The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: Room for Vipers

This week on our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women, in fact, did some things. They cooed when their son’s modeling photos came in about how cute they were. (Not the pictures but the women themselves in the pictures.) They watched as their young daughter pliéd and jetéd in her tutu to (obviously) play the lead in her ballet recital. They had a plump-lipped celebrity designer over to come up with a plan to redo their entire domicile, but he only really wanted to paint stripes in the cabana so that one day when she was on vacation he could borrow it for a really chic orgy.

But mostly, what the women did was fight at the Viper Room, the Los Angeles institution established by Johnny Depp and brought into Hollywood lore when River Phoenix died after a night there. Strangely, none of the women, even L.A. native and ’80s “It” girl Kyle Richards, have ever been there before, though Garcelle did make out with Johnny Depp at a club back in the day. Who didn’t she date or make out with back then? Are we one day going to discover that Garcelle was briefly engaged to Andy Dick?

Before that, we have to endure some rather long, tedious personal scenes with some of the women. Boz goes on a date with her very handsome long-distance boyfriend, Keely. They go to Malibu and have a professionally arranged picnic on the beach. I don’t know if the HD on my TV has now started to show the weather, but I was absolutely freezing watching them as they talked about their love on that windswept beach. Maybe the lack of warmth was between the two of them. The vibe was, I don’t know, somehow off. The whole thing seemed a little too businesslike as if they had decided this was a good pairing based on their heads rather than their hearts. I think we just need to see more. The jury is out on Keely, but he’s showing promise.

Garcelle took two of her sons, her unfortunately nick-named grandson OJ, and one of her son’s girlfriends to her beach house so that they could have dinner. I am very happy for Garcelle’s success, I really am. I hope that she continues to put women in peril, then save them in countless Lifetime movies. However, the “my life is so great” schtick is getting a little bit repetitive. Of course, I don’t wish harm or misfortune on Garcelle, but I want a sense that she’s striving for something. Then again, when she tells the story about her oldest, Oliver, coming by her house in the throes of addiction and trying to break into the place while she just watched, well, that was an absolute nightmare, and I teared up a little bit. Maybe I should just shut the fuck up and let Garcelle enjoy the beach.

While Garcelle and Sutton have been a power couple since they both started appearing together, I’m loving the friendship that Dorit and Boz are developing. As Boz says that Dorit loves to talk and she loves to listen, and it is better for her to listen to Dorit than the rest of us. Boz comes by Dorit’s house, Surely Foreclosed Manor, to talk about the four-hour therapy session she had the previous day with her soon-to-be ex-husband, PK, a spurt of gonorrhea discharge that dribbles down your leg. She says that PK was talking terribly to her and finally said that he wants to get a divorce from her. Wait, did Dorit think that she and PK had a chance of working it out? Didn’t he make it clear at their previous carb-on-carb dinner?

I have never been a huge Dorit fan, as regular readers will know, but she is having an excellent season so far, and it’s because she seems to be facing everything with the truth. Like she says, she’s tired of being talked down to and mistreated, and she’s tired of forgiving people just to get along. She’s out here telling Camille Grammer that she’s just looking for her moment, she’s telling Sutton that she’s unhinged, and she’s telling PK, the grandson of the Nosferatu, that he’s aggressive and erratic. How many Beverly Beach cover-ups has this lady been hiding under, and where was she all these years?

She also seems to be the only one handling her divorce correctly. After PK, a mysterious turd that shows up one evening on your doorstep, storms out of therapy, she says that she needs to get prepared, she needs to make a plan, and she needs to get ready for whatever hell is coming because he is acting so erratically she thinks he could come after her with a vengeance. Pair this with how Kyle is approaching the world’s slowest-moving divorce. She still thinks that she and Mauricio are going to get back together. She thinks that even if they don’t that he’s going to be civil and fair and just part with half of his money and his company because of what he said in a book once. Maybe Kyle should repair her relationship with Dorit just so she can get some pointers.

