please, everybody, go to foreign countries and try to win their versions of The Bachelor. You’ll be mysterious!

6. Becca

Becca was the runner-up on last season’s Bachelor, so when she walked in the room, there were gasps and girls yelling “IT’S NOT FAIR.”

This is my favorite Bachelor squabble. Virtually every season, a contestant from a previous season or an already-eliminated contestant from the current season is brought back, and it always leads to SHOCK. “This isn’t in the rules!” It’s a contrived reality show, pals. They’re allowed to make up the rules.

7. Amber

Amber is truly living her best life, having already been on Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise. I think you’ve got one more in you.

8. Leah

Leah starts out by hiking Ben -- who played quarterback in high school! -- a football.

Textbook. I told you this was sports!

9. Mandi.

The show tried to make it seem like the crazy thing Mandi did was showing up with a rose on her head, when in fact it was GIVING A MAN A DENTAL EXAM ON THE FIRST DATE.

10. Jubilee

Jubilee is an army veteran, which is pretty dope.

11. Amanda

Amanda is a mom, so the majority of the conversations she will have on the show will be about how she is a mom. I’m sure the moms on the show also talk about other stuff, but what makes to air is exclusively mom content.

12. JoJo

JoJo wears a unicorn head. Related: this link.

13. Jackie

I don’t remember anything about Jackie. I’m not perfect.

14. Jennifer

Jennifer is listed as a small business owner. BE MORE SPECIFIC. I refuse to rank Jennifer highly until I know the nature of her small business.

15. Jami

Jami is a Canadian who opens by saying she’s friends with Kaitlyn, the girl who dumped Ben on The Bachelorette. Fun lead-in!

16. Caila.

Caila is actually a software salesman, just like Ben. They even sit by a raging fireplace and talk about it.

Ben. MARRY THIS WOMAN. END THE SHOW. MARRY HER. She’s pretty and she’s the only one of these 28 women who will tolerate you when you go back to Denver and have a job in a cubicle. Caila seems like a perfect match for Ben, so I’m forced to put her as low down as possible in my power rankings about not winning The Bachelor.

17-19: The three girls named Lauren

Look, we need less Laurens.