‘Love is Blind’ Season 10 Episodes 1-6 review: The Ohio Prison Experiment

Love is Blind Season 10 wants you to believe that seven couples from Ohio—the Buckeye State, home of Nick Lachey, corn, and apparently an unusually high concentration of men who have never dated a woman of color despite being, themselves, a man of color—entered a series of glowing blue pods and emerged, ten days later, with the seeds of lifelong commitment already sprouting in their chests.

The show wants you to feel the warmth of that. It wants you to see the tears and hear the Shazam-able pop ballads swelling underneath the proposals and think: yes, this works. Love is real. The experiment is not a machine designed to generate content for Netflix’s Q1 viewing numbers.

I do not believe this. And I think, somewhere beneath the Hollywoodified editing and the suspiciously poignant Never Have I Ever game in Cabo, neither do most of the people on it.

Netflix panicked.

Let’s begin with the meta-text. Because the meta-text is, at this point, the only honest text Season 10 has to offer. Season 9 ended with zero weddings. Not one. The franchise’s first goose egg. And, as expected, the internet was appropriately brutal. Reddit’s r/LoveisBlindonNetflix—which functions, at this point, as the show’s id, its shadow parliament, its shadow government—spent weeks relitigating what went wrong. The consensus? Season 9 cast people who weren’t ready. The season let the rot fester on camera, and then acted surprised when nobody made it to the altar.

So Netflix and Kinetic Content did what any rational corporation does when faced with creative failure. They’ve made the opposite mistake. Love is Blind Season 10 now has seven engaged couples. That’s a franchise record. And it also has the dramatic tension of a Hallmark movie filmed in a Marriott conference room. The first six episodes are so relentlessly banal, so deliberately scrubbed of believable conflict, that I found myself genuinely concerned I had accidentally turned on Perfect Match. But no, this is still somehow Love is Blind. A show that has always promised to be, at its core, about the uncomfortable gap between who we think we are and who we reveal ourselves to be when we’re sleep-deprived, isolated, and slightly drunk on production-provided wine at 11am.

Love is Blind Season 10 has papered over that gap in many ways. Or at least the edit has. And the internet—Reddit, Instagram, the parasocial ecosystem that has grown up around this franchise like kudzu—knows it. The dominant note in the discourse right now is something between bemused and betrayed. We came here for a trainwreck and you gave us a mild fender-bender. The show overcorrected so hard from Season 9 that it landed in a different failure mode entirely. It’s the definition of beige. Productive, watchable, ultimately hollow beige. Or, as someone on one of these shows might say: it’s giving the Minneapolis season.

I guess we have to talk about Kevan.

Season 10 cannot quite bring itself to admit that the show’s actual subject has never been whether people can fall in love without seeing each other. That question was answered, more or less definitively, by Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton in Season 1. And yes, it’s been re-answered with varying degrees of conviction in every season since. The show’s actual subject is what people tell themselves about who they are. It’s in the story they’ve constructed about their own readiness, depth, and capacity for commitment. And then what happens when reality stress-tests that story.

Kevan Jones is Season 10’s most clarifying character because his story collapsed inside the pods. So way before any of the external reality could even begin. Kevan told himself—and Tyler Lanier, and Keya Kellum, and presumably anyone within earshot—that he was ready. Ready for love, ready for a wife, ready for “that sweep you off your feet moment.” Reader, he was not ready. He was so comprehensively unready that he managed to be rejected by two separate women in the same experiment. Both of whom told him, with extraordinary patience and charity, that his problem was not tactical but ontological. He is not a man struggling to choose between two women. He is a man who cannot be chosen.

The progression of Kevan’s arc is worth narrating carefully because it is a masterwork of a certain type of mediocrity. He starts Episode 1 saying Keya feels like a best friend. Then he decides Tyler’s voice makes him feel giddy. Then he waffles between them for episodes in a way that gives neither woman anything to hold onto. Granted, he attempts to end things with Keya in Episode 2, but then she tells him it’s too early for knee-jerk decisions and basically parents him through his own panic. (She does this competently enough to make us presume she’s had to do this before with other men. Maybe a lot of them).  Kevan then, after apparently receiving some form of emotional traction from Keya’s steady presence, asks Tyler to be his girlfriend while still, technically, in an experiment with Keya.

“You’re currently my girl,” he tells Tyler. Currently. The casual temporality of that phrasing. The grammatical hedging built right into the declaration of romantic interest. Tyler, who is self-confident and smart and deserves approximately eleven thousand percent better than this, ghosts him. Just leaves. Finds the exit and uses it, and wow does she. When Kevan returns to the pod the next day, there is no one there. He is alone in a room talking to a wall that contains no one. This is, I would argue, the most accurate visual metaphor for Kevan as a romantic partner that the show could have produced. In this moment, he’s a man speaking his feelings into a void he helped create.

