Bachelor Brad and Bianka (Handout)

It all comes down to this. Wednesday night on Citytv, The Bachelor Canada's eligible slab of beef, former CFL slotback Brad Smith, will make his choice. Families will be met. Private dates will be set. The final rose will be handed out. The excitement, it is palpable.

At least, that's what I gather from the blogs and forums and Twitter and Facebook and all the other places people are discussing, analyzing and making predictions on the outcome of Canada's first homegrown edition of the long-running reality matchmaking show.

I'd love to be able to weigh in on who I think Brad will choose, and debate the relative merits of the two finalists vying for his love, Calgary's Whitney Lee and Toronto's Bianka Kamber. I'd love to rant about who has already been cut from the show and why they deserved better, or how they got exactly what they had coming.

Small problem, though: I haven't watched The Bachelor Canada. In fact I've never willingly seen an episode of any Bachelor series, save for a bit of Season 7 of the U.S. version of the show, when my pal Jenny was one of the contestants (It used to be a point of odd pride to say I knew someone who was on The Bachelor. Now, I'm pretty sure every person in North America is no more than two degrees of separation from someone who's been on the show.)

It's lazy and cheap to pick on reality shows, I know. But when I think about stuff like The Bachelor Canada, I wonder: what would happen if the world was destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, and many centuries from now alien explorers found the charred remains of our planet? And what if, by some incredible, horrible fluke, the only surviving account of human existence and civilization was a PVR sealed inside a fallout shelter that had nothing but The Bachelor Canada recorded on it? What would the aliens infer about us?

It would probably go something like this.

Humans chose their mates based on televised competitions

"We see a virile male surrounded by a collection of eligible, painted women in their reproductive prime. Perhaps the males of the species were dying out, which allowed human men to hold elaborate, humiliating public contests in order to select a mate."

Human females drew sustenance primarily from two sources: alcohol and roses

"The females seem to require alcoholic beverages in order to initiate mating rituals, but given how viciously they compete to receive the red flower, and how distraught they are when they do not, it surely must be their ultimate source of life energy."

Humans considered football to be a noble pursuit

"Despite men being threatened with extinction, they would don armour to do battle over a stuffed animal skin. But only three attempts to move the stuffed skin a predetermined distance? That seems so much more challenging than, say, four attempts to do the same."

Humans progress from strangers to life companions in a matter of weeks

"While we choose our life partners after many months of bonding and familiarization in order to ensure a compatible mate, humans apparently chose theirs after only several weeks of knowing one another. Perhaps their lifespans were much shorter than ours."

The human female called Whitney is a sneaky drama queen and totally doesn't deserve to win even though she totally will

"Well come on, she is. We're not even from this galaxy and we can see that."