We need to start this recap with the foundation of Sai’s argument that she refuses to articulate: She hates Jessel. She hates her. She hates her like vegans hate factory farming. She hates her like hot boys on Grindr hate responding to you. She hates her like Mitch McConnell hates spinning out at public press conferences. That’s the long and short of it. Sai hates Jessel, but that is the one thing she can’t say.
Well, maybe hate is a strong word, but Sai dislikes her. She thinks Jessel talks too much, compares herself too much, and is too annoying. It seems like everything about Jessel turns Sai off. At one point, Jessel says that Sai doesn’t like her because she dresses better than Sai. Okay, well, everything but that because we know that Sai dresses like an old cartoon where Bugs Bunny falls through a series of clotheslines to end up with some rag-tag outfit.
At the beginning of the episode, we have two competing tales about what happened at the lunch between Sai and Jessel. Sai is on the phone, snickering about it like the sorority sisters that they are. Sai says that Jessel had sex with Pavit, but she doesn’t believe her because it took her 20 minutes to warm up down there. “What is she, an oven?†Sai asks Erin, which would be funny if it wasn’t so mean. Of course, they talk about how Jessel was late and how she compared her relationship with her drunk uncle to Sai’s mother, but mostly, what they’re doing is just making fun of her. They’re also making fun of her relationship with her husband because they think it’s weird that he’s flying all the way to Vietnam to score airline miles. That’s the thing about these two: they’re not really held up on the things that Jessel does to them that are rude or bad; they’re held up by her just being annoying.
When Sai does acknowledge Jessel comparing her mom and the uncle, she says she was trying to find a way to relate. Yes, we can all agree that a drunk mom and a drunk uncle are two different things, but when you see someone trying too hard to relate to you, maybe she should open up and let Jessel in. That’s the point of this whole operation that Bravo has created. The job is to meet new people and try to befriend them. Sai is the first person to yell at any of them for not opening up, but to Jessel, she is more closed than every set of female legs that Shia LaBeouf has ever walked past.
When Jessel is talking to Jenna about the same conversation, Jenna says in confessional, “Oftentimes people want from someone who won’t give. The person who won’t give you what you want is the person you go after the most.†She is right. I have a theory about Jessel and her relationship to Sai and Erin. I think that Jessel and Pavit are both huge nerds. The difference between them is that Pavit knows this and doesn’t care, and Jessel also knows it, so she wants to be one of the cool girls she never got to be in high school. What she should do is come out against them, tell them they are cruel and that she has no interest in being friends with them. But because she wants to be liked so badly, what she does instead is she keeps trying to convince them that she’s cool, like if they knew the real her, they would see. She would be just like every girl in a ‘90s teen comedy, and she’d take off her glasses, and they would see the rampaging sex beast lying beneath. She tells Jenna that she feels like she has to prove herself. Jessel’s biggest problem (and she has plenty) is that she cares too much about what people — specifically these two — think about her.
The conflict between Jessel, Sai, and Erin animates the whole episode, though we do get some nice moments alone with the Housewives. Ubah goes to a restaurant called Picnic to create a sandwich on Pretzel bread, an invention that Ubah thanks all the deities for every day. I love Ubah so much more when she’s alone than with the group. It is the same with Jenna, who we see trying on expensive glasses with her son. I don’t care if Jenna never talked to the other women again. I don’t care if she goes full-on Mary Cosby and never leaves the sprinter van. I could watch her shop for sunglasses, well, not for hours, but a few minutes each week. What if Jenna has her own adventures and never talks to the rest of the crew? She could be the Uncle Traveling Matt of Housewives. (Congrats, if you get that reference, you are an old, but an old whose parents were rich enough to afford HBO pre-Sopranos.)
The rest of the episode is dedicated to a group trip to Swingers, which is not the sex club Abe was hoping for; it’s an indoor mini-golf course for adults. It’s basically the new Spin. Call Carole Radziwill and tell her. When Sai and Erin arrive with their respective husbands, they start talking about Jessel again, and Sai says, “I have nothing to say to her. I genuinely don’t care.†Yes, this is it! Sai keeps having all of these “reasons†she doesn’t like Jessel, but they are not reasons at all. She just doesn’t care. For whatever reason, Jessel doesn’t rate for Sai, and it seems like they think her being in this reboot somehow brings down her stock.
