Bachelorette Finale: Shocking Live Confrontation Delays Groundbreaking Proposal Footage

The live three-hour episode started to tease a darker undertone when it was revealed several of Jenn's previous suitors were in the studio audience to lend their support, after what they heard. Then, when asked how he was doing, Jenn's brother James pointedly told host Jesse Palmer he wasn't doing all that good.

All of that set the stage for an explosive confrontation that rendered basically everything that came before it completely moot. No, we'll take that back. It added infuriating context with the power of hindsight.

But first (sorry to Julie Chen for stealing her catchphrase), Jenn had to whittle her choices down from two men to one. Would she choose the man who was choosing her or the one who didn't seem able to choose anything?

The family visits went about as you might expect. Devin said all the right things and continued to express his devotion and love for Jenn, who only finally started reciprocating.

Meanwhile, the man she's loved longer while he's remained emotionally unavailable amid his own life traumas ... well he continued a lot of that. Marcus showed that week after week, he says there is incremental growth, but really he's virtually catatonic with fear.

Does he love Jenn? Inside, he might. But he's not willing to let anything out. Is it fear of rejection? Abandonment? That's certainly Jenn's biggest fear, as she expressed multiple times.

The real hero of the family visits was Jenn's brother James, who was compassionate but hard. He wasn't a total jerk to these guys, nor did he let them off the hook. Devin was called out for talking more about himself and his feelings than Jenn, while Marcus was called out for continuing to hold back.

For James, he's watched his sister have a history of giving to these emotionally detached men who give nothing back and he's seeing a lot of familiarity in everything Marcus is giving, or not giving, as the case may be.

In the end, the family didn't really offer any real strong support for either guy, or this whole process. Considering how few couples succeed out of this two-month journey to find love amid tons of cameras and dozens of suitors -- their reaction is pretty appropriate.

When it came time for their final dates, Jenn and Devin enjoyed a spiritual ceremony to let go of their fears. For Jenn, it was her continuous fear of being abandoned, of someone expressing their love and devotion to her only to bail.

For Devin, it's his own tendency to overthink everything leading him to sabotage a good thing that's right in front of him. Later that night, he gave her a necklace he'd received from a shaman in New Zealand that represented for him the intertwining eternal connections of love.

He was told only to give it to the woman he was ready to share that forever experience, and that he'd know when that time was. So Devin chose the night before proposals.

As for Marcus, Jenn couldn't even smile her way through a date before she finally sat down and made him face how he really feels about her. Express something or get out of the way.

Marcus, as always, was hoping that this date would be the one to draw them close enough where he could finally say he loves her and he's ready. Honestly, watching him try to explain himself to Jenn had us picturing him at 75 years old talking to some woman he's been with for 40 years and saying all the same things.

Marcus is definitely Marcus' own enemy in these moments.

Perhaps empowered by her brother's words, Jenn finally decided to stop "pouring" herself fully into relationships with men who give little or nothing back. She chose herself and to leave Marcus.

And in their face-to-face live with Jesse, after, neither expressed regrets. Marcus spent a little too long in trying to claim some agency in the decision to end their relationship, before finally conceding before admitting the only agency he really had was in not pushing back against her.

But that has kind of been his mode all season. Long silences and looking down before he'd say he was scared to... yes. All of the things. He did it again here, proving he's still not nearly ready to advance genuine love in his own life.

From there, we saw snippets of Devin picking the ring and the unprecedented decision by Jenn to not let him propose (the big moment teased all season). Instead, she wanted to propose to him. This was supposed to be the twist of the season that would leave Bachelor Nation swooning.

It was supposed to be a twist about an empowered woman taking full control of her life and choices. That's how it went in Hawaii and that's how it was supposed to go for this finale.

It did not go that way. Instead, the twist was what happened immediately after the proposal.

"He said that he didn't love me anymore and didn't feel the same way and felt like something had been off since the second he proposed, he regretted getting engaged, and I didn't know," Jenn told Jesse live.

"He denied ever being in love," she added, as Jesse expressed his sadness for her and finally -- after way too long! -- offered her tissues for her tears.

