Before we can get to day 17,653 of Shep’s breakup with Sienna, we need to clear up some things about Venita and JT. This week, we see her on the beach, and Salley is so flabbergasted by Venita’s texts that she almost drops her extraneous vowel in the sand. She sees these paragraphs and paragraphs of texts coming from JT. Venita says that after their conversation the night before, there is no doubt that JT has feelings for her, like she has feelings for JT. She says in confessional, “If JT has a girlfriend at this moment, I feel bad for the girl on the other side because he’s spending all his time talking and texting me, and he’s giving you crumbs.”
Wait. Didn’t they already have a dinner where Venita wasted a whole branzino to tell this man that she had feelings for him and he told her he had a girlfriend? Didn’t she know in the last episode, when she showed up at his hotel room in the middle of the night, that he was already seeing someone? The show would like us all to think so, but according to Venita, that’s not how it went down. She said on Instagram that the branzino scene happened after the Bahamas, so while she was putting on her cute PJs and straddling him in his room, while she was on the beach talking to everyone about how they have feelings for each other, she had no clue that he was dating someone. This makes the usually levelheaded Venita’s behavior make way more sense.
It’s hard to get mad at the show for this. We all know that the reality we’re watching is one that is mediated. There are producers picking where people sit at dinner and when they arrive at the table, and there’s a whole crew making sure they’re getting this hotel and all of its flamingo brunches for free. They are editing these long scenes down to the best bits so we don’t have to sit through the boring silences. I get that. But we expect that while things can be moved around for narrative purposes, they’re not going to do it in a manner that totally upends the narrative. If what Venita says is true, and she seems to have no reason to lie, the edit did her dirty, and she deserves an apology and an extra shot at the reunion.
Most of the episode, once again, was relegated to Shep and Sienna breaking up. Shep asks Craig if he should give her the necklace he bought her at dinner, and Craig says the problem isn’t the necklace, it’s that he invited her to dinner. That’s what is weird. I’m with Craig on this, and I think we all need a friend who will tell us the hard truths we need to hear. However, once Craig tells Shep what he is doing is stupid, he must let it go. Austen is right, Shep isn’t going to listen to them anyway. It doesn’t mean Craig should keep silent; it’s just that he should only interfere with Shep once or twice before letting the subject drop.
Shep goes to meet Sienna and gives her the necklace, which is even more awkward than we anticipated. He sounds like a 14-year-old boy when he gives it to her. “It’s a megalodon tooth,” he tells her about the necklace. “It’s a prehistoric shark that’s bigger than all the other sharks. Do you like it?” When she says yes, he says, “It accentuates your wonderful chest.” I mean, are these two about to slow dance to Boys II Men, because this is the most eighth-grade-dance bullshit I have ever seen in my entire life. The only thing more adolescent is when Taylor says he gave her the same necklace, and he says, “That was a great white, not a megalodon.” Okay, thanks, Shark Week.
They won’t be slow dancing because Shep is officially broken up with. In one of the meanest moves I’ve ever seen the editors pull, they changed her chyron on the screen from “Sienna, Shep’s Girlfriend” to “Sienna, Shep’s Ex-Girlfriend” in real time. Devastating. Do it a million more times. She was never his girlfriend, though, because, according to Sienna, they weren’t ever in a relationship, and they weren’t really in love, even though Shep was in love with her. Shep tells her that they were, but they just had different views on it. Then Sienna springs a trap so shrewd, so dastardly, so deft that it is going to ruin Shep’s entire worldview. “We didn’t have a label on it,” she says.
Shep replies, “I fucking hate labels.” Yes! This is how you use the tools of patriarchy to dismantle it. Of course Shep hates labels. Know why? This is what he’s told every girl who was goo-goo Lady Gaga over him and who wanted to press him into a relationship. “Why do we need a label? We’re just having fun!” he said to every coed he met on King Street. Why would he do that, so when they would have just this conversation with him he could say, “We didn’t put a label on it,” so not only can he see whoever he wants he also doesn’t even need to break up with the person. Now, here he is, being destroyed by an atom bomb of his own creation and, well, it is pretty delightful, isn’t it?
