Not a Yacht of Fun

 

I have to start by saying I loved this episode, and I knew we were in for a fun time as the episode begins with flashbacks of Shah's arrest as she's just casually putting in her contacts.  How she accomplishes this with those deadly claws is anyone's guess, and I'm not even going to wonder how she ... well, you get the point.  Anyway, Jen tells us about how antidepressants have helped her after her father died, but just when she thought she was in a better place, the SWAT team showed up. We’ve watched her deal with this saga for a season and a half now, but it feels like this opening scene reaffirms how she's hitting a real breaking point.

 

Meredith shows up at Jen's lovely rental on a snowy afternoon to go over the plans for the girl's trip to San Diego, and hopefully get her to reconsider inviting Danna, whom Jen is currently battling with.   Jen tells Meredith that it’s currently the month of Ramadan, which in the Muslim world means  "a time of reflection and forgiveness".  So apparently jet travel and skyscrapers around the world are safe during this time ... who knew?  “This is a great month if anyone wants to talk to me about anything,” Jen says, determined to be Zen Jen, which is great news for Meredith, who then brings up Jen’s fight with Danna.   Against all odds, Jen agrees (as if production gave her a choice).  It's one thing to train her good friend (Angie K) as her replacement, but this Danna chick is another story.  BTW, have we discussed Jen's tiny black hat and gloves that she's rocking this season to film her confessionals?  We usually get decent array of outfits costumes out of Jen, but this season, she's serving up Hamburglar chic'.

 

While Meredith is securing her invite for the trip,  Danna is having lunch with Heather and Angie H (the blond Angie).  Things are so bad for Shrek that she's on an island with no alliances left, and stuck doing group scenes with the B-Team; particularly Danna, who clearly feels out of place on this show.

 

Danna tells them about her plan to go on the cast trip as a guest of a guest, which is more than poor Angie H. can say, who didn't get an invite at all.  All this talk about the trip is giving Heather anxiety given she's on shaky ground with Jen. Unlike Danna, who plans on airing her issues with Jen, Heather says that when she has conflicted feelings, she’s learned to push them down and suppress them until they just go away (just like a good Mormon).

 

The ladies all meet at the airport at the crack of dawn.  Seth says goodbye to Meredith by whispering, “Watch out for the schadenfreude”, which for some reason, makes them both laugh. Heather drops her three suitcases down an escalator, and Whitney says  “Yay, another domestic trip because of of someone’s court-ordered travel restrictions”.  Meanwhile Danna awkwardly stands off to the side kicking herself for not timing her arrival to the airport with one her buds.  Eventually, they all board (in coach), and Jen somehow manages to take control of the plane intercom, and makes an inflight announcement.

 

 

They arrive at their San Diego vacation house, a sentence I never fathomed I would have to write about the Real Housewives. “Wow, this place is so good, it’s like a little Santorini,” Lisa Barlow lies, clearly vying for an Oscar to add to her shelf of Grammys for Away in a Manger. But as soon as they get there, a power struggle instantly emerges, with Angie K. leading the house tour and giving out rooms even though Jen planned the trip.

 

The Real Housewives franchise has been on the air for 16 years, but to this day, its foolproof conflict-generator is cast trip room assignments. And I, for one, even after all these years, will never tire of it. It’s a rich tradition that should be respected as an ode to all of our foremothers who’ve come before and who’ve baselessly demanded master bedrooms year after year.

 

This time around, Angie, having been the one to find the house, helps herself to the biggest room. Naturally, this doesn’t sit right with Jen. After all, the one silver lining of her indictment has been getting the biggest room for every cast trip out of pity. Who is Angie to take that away from her? Even Whitney agrees that the room should go to Jen, given the circumstances, since “there is a big possibility that she might be spending the next couple years in a six by nine-foot jail cell.”

 

 

But as annoyed as she is over her room demotion, Jen is just as annoyed at Angie leading the charge when she was the one who planned the trip. Sure, we all know that production really planned it, but let’s just play along. So after a tense, very passive-aggressive house tour, they try to address the group before getting into it over who’s a “pro” at this. The subtext here is glaring: Jen is a Housewife with a capital H, and Angie is a measly Friend Of. And there’s no better way to remind someone of your Real Housewife status than pouring a glass of champagne on them, which is exactly what Jen does with a theatrical flourish, sending the bubbly running down Angie’s freshly blown out hair.