Naturally, he goes back to Keya. He delivers what is apparently intended to be a heartfelt speech about how she was never second place. For a split second, I thought he might reveal he’s secretly an art dealer from Washington D.C. (Alas, that was seasons ago at this point). Keya—and this is where she becomes Love is Blind Season 10’s first hero—stops him. She doesn’t let him finish. She tells him she isn’t falling in love with him. That he isn’t ready for a relationship of this magnitude. That he should not have applied for this experiment. She delivers this verdict with the gentleness of a doctor explaining a diagnosis to a patient who already knew something was wrong. Then she walks away and says, “I chose me.”

The Love is Blind hive has collectively lost its mind over this, and correctly so. The comparison to Deepti’s Season 2 altar refusal was immediate and somewhat overstated. Deepti’s moment had more ceremony, more buildup, more accumulated hurt, after all. But the emotional logic is the same. A woman in this experiment, confronted with a man who has revealed himself to be unprepared for what he signed up for, decides that her own worth is not contingent on his willingness to finally, after all this, choose her. This is, apparently, still radical enough to go viral. That it remains radical tells you something about the show’s default expectations. It ain’t pretty.

Funnily enough, Kevan didn’t appear angry or particularly devastated in the end. He seemed, mostly, chastened. Which is either sincere growth happening in real time or very good editing. Probably both. He leaves the season (for now) as a minor figure who inadvertently gave us its best moment. Make of that what you will.

Alex Henderson: The show really just keeps casting this guy.

If Kevan is the character who revealed his limitations inside the pods, Alex Henderson is the character who waited until Cabo to reveal his. Which is, in some ways, worse. Because Ashley Carpenter has already said yes, already done the reveal, already announced to the Cabo sun that she is “very excited for sex, honestly.” And it is while she is presumably enjoying the fruits of that excitement that Alex is sitting down with Brittany Wicker and explaining, with the casual confidence of a man who does not anticipate consequences, that Brittany is his “usual type.” Darker features. His kinda woman. Ashley, he clarifies, is not that.

Let’s be precise about what this moment is and is not. It is not Alex saying he isn’t attracted to Ashley. He maintains—to Brittany, in this conversation, with Ashley conspicuously absent—that he is emotionally connected to his fiancée. What he is saying is that his emotional connection has arrived despite his physical instincts rather than alongside them. Which is, um, somewhat the point of the experiment? The pods are theoretically designed to build emotional connection that precedes physical preference. Alex enrolled in an experiment literally designed to challenge his pattern of prioritizing appearance. And then, barely a week into the experiment succeeding, went and told another woman that his pattern is still his pattern. He just hasn’t acted on it yet.

And keep in mind one simple thing. He did not tell Ashley about this conversation. Not yet at least.

Listen. Every season of Love is Blind has at least one man in it who enrolled in the experiment to do personal growth work on his superficiality and then, when the experiment partially worked, immediately defaulted back to the superficiality while maintaining the language of growth. Season 2 had Shake. Season 3 had Bartise, who spent two episodes waxing philosophical about his spiritual connection to Nancy and then told Cole he wasn’t physically attracted to her. Who else…oh, right, Season 6 had Jimmy. And now Alex is Love is Blind Season 10’s version of this character. The man who came here to change and changed just enough to get engaged… But then held the change in his hands and looked at it like something he’d received as a gift but wasn’t sure he wanted to keep.

Instagram is not being kind to Alex. The comments sections on the official Love is Blind account’s posts about Ashley and Alex have gone full Chernobyl. Reddit is, if anything, more organized in its contempt. There are threads breaking down the Brittany conversation frame by frame. Some literally noting his body language and reconstructing the timeline of what he told Ashley versus what he didn’t.

The consensus is that Alex is going to make it to the altar and then say something that will make Ashley’s face do a specific thing. And that specific thing will be difficult to watch.

That said, Alex will likely end things at the altar by blaming lack of attraction, without once taking accountability for the dishonesty of not telling Ashley about the Brittany conversation. This is probably a common prediction. Because it feels correct in the way that predictions about weather patterns feel correct. Not because people can see the future, but because they’ve seen this cloud formation before.

The Couples, briefly, in ascending order of my investment.

1. Emma and Mike: The Sinkhole Couple

Emma and Mike occupy the unenviable position of being Love is Blind Season 10’s most “I wish they weren’t doomed” pairing. But also somehow its most earnest one? Emma’s backstory is quite moving. Her parents adopted her from China at three. She had more than ten surgeries by age seven to remove precancerous birthmarks.

