Copyright Vulture
When I was in elementary and middle school way back in the 1900s, my family moved four times in two years. We went from Sugar Hill in Harlem up to two different neighborhoods in the Bronx before returning back to Manhattan. In that time, I attended three different schools, and each time, I had to go through the ritual of finding a social group to integrate with. While at the first school my penchant for being boisterous and chatty was seen as charming, the girls at school two just viewed me as a restless chatterbox. By the time I got to school three, I realized that my best strategy was to figure out the lay of the land before deciding what version of myself made the most sense for my new environment. Nevertheless, I would still find myself getting caught in unexpected fiascos. (Kids, if the Dominican classmate next to you tells you to compliment your Spanish teacher by saying she’s a mamaguevo, just don’t raise your hand.) Much of Housewives is just an adult extension of these dynamics, only with alcohol involved. A new girl comes in as a fish out of water and is immediately thrown in the deep end while everyone watches to see if she is going to sink or swim. Will you get swept up in a riptide or will you be able to move with the current? The second you start to visibly panic is when you become the architect of your own demise. And while the Eileen Davidson Accords aren’t up just yet, this episode was all about how the new women of Potomac are trying to carve out their own space, to varying levels of success. Let’s start with the ringer so far. Stacey Rusch is giving a masterclass in how to manage confrontation and flip aggression against your opponent. It’s hard to have an impressive Sprinter scene in the years following Jen Shah’s arrest, but watching all of the women attempt to pile on Stacey as she gingerly combs through her synthetic kinky straight unit genuinely had me in stitches. It’s not clear what issue Keiarna and Gizelle have with Stacey besides her being annoying — which isn’t a crime — and making a scene about their disgust with her while the QVC alum stares at them cluelessly dispels any momentum they have. Stacey’s sly smile in the confessional when she realizes that Gizelle went out of her way to not bring customized gifts for her at the Nevis resort is the visage of a woman who knows she has the upper hand: “It takes a lot not to think of me, doesn’t it?” Stacey’s wet and wavy wigs may be a crime against beauticians, but I have to give my respect to a diva who knows that her foes just can’t take her, and lives for it. She doesn’t take the attempted hazing by Gizelle lying down, though — in fact, Stacey is a crafty master of retaliation. While in the Sprinter, she conveniently asks everyone about their romantic lives, on which Gizelle naturally demurs. By the time they’re at dinner in Nevis, Stacey has her gauntlet ready with the name of the NFL player that Gizelle has been dating, receipts and all; even Ashley is left stuttering when she admits that she has seen Gizelle out and about with him. What Stacey did not expect, however, was to be hit immediately back with the accusation of pursuing Chris Samuels. Now that all the cards are out on the table, we will see how Stacey addresses Gizelle and Ashley upping the ante, but so far she has played her hand impressively. Jassi is more of a mixed bag. It’s clear she has built numerous relationships among the group, but her eagerness to play the heel in the name of acceptance from the core cast feels a bit unseemly so far. She’s entirely too eager to accept a last-minute invite to a “bachelorette trip” to Nevis, despite being such an afterthought that on the flight she’s seated all the way back by the toilets. She seems well aware that her ticket to being on the show is to create tension among the newbies, which is all well and good if you have some real tea to bring. But all we get are allusions to tensions between Wendy, Jassi, and Keiarna that make little to no sense. Why is Jassi mad at Keiarna for asking what the issue is when it was a problem that Wendy admitted she raised on the phone? And if there is no real issue, then why was she so quick to start insulting Keiarna’s personal life? If she has so much tea about Keiarna’s actual issue with Wendy, then why won’t she just say it instead of alluding to an ominous conversation? I have a suspicion that, in the same way Wendy inflated her conversation with Jassi, Jassi knows full well that whatever Keiarna said off the cuff was not that deep, and is trying to maximize Keiarna’s time under pressure. Unfortunately, Keiarna doesn’t seem to be able to withstand it so far. The best guess I can make for why Keiarna and Jassi even have an issue is that both women were up for a full cast role last season, and Jassi reportedly