Well, they’re here. The Tom and Ariana confrontations that we all were hoping for, that we all wanted, that we expected this season to deliver. We got them. Well, did you keep the receipt? Because I want to return them. Please tell me you saved the return shipping label from ASOS because, just like that $7.99 top you just bought, they should be sent back to the Bangladeshi factory from whence they came. It’s because no one here is right, and with Ariana behaving badly when the show forces her to confront “her ex,†there is officially no one left to like on the show. We can like Ally, I guess, but even she is one astrological reading to the wrong person away from her very own Milkshake Ducking.
It starts when everyone goes to James’s house (yes, the editors inserted an airplane flying overhead so we could orient ourselves) for Lala’s water sommelier event. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they did drink the only $1,000 bottle of water in America, and I’m pretty sure it was just filled with runoff from the L.A. River. After that, the pizza arrives, and Sandoval runs out to find out if the delivery guy forgot the ranch. “He’s doing the most right now!†Ariana barks from the couch, something you know she has said a million times in their ten years together but never with this much bile.
It gets worse when everyone sits down to eat, and Tom walks by the table, and Ariana calls him an “attempted dog murderer†within earshot but without actually acknowledging that he’s in the room. This stems from the last episode when Tom lets their dog into Ariana’s room, where she ate a takeout container with some leftovers and chicken satay sticks. It quickly devolves into petty arguing. Ariana is mad that Tom didn’t close the back door to their house. Tom accuses Ariana of never emptying the litter box even though she says she did it last week, and the editors grace us with footage of her doing just that as proof.
What Tom is really upset about is that Ariana won’t respond to an email that Tom and his lawyer sent her about buying her out of the house. She says that her lawyer is going to handle it, but Tom counters that it’s been with him for two months, and they haven’t done anything. It’s clear that one of these two really needs to get out of the house for the healing to start. Ariana says in a confessional, “Short of removing myself entirely from this group of friends, it’s not possible to just never be in the same room as my ex ever.†But I feel like being in the same room with him at a social function might be easier were they not still fighting about stupid household shit, which, like drug resistant gonorrhea, are painful, intractable, and will certainly ruin your sex life.
The problem with their current situation is that they need to be able to communicate with each other — about the house, the show, their boundaries — but Ariana won’t let them have any type of conversation, nonetheless a productive one. When Tom comes at her about the email and the house, she just starts shouting, “Get the fuck away from me, get the fuck away from me,†repeatedly.
What Sandoval did to Ariana was terrible and entirely his fault. However, how they deal with the aftermath is up to both of them. Tom wants to get it done (maybe not fairly, but he wants it done). Ariana wants to make this guy’s life as hard as she possibly can. I don’t blame her. I would have set all of that man’s possessions and his pubic hair on fire if he did to me what he did to her. Still, the way it’s set up now is serving neither of them.
When Ariana yells at Sandoval, he packs up and leaves, ceding control of the situation and the friend group to Ariana. It is a little bit of kindness from a man we haven’t seen be kind since, what, when he paid for James’s engagement so that he could fuck his fiancé? Okay, maybe not that. On his way out, he says, “You got everything. You got all the campaigns; now you’re going to take my assistant?†He’s not wrong. She’s doing much better than he is (and she should!), but can’t she take a bit of consolation from that? Will that lessen her anger? Later in the episode, Lala says, “Look at his life. She won.†She’s right! Ariana says that she doesn’t want to sit there while Tom jabs at her, but he seems mostly silent to her other than asking to figure out the house situation, which everyone says needs sorting. She’s the one who is stonewalling him and making it impossible to move on either at home or in the group.
As this is all going down inside the house, Schwartz and Katie have one of the nicest, coolest moments they’ve had in their entire relationship when they’re out back talking about how Katie fucked Tom’s best friend, Max. “You dirty dog,†Tom says to Katie, almost in admiration. He likes that she has lost the moral high ground of him always cheating and making out with Rachel when she asked him not to. She seems to take some kind of sick pride in having revenge on him. It’s like the two are finally starting to respect each other for the horrible banshees in each other’s souls. They end with Katie telling Tom, “I won’t fuck any more of your friends,†and he chuckles, and I can see a small sliver of the future if everything goes just the right way, where Tom and Katie both find new partners and can someday laugh about their horrible first marriage to each other.
