I don’t know about you, but after watching the second half of that reunion, I have tear stains all over my Slanket. We got apologies, we got fighting, we got understanding, we got shockingly tender moments, and, for some reason, we got one of Naomi Watt’s famous pavlovas. (It did look amazing!) Yes, the whole thing was an emotional wreck, and if I had to sit through that boring ass season for this level of catharsis, well, it was totally worth it.
Before we can get to everything else, let’s deal with Boring Becky Minkoff, hopefully for the last time. The biggest indictment we got of her was the unseen footage of her in the helicopter talking to Brynn and Jessel and saying she wanted to do the show because her sales were down 70 percent, and she wanted better marketing. There is no right reason to do a reality show, but there is one wrong reason, and this is it. Cindy Barshop did the same thing; they both came on not because they believed in the enterprise or wanted to be honest, but they did the show to move product, and they were both terrible at their jobs. Yes, Jenna says that she came on to sell eyelashes, and she might have, but she’s still here, sitting on that couch in a $1,500 robe she is going to return, when her eyelash line is effectively shuttered so that is no longer the reason she’s here. But, a warning to all of those applying to Bravo’s casting call for the next season of RHONY: if you only want to be on here to help your business, don’t bother cause we will hate you and it will not work.
Most of Becky’s time was spent talking about her new feud with Erin — maybe if she brought this to the show, she’d be invited back — and Scientology. Becky says that she felt like the women were talking shit about her religion in confessionals but weren’t willing to say it to her face or even talk about it in the group. The rest of the women say they didn’t bring it up on camera because it felt like a closed subject. When Erin asks her about how she could be a Scientologist and a Jew at the same time, Becky says she doesn’t like her tone, which just seems to prove the rest of the women’s point that it was not something that could be discussed. We also see, thanks to some canny editing, that Becky is now calling it a “religion” at the reunion but called it a “philosophy” on the show. Looks like someone got a call from on high correcting how she discusses this rel-osophy in public.
I’m not going to weigh in on whether it’s a religion or a cult, whether or not it has a place on the show, or whether the women were right not to talk about it. I will say that when I was working at Gawker 1.0 (R.I.P.), we used to talk a lot of shit about Scientology, and I’ve seen first-hand how litigious and retaliatory the church can be when it feels people are attacking it. That also creates an environment where these women, who know they are on a public platform, are wary about discussing it publicly. If that’s the way that your religion operates, maybe you need to take a second look at that religion, why it is that way, and decide whether or not you still want to be a part of it. As for whether or not I want Becky to be a part of Housewives anymore, the answer is the same as when she first sashayed in, and that is a big, fat N to the motherfucking O. Mic drop. Dab. Exit stage right.
Obviously, the other two people we need to talk about are Ubah and Brynn. Ubah is up first as the conversation turns to the trip to Puerto Rico, and we revisit Ubah throwing a fit when she didn’t get a good enough room. Then, she said that the beach that Racquel took her to was disgusting. In both of these instances, Ubah refuses to apologize and even blames Racquel for not being a good enough host in the room situation. As for the beach, she says that she didn’t say the ocean was disgusting, just the runoff, but we still see footage of her telling Brynn not to go in the ocean because it’s disgusting. In both of these instances, Racquel stands up to Ubah and holds her own, defending her own point of view. Give this lady another season, and she’ll be a scrapper through and through.
Ubah eventually apologizes for ruining Racquel’s childhood memory, but even that seems condescending. She doesn’t apologize to Sai or Racquel, whose feelings she both hurt or to the island of Puerto Rico, which she purports to love so much. This leads to a discussion where Andy says that all of the women are afraid of getting into conflict with her. Ubah says, “Continue to be afraid. Good.” However, the problem, as Andy points out, is that it doesn’t allow her to have real relationships with the other women because they’re censoring themselves around her. She again says that they should.
