Let’s just jump straight to the Grande Dame–size elephant in the room: Karen Huger finally had her day in court and was found guilty of five of six charges by a jury of her peers, and now faces a real possibility of up to two years in prison, potentially joining Theresa and Jen Shah in the list of women who have had to serve time after a season serving chaos. While the result is far from shocking, the public release of the bodycam footage was darkly illuminating to the side of Karen that women from Charrisse to Robyn have been publicly and loudly alluding to seeing when the cameras are off. I don’t think my group chats will be recovering from Karen sitting in a drunk tank haphazardly mumbling that she is “Thomas Jefferson’s concubine†anytime soon.
It is past time for Karen to take some accountability for these choices, but a woman who is prepared to own her mistakes likely wouldn’t have even taken this fiasco to trial. Both Karen and the viewers are stuck at a fork in the road: For Karen, she has a few weeks to regroup before the reunion, where she will have to be meaningfully contrite and remorseful for evading discussing the long-standing rumors of her alcohol abuse, or she can continue to stand defiant and die by her own sword. As viewers, we have to make a decision on how we continue to evaluate the rest of the season. I think most of us knew that Karen was reasonably guilty, but that is different than seeing the abandoned bottle of Stella Artois in 4K. Will we judge Karen with the benefit of hindsight or will we judge her performance as it comes?
This episode is a great litmus test for how we will receive Karen’s performance for the rest of the season, as she continues to make plain just how much she cannot stand sharing the same breathing space as poor Jacqueline, who feebly attempts a moment by crashing Karen’s love lagoon but can’t manage to be either funny or evil enough to deliver the stunt successfully. If you are going to be carrying eight balloons for eight citations, you kind of have to do that with a bit of bass in your voice — Jacqueline couldn’t even muster a syrupy nice-nasty edge to her voice when she claimed to be coming “with love in her heart,†and half the cast couldn’t even hear her half-baked attempts at shade. It was cringe of her to dare try something so shameless only to lack follow-through in the execution. First rule of Housewives stunts is to commit to the bit! Put the names of the charges on each balloon, play the audio of the time Karen called you, something to make clear that you are coming for the hostess’s neck. Jacqueline is incapable of serving her revenge either hot or cold, her responses are always in this lukewarm range that just spoils everyone’s appetite.
Karen might be a lush, but she is far from a slouch. She knows that Jacqueline would only feel emboldened to go with such a gambit if the persistent devil in her shoulder, Mia, enabled her, and Mia freely admits that she helped coordinate Jacqueline’s unwelcome interruption. As the underwhelming confrontation happens, Mia tries hard to sell the scene, cackling with all 32 teeth showing, and after Jacqueline is unceremoniously booted from the premises, whispering middling insults into the mic from the curb with her friend. Perhaps a dig about Karen renting would land better if we hadn’t seen Mia go through three rental properties this season alone. What gets under Karen’s skin about Mia isn’t merely her unscrupulous antics, it is that a woman of Karen’s generation cannot wrap her head around being so shameless about your personal life at the expense of respect and social standing; Mia, on the inverse, quickly sees through the façade of Karen’s image for the disaster she is. As a result, they end up with the most pointed critiques of each other. Karen: “Everything is so fake in Mia’s life, I don’t know what’s reality, and I don’t think Mia knows reality anymore. I think she’s in survival mode, and willing to use her puppet Jacqueline to do and say anything to keep that story going.†Mia: “Karen lives in delusional Karen world.†They’re both hypocrites, and they’re both right.
While Mia only really has the largely incompetent Jacqueline as an ally in this, Karen has slowly willed Gizelle into her corner. The brief scene in the lobby of the Dulles airport terminal is very telling. Gizelle has been slowly simmering over how Mia chose to strike against her daughters, and realizes that Jacqueline’s antics offer the perfect cover for her to retaliate. Karen picks up on her scheming and takes it across the finish line as they prepare for an “OG check,†perhaps the most blatant version of collusion we have seen between Housewives this year. “It’s about time, let’s take them to school,†Karen stresses. “We gotta make do what it do for the next three days,†Gizelle concurs.
