The one good thing I can say about this season is that I really like Lisa Vanderpump’s new role as a general friend and adviser to the group. Instead of being the imperious overseer of the staff at SUR, she is the older, wiser friend who helps these reality-TV wraiths that she spawned from her own handbag of hate. It’s like Shark Tank, except every idea is stupid and no one wants to work. It’s like she’s the host of Sloth Tank. She patiently sits while Katie and Adriana tell her they want to open a sandwich shop that is “unapologetically feminine†(good idea) called Something About Her (bad idea). For some reason, the only word I can imagine coming after Something About Her is “farts,†and that is not a good look for a sandwich shop, to think that it is going to give you enough gas for three Cadillac SUVs.
Lisa and Ken, a recipe for Spotted Dick dated 1492, also stop by the Schwartz & Sandy’s progress party in an old Mexican restaurant where there are dead la cucarachas on the floor. Sandoval just wants to tell all of his friends about the giant archway that is going over the bar and how he’s going to lower the cavernous ceilings to make it seem more like a lounge. He wants them to ooh and aah at his vision like he’s Dr. Frank N. Furter unveiling his blond Adonis to a crowd in tights and party hats. Instead, Lisa and Ken are like, “That’s a bad idea. They are going to lose a ton of money. They are dopes.â€
I like that Lisa, a real successful adult, is here to tell us that we’re not fools, that these people are making crazy mistakes based on their own hubris. Just because they’re famous, this won’t automatically work, right? Just because we watch them on TV doesn’t mean that we’ll plop down $50 for a mediocre craft cocktail with pineapple juice and ginger and sliders made from sirloin offcuts they got for half-price at a meat market. Right? RIGHT?! Haha. JK. I’ll be at the Schwartz & Sandy’s opening no matter how many arches and light displays they have.
What I’m saying is that I like that Lisa is involved in a way that seems logical, like they’re not stretching too far to keep her included in these people’s lives, and that she seems to be offering them sound business advice with a heaping side of cheeky puns. I hope this isn’t all being engineered so that she can swoop in at the last minute and save the Toms from themselves. After all, whenever you kick the hatchlings out of the nest, you have to watch a couple of them Jackson Pollack on the forest floor. Just ask Meemaw’s Beer Cheese.
Some other things happen in this episode too. Lala tells us she won’t give “blowies†anymore since having a child and that, right there, is the reason I will never have a child, other obvious reproductive factors be damned. Schwartz and Sandoval cuck each other by posting pictures of their hangouts with DJ James Kennedy and Brock Budgie Smuggler, respectively. (Does anyone know Brock’s last name? He seems like such a large person he doesn’t need one, or maybe he sat on it and crushed it? I don’t know.) Raquel, a miniature pinscher in a Girl Boss sweater, talks about how “I don’t know anything about flowers except they make every party pretty,†which just makes my job easy and I thank you for this, Raquel.
However, the episode is really taken over by the continued insanity of Brock’s wedding plans for Scheana. I have never cringed harder when he shows up to pick up her 12.97-carat “diamond,†which is really just a pink gemstone and not a diamond at all, and then he has to split it between three cards, and even then, he is so overjoyed when all the transactions go through that he does a Leprechaun in the Hood jig right there in the jewelry store. Brock, my man, my morsel, my Crunch on Sunset steam-room fantasy. Maybe you shouldn’t be dropping $25K on a ring right now when you owe your fiancée $10K in start-up costs for your already obsolete home-workout app and you can hardly afford the hair ties to keep your man mane out of your matcha latte.
Since Brock is the sole conductor of the bad-idea train, he has given up the last episode’s idea of a shotgun guerrilla wedding for a shotgun guerrilla wedding at someone else’s engagement party. I mean, who is this guy? An Australian Connor Roy? Because Brock can’t afford an engagement ring without resorting to a Fonzi scheme (that is a Ponzi scheme but if you’re on television), he couldn’t afford the $20K it would cost to pull off his event without Randall and Lala or production paying for it, which seemed to be his angle.
His plan, instead, is to go on the totally sponsored trip to Santa Ynez (with a Y!) for James and Raquel’s engagement party and marry Scheana there in secret. He tells this to Ariana and Sandoval, and they’re like, “Yeah, James can never find out. He will rend the globe asunder if he finds out.†And they’re right. How can Brock not see this? It’s sort of like getting the room next to the honeymoon suite and then trying to fuck louder than the just-married couple while telling everyone that you were trying to keep it down. No one wants a headboard rattler like Brock ruining their engagement party.
What’s even crazier is that everyone knows this is a bad idea; everyone knows that James will go all Fukushima, and no one just flat out tells this guy, “No. This is a bad idea, don’t do it.†They just tell him that James can never know, but they all know this will be on TV at some point and James will find out. Are they just hoping that he won’t care by the time he notices? That he won’t care that he and Raquel “planned†this whole party at a venue and then Brock is just using a little corner of it because he thought it would be nice and memorable and free for his marriage?
The stupidity of this move can only be explained by shouting “Duh duh duh†in a mocking voice while hitting yourself on the head with your closed fist, which is exactly what James does to Brock at the Schwartz & Sandy dead cock-a-roach party. Brock is talking to James about how he was going to quit weed, and James said he was having a stressful time with everything that was going on and someone at SUR testing positive for COVID (was this episode a HIPAA violation?) that he still hadn’t quit smoking weed. Brock says, “I get how that’s frustrating, but like I would just say because I was stressed out and I couldn’t handle the pressure …â€
That is when James blows up and tells Brock that is not the truth and to shove that idea up his ass. Well, James did just say he was stressed out and that’s why he couldn’t handle quitting weed, but whatever. He doesn’t know the truth. He doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t know how to treat people or how to have his response fit whatever perceived slight just happened. We know this. This is nothing new. It is as old as the goat-cheese-ball crust on the SUR menus. It turns out that Brock is just mad that James won’t come to his photo shoot, and James is mad that Brock isn’t hanging out with him. It’s as if James just pushes people away with his abuse, and then when they back away, he sees it as an excuse to abuse them even further. It’s an unvirtuous cycle, and we have seen it in so many iterations that it is nothing short of exhausting.
And the Toms, newly reconciled, watched all this, wondering if this is how they will one day end. If their friendship will be torn asunder by petty squabbles? Schwartz looked at Sandoval while this was happening, looked deep into his eyes, and imagined something else. He imagined that their friendship bracelets weren’t just little ties but ropes. Long, multicolored strands of macramé that he could use to tie Sandoval to his bed, each of his limbs knotted to a post, his naked body stretched out like an empty California pool, and he was the skateboarder who got to play in it all day, riding up and down its concrete ridges, placing his hands on its firm, craggly parts to do tricks, showing off his skills to the one man in his life that matters until he finally collapses in a soggy, sweaty heap, gasping for breath and hoping the afternoon would never end. That is what Schwartz was thinking as the two stood behind the bar, and he slowly slipped his right hand into Sandoval’s left-back jean pocket, trying to make the whole world melt away.