Like Lisa Vanderpump tucking into exactly one (1) goat-cheese ball, let’s get right into this, shall we? The episode opens with Dayna and Max at bartender school, a legally required prerequisite for any Los Angeles transplant with entertainment-industry aspirations. While they’re learning how to pour various alcohols into the same cup, Brett tells Dayna that her ex Max was in Vegas sleeping with a Scheana Shay impersonator. This seems like really bad form.
Over in Valley Village, Katie and Tom are hosting Stassi and Beau. In between jabs about how Beau hasn’t proposed yet, because Stassi has the patience of a Sour Patch Kid–addled fourth-grader, it is a sort of planning meeting for the Witches of WeHo wine party that the crew is going to have at the end of the episode. This basically means that it’s another bitch session about Kristen and how awful she is and how no one wants to be her friend anymore. This is especially rich because Katie, a woman with the motivation of that same fourth-grader after he has crashed from his sugar high, basically says, “Oh, the event is going to be great. Kristen did all the work.â€
This is what I really don’t understand about this whole fracture in the group. Kristen is the only one attending to their joint business venture and somehow they’re still mad at her. This doesn’t give her a pass or at least some credit with the other two? God, what did I do in a past life that I am now saddled with the curse of sympathizing with Kristen?
At SUR, Scheana sits down with Lisa for a producer-mandated update on all of her story lines. Scheana tells Lisa that her egg retrieval netted her seven (7) eggs for her future use with a man she has yet to find. She tells Lisa that she’s really happy to be single right now and having fun, which is sort of like someone who is being tortured by a drug cartel painting a smile on his face and saying, “I’m actually into S&M so this doesn’t really hurt at all.†Just like in that scenario, no one believes it.
Lisa, because she is an asshole, brings up that Max was hooking up with fake Scheana in Las Vegas, a manufactured plot point that everyone is so proud of that it keeps coming up like last night’s curry. Scheana says she’s mad at both Brett and Max because they didn’t call her after her entirely elective surgery to ask how she was doing. Lisa drops some very wise words: “You can’t expect that level of attention from a man who is not your husband. You also can’t expect that level of attention for a man who is your husband.â€
After her shift, Scheana goes to hang out with Dayna, which is odd because they were in a fight until about one bubble tea ago. (A “bubble tea†is a measure of time equivalent to how long it takes to drink a bubble tea, which is somewhere between fifteen (15) minutes and never, depending on how you feel about bubble tea.) When Scheana arrives, she tells Dayna she can’t go to the club that night because she injured her knee in a Bird scooter incident that is so bland I can’t believe it’s even on our television. Scheana says, “My doctor told me I can’t do anything physical like twerking or dancing.†I love how this is her translation of what the doctor said. To Scheana the only physical things she does are twerk and dance. That’s it. Not Pilates, not walking to the grocery store, not her damn job waiting tables. It’s just twerking and dancing. Those are the restrictions.
There is a whole kerfuffle at Dayna’s litter box of an apartment because Scheana says she hired a medium so that Dayna could talk to her mother but wanted to check with Dayna first to see if that’s okay. Dayna says that seems like a lot, so Scheana has to go outside and tell the medium to skedaddle. Then Dayna is like, “Wait, you told me that the medium was available, not that she was here,†and Scheana says, “Well, yeah, she is available and she is here because we are filming a reality show and she needs to be here now to film if we want to film this. Where do you think she’d be?†And Dayna’s like, “Oh, we’re doing a reality show? Let me unpack all of my fast fashion on this couch and talk about it for no good reason.â€
It’s all weird and dumb but also hilarious because this is the fight that we’re subjected to. But it leads Dayna to a really insightful observation about Scheana: She wants so badly for everyone to like her all the time that she says whatever she needs to say to make herself agreeable, even if that means lying. However, it’s that lying and thirstiness that makes people not like her. It’s a vicious cycle of people-pleasing that Scheana just needs to stop.
