If I were ever to return to school to get my degree in media studies, I always said my dissertation would be about the use of elevators as metaphor in The Good Wife. After this episode, I have decided to revise my field of study. I will now spend thousands of pages talking about the socioeconomic impacts of Lisa and Lenny Hochstein’s invisible nanny falling in the shower and how it essentially caused their divorce. The White Lotus could never.
Before we get to that, however, we have to revisit the Stupidest Fight Ever: The Way of Water and finally bring the whole thing to a close. After Alexia and Todd the Gringo Kid’s non-wedding-ceremony wedding ceremony, the girls retreat to the ship’s lower levels (on Below Deck they would call it the main salon) and Lisa continues to talk shit about Larsa. When Larsa arrives, she says, “Yeah, Larsa, we’re talking about you.†The fight, like Bennifer, rekindles itself seemingly out of nowhere and continues completely in bad faith from both parties. Lisa says Larsa is implying she can’t afford her lifestyle. Larsa says she is not, though she clearly is. These two are not …
Oh, sorry, Marysol. You’re right. We should not be fighting at Alexia’s non-wedding. Let’s knock this off. Okay, we have moved upstairs to the bridge deck aft (I have no idea what this means, but I hear it on BD all the time), and the ladies sit down in a little clump, and Lisa tells Larsa that she should walk the plank, recycling a joke from earlier. “Dude,†Larsa says, and my favorite thing about these women is that they call each other “dude†and “bro†as if they’re in a Fraternity X video. (That is a joke for the gays only. Straights, do not Google that.) “Dude, I’m sorry. Let’s just take a shot and get over this.†And they do. And they do. And the boat docks, and everyone shuffles off to their homes totally shipping Frankie and Kiki.
After the wedding and before Lisa and Lenny’s awful home date, there’s all sorts of bonkers filler. Julia meets with a model agent named Auggie. Never trust a grown man named Auggie unless he is the manager of a Quiznos. Know that. He’s Kiki’s agent, and he looks at Julia’s portfolio of modeling photos from the late ’90s and early aughts and says, “Yeah, you need some new pictures, but you still got it, baby.â€
Larsa meets up with with Jas Leverette, the hottest dog trainer in the known world, which is not only an advertisement for her Halo collar but also an excuse to show that the reason her dogs are so poorly behaved isn’t because of the dogs but because Larsa has no idea what she’s doing. Julia brings her very well-behaved dog, Zorro, to the beach for a group meetup where mostly the girls just talk about Lisa and Larsa, neither of whom is there. They agree that no one cares that Lisa may or may not have a mortgage, which none of us does, but everyone is missing the point of this fight, which is that Larsa doesn’t trust Lisa because Lisa didn’t stand up for her “in New York,†which is how the producers want us to say “at the reunion.â€
We do learn a little bit more about Adriana’s date to the wedding, Thierry, and we learn that Alexia thinks that he is married. Adriana gets all upset about this getting brought up, but if the dude I just started dating was married and my friends knew and didn’t tell me, I would make them walk the plank. (See, Lisa: It’s funnier the second time around.)
There is a scene in which Alexia goes to lunch at a sushi restaurant with her son Peter, the worst man on television. When they arrive, Alexia asks what the “cooked rolls†are, and the waiter tells them there are only two, and she says, “So we’ll have those two then.†Wait, what? They’re going for sushi and no one wants raw fish? It makes no sense. The less we say about Alexia and her son, whose rapper name is Yung Doge, the better. I respect Alexia’s work on the show, but I do not like her, and I hate her son and the image rehab she’s trying to do on this kid by reframing his domestic-violence charges as the girlfriend’s fault. I mean, just eat a spicy-tuna roll already.
Okay, here we are. My media-studies dissertation. Lisa is throwing a date night for her and Lenny, and she hired a chef to cook them dinner so they can eat by the pool on their back patio. I’m willing to admit that the view is stunning even if the black-bottomed pool doesn’t make my rockin’ world go round. First up, Lisa and their son Lenny Jr. (that’s not his name, but I will not slander the innocent in these pages) have a surprise for Big Len. They made him pizza! He and his sister made one pizza with cheese and one with pepperoni. Lenny feigns being upset that he can’t eat the pizza because he’s on a diet to impress the new girlfriend Lisa doesn’t know about yet but we do. (It’s called dramatic irony. Some of you never read Oedipus Rex in freshman English and it’s showing.)