Somehow, the guy who'd been showing up and choosing Jenn and doing all the right things and even did a ceremony with her where she revealed her biggest fear was abandonment ... well, he abandoned her.

He took back all those things he said. How does that happen? Did he ever mean what he said? How do you immediately regret a proposal as soon as it happens? Did he get wrapped up in the majesty of the show? Did he not really want to win (we know a lot of contestants come on just to become famous)?

We'll never know the truth because even after Jesse brought him out, one of the most eloquent speakers in Bachelor Nation history, who never had any problem expressing how he was feeling, had nothing to say.

He was totally channeling Sam M in saying a whole lot of words with very little meaning. He insisted everything he'd said on the show was real, at least until it wasn't.

He did concede that he "was regretfully late in letting you know" that he was over her and their relationship after she called him out: "I was in a relationship with you for two months where you had one foot out the door."

He kept trying to show how much he'd been open and honest with her, during which Jenn defended herself and pushed back with one shocking revelation after another, like what happened right after he broke off their engagement.

"The next day I wake up to you following girls on Instagram; not just any girls, but Maria," she said, referring to Maria Georgas -- the girl everyone thought was going to be the next Bachelorette (including the guys) until she turned it down.

"Not only is that disrespectful to everything we had shared together, I just don't understand it, why you would do something like that, because it completely invalidated our entire relationship," Jenn added, which isn't wrong. It makes it seem like his heart was on Maria the whole time, and maybe she never fully left his mind.

When she called him out for partying in New York with cast member Jeremy, his counter was, "Am I not allowed to live a life?" But that was the problem. He talked about how emotionally distraught he was and how hard this was for him, but were was that?

"This past month, every Monday night my heart is broken over and over again, whereas you don't give a crap," she said, mentioning that he was sharing memes online about it and seemed to be having a gay old time.

"I am heartbroken every Monday night watching the lies that you said to me on TV," she added, to which he again insisted they were not lies.

She then reminded him that for all his hearing her fears of abandonment, his declarations of love and being there, he broke off their engagement with a phone call. When he kept saying he was sorry, she reminded him even that she wasn't buying, referencing that call.

"That's what you said to me in a 15-minute phone call when you broke up with me, 'I can't be sorry anymore, I gotta go,'" she reminded him.

After Jesse made them watch the proposal moment, with Jenn quipping that she knows she has no choice, she said she has no regrets for the choice she made in that moment. "I do not regret proposing to that man on there, but what happened was that man does not exist anymore," she said.

In the end, Devin never offered any sort of satisfactory explanation for what happened. It all seemed so abrupt, as if he'd been putting on a performance all season long ... but to what end? He's definitely coming out of this a Bachelor Nation hero. Is he hoping to be a villain on Bachelor in Paradise and parlay this into a mid-tier reality TV career?

Did he mean anything he said out there? Did he get wrapped up in the magic of the season and then real life slapped him out of it? Did he overthink his way out of genuine feelings for Jenn, as his own fear was that he would do?

The best explanation he could give was when he said, "I watched this beautiful girl grow and flourish into this amazing woman on her own. It took none of us on the show to make you that person. It was amazing to watch you flourish into who you were."

Devin said that after filming ended and they returned to the real world, "I found myself falling short of those expectations in the real world. I found myself not being able to live up to the things that you need and you deserve. I watched myself contribute to your regression and that hurt me. You don't deserve to compromise your standards to be happy."

"I hope that you learn that the weight of your words matter, and that if you're going to promise something, you should be able to fulfill those promises," Jenn told her ex in her closing remarks.

"I just I simply couldn't have done what you have done in that position," she continued. "And when I love something, I nurture it and I value it, and I don't throw it away the next day."

The next journey for love begins Wednesday, September 18 with the inaugural season of The Golden Bachelorette on ABC.

Meanwhile, Jenn's journey also continues ... straight into the ballroom as she joins the cast of Dancing with the Stars, premiering one day earlier, September 17 on ABC and Disney+.