So she has a lifelong hyperawareness of her own body as a site of medical negotiation rather than straightforward pleasure. Her hesitance about having children is not a quirk or a fear to be overcome, as a result. It is a considered position arrived at through a specific relationship to bodily autonomy and medical uncertainty. Mike has neither engaged with nor, apparently, fully heard her on this. When he implies that she’ll come around, he is not being patient. He is declining to believe her.

Emma also called Mike her second choice. Repeatedly. To multiple people. He was her backup, after all, and she’s been clear about that. This is not necessarily fatal, of course. People fall in love with their backup options all the time, and Emma’s warmth toward Mike once she fully committed is evident. But the ground this relationship is built on has soft spots. And the kids question is most certainly not a soft spot. It is a sinkhole. And both of them are standing on the edge of it acting like they don’t see it.

2. Bri and Connor: The Couple I Understand Least

Connor is kind, funny, self-aware, and apparently secure enough to let Bri talk over him without making it a thing. Bri’s energy is bright and genuine. They bonded over “Mr. Brightside” and mutual childhood sports memories and a shared dream of coaching their kids’ teams. All of that is warm and real and good. And yet. Bri is clearly still rotating the Connor/Chris decision in her head like a Rubik’s cube she hasn’t solved yet. So the poolside closure conversation with Chris in Cabo—initiated by Bri, on Connor’s birthday, in front of the other couples—looks more like a woman who is testing something. What exactly she is testing is the real question.

The trailer for the season seems to show Chris telling her that Connor is “too submissive.” This is the kind of observation a person makes when they want to plant a seed without appearing to. So…well done. The seed has been planted. Instagram has a low-grade Bri/Chris shipping contingent that is probably not helping the situation.

My only takeaway is that the show goes to pretty extreme lengths to show Bri’s repeated insistence that everyone else at the group gathering is being “surface level,” and it’s cringe to the point where even Connor might be joining the rest of us in predicting that she’s really just here to audition for Perfect Match.

3. Jessica and Chris: The Underserved Couple

Jessica and Chris are Love is Blind Season 10’s most underserved couple. They’re also structurally its most compatible (at least from what we’ve seen). She’s an infectious disease physician who divorced during the pandemic because her husband couldn’t meet her when she came home from the front lines. Chris appears to provide groundedness and stability, though I suspect he may secretly be another infection disease for Jessica to diagnose, ahem.

They also both explicitly don’t want children, which makes them, in Season 10’s context, as rare as matching socks found in the same load of laundry (shoutout to Monica from Season 8). The show has given them basically twenty minutes of screen time, which is its own form of editorial statement. We don’t even meet Jessica until a while into the first chunk of episodes.

And even the age gap “issue” between them ends up becoming a footnote. Jessica’s six years older, but neither of them appear to register it as a noteworthy issue. And they might be right in that respect. Both seem to be on the same maturity level, more or less. And although the trailer for what comes next tries to hint at Chris possibly flirting with Bri (whom he had a connection with in the pods at one point), it still looks to me like a friend looking out for a friend. In this case, insisting to said friend that her partner might not be the right match. And, well, yeah.

That said, I have a sneaking suspicion that Chris and Jessica do have one pain point that absolutely will have to be discussed. And that’s politics, of course. Jessica invokes it in Cabo, and Chris’s sort-of non-response is quite telling. Looks like we might have another Ben-and-Sara-from-Season-8 situation on our screens.

4. Brittany and Devonta: The Failure-to-Launch Couple

Brittany arrived at the reveal and fought hard not to let her face do what her face wanted to do. She catalogued Devonta’s height and freckles and sweatiness with palpable intensity. Like she was recalculating a budget in real time. (Even shames him for his weight when reflecting on the reveal).

Then she said his eyes were “the kind of eyes that are going to get me pregnant.” Which is a sentence I have now read many times and still cannot fully parse, but which felt like Brittany trying to alchemize anxiety into desire through sheer force of will. In Cabo, Devonta has retreated into grief about his grandfather. And it seems real, valid, not a flag in isolation.

But the retreat is being read, by Brittany and by the audience, as withdrawal from someone who isn’t sure about her. Most viewers have probably written this couple off and understandably so. The physical disconnect became undeniable when they were, reportedly, the only couple in Mexico not immediately celebrating their engagement in physical terms. Which wouldn’t normally be a big deal, of course, except that both of them have now insisted that they actually do want to…but haven’t.