Lenny takes a bite of the pizza to make his kid happy, which is the nice thing to do. But then he finds out there is another meal for him and Lisa. Wait, isn’t their dinner the pizza? Lisa is about to put the kids to bed, so they’ve eaten already. Who is going to eat this pizza they made? Is it going to go in the trash? Is this a family of food wasters? Did Lisa just allow them to make pizza with no clue who is going to eat it? Is she just like, “30 people work here. Someone will want pizza. Come on. It’s pizza!†The fate of these two pies is boggling to me.
Lisa and Lenny sit down, and for some reason, we learn about their dog, Jax, who can’t use its legs, which reminds me of another useless lump of flesh we used to see on Bravo with the same name. Anyway, poor Jax. His condition is getting worse, and Lisa admits they’ll have to put him down eventually, but she wants to spare the kids. What about the dog? Don’t you want to spare this dog who can’t even fucking walk? I think there is a time to put the dog down, and sadly, that time is now. I don’t want to be callous about people’s pets. I know the love and grieving for them is real, but poor Jax is badly off, lying there like a chunky knit that someone cast off in a Las Vegas parking lot because there is about to be a fist fight.
Lisa starts to tell him about the fight at the wedding, and Lenny is so checked out it’s like he is astral projecting and his spirit is at a cigar bar somewhere pawing at a coed who is just trying to make it through college by flirting with old men who don’t realize that excess Botox won’t shrink their foreheads and make their hairlines go back to where they were when they were her age. He wakes up just long enough to say the two mortgages Larsa is seeing on his home are “home-equity lines of credit†and they have a zero balance. (Again, why is Lenny, a man about to enter a divorce, saying he owns every last brick of an $80 million house?) He says, “She doesn’t know what a home-equity line of credit is. That’s pretty embarrassing for her.†Is it? Is that the kind of thing everyone knows, like the Konami Code, how to do the Macarena, or that Lea Michele can’t read?
Their romantic dinner, where they drink smoke out of test tubes and eat ceviche over raw fish, is interrupted by one of the Hochstein’s many staff members coming outside and telling Lisa and Lenny that the nanny fell in the shower and probably broke her arm. I get that Lenny is a doctor, but she didn’t come out and say, “Dr. Hochstein, we need your help.†It was like, “Sorry about the inconvenience — someone is dying.†Like, couldn’t the help sort her out on their own? That’s why they’re called “the help.†They’re supposed, you know, to help!
They both rush in the house and Lenny examines her but can’t tell what is really going on because she broke her arm not her boob. Lisa wants to call 911 to have her taken care of, and Lenny tells her no. He says that they don’t need an ambulance, that someone just needs to drive her to the hospital. Lenny is obviously right here. I once had a collapsed lung and took a cab to the hospital. If you have a nasty cut that needs stitches, you don’t call an ambulance; you make your bestie pack you in the car with a whole roll of paper towels. Unless it is life-threatening, an ambulance is not needed.
But Lisa isn’t reacting to the medical necessities of the injury; she’s reacting to the perception. She does not want to be the rich lady whose nanny broke her arm and she didn’t call the ambulance. She doesn’t want to be called out for putting her nanny in an Uber and continuing to eat her home-cooked (technically) dinner while she spends five hours at the ER. When Lisa asks the chef if she should call 911 and he says that she should, he is thinking in the same way. He’s thinking that, if he were on a job and got hurt, he would want the person paying him to take really good care of him, which means an ambulance.
Despite telling her not to do so several times, Lisa calls 911 anyway, and Lenny comes in, tells her to hang up, and tells her very clearly she is wrong. His tone, delivery, word choice, outfit, watch, socks — everything about the way he does it — is wrong, but Lenny is still right. It’s as if Lisa can’t think of what to do other than call 911, so that’s what she’s doing. She can’t figure out who should drive her to the ER. She can’t figure out how to get an Uber for her. Lisa is just paralyzed but also feels the need, for some reason, to be the one in charge. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t want to “lean on Lenny,†as Larsa keeps accusing her of doing.
Meanwhile, we don’t even see the nanny, and no one is talking to her. Most important, no one is even asking if she has health insurance. Is that because Lisa provides it for her and already knows? I hope so. Because if she calls an ambulance and this woman doesn’t have health insurance (which 30 million people in the U.S. do not), then she is now saddled with five figures of debt that she may never repay. And she’s just writhing on the floor, probably naked, definitely in pain, wondering just when someone is going to figure out what the fuck to do and get her some pain pills already. Jesus.