This all happens at a club called Nightingale where all of the “new kids†meet up with James and his girlfriend Raquel, a Pinterest board for Mason jar wedding centerpieces, because none of the “old kids†will film with him anymore. This is a weird club in that it seems like everyone who works there is hot, shirtless, and male, but it also doesn’t seem to be a gay club. I am very confused. Also confusing: There is a clearly set up staging area for Danica and Brett to sit on a bench and have a conversation so incredibly inconsequential it could be happening between strangers on public transport, if any of us were allowed on public transport or to sit close enough to a stranger to have a conversation.
At the club James is talking about just how incredibly sober he is now, a conversation he continues at the music studio with Lala. They’re laying down tracks with her producers Los and Sean2: The Revenge. Their Weeknd rip-off of a song even includes a lyric from Lala about how she doesn’t drink anymore. These two are sober and bonding. Fun.
Now Beau is at Lisa’s house so he can arrange a dinner party there after he proposes to Stassi in a graveyard in the next episode. This visit is intercut with Stassi’s visit to the gyno, where she finds out that everything about her reproductive tract is normal so she can start having babies whenever she wants. Both of these scenes are as extraneous as a corpse’s appendix.
Over at SUR, Brett Willis, Danica’s three-way-loving ex-boyfriend, teaches racist Brett how to make drinks. Meanwhile, at the UNESCO World Heritage site that is the SUR Dumpster, Scheana yells at Brett for not caring about her surgery and for their friendship being really one-sided. Oh. Oh, Scheana.
Then we’re dropped into the Witches of WeHo party at a bar called Farmhouse that is in the Beverly Center, the most depressing urban mall in known creation. It’s so sad, the Filene’s Men’s Store there once tried to take its own life. The girls all sit down with a reporter from Us Weekly and Kristen says that when it comes to business, they all totally agree on everything, and by “agree on everything†she means they let Kristen do all the work and collect the same paycheck.
At the party there are two important developments. First, Danica challenges Tom Sandoval to a SUR versus Tom Tom softball game. Brace yourself for that. Second, there is this weird fight between Kristen, Stassi, and Beau. I can’t tell if this is real or partially manufactured, because Stassi has the same sort of shrill bearing that she had in her fight with Sandoval at her book party, and that has been widely reported to have been filmed a number of times. Is this how Stassi acts? Also, it just seems totally irrational even for this clown car full of MENSA rejectees.
The gist is something like: Beau was friends with Kristen first and she introduced him to Stassi. Now that they’re in love, he has to take Stassi’s side in the Kristen argument, but still wants to be friends with Kristen. When Beau tries to find a way to get Stassi to be a bit more human to her former best friend, Stassi freaks out. She says in her confessional, “Why can’t I outgrow a friendship without everyone asking me about it all the time?†Well, because that is lit-rally your job. But also she’s not outgrowing Kristen, she’s actively trying to excise her from her life and doing it in the cruelest and most passive-aggressive way. Katie is behaving similarly, but that is just how Katie rolls in general. She could find a way to be cruel and passive-aggressive to the self-checkout machine at a CVS.
When Beau tries to tell Stassi that he loves her the most but he still wants to be nice to Kristen she screams, “Beau, am I your person? Am I not? Am I not? Am I not?†and it is the sort of post-bottomless-brunch ridiculous drunken fight that I don’t even have time for because the consequences of it will soon be erased, the Etch A Sketch of her anger shaken by sobriety.
That’s it. That’s all the scenes we had this week. So many scenes and not one thing that I can actively imagine caring about. So many attempts to make something happen and nada. At least last week we had the incandescent indignity of how fake the show was. This week we just had a long slog toward our grave with a fake fight about Kristen thrown in for good measure.
After the party, Tom Schwartz met Tom Sandoval somewhere and it was dark and they were horny and Sandoval said, “I guess this is where we bang.†Schwartz responded, “I guess it is.†Sandoval said, “Do we really need to keep doing this?†Schwartz, I guess maybe kinda rubbing his crotch was like, “I guess so. I don’t know what else to do.†And then they hugged, sobbing, as the pavement of the L.A. streets released its heat in vast, invisible waves.