5. Jordan and Amber: The Surprise-Normal Couple

Jordan apparently told producers that kids were a dealbreaker. Then he met Amber. He baked her cookies and sent them to the women’s quarters. He reversed the dealbreaker. In Cabo, Amber told him about getting pregnant at 26 without a partner, about the years of difficult relationships. Even about the specific exhaustion of loving people who aren’t capable of loving back well. Jordan listened to her, or seemed to, anyway.

He navigated a CPAP machine and let Amber shave his back. Which is either deeply intimate or deeply chaotic. Or, as is most common with Amber and Jordan, somehow both.

To be honest, her reaction at the reveal definitely gave the vibe that she was initially put off by his more husky appearance. Or maybe something else. But in that time since, she’s pretty much been one half of Love is Blind Season 10’s rare “normal-ish” couple.

6. Vic and Christine: The Couple in Malibu Because They’re Too Good for the Rest of This

Yes, they are in Malibu instead of Mexico with everyone else. Why? Well, apparently, they have no outside drama requiring resolution. My guess is that the producers were seriously worried about zero weddings this year, so they kept this couple as retainer. A backup plan. The idea being that they could easily edit them out if no one else gets married. It (sort of) happened in Season 1 when “too many” people got engaged and they didn’t have room for everyone to keep participating.

Regardless, maybe the simpler explanation is that their connection is too stable and normal to generate the kind of content that Love is Blind needs in its group Cabo scenes. Those scenes naturally require jealousy and closure-seeking and poolside confrontations to function. Vic and Christine did not need any of that. They talked about faith and childhood and community. They look at each other like people who have been waiting a long time to find someone and, against their own expectations, have.

Even the cynics are earnestly rooting for them, which is unusual enough that it deserves noting. They are, at this point in the season, Love is Blind‘s best argument for Love is Blind. Whether that argument holds through the apartment phase and the family visits and the altar is the season’s only remaining suspense.

7. Ashley and Alex: The Job Interview Couple

Eh. Let’s keep this one brief. First, what the “shell” is wrong with this man?

Similar to Bri, these two have a better shot at Netflix casting them for Perfect Match than they do getting married within the next two years. Alex clearly wants to be an influencer.

He came in ready with an influencer-prepped backstory as the former soccer athlete who failed to find love on Netflix but by golly he can sell you a supplement that will knock your cleats off.

8. Elissa and the Nail-Glue

Best couple on the show? Sorry, but it’s just so difficult not to laugh both at and with this show when it ends the first episode on an ambulance-siren cliffhanger straight out of Canva and resolves in the first scene with the hilarious hijinks of a woman who really wants to test out the idea of love being blind by accidentally putting nail glue in her eye because she thought they were eye drops. She’s an ICU nurse by the way. The “I” stands for Iconic.

What Love is Blind Season 10 ultimately reveals about itself.

Ten seasons is a long time. In television terms, it is the length of Friends, The X-Files, and Cheers. Most scripted dramas would be long dead by now. But Love is Blind, like a lot of reality television in its vein, has survived by being fundamentally renewable. Each season has new people, new pods, new variations on the same essential question. But ten seasons also means that the audience has built up a kind of structural literacy about the show that is starting to work against it.

We know the architecture now. We know when an engagement is real and when it is momentum. And we know what a Shake looks like in episode two. We know that the Cabo conversations are the first place the pods begin to crack. One of the only reasons the show still maintains relevance in the midst of all this repetition is the discourse. The addicting nature of finding other people to gossip and be snarky with. Still, even that is wearing thin.

Season 10’s discourse, such that it is, has the quality of expert diagnosis. Which is its own problem for the show. When the audience knows the grammar of your storytelling better than some of your contestants know themselves, you have lost a certain air of innocence.

The engagement of Vic and Christine generates warmth because Vic and Christine appear to be outside the show’s normal operating logic. They’re two people for whom the experiment worked the way it was supposed to, cleanly and without drama. The rest of the season generates a different kind of engagement. It’s forensic interest, the pleasure of watching something unfold in a direction you already predicted. It’s the satisfaction of being right about Alex. And being right about Alex is not, it turns out, pleasurable in the way that being right about a television show usually is.

There’s just something uncomfortable about watching a woman announce her excitement about being physically intimate with her fiancé in one scene, and then watching that fiancé tell another woman, in the next scene, that the first woman isn’t his type. It doesn’t resolve into schadenfreude. It just sits there. It’s a little heavy, and it’s a thing the show isn’t quite sure what to do with. Which probably makes it the most honest moment Season 10 has produced yet.

Love is Blind Season 10 (Episodes 1-6) is now streaming on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 drop February 18, 2026.

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Images courtesy of Netflix.