The Golden Bachelor Australia has officially kicked off and we’re already starting to see our usual dating series tropes including the contestant with the winner’s edit who’s obvs going to win the thing, and — conversely — the gal who’s received the villain edit: none other than Catherine Kirwan.

The Golden Bachelor villain Catherine

So what does one have to do to cement themselves as a villain on The Bachelor, I hear you ask?

Betraying the other girlies, ignoring the show’s rules and hogging the show’s hunk is usually enough to do it and Catherine was guilty of all of the above in the show’s second ep!

“I haven’t had any time [with Barry ‘Bear’ Myrden],” said Lauren, envious of the fact that Catherine had been monopolising Bear at the parties. “You’ve touched him, you’ve kissed him, you’ve held him, you’ve danced with him. I want that.”
The Golden Bachelor villain CatherCatherine bragging about the attention she received from Bear. (Credit: The Golden Bachelor / 9Now)
To remedy this, the ladies came up with a plan to ensure fairness, so that Bear would be evenly shared amongst the ladies called the ‘permission to push’, in which gals who had already spent time with Bear would bow out to give others a turn.

All the ladies were up for this plan, except for Catherine, who told the cameras: “I make my own rules up”.

Then, when one of the other contestants was chatting with Bear, Catherine cut her grass and stole Bear away, prompting Lauren to say: “Where’s the sisterhood?”

“Did Catherine just go in for the kill?” a baffled Lauren ask. “This is the longest he’s been with anyone, I feel. I’m totally screwed.”

Viewers were quick to label Catherine as this season’s villain, taking to social media to call out her shady manoeuvre.

“Catherine is here to be our villain… she’ll be here a while,” one person pointed out.

“Catherine is not making it easy for anybody,” wrote another.

Sure enough, despite her villain antics, Catherine was safe from elimination – check out who did miss out on getting a rose.

From my experience, there are a few different types of Bachelor villains. There are ones who are overtly obnoxious and end up eliminated in the first few weeks as they’re too excruciating to watch on screen, and there are the ones who producers intentionally keep in the show ’til the end for the spice.

There’s currently no way of knowing which type of villain Catherine has been cast as, so we’ll need to keep watching to find out! Who knows, maybe a redemption arc is coming… but I doubt it.