When Jessel and Pavit show up, Erin and Sai start grilling him about what is happening in Vietnam. He says that he bought these tickets for $900 each before the pandemic, and he’s waiting for the flights to open up because of the borders, he wants the points, but he’s also just going to stay overnight and fly home. Blah, blah, blah. This is plane-nerd shit. How do I know? Well, because I live with one. What Pavit is doing is a thing. It’s a real thing that certain parts of the population are really into. The Points Guy literally has more followers on Instagram than any of these women and they’re treating Pavit like he’s a three-headed ferret for wanting to fly to Vietnam for some alone time on a plane and a Báhn mi.
What I really don’t like is Sai’s insinuations the whole episode about what Pavit might be getting up to in Vietnam. She jokes initially like he might have some side piece in Hanoi or that he’s going to be a sex tourist when there is no indication that that is even remotely true. I mean, look at Pavit. He is handsome, he seems wonderful and supportive, but this guy has no game. He has the opposite of game. He has rain delay. I don’t think for a second that Pavit is out there cheating. I think he actually just wants to sit on a plane, watch a bunch of Liam Neeson movies, eat some street food, and then watch more Liam Neeson movies (and maybe Spy, if they have it) on the way home. We have met a lot of Househusbands over the years who are immediately suspicious, but I think that Pavit is as wholesome as watching Hallmark movies with your mother. But no, Sai asks, “But why are you going?†Girl, because of the points! How many times does he have to tell you?
When Sai and Jessel start talking about their lunch, Sai says that the reason she wanted to talk to her at lunch could have been a phone call, and she didn’t want to be there. She was only there because she was being nice. Okay, at no point during this conversation does she bring up the very legitimate grip that Jessel was very, very late. Start with that! Start with a genuine grievance. Instead, she starts with, “I didn’t even want to be there.†But you should have been. Jessel called the lunch because she was trying to get to know Sai, which is her job. She was trying to penetrate her frosty exterior to see if there was a friendship there. Isn’t that enough?
Then Sai says that she didn’t want to talk about her mother in that aspect (of her addiction), and she was insulted that Jessel brought it up. She said she talked about her mother and never wanted to talk about it again. I think what she means here is she knows she has to bring it up on camera because it’s an important part of her story, but she never wants to talk about it on camera again. But how would Jessel know that? Now that Sai’s said it, she does, but Jessel saw Sai bring this up at a random vacation breakfast, why wouldn’t she think she would be more open to talking about it?
The conversation then turns to how Jessel lies all the time. When she presses Sai for an example, she says, “You just lied about when Pavit is going to Vietnam.†Jessel told her the reason she was doing the staycation was because Pavit was going to Vietnam in two weeks, but now Pavit says he doesn’t know when he’s going. Sai treats this like some betrayal. Girl, I don’t know my husband’s travel schedule either, and it sounds about as boring and convoluted as Pavit’s. Who can listen to him talk about all of this shit? Or who wants to explain to their friends their husband’s arcane system of booking travel for rewards? This isn’t a lie; it’s an inconsistency because Pavit’s plans keep changing.
Erin also gets into it and says that Jessel is such a liar. What has she lied about? Jessel’s problem, if anything, is she can’t keep from telling you the truth at length. She’s going to open up the family history book and read it all to you; that’s why she’s annoying. It’s not because she’s lying.
While at Swingers, Ubah asks all the dudes what about their wives made them know they were the one. When Jessel talks about Swingers with Brynn and Jenna, who weren’t able to attend, Brynn tells Jessel that Sai said Pavit’s answer was, “Because Jessel lets me do what I want.†That wasn’t the answer, even though Pavit doesn’t remember because he was six cocktails deep at the time.
Jenna is confused as to why they’re taking shots at Jessel, and Brynn says, “We shouldn’t poke holes in other people’s marriages.†That’s the whole problem right there. It’s not like Pavit is Michael Darby. It’s not like we’re all like, “What is going on with those two? He seems to hate her and is always cheating.†No, he seems like a nice guy who loves his wife (even though she mistreats him a bit, and they bicker some). Why is Sai trying to drag them through the mud? I’ll tell you why: because she hates Jessel, and for the woman trying to sell herself as the ultimate truth teller, that’s the one thing she can’t say.