For a moment during this episode, I thought that Raquel had never been to a shop called Humble Crumble, which is all millennial pink and serves only fruit crumbles in tiny little gourds so that people can post pictures of them on Instagram and then throw the crumble away half-eaten because it’s not very good. Instead, I thought she might be Carrie. No, not the narcissistic shoe obsessive from Sex and the City, the telekinetic pig’s blood survivor who burned down all her school bullies. This would make an excellent narrative arc. She’s getting back at Lala by calling her a mistress. She’s getting back at Katie by kissing Schwartz. She’s coming after every girl on the show who was mean to her. After she cussed out Lala at a pool party and said that she really likes this version of herself, I thought, Oh, this is her villain origin story, like Cruella but with fewer coats.
That’s what it seemed like, and then I remember the one person she screwed over the most, and that’s Ariana, and she seems to be the only friend that Raquel has in the bunch. There goes that theory. However, this is the second episode in a row where B.S. (Before #Scandoval) I was totally on Raquel’s side, and then A.S., well, she and Tom are just as awful as everyone else on this here show.
The episode starts with Raquel and Charli crashing boys’ night, which sends James skittering home to Ally, an aspiring astrologer who had to sit through an ungodly barrage of kisses, pecks, handholds, compliments, and other PDA when she was just trying to get a simple tarot card reading. Raquel tells them what happened in Lake WeShouldSue, and all of the dudes (plus Scheana) applaud her for standing up to Lala and getting the hell out of there. (This is supposedly the night she and Tom started their affair, but that rumor hasn’t been meaningfully substantiated.)
Back in Arizona, Lala, Katie, and Kristina Kelly (always both names!) return from a bar ironically called BJs. Shortly after that, Don, who has never met a face tattoo he didn’t like, shows up and bangs Lala so hard that she can’t sleep in the bed because it was so wet. This is also Lala’s chance to tell us that the sex with Randall was horrible and that she hasn’t had an unfaked orgasm since Donald Trump was in office. Why would anyone think that Randall was good in bed or that she was with him for the sex? People like Randall have to get rich and “powerful†(in scare quotes) in Hollywood so that women like Lala will have sex with them. If he were a natural-born pussy pleaser, he’d probably work at a Baskin-Robbins and have fucked every one of our girlfriends.
The biggest fight of the episode, however, starts to unfold when Brock and Scheana are hanging out in their condo. They’re checking off things on their enormous whiteboard To Do list. Non-erasable To Do items include “Meditate/Stretch,†“Content,†“Lunch Water,†and “1 Minute Kiss.†I have no idea what Lunch Water is (maybe the 3 p.m. LaCroix that is supposed to hold you over until dinner?), but this is the most nonsense California Influencer board that I have ever seen, and I once had a fourgy with Tyler Oakley, Kyle Krieger, and the annoying one from Real Friends of WeHo. No, not him. The other really annoying one. No, the other really annoying one.
While they’re home, Scheana gets a call from Jamie, one of her bridesmaids, who says that the all-inclusive Mexican resort where they’re getting married is out of rooms. There is nowhere for Jamie to stay, and it’s two weeks before the wedding. Throughout the episode, we learn more and more about this wedding. People are paying around $1,000 for their rooms. Scheana says several guests are coming to the wedding with significant others who are not invited to the ceremony, only to the welcome and after-parties. These people include Ally, James’s new girlfriend.
Wait just a minute here. Scheana is getting married on a weekday in Mexico at a resort that production surely got free. All of these people will be in Mexico at the resort, but they can’t come to the ceremony? Why? If they’re there, have accommodations, and all of their food and booze is paid for as part of the package, why can’t you just add a dozen more chairs to the back of the wedding and then say they’re all invited? I mean, what in the Star Jones Bridezilla is going on here?
This all boils over at the pool party. After a scene where Katie and Ariana talk about their sandwich shop (“We made a mood board!â€) and Raquel tells James he’s invited to Tom and Ariana’s pool party because Tom Sandoval told her so (!!!), we’re at the pool party in Valley Village, where there are plenty of hot dudes with their short-sleeve shirts open, and when I die, if they can’t upload my soul to BravoTV dot Com, I hope it forever resides in such a place.
Katie Maloney, the meanest person on television, arrives at the party wearing a beret because only Katie would think that headwear goes with no one swimming in a pool. When all the girls are sitting in Ariana’s kitchen, they’re all talking shit about Raquel, how crazy she is, how she was fighting them, and how she stormed out of Lake MyNameIsNotSusan. Ariana says, “I would think that Katie, Lala, and Kristina Kelly gave the mean-girl treatment to Raquel like they have given to other people in the past.†Amen, my sister. Should we go over the list of people that Katie and whichever Witches of WeHo are around her at any given moment have tried to ostracize over the years? Season one was Scheana; season two was Ariana; season three was still Ariana but also Stassi; seasons four and five it was Lala; season six, I think is when Katie turned on Kristen; season seven, I don’t remember, but season eight was when they hated all the new girls like Dayna and Danica. What I’m saying is that there is a pattern and that Katie has always been awful to any new girl who shows up in the group.