What’s confusing to me is how this contradicts the Ubah that we see later in the hour, the one who goes over and hugs Brynn when she is sitting there on the couch like a half-deflated “It’s a Girl” balloon at the end of a gender reveal party. She is capable of true connection, of being forgiving and empathetic, of true caring even though she just told Racquel she wished she could tell her she cared. What she’s not capable of is being wrong, apologizing, and trying to diffuse conflict. That’s not necessarily the worst problem a Housewife could have, but I feel like if we got more of this balance of Ubah, the hard and the soft, over the course of the season, she’d be in much better stead, not just with the fans but also personally.
That is getting a little bit ahead of things because we haven’t talked about Brynn yet, and, well, it’s a doozy. As she recounts the last night in Puerto Rico, the women have to stop her several times to correct her version of events. First, she says she said that Ubah maybe didn’t clock that she said she was raped because she was defending Ubah. There is a quick round of people murmuring, “No!” from both of those couches. Then she says that the women didn’t comfort her that night; they were just asking about who the guy was and how rich he was, and the same chorus came up again. They ladies all had to correct her again when Brynn said they didn’t reach out to her after the trip.
It seems like Brynn is still up to her old tricks, taking things that happened off-camera and reinterpreting them to gain some advantage or at least a little bit of sympathy. Sai says it directly: “You weaponized your experience for the downfall of a friend.” Yes, that’s true, and it’s gross. Even with all the forgiveness in the room, especially coming from Ubah, I don’t think Brynn can come back from this as a practitioner of the reality television arts and sciences because we’ve seen her game, and none of us can trust her as a reliable narrator again.
But that doesn’t mean none of us have sympathy for her or what she’s gone through, both in terms of her sexual assault and her traumatic childhood that made this into one of her coping mechanisms. Jenna says that she learned you can be upset with someone and still care about them, and that’s how I feel about Brynn at the end of this. What she’s gone through has been horrible, and what she’s gone through since the finale aired in terms of fan reaction has also been horrible, even if it is a mess of her own making. If Ubah can shock Sai and Erin and go over and hug Brynn, then I think we should try to shock ourselves by having a bit of compassion for Brynn and Ubah, too! She’s been through shit that made her this way as well. And let’s be compassionate for Jessel and her ruined marriage, Racquel and her fractured relationship with her mother, Sai and her busted foot, Jenna and her straight pubes. These women come on this show and bear the terrible parts of their souls for our entertainment, and instead of trying to villainize them, to say who is wrong and who is right, maybe we should try to find a little bit of caring for each and every one of them. Except for Erin Mew Mew Lichy, of course. Just kidding. She lost her father this season, and her husband sold her Bitcoin without asking. Those are two huge tragedies she shared with us.
There’s one moment that hit me more than others, though, that put me in this strangely charitable frame of mind. It’s a moment that made me think how this whole enterprise is worth it. After the big Ubah and Brynn discussion and confrontation, most of the women gathered to talk about how they feel sorry for Brynn, how they care for her, and how they really want the best for her no matter what happens. Racquel goes into Brynn’s dressing room to tell her that the women all love her no matter what and they won’t abandon her with everything she’s going through. Racquel talks about how much she’s cried the whole time in Puerto Rico and the aftermath, and even now when she’s confronted with Brynn. Brynn tells Racquel, “You cry like it hits too close to home.” The “it” takes on a lot of meaning, but it seems like Brynn meant, and Racquel understood it, as sexual assault.
“It does,” Racquel says, pulling her closer. “I get it. I get it.” These are the moments we watch Housewives for, when all of the artifice, all of the production is stripped away, and we see real women at their very core. We see what they’re both able to endure and capable of surviving; we see them caring for those who have wronged them, and we see the totality of life experience through an incredibly short but charged exchange. “Only connect!” EM Forster implored us, and this is what a real connection looks like. It looks like two women who may hate each other crying together, it looks like a fake room in a fake building in a fake world that allows just enough reality in to jolt us out of complacency; it looks like a spark, it looks like two wires under a steering wheel that some thief is putting together to finally get a car started, to run off with it into the unknown when we weren’t expecting it to happen at all.
