Photo: Bravo
I love the kids these days. They play Spin the Bottle, and they all just make out with each other; boys on girls, girls on boys, boys on boys, girls on girls. Sure, Jesse puts his hand over his mouth when kissing Kyle, and Jesse and West give each other more of a nuzzle, but these kids don’t care at all about the homophobia. Still, the guys definitely like it a lot more when Bailey and Ciara have to suck face than when they have to do it with another dude. Ah, the patriarchy. Never change. (But actually do.)
During the game, Bailey also has to do a full-fledged makeout with her new arch nemesis, Ben. (Remember, this is the day after he reamed her out over her inappropriate joke at Amanda’s birthday dinner.) Ben is a good sport and even compliments her kissing. Even better, after the game, he goes to Bailey’s room to apologize for being a dick the day before. That is very sweet and adult of him. He is back in my good book, but, much like Bailey, any crush I had on him has shriveled up like a wiener in a cold plunge.
Just like Ben and Bailey (B&B Snooze-ic Factory), this episode is really all about contentious couples making up. Well, kind of. KJ and Dara have yet to have their first fight outside of a boxing class, so they don’t have to make up, but it seems like they’re doing a lot of making out, which makes me very happy for both of them. A+ work from the whole cast telling Jesse that he needs to give KJ a lesson on what it’s like to move too fast.
I don’t think we can say that Kyle and Amanda have made up, necessarily, but it is the calmest conversation we’ve seen them have the entire season. When they’re at home and discussing Kyle’s stress level and professional career, it obviously turns to his DJing. He’s about to sign with a manager, he’s flying to Dallas for 24 hours to perform, and he’s committing to this new career long term. Amanda says, “I didn’t marry a DJ and all of a sudden I’m the wife of one.” I think this really gets to the heart of the issue, but in a different way than we anticipate. It’s easy to make fun of Kyle for DJing specifically, because it is such a douchey pursuit that reeks of Red Bull vodkas and midlife crisis. While plenty of people love DJs (I’m the head of the DJ Tanner fan club), no one really respects them.
I think if we take the DJing out of it, though, what Amanda is really saying is that she signed up for one thing and got another. It would be the same if he suddenly took a job as the host of the Today show and had to be up at 3 a.m. every day and go to bed at 7 p.m. (Actually, Amanda would love this.) Or he got a job that required lots of traveling or moving to a foreign city. Amanda doesn’t seem upset about the DJing specifically, but that he’s out every evening, he’s gone every weekend, and he’s partying all the time. It’s not the DJing she hates (though she hates the DJing), it’s the lifestyle changes that it entails. This is entirely valid.
The most surprising couple to reconcile is the travesty formerly known as Larl. When both Lindsay and Carl arrive at the house for the weekend, they have an awkward conversation about each other’s haircuts. As Lindsay says, she’s trying, and if they can talk about such subjects, maybe they’ll be open to friendship sometime soon. Next, they will tackle discussions about the weather, traffic, and who is the ultimate villain of RuPaul’s Drag Race this season. (Any answer other than Athena Dion is wrong.)
It goes a bit better when the cast is out to dinner later, and Carl talks about his date/not date with Bailey, where these two people who are so terrible at flirting had to inform each other that they were flirting with each other. It was the dating equivalent of having sex and asking, “Is it in?” and your partner replies, “It’s in.” Carl informs the table that Lindsay told Bailey that she should date Carl, even though she otherwise gave him negative reviews. Lindsay says she said that they probably wouldn’t have sex, but he was a good conversationalist. Poor Carl, it’s like Lindsay is Dr. Evil and has him strapped to a table with a laser beam just one pube away from being aimed straight at his dick. However, this is what civility looks like, and I like it. They’re not at full Austen and Madison from Southern Charm yet, but it’s allowing everyone in the house to breathe and be comfortable, and that’s really all we need.