Before dinner, Madison and Taylor FaceTime with Leva, the only reality-television professional allowed to permanently work from home. She does have the absolute correct read on the situation, saying that these guys in their 40s always end up meeting a girl who is younger than them and is so much better at their own game, and that the young woman is the one who makes them feel old. I can see it happening to Shep, him slowly turning into the little old man in Up right before our very eyes. Maybe this is what he needed, someone to show him that he can’t play the game anymore, that it’s time to find the next available woman with a great personality and a decent rack and just make that his home for the rest of his life.
Sienna makes the weird decision to stay for dinner after all of this, and everyone is just asking her if she’s into Shep, if she wants to settle down with him, if she doesn’t want to date him now, or if she just doesn’t want to date him, period. It’s all too much, it is all weird, and, again, it is giving junior high. Shep is right to pull her aside and tell her that it is time to go and have their sad little half-hug in the moonlight while all the bar staff looks on in disbelief, pissed that they’re going to have to listen to yet another American drone on about his problems. They definitely do not pay enough at the Baha Mar for these people to be the recipients of sunburned trauma dumps.
However, the best and most touching scene of the episode is between Craig and Austen. It starts as a fight with the group when Austen accuses Craig of being an embellisher. “I’m a lawyer!” Craig shouts. “I am a lawyer and a storyteller!” Oh, how I laughed. Oh, how I cackled. Oh, how I almost tinkled a little bit in my undies. Put this on a pillow and sell a million of them, Craig. This is why you will always be one of the greats.
However, I am conflicted about the rest of the scene. After he yells about being a lawyer and a storyteller, which would be the title of Tom Girardi’s autobiography, the two go off to talk alone and rehash some of the topics we’ve been covering all season. Austen tells Craig that he thinks Craig is trying to project an image of himself as being a wholesome homebody and that he is going to fuck everything up if he’s seen out at the bars with a beer in his hand. Austen thinks Craig is drunk on this image of him being a nice guy and needs to loosen the reins a little bit.
That’s when Craig drops a bomb. “I can’t because I don’t have any leash on myself. That’s any addict,” he says. Craig says that he didn’t want to be at home on his couch, but he needed to be at home on his couch so that he didn’t “drink a bottle of Jaeger and do stupid stuff.” While I applaud Craig for talking about his addiction issues so publicly and letting Austen in enough that they can take their friendship to another level, I think we’re going to need a bit more explanation at the reunion. Craig illustrates his addiction with an example of alcohol, but they’re having this conversation while Craig has a half-drunk bottle of Champagne at his feet. We also go into his previous struggles with Adderall through some flashbacks. Is he talking about pills? Is he talking about booze? Is he talking about a combination? Is he getting treatment? Is he in a program? We all have plenty of questions.
Craig gives Paige a lot of credit for standing by him while he figured all of this out and then says something that truly broke my heart. He’s not putting on this image of clean and shiny Craig to convince other people of who he is, he’s doing it to convince himself that he can do it. Okay, I take back all the questions about his addiction. Our poor Craigy! Austen seems to be clearheaded about it in his confessional, saying that his addiction doesn’t eradicate his bad behavior, but now that Austen knows the extent of his struggles, he can be a bit more empathetic about the whole thing. They end the convo with Craig saying, “Let’s find our new quality time together.” Yes, Craig! That’s all Austen has been asking for all season; he just needed Craig to come around to it.
Craig and Austen are bro-ing down again, JT has been run back to the mainland like the punk that he is, Venita has been vindicated (Venit-icated?) from the treachery of production, and Shep has finally been dumped. Can we finally retire from this never-ending trip? I think we should leave it with Rodrigo’s quip at brunch: “I wouldn’t travel internationally to watch anyone else get broken up with.”