Every couple on Love Is Blind season two is wrong. Danielle and Nick. Iyanna and Jarrette. Natalie and Shayne. Deepti and Shake. Mallory and Sal. They’re all so inharmonious, so fundamentally incorrect it boggles the mind how any of these people are together in the first place. The contestants are so dogged in their pursuit of marriage—and so mutually willing to overlook their partners’ flaws—it’s a wonder that they’ve managed to keep things going this long. 

But that’s precisely what makes Love Is Blind season two so watchable. It is peak red flag television, a study in how uncanny a dating show can really get. 

The show, which debuts weekly in small batches on Netflix, maintains the same format this year as it did in its first season. Dozens of men and women are brought into a house, where they enter small pods and talk to potential partners through a wall. Once they “fall in love” and agree to get married, the couples are finally allowed to meet in person and live together for a month, barreling toward their wedding day. Season two has been immensely popular, currently Netflix’s second most watched show in the U.S.—and perhaps increasing in viewership because of the onscreen chaos that escalates with each passing episode, as the weddings loom closer and closer in this week’s upcoming finale. 

It’s hard to say who is the biggest walking red flag on the series this season. There was Shake, who asked women rude, shallow questions about their bodies and confessed he had never dated an Indian woman before, always preferring blondes; his partner, Deepti, was in the exact same position, having never even kissed an Indian man. There was Shayne, who asked Natalie to be his girlfriend, then immediately resumed aggressive flirting with Shaina, which is as close to one can get to cheating in the pods. There was Jarrette, who proposed to Mallory, got rejected, then proposed to Iyanna. 

As the season has progressed, the red flags have only flown higher and higher. Danielle and Nick can’t seem to have a conversation without ending it on the most bizarre argument you’ve ever heard. Shake tells everyone he comes into contact with that he’s not sexually attracted to Deepti. Jarrette parties and stays out all night, much to Iyanna’s disappointment. Natalie, in spite of her incredibly calm demeanor, can’t stop making fun of Shayne, who is too sensitive to handle it—even though he openly calls himself “the most obnoxious person in the world.” Mallory has been slowly laying the groundwork for a relationship escape hatch, telling mild-mannered songbird Sal that he only has so many more strikes before she walks away. An honorable mention goes to Kyle and Shaina, who never made it to through the getaway in part because Shaina was still fixated on Shayne. (And also because Shaina is a Christian and says she doesn’t believe in evolution, and Kyle is a staunch atheist who believes in science.) 

What stretches the series into the realm of surrealism, however, is how often the contestants parrot the show’s thesis. Love is blind, they insist. They can’t wait to get married. You know me better than anyone, they tell one another, the kind of breathless hyperbole that powers this kind of reality-as-fantasy terrain. The show’s premise is so pure—connect with someone without looking at them; fall in love with their inner beauty. The contestants are all in, but in a way that turns love into a kind of threat, and marriage into a weapon. 

Of course, people doing and saying unbelievable things on reality television is the lifeblood of the genre, and the pursuit of love is as honorable a reason as any to sign up for a reality show. But, at this point, it’s next to impossible to root for any couple to survive this season because they’re all so spectacularly mismatched. 

Season one of Love Is Blind was similarly unhinged. It didn’t have the robust, obsessive approach perfected by the Bachelor empire, nor the sizzle of newly dominant shows like Love Island, which took the polar-opposite approach: throw a bunch of conventionally attractive people into a paradisiacal villa and watch what happens. The latter show created a kind of authenticity by virtue of airing episodes every single day and setting a very simple end goal: become part of a couple and win money. Love Is Blind, though, takes a modern fairy-tale approach, homing in on a handful of potential love stories and bottling the whole thing into a bingeable 10-episode format. 

But season one also lucked upon some genuine couples, two of whom are still together: Lauren and Cameron, and Amber and Barnett. While the latter couple had their ups and downs, Lauren and Cameron were more stable, deepening their connection with each passing episode. At first, Nick and Danielle seemed like the Lauren and Cameron of season two: a lovely first match to kick the season off and perhaps buoy the hopelessness of this entire enterprise. That’s no longer the case, to the point where the penultimate episode’s cliff-hanger sees Nick sweating bullets at the altar. (Yes, because it was a blisteringly hot day, but it couldn’t be a more apt visual for the conundrum he’s in!) 

What’s apparent now is that season two desperately needed a buoy, a foundational couple that could be relied upon to inject the show with some kind of hope. Perhaps the two couples who got engaged offscreen this season could have offered that; what Love Is Blind could use is a little real love.

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