Unfortunately, what was promised is not quite what was delivered. Perhaps they both wanted to take it easy the first night, but the two-pronged attack between Karen and Gizelle doesn’t quite land with the splash I expected. Karen strikes first, calling Jacqueline the devil who attempted and failed to make a stunt at her event. Karen is so obviously correct in this assessment, and I don’t think Jacqueline even believes her flimsy rebuttal about her flop moment being a poorly executed grand gesture of love. The Grande Dame is right when she says that whatever her intentions were, they failed miserably. Where her momentum immediately collapses, however, is when she starts to proclaim that she is seeking legal recourse. Putting aside how asinine she sounds claiming that Jacqueline violated some sort of environmental status by releasing balloons to the air, in what world does someone who is in the middle of claiming they are being falsely accused by Maryland PD have the moral high ground on someone else’s criminality? Given the news that has come out this week, I have a strong feeling that Karen is going to deeply regret uttering the phrase “Arrest her, clankity-clank bitch†over the next few weeks; Jacqueline’s retaliation is her hand to lose at the reunion.
Gizelle seems primed to tag in and chide Mia for bringing up her daughters in the conversation, but I was yet again surprised by how muted her retort is. As Wendy points out, last season Gizelle was fuming at the suggestion that Wendy and Candiace had an issue with her talking about her daughters, and while I understand that they were on the outs at the time, Gizelle still seems uncommonly measured in addressing what she has made clear over the years has been a bright line for her. She has moments of intensity — namely when she sits in the confessional chair and briskly states “Who you [Mia] were at their age, that ain’t them†— but Mia doesn’t feel threatened enough to back down off her position, standing firm on her argument that it was mainly about how they both use social media. Sure, Mia, but you certainly wanted to make the implication that Gizelle’s family drama was in any way comparable to the tumult that seems to have taken up permanent residence in your apartment, which is a delusion I don’t think she even buys.
Gizelle may have simply faltered because she was unprepared for how Mia has turned all of her flaws into a representation of “radical truth.†Now, showing all of her partners in the best light on her Instagram is a trauma response to having adoptive and foster families, and not a ball of confusion when you repeatedly imply your ex-husband is manic and abusive, traits that are not healthy to have around young children if they are not immediately addressed. Mia apparently gives an impassioned speech around dealing with Gordon’s mental health, which I can only assume was edited in a way that we just never got around to hearing the good parts, because nothing she seems to say at dinner veers far from the speeches she has made all season. I am of the mind that it was and has been genuinely hard for Mia to navigate this separation — her reaction to Gordon seemingly taking the children to another state and leaving them there sounded like genuine fright based off of situations she has long been dealing with — but that doesn’t mean that she has been making the best decisions for her children, either. It seems that, as of yet, the cast is struggling to find what they think is the best way to communicate that very sentiment in a way that doesn’t sound like “we don’t believe you.â€
Next time, Ashley takes sides between Mia and Gizelle, and we finally see Keiarna start to earn her paycheck. See you all then!
Cherry Blossoms:
• Wendy’s level of general disgust at Ashley being head over heels for a man that, as commenters pointed out, looks like her sons all grown up, is hilarious. I think she speaks for many of us in failing to see the young man’s appeal, but I don’t have to share a bed with him so it’s not my problem.
• We’re only on day two of the trip, but I appreciate Wendy’s openness about trying to eliminate the chaos of room assignment games while still being committed to the mess of an international trip. No more pretending that they are traveling to “heal†and fix friendships, this is about getting straight to the drama!
• Is it just me, or did Gizelle and Stacey clashing kind of seem to come out of nowhere? Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear that the rest of the cast feels that Stacey is a little corny and square, but Gizelle is both of those things as well — I am a bit shocked at how viscerally Gizelle seems to be annoyed by her. It could simply be that she’s frustrated at how Stacey threw her under the bus during the love lagoon games, but it seems to be stronger than just lingering issues from a passing slight; Stacey can’t so much as ask for toothpaste without getting an eye roll.
• What do we have to do to give the women more of a budget on these trips? First we were hanging out on the rooftops and patient waiting areas of the Greater Charlotte area, now this. The resort doesn’t look bad per se, it just looks like the cookie-cutter all-inclusive resort you can get on a payment plan through CheapCaribbean (shoutout to my 2014 heartbreak trip to the Dominican Republic).