As much as I loved Shep getting his comeuppance from Sienna, at this point, it’s kind of boring to keep rehashing. What else can we talk about? Can we get JT to show up for 13 hours so that there will be some other drama on this here reality-television program? Apparently, we can!
JT shows up three days late and a dollar short. (That’s a short joke.) It appears that there are two things no one in this crew can do: catch a flight or apply sunscreen. Craig’s face is redder than the flags that Shep should have been getting about Sienna. Molly has a burn only on one shoulder, which is so bad that she can’t wear a pink dress. And Ryan. Ooh-boy. When he was on the boat in just his trunks, he was displaying what I knew all season — that his body was absolutely on point. Too bad I couldn’t make out with him because it looks like even a stiff breeze would inflame his sunburn. (Because the sunburn is precisely the only thing preventing us from getting hot and heavy in the surf.)
Yes, JT shows up just to dinner after skipping a day of activities, and he’s just pretending like half of the people at the table don’t have beef with him. It’s so bad that Salley and her extraneous vowels don’t want to sit next to him. He tries to make good with Salley by giving her compliments, and she is not having it. She says she wants to talk about their issues, and JT says he doesn’t want to bring it up at dinner in front of everyone out of respect. This is what drives me crazy about JT; he is always the one setting the rules, telling everyone how they should behave, making them conform to his idea of manners. If the people want to talk, let them talk. Even Salley says, “Why does it always have to be on your terms?”
JT does apologize to her, saying that when he’s trying to defend someone that sometimes people catch strays, and he needs to work on that. That is a little short (he-he) of an apology, but at least it’s getting somewhere close. The one thing that JT wants to talk about is that Craig lied about him calling Miss Patricia a “bitch” during their weird conversation at the fake golf course. This conversation actually made me feel a little bad for JT. Craig insists he’s right even though his bestie, Shep, says he didn’t hear the B-word. Shep also says he didn’t hear JT say that anyone thought he and Madison were having an affair. When the women who know JT well around the table say there is no way he would talk about a woman like that, and he wouldn’t, Madison starts to see that something is up with this story and tells him that she’ll talk to him privately the next day.
I do feel a little bad for JT in this instance. As he says, he can’t negotiate the truth with Craig, who is well ensconced in the group and righteous in being correct. Until Craig can relent that maybe he misunderstood some things, then JT is toast. Maybe the reason Craig hates JT so much is because they’re so much alike. Craig takes JT to task for not apologizing, but have we ever heard Craig say he’s sorry? Like JT, he thinks that his way is the only way to do things, and if other people disagree, they’re wrong. They’re both arguers who won’t back down from their stances. They’re like two positive sides of a magnet, pushing each other away.
But that doesn’t mean that JT is right or, more to the point, isn’t a dweeb. The problem is that he’s so annoying everyone wants to believe Craig, because most of what he says has the ring of truth. I’m curious how everyone will feel about these things at the reunion after they’ve seen them on the show. At fake golf, JT was running his mouth and not making any sense, as Shep said, and he shouldn’t have been doing that, but what he said is not nearly as harmful as Craig has made it out to be. What he did to Taylor, well, that’s his own damn fault, and he needs to apologize to her.
I think what he does to Venita is even worse. He leaves her at the table to go sit in the Sprinter van all alone like he’s Mary Cosby with a bag of McDonald’s. I love how everyone else in the cast is squished into one van, and JT can only get Venita and Shep to ride with him. They tell Whitney that if he rides in this one van, there would be free cocaine, and he just stumbles on and then is like, “Oh, fuck, it’s JT’s van. Damn it!” Even worse than the van is when he invites her to his room, bars the cameras from it, and then invites her in.
The editors give us some fireworks B-roll after the door closes to make us think something happened, but nothing did. Well, something did, but nothing sexy. Venita says that she straddled JT and asked him if he didn’t feel for her what she felt for him. He said he couldn’t do anything because he has a girlfriend. While I have never in my life had a girlfriend, from what I’ve learned about them on reality-television programs, they really don’t like when you’re alone with a woman in a hotel room and she straddles you, even if “nothing happened.”
The next morning, JT comes to have a chat with Madison, which seems to go well enough for her to quash the beef but not forgive him. She tells him that he needs not to be a coward, go on the boat, and have some conversations with some people. He refuses, and I don’t think he’s wrong to not want to do it in front of Craig, who is just going to scream that he’s a nasty, short liar and won’t let anything productive happen. Venita says she texted him to say he should go on the boat for her, and that didn’t sway him. In confessional, he says he needs to leave because of the tension with the cast and because Venita kept escalating things, and he put the kibosh on them.
Let’s not blame this on Venita, his only ally in the whole cast. He’s the one who invited her into his hotel room with no cameras. I get that he didn’t want to be filmed, but they are in a whole-ass resort. There’s nowhere they could have gone that was public where they could have hidden from the cameras? Can’t they just go into one of the waterslides or something? But, no, this man invited a woman who he knows has feelings for him to hang out in his hotel room alone, and then he blames her when she thinks that is some kind of green light? Come on, dude.
The morning after the big dinner, we get another survey of the guys’ room after a big night out gambling, and these are the images they really wanted us to see: eight different glasses or beverage containers lined up on a counter, all of them full, an entire room service cart of uneaten food including an entire pizza and an untouched hamburger, the kitchen faucet left on for an indeterminate amount of time, and Austen’s dirty-ass foot hanging out from the comforter. We didn’t need to see the footage to know just how this night went.
Then we hear that Shep slept on a beach chair because he got so drunk he was kicked out of the casino. That sounds just like BravoCon all over again. Yeah, getting one’s heart broken sucks, but if Shep’s only way to regulate his emotions is to drink himself into a blackout, he needs to do a whole lot more work before getting with anyone, especially our sweet, sweet Molly, who everyone keeps thrusting on Shep like they’re at Coachella and everything will just be a whole lot more fun with Molly. You know, if Molly is there, making you feel good, making you love life, making you think that Tate McRae actually has talent and wasn’t created in a hermetically sealed lab by gay pop-music stans.
While I am starting to find the Shep and Sienna stuff a bit tedious, there were a few things about it that I enjoyed. Craig was so right to get Paige on the blower so that she could tell Shep what is going on. She did a great job, even couching it as advice she got from her mother when she was younger: “If she liked you, then you would know. She doesn’t like you!” Someone needed to say it. That someone needed to be a girl, and that girl, almost always, should be Paige DeSorbo. Can she offer this service to the public? We really need it.
I also like seeing their text exchange on the screen where Sienna says she would miss the boat because she’s running late, and Shep won’t take no for an answer. We see her three dots, and we keep checking on the phone, and the dots are still there, still there, still there. It is just like real life, and then the bomb finally drops, saying that she is not coming, and I can feel the devastation of that text coming through. Poor Shep is so devastated that he takes the whole boat’s mood down, but it gives him a chance to have a very nice conversation with Madison, something I never thought possible even a season ago. It might have had something to do with the killer brown one-piece that she was wearing. But after another long day in the Bahamian sun, baking our favorite Southerns, the trip still isn’t done, and there is not a spray bottle of sunscreen anywhere in sight. I never thought I’d say this, but we need to get back to Charleston immediately, even if that means seeing JT again.