Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap – 2/24/15

Let’s take a closer gander at that “random” collection of teammates, shall we? We have on one team Kyle and Brandi, who despise one another. On another team is Eileen, Queen of Not Believing Kim’s Bullsh*t, and Kim, Queen of All Bullsh*t. And the last team is the one I would have played dirtier than f*ck to land on, because it’s made up of the rational members of the group who know how to have the kind of fun that rarely ends in either tears or a lawsuit.

The rules of the scavenger hunt are as follows: the entire race must be done on foot, the team must stay together at all times, any infraction will result in a ten-minute penalty, and should any member of the team be murdered by a fellow teammate, that group will be disqualified – unless the one who is murdered is Kyle…or Kim…or Brandi. Should any of them be the one to go, the murderer will be anointed as royalty and will be allowed to keep the severed head of the victim to be used as an ice bucket from which only the finest champagne will be served at future Housewife gatherings.

As soon as the race begins, it becomes clear that Lisa R. is a great sport about doing silly things and that Kim is that rare version of a human being who is a buzz-kill both when she’s wasted and when she’s sober. She complains about every aspect of the game, especially having to run. She’s been sick lately, she explains, so running is tough for her. It might be easier for her to break into a trot if she didn’t puff constantly on an electronic cigarette, but what do I know? I’m not a doctor. I’m just a viewer who judges every single misstep this nasty and psychologically-warped woman makes and I refuse to apologize for doing so because she does it all on television and it’s not like reality television is a new phenomenon where the participants can even pretend to claim that they didn’t realize that part of the deal is allowing the public at large to judge you.

Over on the Kyle/Brandi team, things are going pretty well. Turns out that Brandi is able to compartmentalize her anger and focus on the task at hand – and her behavior during the race is normal-human-being behavior. I would like to mention that this scavenger hunt is a dry event, so maybe not being drunk off her ass has a little something to do with Brandi not acting in her usual horrific manner, but maybe that’s just a coincidence.

(Psst: it’s not a coincidence.)

One of the challenges along the scavenger hunt journey involves each team having to run into an ice cream shop where they must collectively finish one milkshake. Kyle balks at putting her mouth on any straw that has been between Brandi’s lips – and she might have a point there – and watching Yolanda ingest anything but a lemon or a vitamin is like watching a schnauzer stand up on his hind legs and begin to recite the Gettysburg Address.

At some point, Lisa V. decides that she’s broken enough of a sweat for an afternoon and she hails a ride on the back of some guy’s bicycle and then her entire team hops aboard a Star Tours van, making the women in the back of the van who probably hail from some square state in the middle of the country go apoplectic with glee. Despite the unsanctioned transportation, their team still winds up in dead last. Eileen’s team wins and two things are abundantly clear when her team is announced as victorious: Eileen likes to win and she thinks that Kim is the biggest pain in the ass on this spinning planet.

After the medals are passed out, the two non-Housewives leave because they are not contractually obligated to sit at a table with people they can’t stand. And it is while they are sitting at that table that Yolanda presents the group with another surprise: they are going to Amsterdam! And they don’t have to run there! They will be taking a private jet, which essentially breaks down to the fact that this collection of enemies will soon be trapped in a luxury tube with one another as they fly over an ocean.

Please join me for a moment in a prayer for the pilot.

How do the ladies feel about traveling en mass to Amsterdam? Well, the first thing that Brandi exclaims is, “We get to smoke pot!” and I really wish that she would have added “on camera!” because something tells me that this voyage to Amsterdam will not be the only time this month that Brandi will be getting a little high. Lisa V. also mentions smoking and refers to the several times in the past when she smoked and then ended up spread-eagle on a billiard table, which has rarely been the outcome of smoking that I have personally experienced, but Lisa is far more rare of a species than I am and I made my peace with that fact long ago.

But there are some real concerns:

• Brandi and Kyle are still not getting along since the evening when Brandi shoved Kyle down some stairs and told her she was the worst sister in the whole wide world and then mentioned straight to her face on another night that Kyle’s husband was cheating on her. But it’s Brandi who is not ready to forgive Kyle, which makes just about no sense. Trust me; I have tried to study the whole thing like it’s an algorithm. There’s no logic to be found.

• Brandi is also concerned about setting Kim loose into the city of Amsterdam, a place where all kinds of substances are sanctioned. She’s got a point there because, as we have all seen, Kim gobbles down random substances even when she hasn’t left Encino.

• It turns out that none of the husbands on this show are capable of doing anything without the guidance of their wives. “Anything” includes getting their children to school, providing their offspring with meals, getting the kids to take their vitamins, and knowing what day the housekeeper shows up. To completely drive the point home that the lives of these men would crumble into a fine rubble that Kim could maybe snort, we get a cute little montage of all the ladies explaining how life should run in their homes in Beverly Hills while they are in Amsterdam, spread across billiard tables. What also gets revealed in this little sequence is that Lisa R.’s daughter is obsessed with designer labels (I fear that one day soon this teenager will write a report for school entitled Why Kyle Richards Is My Role Model, and I’d like to suggest that maybe she take a semester abroad in Siberia); that Kyle cooks dinner while wearing a sequin apron; that Brandi’s hairstylist is still living in her basement; and that Lisa V. can mention a Versace dress, a Dolce and Gabbana sweater, and Chanel boots in only one sentence and it doesn’t bother me in the least, which creates pretty clear evidence that it’s not the brand obsession that annoys me about Kyle; it’s Kyle who annoys me about Kyle.

• Perhaps the biggest issue the ladies will face when they embark on the least relaxing vacation that has ever occurred in the history of everything is that Kim has been hearing that Lisa R. has been talking about her. What has she been talking about, you ask? Well, she’s been mentioning that Kim’s recent behavior is that of an addict who is still using and that someone needs to say something to her because if Kim continues to keep using and continues to keep pretending that she doesn’t have a disease, Kim could die. You know – meaningless gossip. The thing is, of course, that everything that Lisa has been saying is accurate. We all watched Kim spiral into an emotional tornado that tried to destroy everything in its path when she sat in the backseat of the car she rode in with Lisa to Eileen’s party on the night that a sober person like herself chose to swallow one of her ex-husband’s cancer pills. We have all watched her lie for years and we have been told that she also lied during all of the years we were not watching her on our television screens. And that Lisa is concerned and completely freaked out is a very natural reaction to the irrational person who has been in her company rather frequently lately.

By the way, it’s worth noting that the reason that Kim knows that Lisa R. has been talking about her non-existent sobriety is because Brandi told her. What Brandi failed to mention is that she all but told Lisa that Kim was worse off than anyone even realized and that she fully believed that Kim had relapsed. But does Brandi mention that Lisa has a point – one she agrees with – to Kim? Of course she doesn’t, because Brandi is a manipulative monster who runs on faux-confidence and the energy created by using the word “mother*cker” more frequently than the word “it” and she will never actually tell her sick best friend that she needs help because it’s easier to destroy someone else than to be honest.