Girl, Jax and Brittany and Jason and Michelle are all getting divorced, and I am here for it. It’s so odd that fans have been telling Bravo to do a show about married couples with young families ever since everyone on Pump Rules quit SUR. We’ve finally got it and now all the couples are busting like both the top button on my jeans and all of Red Lobster after its Endless Shrimp promotion.
While the women are getting ready for Janet’s surprise baby shower, which was apparently designed by the world’s laziest Pinterest board, Brittany and Michelle are talking about their relationships. Michelle says that Danny is trying to fix their relationship, so he’s up on her all the time now, and she just finds it, well, kinda annoying. Brittany finally asks flat out if she wants to be in the relationship anymore. “I do, and I don’t,†Michelle, which is the nicest, “No!†I have ever heard. This woman is done. She is more done than the dishes in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.
Michelle then adds that she is not only physically turned off by Jesse, but everything he does on a day-to-day basis annoys her. She says she wants to go back to the way she used to love him when they first got married or when they had their daughter. That is the problem right there. You can never go back to the old kind of love. Too much has happened in their lives and as a couple. They should both be focused on a new kind of love. As soon as you want to recapture the past at the expense of the future, you’re absolutely done.
Then they have the baby shower, and the only game they play is chugging water out of baby bottles. I did that as a raver in the ’90s, and it’s not nearly as fun as they make it look. As they’re sitting around celebrating, Janet, Brittany, and Michelle start telling stories about how awful their labors were and how they lasted for days. Then Nia comes in and tells Janet that she almost bled out during her labor. Um, you ladies are seriously not helping. This woman will now hold it in until it’s old enough to vote.
Meanwhile, the boys are out fishing, and the only interesting thing that happens is that they prank Jesse and leave him at the lake-side latrine, so he gets in another boat, and Danny catches a tiny little fish. That poor fish. He tried to throw it back but it was dead and gets eaten by the world’s laziest seagull. And Bravo couldn’t even afford the rights to “Circle of Life†from The Lion King, so they had to bleep out the guys singing it. Guess that’s what happens when they fire the director’s wife.
The other thing that happened is Danny gets, and I believe this is the scientific term here, schwasted. We’re talking Denise Richards with her coat on backwards wasted. We’re talking Tequila Katie rage texting wasted. We’re talking about Andy Cohen on CNN’s New Year’s broadcast wasted. It’s just a travesty, and he ruins a whole dinner, which all of the people are supposed to dress as their partner’s fantasy. This is a great theme. Jesse puts on a bunch of tattoos to dress as Harry Styles. Michelle dresses as “booty call†Michelle. Brittany is dressed as a hockey girlie, and Jax is dressed as an NBA player, complete with stilts. Jason is dressed as a hot dog, but the real fantasy is his massive man guns poking out of that costume. Janet dresses as vanilla, because that’s how Jason likes it. Same, sis. There’s a reason it’s the staple of all flavors; it’s basic but fucking delicious. (Get at me, my missionary-style hoes.)
The problem is with Nia and Danny. Nia was supposed to dress as a bottle of ranch dressing, which is Danny’s fantasy. Danny was going to dress like Jamie from Outlander, but all he had was a wig, a flannel shirt tied around his waist to make a kilt, and a horrible Scottish accent. He keeps deploying it, ad nauseam, at the table until Jesse says he doesn’t think that Danny is a good actor.
This is the start of Danny going into a tizzy. Having a person this drunk at dinner is sort of like dining with a baby; they both pull focus, they both can’t keep any food in their mouths, and nothing either of them says is really of any consequence. There’s a whole fight at dinner about where Danny and Nia should live, and I don’t even want to recount it because it’s just about a drunk dude rambling and being obnoxious. Thankfully, Danny eventually goes to bed, and the annoying night comes to a close.
The next morning, Jesse gets some of Michelle’s watermelon sugar, but he says that she didn’t seem like she was there and kept her eyes closed the whole time. That’s because she was working overtime, picturing the second sexiest member of One Direction railing her from behind. He also starts thinking about how everyone keeps saying that Michelle was sending dirty pictures to a famous director (John Waters is one lucky man!) and that maybe there is some truth to it, even if Kristen is a known liar. Michelle also insinuates in her confessional that Kristen might have cheated on Luke, and, well, we know her track record, and that’s not a hard conclusion to draw.
Let’s check in once again on our other doomed couple. This time it’s Brittany talking about how awful her relationship is to Janet. Both Janet and Michelle have told Brittany that the way Jax talks to her is appalling and she knows it, but she says there is nothing she can do to change it. She says that even asking him to go to therapy or just be nice to her doesn’t work. Then Janet says, “I know you don’t believe in divorce …†and Brittany is essentially like, “Oh, sister, I believe in divorce, and if he does one more thing, I am driving straight from here to Reno to get the quickest divorce known to man and he can rawt in hell.â€
Jax keeps saying that he doesn’t think his wife will leave him and that they don’t believe in divorce, but just because he doesn’t believe in divorce doesn’t mean that his partner doesn’t, especially if he keeps screaming at her with no remorse over every single perceived slight he deals with. Jesse has this annoying “gentleman’s lunch,†which started as a networking event but is now just more fodder for reality TV. He says that four people once spent $20,000 at one lunch. That, my friend, is too much lunch. It’s really too much anything, but lunch should be, at most, $20. It’s lunch! It’s just there to eat at your computer before you can get creative for dinner. I’m not knocking lunch. I love lunch! (I also love lessert, which is lunch dessert.) But, dude, you lunch way too hard.
At the lunch, Jax is talking about how his wife will never leave him. Jesse pipes up and says that based on the conversations he’s had with Michelle and Janet that Brittany might be worse off than he thinks. Jason, in confessional, says that Jax always says that Brittany won’t leave him and they won’t get divorced, but that’s because Jax is living in a world where he calls all the shots. Brittany has ceded a lot of power to Jax in their relationship, but this is the one shot she gets to call. She’s going to call herself a divorce lawyer and finally leave that no-good rage demon.
In his own confessional, Jax is skeptical about everything that Jesse says, but he shouldn’t be. Jesse is trying to give this guy a heads-up so he can fix his relationship, but Jax isn’t hearing it because he thinks that Jesse shouldn’t be giving advice because his own marriage is falling apart. Yeah, that’s why Jax should listen to this guy. If you want to know how to deal with a flood, you don’t call someone sitting on top of a mountain; you talk to a guy with a basement full of water. He’s going to know the signs, he’s going to know what to do, he’s going to know how to fix it by doing the opposite. Jax not listening is a blunder in a long line of blunders; the only bigger one might be thinking that he calls the shots rather than drinking them.