How many times have I told these women never to get on boats, and still, still, they don’t listen to me? Angie K. already lost a pair of luxury shoes when Jen Shah threw them overboard; you would think they would pay attention by now. Will it take someone getting eaten by an alligator for them to finally get it? This episode was a real ride, though; even if it wasn’t just a boat ride, I think it was a Ramona-coaster ride as well.
It starts with Nicole arriving on the red eye and going right into glam so that the women can attend Cathedral Metropolitana in the center of Mexico City. I know that on the same night this episode airs, the women of Beverly Hills are also attending a chapel, but it’s not very often that we see our ladies in religious institutions. It’s not that I think they’re heathens (though many of them certainly fit the bill) but that churches don’t necessarily want Bravo sullying their images with their cameras. I guess things are different in Mexico.
Cathedral Metropolitana is gorgeous, but — and I say this as a born and raised Catholic — if you’ve seen one cathedral, you’ve seen them all. But what happened with the women wasn’t common for what goes on in the lord’s house. The eight women (Adriana stayed at the hotel) peel off to a small enclave dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico City, and many of them kneel down at the shrine. On the left are Larsa, Guerdy, and Alexia, who had made this pilgrimage because she prayed to the VoG when her son Frankie had his accident, and she believes that she saved her son’s life. (She even leaves the letter she wrote her and his picture underneath a prayer candle in the apse.)
As they’re all praying, as they’re all thinking about Frankie and their own mortality and the divine and the smell of the incense and the flames of the candles flickering when a person or a spirit passes by, as all of this is happening, Guerdy is saying that she’s scared. Of course she’s scared, they’re all scared, they’re all scared that the end is coming sooner than they ever hoped, they’re all scared that cancer is going to take Guerdy out and, by extension, kill a little bit of each of the women.
Remarkably, it’s Larsa who hugs Guerdy closest, putting her arm around her and showing her both physical and emotional support. Alexia does the same, and, for a moment, they’re a sisterhood, a sorority as Julia calls them later, as an excuse to kiss every woman on the trip on the mouth. They stand united, even Julia, who hasn’t been in a church since the death of her son, ready to be there for their friend, ready to tell the demons and the darkness and the cancer cells that they are banished from this realm, burned up in the flames of their devotion not only to the VoG but to each other.
That is what I love about this group. Even as they’re talking about Adriana’s gig the next day at Mexico City Pride, she’s spinning out a little bit when Nicole tells her they saw the stage, and she doesn’t think she’s mentally prepared for how big of an event this is. Even then, Adriana’s arch-nemesis Alexia says, “Don’t like some things that Adriana does, but I like her songs, she’s a great performer, and she’s going to rock the house down … And hopefully she’ll leave me alone.†This is not Gizelle Bryant refusing to attend an event because Candiace Dillard-Bassett isn’t there. This is the group saying, “Even though we hate each other, we’re here for each other because that is what reality television contracts can do to women.â€
If only the rest of the day was as divine as the visit to the church. The second part of the day is taken up by Lisa and a boat ride. Lisa and Lenny have finally reached a settlement agreement, and Lisa has to sign it while on the trip. After she’s talked to her attorney, she gets a call from Lenny, who refuses to be recorded for the show. Well, at least that asshole learned one thing from last season when he just let the cameras capture his worst impulses all willy-nilly. (Ew, don’t let me ever mention Lenny and his willy in the same sentence again.)
Naturally, Lisa is upset about the divorce and the fact that she married a man who looks like the creature from the black lagoon covered in turds. But that doesn’t explain why their boat ride was so incredibly chaotic. There’s Adriana yelling on the phone with her producer Emilio Esteves. No, wait. It’s Emilio Estefan. Sorry, my bad. Then there’s Julia “applying lip gloss†to Marysol’s mouth using her own lips. There’s David, the gondolier, trying to just survive in this economy in Mexican Brooklyn, and while he’s in Brooklyn, the rest of them are in high school. Sorry, the ghost of Alex McCord just entered my body and I’m not sure what happened.