The best reconciliation, however, belongs to West and Ciara. It starts during Spin the Bottle, when West, who is seated next to Ciara, reaches and kicks her with his leg. Boys learn to flirt in first grade and then never upgrade their skills. Then he moves his chair closer to hers so that he can hold onto her arm or her leg or whatever. She’s in her chair, letting it happen, but you know she’s loving it. Actually, I don’t know that. I just know that I would love it, that slow-burning desire, the little bits of physical touch that could lead somewhere, but maybe not. It’s all tension, that delightful tension, that gets the blood flowing to all the right places.
It wasn’t flowing to West’s brain, however, because in the morning he wakes up and doesn’t remember anything that happened, and needs Ben and Jesse to fill him in on all the touching. West says in a confessional that he needs to have a talk with Ciara about where things are going, but why isn’t that talk happening? Carl and Bailey found the time for a maybe date, West can’t go over to Ciara’s place with an iced coffee, hash it out, make sweet sweet love for 72 hours, decide to get married and raise a family on a ranch somewhere, and retire from reality television forever to cultivate their love? That’s what I want for them, minus never being on my TV again.
The next weekend, when the girls talk about Ciara and West (with Lindsay once again driving the story with her telekinetic drama powers), Mia tells the group that she thinks that West is in love with Ciara, and, you know, I don’t think she’s wrong. That night at dinner, they give KJ unsolicited advice on how to proceed with Dara, and West says that he shouldn’t talk to the press about their relationship at all. He then harkens back to Jesse and Lexi (can that please never happen again?) and says that when Lexi was talking about Jesse and how West and Ciara may or may not have impacted their relationship, he saw how bad it was. He says he needed to be on the other side of it to get why it’s bad. He then apologizes to Ciara about how he handled their relationship, and it seems the most sincere he has ever sounded.
Ciara, of course, is giving West no quarter. She says she appreciates his apology, but that it sucks that someone had to go through something like that to understand his own actions. I think this is a little unfair of Ciara. First of all, so many of us can’t take advice and will only learn from our own experiences. No matter how many times you heard “liquor before beer, you’re in the clear; beer before liquor, never sicker,” you still had to go do shots of Jäger after three Solo cups of Miller Light and arrive back home with dried sick on your favorite T-shirt. But also, what Ciara is talking about is the experience of being on a reality show. Their first season together, she had it, and West didn’t. She had already been through this bullshit on screen once with Austen to know what the consequences would be. Yes, it sucks that Ciara had to be collateral damage for his learning curve, but I don’t think it’s a personality flaw of West’s that he had to see it himself to fully understand it. That seems like human nature, and he’s realized his mistake, apologized, and I think he wouldn’t do it again. (Well, based on that mid-season trailer, maybe not!)
What Ciara says next changes the conversation and should change the way we look at both their relationship and how reality television works in general. She talks about the racial component of their relationship and how West could never understand what it was like when people were talking about her being played by a white man on television. Of course, she was getting the brunt of that in a way that would never be directed at a white man and that a white man could never understand.
The excellent thing about the show now is that she has both KJ and Mia there to talk to about it. Real change won’t happen on these shows, real diversity won’t be met, until you can have several people of color who can talk about their experiences with each other. They’re all correct: the white people will never get it (through no fault of their own), and the only way they can fully experience being Black people on a racially mixed show is to compare their experiences with the others in the cast. KJ talks about how they all need to be thinking 20 steps ahead because they’re always thinking about how they’re going to be perceived by the audience at large. Kyle says he doesn’t think about it at all. He has the luxury of popping off, while we’re all going to let him have it in the comments, there will never be a racial component to the judgment the fans are making.
West apologizes again for not understanding the extent to which Ciara dealt with the racial aspects of their relationship. He and all the other white people around the table do their best to be supportive, to let them know that they’re all there to help as much as they can. Amanda, always the emotional heart of the show, says, “It’s our job to be family and support one another rather than giving people opportunities to tear other people down.” It seems so simple, so trite, but sometimes it’s the simplest things that are the most true. What anyone needs are those people who will stand by them no matter what, when they’re yelling about how summer should be fun, sloshing around their messy bedrooms, hooking up indiscriminately with guys, or sucking toes with strangers. We all need that support, that love, that understanding, those people who, even if they can’t understand, will truly listen.
