Bachelor Zach Shallcross and his dates before the wheels fell off the pool party.
PHOTO CREDIT: All photos but screen grabs Craig Sjodin/ABC

There were two questions to be answered after Monday’s episode of “The Bachelor”: Is Christina Mandrell a mean girl or a misunderstood girl? And did Zach Shallcross and Kaity Biggar jump each other’s bones during their night at the Natural History Museum?

Well, OK, maybe three questions: If the episode’s musical performer is a cousin of the host does that make them a nepo baby? A nepo cuz, at least?

The episode was bookended by some (manufactured) drama and also saw a couple of women crash and burn — luckily not on the skydiving date — but only one of them decided to burn someone else on her way out. More on that later.

First things first: the “Bachelor” producers apparently have so little faith in their ability to keep viewers interested this season that they opened the episode with both gratuitous shower footage of Zach and a FaceTime call with Sean Lowe, although it’s beyond me why you’d want to keep reminding everyone that your show is 1 for 26 (maybe soon 27) when it comes to your stars actually using the platform to find their spouses. (OK, maybe 24 and a half if you count Jason Mesnick and Arie Luyendyk Jr.)

Next it was time for host Jesse Palmer to stoke the hopes of the 17 women who were still around and immediately crush 16 of them by handing out the first one-on-one date card.

ER nurse Kaity was the recipient and got decked out in a slinky green dress so she could . . . walk around a museum looking at dinosaur skeletons and animal dioramas?

The other women, as much as they were all “so happy for you, Kaity,” couldn’t help but notice Zach’s hand resting on her knee when he came to the mansion to pick her up. Little did they know worse was yet to come.

Zach Shallcross and Kaity Biggar commune in the shadow of a dino.

Kaity herself described the museum date as the only romantic thing she had ever done in her life. And I know she’s only 27, but what?

When she told Zach that after seven years of a toxic, on-and-off relationship she just wanted to feel safe and to find “a good man to treat me right,” you kind of wanted to hug her.

This show makes a fetish out of vulnerability, but some of these women truly are vulnerable as hell.

The mood lifted when Zach — who kept whispering as if he was afraid of waking up the fossils — gave Kaity the date rose, then invited her to spend the night with him in a tent next to the elephant display. There were his and hers animal pyjamas and two camp cots, which they pushed together before zipping up the tent.

I guess what happened in the museum stays in the museum, for now anyway, but the other women were rattled when Kaity came home the next morning, still in her PJs, and talked about how romantic the date was.

“Did you get any sleep?” asked Gabi.

“Nope,” Kaity said.

That was the point, of course, to stress out the other contestants thinking Zach got intimate with Kaity. Why else would you put an overnight date in the third episode?

It was back to business as usual, however, with a football group date, the fifth instalment of the so-called “Bachelor Bowl.” It was the Shall-Crushers against the Ball-Zachs and, honestly, the latter should have won for the name alone.

Ariel, Christina, Kylee and Kat of the Ball-Zachs prepare to kick off Bachelor Bowl V.

Despite an ambulance being called when Anastasia took a dive, there were no injuries unless you count Gabi’s pride when she peed her pants a little on national TV.

The Ball-Zachs did indeed win and got to enjoy an after-party with Zach while the Shall-Crushers slinked back to the mansion. Only two things of note happened.

Bailey, one of the women who first met Zach on “After the Final Rose,” decided she needed “validation” from him, but as soon as she told him things were feeling “weird” to her and “regressing a little bit,” he rapidly agreed.

“I’m just not confident there is a future between us,” Zach told her.

“I do feel, like, if we had more time together, like, we could get there,” Bailey responded.

Like, you’re on “The Bachelor,” sweetie. Even the women he really, really likes don’t get enough time.

Bailey’s departure upset the other women and was the beginning of the end for Christina.

Bailey says goodbye to the other women while Christina makes a sad(?) face in the background.

She had already been annoying her teammates by bringing up her one-on-one date. Sin No. 2 was to describe Bailey’s departure as “sad” but “inevitable.” Strike 3 came after Charity got the group date rose. As the other women told Charity how well-deserved it was, Christina blurted out that she was confused as well as mad that it didn’t go to her, punctuated with a “duh,” all of which appeared to make Charity cry.

Christina defended her faux pas as her “trying to be 100,” but Brooklyn and Kat countered that Christina was making things all about her.