This is the major difference between the two of them right now, as well as what is at the center of the argument of whether or not Kyle should keep sending memes to PK, a haunted porta-potty. In a real-world divorce where people are friends with both members of the couple, there is a side to pick, and it’s surprising that it’s not always the one they were friends with first. I feel like Kyle would choose PK, a Pepsi challenge with no winners, in this divide because she likes him better and he makes her laugh. Also, I think she’s half expecting to get back together with Mo, who’s besties with PK, a sugar-free Redbull that’s full of sand, so he is going to continue to be in her life. I think that is why she keeps this meme conversation with him going.

However, these people do not live in the real world, they live on our television sets; they live in a reality show. That means that Kyle will have to choose Dorit because she will always be around her. So yes, in any other context, I could see Kyle sending memes back and forth as not that bad. But, as Dorit mentions, if their divorce is about to get as toxic as she thinks it’s going to be, she can’t have Kyle talking to her ex and possibly giving him information or details, even inadvertently, that he can then use against her. So, yes, Kyle, you need to stop texting that bursting corpuscle.

This all comes to a head when they get to the Viper Room for the Pride party for a marketing company where Erika is debuting her new single “Dominoes,” which strangely has nothing to do with pizza delivery. (Missed opportunity.) Kesha, missing both her $ and Pink’s !, is there for some reason because she’s friends with Kyle now. Okay, great. As far as odd pairings go, Sutton has a chat with Boz because she doesn’t like that Boz used the word “weaponize” to describe what Sutton was doing to Dorit at Kyle’s Bucking Bronco party. Well, Sutton, if you don’t like the word, then maybe you shouldn’t, you know, weaponize things that Dorit told her in confidence against her. Sutton says that she didn’t say it to hurt Dorit, but Boz points out that she did, and she didn’t take ownership of that or even apologize.

It gets even worse when they all sit down at the table. Kyle and Dorit start fighting about Kyle’s group-chat meme sending and Dorit mentions that her problem right now with her ex is that he’s not communicating with her, and that’s hard when they have two young children who don’t know about the separation. Sutton points out that Dorit can’t hide it from the kids forever, and she’s absolutely right. If this is Dorit’s big problem with PK, a man I have almost grown tired of creating disgusting metaphors for, then it is an unforced error and one she can end quickly by sitting the kids down and having that awful discussion. While this is true, Sutton needed to keep her little yapper shut at this point and let two professionals really get into this.

This also opens the window for Dorit to talk about how Sutton’s claim that she can always call her is bullshit. While Sutton says she’s there and supportive, she sure isn’t acting like it, as both Erika and Boz point out at the table. Erika even says in confessional that Sutton has a pattern, that she went after Erika at her lowest point and has subsequently done the same to Kyle and Dorit. This sisterhood bullshit that she’s always preaching is faker than the Walmart Birkin. Then Sutton drastically reverses course, saying they’re not friends at all and that she will only be cordial to Dorit in the future. This is the erratic behavior that the rest of the cast is always talking about, how Sutton seems to say one thing that denotes the way she wants to be perceived and how she acts differently, denoting who she really is.

But the real title fight is not between Sutton and Dorit, it’s between Kyle and Dorit. While Kyle concedes that she won’t even look at the memes from @BritishHumourDaily that she gets from Mr. Kemsley, she is still condescending to Dorit, not acknowledging that there might be a problem or why. This is, again, how there is a different set of rules for Kyle than there is for everyone else, and Dorit is right to tell Kyle to stop raising her voice at her when Kyle is the one in the wrong. Again, it’s Dorit as truth-teller, Dorit piercing the balloon that is around all of them, cutting through the bullshit of the show to get to something deeper. And just as the night starts to brood in the Viper Room, the smell of old bourbon and even old ghosts mingling with the musk of too many Housewives and gays in mesh tank tops, the show cuts us off right in the middle, letting us wonder what might be left of this fight that will be continued next week. But we all already know what it’s about; it’s about everything and nothing, and it has absolutely no consequence. However, it is the most important thing we’ll ever watch.