Katie gets in another funny when she texts Ariana the next day and asks, “Should we go to Scheana’s beach day or should we fake our own deaths?†I would definitely opt for B, but since it’s Scheana’s beach day that means Brock will be in attendance and his budgy smugglers are coming out. You know I am not going to miss an opportunity to stare at his thighs like they’re the Mona Lisa or the ABBA hologram show.
Speaking of my main man, Brock, just because I’m in love with his body doesn’t mean I always love his personality. On the one hand, he keeps being one of the wisest and sanest voices about life after Sandoval. When Scheana insists he uninvite Sandoval because of the fight at the water party, Brock refuses. You have to love a man who can stand his ground while playing with his daughter at a teeny tiny table. Just because Sandoval triggers Ariana and she can’t handle her anger doesn’t mean that Sandoval shouldn’t be invited. It means that someone needs to tell Ariana that they need to peacefully coexist for the good of the show, and that entails at least tolerating her ex. I’m not even asking for acceptance or cordiality here. I’m talking about just letting the man breathe within 100 feet of her.
However, when everyone finally arrives for the beach day, Brock brings up something about Tom and Rachel and sets us off for the second round of fighting. Here I thought DJ James Kennedy did a good job of dispelling the tension with his joke about one side being Ariana’s and one Sandoval’s and now my big, beefy man-lover goes and ruins it all.
The subject of Ariana’s pets comes up, and she says that they’re hers because she paid the adoption fees. (It turns out she paid for most of the furniture in the house, too.) When Sandoval tries to come up with an argument, she just keeps shouting, “Stop speaking to me. Stop speaking to me,†repeatedly to silence him. There is a flaw in this very effective strategy, though. If she let Tom tell his side of the story, he’s probably going to look like an asshole because that’s what he always does, and she will be vindicated. Just look at what happened with the cat litter. However, if she silences him, he seems like a victim, which we all know he clearly isn’t.
I don’t need Ariana to be a perfect victim. I don’t even need her to be nice to Sandoval, but I at least need her to try to engage with him in a meaningful way, if not for the good of the show, but for the good of herself. James says in a confessional, “I don’t think Ariana should forgive and forget, but maybe it’s good for her to release some of this anger.†Dude, if the White Kanye, the same man who shouted, “It’s not about the pasta!†is telling you that you have anger-management issues, maybe it’s time for you to take stock of your life choices.
Back in Valley Village, Ann just showed up for work in her suit with her resume printed out. She was interviewed for a job with Ariana, and Tom listened to everything from the landing of the house. “Ann!†he bellowed at her, throwing the boxer briefs he’d worn for three straight days at her face as she walked up the stairs. “Do you even want to work here anymore? Do you even know what I’ve done for you? I’ve saved you. I’ve saved you from her rage. I’ve saved you from her never replacing the batteries and the pens. I’ve saved you from taking care of those dogs that I do most of the work on anyway. I’ve paid you and taken care of you for months, and now you’re going to leave me just because of what? I’m too nice to you? I pay you too well? God, Ann. Just get out of here and come back in a few days. Actually no. You go downstairs and sit on a stool for an hour and think about what you did. But can you get my stripey green top from the dryer first? I need to go to the beach.â€
Meanwhile, in The Valley …
In classic Kristen Doute fashion, she takes something Janet said about Michelle maybe being a Republican because she supports “Don’t Say Gay†bills and turns it into Janet saying that Michelle is probably a racist. Now, it isn’t a huge jump from the GOP to racism, given the current MAGA state of the party, but this is ridiculous even for Kristen. She says that she heard it from Zack, the only human on the planet whose hair grows like a winter hat. He says he never said that because everyone knows no one ever said it because Kristen is an actually insane person who makes things up. When the whole group meets for a Capri dinner that, for some strange reason, was not held in the Capri Room, the whole business erupts with lots of screaming about things both trivial and, well, trivial. Except no one wants to be called a racist, which is the thing white people fear most, even more than sunburns, doing the Electric Slide badly, and Grey’s Anatomy being canceled. Speaking of being canceled, Kristen finally opens up about the worst thing that ever happened to her. “I was canceled,†she says, like it is a disease and she just caught it. “I have rickets,†Kristen tells everyone, and they commit seppuku together and dream of Capri.