Finally Brooklyn shut down the argument with a line that will live in “Bachelor” infamy — or at least in the highlights reel at “Women Tell All” — “Have you ever considered just literally shutting the fuck up?”

So was Christina deliberately trying to intimidate, and being manipulative and calculating, as Brooklyn said?

I don’t think so. She clearly sucked at reading a room, particularly one of exhausted and emotional fellow contestants, and it seems she never heard the expression “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Christina’s final reckoning was still to come. First there was a second one-on-one date to dispense with. If you were surprised it went to health-care strategist Aly, well, join the club.

She put on the wedding jumpsuit that the producers sent over and met Zach, dressed in a groom-like charcoal suit and white, open-necked shirt, next to a wedding bower — and I’m sorry, but these faux wedding dates are as boring as the football ones.

Zach to Aly Jacobs: “Will you jump out of this really scary plane with me?”

At least it wasn’t one of those stupid fake wedding shoots; Aly and Zach got dressed up to parachute out of a plane, because that worked so well for Rachel Kirkconnell on Matt’s season.

But you know, Zach is looking for his best friend — which is becoming the overused, meaningless phrase of the season — and, uh, best friends jump out of planes together?

Zach and Aly emerged unscathed to have dinner at the cool-looking Bradbury Building in downtown L.A. True confessions were on the menu.

Aly told Zach that she liked to be in control of everything to avoid the hurt of her past relationships and that she never put herself first in a relationship before, but she wanted to find “a safe space where I could put myself first but still be fully invested in you.”

Zach seemed down with that or at least down with getting to know the real Aly — it is only Week 3, people — and handed over the date rose.

Griffen Palmer gets to enjoy performing on “The Bachelor,” i.e. having the Bach and his date ignore you.

Then he had a surprise: Griffen Palmer was playing a song called “Second Chances.” Who dat? Why Jesse Palmer’s country singer cousin from Pickering. Look out folks, the Canadians are taking over.

Speaking of Jesse, he showed up at the mansion the next day to announce there would be no rose ceremony cocktail party . . . but there would be a pool party so run and put on those skimpy bikinis girls!

It was all fun and games and clandestine smooches until Brianna, a.k.a. America’s first impression rose winner, decided to tell Zach she was leaving.

No surprise here. It seemed obvious to me from Night 1 there was nothing cooking between Zach and Brianna, which I guess is what happens when you let “America” hand out the roses instead of the Bachelor. Yeah, great idea, Mike Fleiss.

But Brianna had a parting gift for Christina. She told Zach that their “connection didn’t get off the ground because of hard things I’ve been going through in the house” and that she felt intimidated by Christina, who made her cry several times.

Brianna Thorbourne has her exit interview with Zach.

So where is the footage of this intimidation? The only thing we saw, in Week 2, were receipts of Christina giving Brianna a back-handed compliment on the first night, which Brianna interpreted as hurtful.

Look, it’s always tricky when a white woman is accused of making a Black woman feel unsafe, but this reeked of production stoking Brianna’s insecurities and then manipulating her to throw Christina under the bus.

Whatever the case, Zach really wasn’t kidding when he told Brianna he didn’t like drama.

Christina defended herself as best she could, telling Zach her “outgoing and happy and loud” personality was rubbing people the wrong way, but she thought her conflicts with a couple of the other women had been settled and it would be a mistake to believe Brianna’s accusations.

And then she went and cried on the stairs.

Quite honestly, I figured Zach would go through the motions of debating whether to keep Christina and she’d get the final rose, and then we’d have a few more weeks of her pissing off Brooklyn and Kat and Kylee.

But nope, Christina was banished as Zach gave roses to Jess, Gabi, Ariel, Genevie — who showed up at the rose ceremony with a cast on her arm? what?!? — Greer, Kat, Kylee, Davia, Anastasia, Brooklyn and Mercedes.

So who’s gonna be the centre of the drama now? Don’t worry, looks like somebody is getting outed as a social media clout chaser next week.

Sorry, Zach, if you didn’t like drama you should have stayed home.

You can watch Monday at 8 p.m. on Citytv and you can comment here, visit my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter @realityeo

Edited because a reader — yay, I have readers! — emailed to point out that Jason Mesnick wasn’t the only one who married his runner-up.