got demoted at the eleventh hour (and was barely a blip in the reunion). While Jassi’s envy seems to be spilling out of every scene, Keiarna does a bad job of addressing it, both at Preakness and while they’re traveling in Nevis. It’s true that Jassi’s romantic situation feels a bit like her winning the world’s worst game of musical chairs with her fiancé’s other baby mommas, but when you are currently living separate from the man you want to marry because he cant stop turning into the dad from Moesha, you kind of can’t throw that stone. I’m astonished that Keiarna seems to be struggling to express her issues with the dynamic in the group, particularly with Wendy. Absent conflict-resolution skills, all she ends up doing is pouting with Angel, which does them both a disservice. They are pouting on the plane, on the boat, in front of the horse, and at dinner. Unless they turn this around, they will soon be pouting in their houses, with no cameras. Unfortunately, all of this seems to be putting Angel at an extreme disadvantage. Her view of the women is clearly colored by Keiarna, but she hasn’t figured out if she wants to play the background or the mouthpiece just yet, and her indecision has left her flailing. At dinner, Angel attempts to explain that she takes time to open up to everyone and is trying to feel the room out. Unfortunately, Housewives is like an MMA octagon — you have to come in swinging, or you will be put in a submission grip at the first sign of weakness — and in quick succession, she takes one devastating body blow after another. Gizelle exploited Angel asking her to invite Charrisse to imply that she has an issue with Jassi, which Wendy picked up and used to imply that Angel views herself as a higher-status WAG than Wendy. Before she can get a chance to knock a drink back, Gizelle goes right back in by calling out her heavily Facetuned photos — an attack the I personally found a little distasteful to wage against a postpartum mother who is clearly dealing with a few insecurities, even if a few of the photos landed somewhere in the Nene Leakes Uncanny Valley of Facial Dysmorphia. It’s obvious that Angel wasn’t prepared to be in the hot seat, but if she wants to escape it, she will need to strike back fast and hope she doesn’t miss. It is a shame, because despite Wendy coming into her own this season in terms of commanding scenes and navigating storylines, it’s clear that there is something valid to the criticism she has faced. She freely admits that she is fine with Stacey receiving the brunt of Gizelle’s arbitrary disdain because she knows what the brutality of her cold shoulder feels like and doesn’t want to go back there. Despite insisting that she knows nothing of or about Angel, she tells Gizelle, unprompted, that Angel is a college dropout — which even if true, is a hypocritical jab from the academic who flunked out of law school by her own admission. Wendy is highly attuned to condescending doublespeak, which I think both Angel and Keiarna immediately recognize. But if they aren’t able to call it out in front of the other women, or recruit them to make the argument in their stead, it doesn’t really matter. Hopefully they can take a page from Tia’s book on how to take control of conflict, completely flip it on its head, and defuse the issue to keep the energy flowing. When Ashley attempts to create friction by rightfully calling out that it was rude to invite other women to an event in front of her, she doesn’t raise her voice or go into histrionics, but she doesn’t back down from Ashley’s barrage of insults, either. By the time she cuts Ashley off by saying, “I don’t know what you’re struggling with,” it’s clear she’s won the scene, which is no small feat against a woman whose entire rationale for existing on the show at this point is to be a bisexual chaos goblin. Next week, we’re back in the thick of dinner in Nevis to see the fallout of the Chris Samuels exposé. See you then! Cherry Blossoms: • Pleasantly shocked that they sprung from a weeklong trip to Nevis this time around. Come on, new budget!!!! • The alleged contract that Stacey and TJ made has been leaked on social media. There’s not a chance that said document — if it is even legitimate — would hold up in any kind of court, but I’m sure Gizelle will manage to make a mountain out of it anyway. • Genuinely cracking up that Wendy made a huge hubbub about being a guest of honor at the request of the first lady of Maryland, only for her to do a blurry drive-by off camera. Dawn Moore treated her like a sneaky link that she was afraid to claim in public. • I’m surprised that Angel wasn’t aware of the camouflage restriction, which is common in many Caribbean, South American, and African countries for various reasons. Maybe she doesn’t travel much outside of the U.S.?