Katie eventually says that Raquel needs to get her head checked, which Ariana and Sandoval think is out of line. Sandoval then comes to an impassioned defense of Raquel by yelling at Katie. Ariana walks away, saying, “I’m walking away because I’m not doing the Tom against the girls … thing.†She’s right; the only thing Tom Sandoval loves more than unnecessarily large striped sweater vests is yelling at someone with two X chromosomes.
His defense of Raquel gets even more impassioned when she walks into the conversation and, while she’s thinking of something to say, Lala says, “Get a thought together.†Okay, I have made plenty of fun of how dumb Raquel is over the years, but I do that as the American Jesus intended, on the internet where she can’t see it. I would never do that to her face. Sandoval then says that all he sees is Lala being a bully to Raquel for no reason.
Yes! I mean, I hate him for cheating on Ariana with Raquel. I hate Raquel for cheating on Ariana with Tom. But I love that someone finally calls Lala out on how she has treated Raquel despicably since she arrived on the scene at SUR. Regardless of James not wanting to be in the fight, it’s because she was hooking up with James that Lala never liked her.
Finally, Raquel says to Lala, “You’re a bully. You’re pathetic. I don’t need this energy in my life. I learned my lesson with James, and I’m finally learning my lesson with you. If you two are going to be like Chihuahua followers, like literally, I’m done.†Okay, she lost me with the Chihuahua followers, but I love this Raquel who doesn’t care about making people like her and is sticking up for what is right and for people treating her with respect. (Oh, if only she didn’t go fucking her only friend’s common-law husband!) As Raquel is still talking to Lala, she then starts pretending that Raquel isn’t there. There is mean-girl behavior, and then there is this, which is a sort of lopsided savagery I have never seen before.
Oh wait, we’re supposed to be talking about the room thing! At the pool party, Scheana approaches Katie, who paid for her room at the wedding but has been disinvited from the wedding because she and Scheana have always hated each other and now they have the space to say that on the TV show that has employed them for a decade. Scheana wants to pay Katie for her room so her bridesmaid Jamie can use it. Katie says no. She’s still going. She’s just not going to the ceremony. Oh, and she’s bringing Kristina Kelly, who hated Scheana’s first wedding dress and will probably hate the second one.
Ariana tries to play mediator and asks Katie, “What’s your price?†Scheana just doesn’t want Katie’s bad energy at her wedding. But why does Katie even want to go? Yes, this is a cast trip, but then she will be stuck on a resort just hanging out with the people at the wedding but not going to the wedding herself? That seems, I don’t know … what’s below petty? Hellacious? But Katie won’t even bargain with Ariana. “We’re going to Mexico; that’s what’s happening.†She has the plane ticket (probably courtesy of Bravo). Scheana will give her money for her hotel room so she can book another one. Just go to another fucking resort already.
Tom Schwartz, the idiot that he is, gets into the fight too, trying to show Katie that it’s nice to give up the room for Scheana and just make everyone in the situation happy. Katie gets offended that Tom is against her once again. She says one reason she divorced Tom is that he always took everyone else’s side against her. She hoped that now that they were divorced, he would see her as a “normal person†and not be against her. Did Katie think for a second that maybe the reason that Schwartz was always against her was that she was always up to hellacious stuff like this and perhaps that it wasn’t Schwartz who was wrong this whole time? Maybe it was her? Did she ever consider, for a second, that the reason people don’t like her has nothing to do with her boyfriend and more to do with, I don’t know, how shabbily she treats people?
Schwartz had initially followed Katie into the front of the house to resolve things, but she got in an Uber and went home. As Schwartz walked into the front door, Sandoval confronted him. “Come here,†Sandy said, with a cockapoo smile as he jogged upstairs to one of the guest rooms. Schwartz entered the room and saw a phone in a ring light tripod at the end of the bed.
“What’s this for?†Schwartz asked.
“You know how Lisa said she’d pay $50 for our OnlyFans? Well, I bet a lot of people out there would subscribe. How about we …â€
Sandoval shimmied close to Schwartz, putting his hands on his hips and closing the gap between their bodies. “Collab?†Schwartz asked, the blood rushing to various parts of his body.
“Yeah, collab,†Sandoval said, and kissed his best friend on the lips, taking his shirt off, taking his own shirt off, then pants, then everything, the two of them sweating and panting on the bed, their energy, gasping and passionate, filling the room as it got brighter and brighter, brighter and brighter, so bright that it was like an iPhone 13 trained right at the center of the sun. Then it was over. They laid on their soggy bed just like Lala with Don, panting and thinking about how good they made each other feel. If only Sandoval had already learned his lesson about deleting dirty videos off his phone.