The big fight happens when they sail past some lean-tos and huts that are built along the banks of the river and all of the women say they’re glad they don’t have to live in one. Kiki takes a bit of offense because her grandmother in Haiti lived in a house just like that. It gets worse when Lisa sees a pack of dogs that she says look “sick†and “dirty.†I don’t know; they looked like pretty normal pets to me. Just because they aren’t wearing sweaters with their names on them and eating SparkleDog brand dog food doesn’t mean their strays are not being taken care of.
With the empathy in her heart, Lisa throws some leftover sandwiches to the dogs so they’ll have something to eat. Everyone on the boat cringed so hard that they sank the thing, and they’re now living in a papaya under the canal with the Mexican version of SpongeBob. Even David, the gondolier, thinks it’s kind of gross. As he says, in Spanish, to Alexia, the owners of the dogs probably feed them too; Lisa doesn’t need to.
It seems like Lisa had a visit from Karen Kemsley, the evil Housewives spirit of white privilege. The visit actually might have started when she said she would get herpes if she swam in the canal. Luckily, Dr. Nicole points out that the ST in STI stands for “sexually transmitted,†not “swimming transmitted.†I’m not saying the water is clean or that you should even go swimming in it, but just assuming that the water will give her a disease says all you need to know about what Lisa feels about Mexico.
When they all point out to Lisa that she doesn’t need to feed the dogs, she says, “It’s better than what they get fed, I promise you.†Does she know that? Does she know what they get fed? Does she know that Mexico has the best dog food in the world? I mean, I don’t know that either, and I’m not sure that it does, but it could, and Lisa would have no clue. (The fastest of all Google searches shows that Mexicans care deeply about giving natural pet food to their dogs.)
But Lisa can’t say, “Fine, I’m sorry.†She digs in and says she did nothing wrong because she is trying to help animals because she loves them. What is up with the way that all of the women on this show fight? She’s just like Alexia, Adriana, and Larsa; they can’t admit fault, they can’t show weakness, and then they end up getting in stupid screaming matches for no reason.
This one is against Kiki Barth, the undisputed Burger Queen, who should not be messed with. When she tells Lisa to stop, Lisa stands up, and Kiki tells her she better sit down or things are going to get worse. Lisa looks at her like she’s a petulant child who just swatted a full glass of milk off the counter just to be a total dick. Kiki then tosses what appears to be an empty juice box at Lisa. First of all, no one knows where the juice box came from, and I wouldn’t put it past Kiki to hide one in her purse in case of dehydration emergency or she just needed a projectile to make a white woman sit down.
Lisa, with all the fragility of an already shattered mirror, tells Kiki that she assaulted her, and now they’re both screaming at each other until Lisa tells her to “Shut the fuck up,†to which Kiki tells her to “Shut the fuck up†and then it’s like “Shut the fuck up†ping pong back and forth on the boat. Considering her age and ethnicity, it should probably be “Shut the fuck up†pickleball because you know Lisa has a set of racquets gathering dust in the trunk of her borrowed Bentley.
Everyone knows that Lisa is really upset about her divorce, but to their credit, they don’t coddle her. Larsa tells her that she is being mean to Kiki and that if someone came at her like that she would probably run them over with a gondola. Alexia says that Lisa is embarrassing all of them and she finally sits down in a puddle of her own tears.
To get everything back on track, Adriana gets everyone to hold hands, and she says a shitty prayer, but as she does, the wind gathers up, the sun darkens out, and the screams and cackles of small children surround the boat like a nautical siege. They pass the Island of the Dead Dolls. “Tener Cuidado,†David says. “Tener Cuidado.†As legions of beady dead eyes look down at them, something swirls deep in the water, something that lives among the reeds and algae, something that drags the cranes from the banks of the river and consumes their bodies whole, expelling only their black bones back into the mud. Lisa has awoken something dark and terrible, and all the prayers in the world to the VoG are useless as its long fingernails scrape the bottom of the boat’s keel.