 

The room is hilariously unfazed by this, mostly just watching on as if Jen did something as normal as coughing. But Jen very quickly realizes that this might not have played out the way she wanted it to, and what she thought was a “fun bitch” move was maybe just a “bitch” move. So in an attempt to get ahead of it, she encourages Angie to join in on the fun and pour her champagne on her now. Angie has no desire to do this, so Jen grabs it and pours it on herself.

 

The group splits up to dry off, and Lisa checks in on Angie. Typical Lisa, “Sorry you got dumped on”, an incredible arrangement of words.  Getting over the initial shock, Angie K. is beginning to get angry, especially because she apparently bankrolled Sheriff’s birfday party. “I not only planned it, I paid for the entire party”, she says.  Then in a hilarious bit, Angie K. runs through a list of receipts totaling $15,000, as the editors flash the breakdown on our screens complete with ((( ca$h register dings))) sound effects.  “I could have bought my daughter a horse with the amount of money I spent ... well, I did do that,” she says, as they cut to a photo of Angie’s 10-year-old daughter Elektra, looking like National Velvet and posing with a gorgeously expensive horse.

 

Meanwhile, Whitney and Meredith are trying to encourage Jen to apologize for what she calls “trying to lighten the mood”.  Personally, I'm kind of torn on this one; the water toss wasn't exactly filled with Margaret Joseph/Danielle Staub rage, but definitely more angry than the Brandi Glanvile/Eileen Davison incident. Jen wants everyone to believe that she really doesn’t see what she did wrong. “It’s not like I threw her in the pool or ripped her weave out,” Jen says, referencing other iconic Housewives offenses.  Meredith says, trying to minimize the dispute, just as Angie is upstairs blowing it out of proportion with Lisa.  “I’m so mad right now", Angie says, fighting back the tears.  IMHO, Angie passed her audition and needs to be handed a snowflake immediately.

 

It’s time for everybody to head out to the "yacht", so they load back up into Ol’ Reliable, a.k.a. the sprinter van. At this point, I think it makes more fiscal sense for Bravo to buy these vans rather than rent them, especially since they, without fail, bring out the crazy. Angie, having had time to collect herself and re-blow dry her hair, gets into it with Jen about the pour, which Jen insists was a joke.  In what is becoming habit RHOSLC, Angie says to the ladies, “Raise your hand if you thought it was funny?”.  Of course no one raises their hand and Angie uses this fight to pivot to her another grievance she has with Jen.

 

In front of everyone, Angie accuses Jen of not paying for any of Sharrieff’s party and sticking her with the bill, but Jen outright denies the accusation (her MO). According to her, Angie was the one who wanted to host the party in the first place. The subtext here is that Angie wanted her house to be on the show, and Jen agreed as a favor to her friend. And what a great favor it ended up being: it gave Angie and her home a great showcase at a big cast event, and now it’s even giving her her first conflict as a cast member. The party was worth every penny when you think about it.

 

 

Jen also pushes back on the idea that she didn’t give Angie anything for the party, having just given her a $5,000 necklace the other day.   Angie then comes up with the most hilarious line of the episode (and there were many) when she tells us in a talking head, “The last thing I wanna do is keep this necklace, and be out in public and have the Southern District of New York find me and take the necklace off my neck,”.   She also says that she didn’t hear from Jen for three days after the party while she was on her knees scrubbing the floor. Now we all know that’s a bald-faced lie. I’m sure someone was cleaning her floors, but it wasn’t Angie.   Bitch, you bought your ten-year-old a quarter horse, you are never going to convince me that you've ever operated a Swiffer.

 

As they board their yacht cruiser (ironically named "Champagne"), Meredith tells us that she is failing miserably as "CEO of Fun", a position which Jen assigned her to before the trip.  But now the fun is taking a backseat while Jen vents about Angie, and Meredith is concerned. Jen’s mental state was already fragile from the case, and that’s now being exacerbated by unsupportive friends. “I feel like she is hitting a breaking point,” Meredith says, and while we might have thought we’ve seen Jen unravel dozens of times before, these new special circumstances could make for a rough rest of the  season.

 

In case you haven't heard, Shah's sentencing was initially set for November 28, 2022, but on October 6 the prosecution requested it be postponed until December 15, 2022, due to some kind of scheduling conflict. Now the sentencing has been postponed again; this time to January 6, 2023.  Talk about torture ... and I'm not talking about for Jen Shah!