Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap – 3/3/15

Out of what I think is desperation for peace and solace and the awareness that she will be stuck in another country with this person for a few more days, Lisa accepts Kim’s apology and actually apologizes as well. I can see apologizing for heaving glassware at Kim’s cranium, but I can’t really get on board with any of the rest of Lisa’s apology. I understand why it’s happening, but all it’s really doing is continuing to let this warped woman off the hook for behavior that is damaging and dangerous and destructive and delusional. And now, having used all of my “d” words, I’m going to run from this odd scene to the one taking place outside of the hotel where the women are ready to embark on a carefree day of bicycle riding, even though none of them slept a wink the night before because the sickness in the group was not cured; it was just masked with a generic Mickey Mouse Band-Aid.

But one more quick thing: Kim says that she is able to forgive and to move on, which is something she learned being “in treatment on and off all these years.” I think that the being “off” of treatment so frequently might be part of the problem. She might have stopped the drinking and the pill-popping – which I still question because I’ve been blessed with a handy thing called vision – but the behavior that cushions the addiction remains stronger than any other part of her.

The ladies have a jolly time biking around, but Eileen is normal so she is a little stunned by the turn of events. She also says that she hopes that maybe Kim will shoot an apology her way – you know, for calling her a beast and saying that she hated Eileen’s face – and that she hopes Kim will apologize to Kyle too.

I really think that neither Eileen nor her face should expect that apology.

Along the ride, the women stop to gaze at scenic windmills and we cut to Kim trying to make a joke during one of her interviews, but it’s just painful to watch someone who has no command of the English language and, even when happy, I still find her utterly tragic. But things look up when Yolanda runs into a farmer who claims they once dated and Yolanda cannot remember dating or kissing him.

“I should remember who I kissed,” she muses, and you know what, Yolanda? So should I, but that doesn’t always happen.

I remember the good ones, though.

Watching the exchange between Yolanda and the stranger whose tongue once wandered into her friend’s mouth, Lisa V. laughs and says, “She was clearly riding other things. It wasn’t just bikes in Holland,” and I’d like to ask the universe at large to join me for a quick prayer of thanks that Lisa Vanderpump exists and is able to inject some humor into the worst voyage that I have never been on.

After the happy day of sightseeing and avoidance is complete, Yolanda takes the women to her mother’s house. Yolanda’s mother and brother seems like welcoming people who do things like serve cake and things appear to be looking up, which means that maybe nobody will have her life or her reputation threatened for the next quarter hour.

The plan for that night should be a fun one. They all – except for Kim, who will stay in her hotel room and run a brush through her hair one hundred times and smile in the mirror at herself at how much rehab has helped her – plan to go to a café where they will indulge in some space cakes and hopefully laugh a lot and put the bullsh*t behind them.

Unfortunately, though they are in Amsterdam, most of the Housewives have no desire to partake in the local custom because they have children or because they are on camera or because, according to Brandi, they are all trying to pretend that they are people who they are not. After all, the last time Brandi smoked was with Kyle, who appears horrified to be exposed as a sometimes-weed-smoker-who-rolls-the-worst-joints-in-history on television. Brandi doesn’t want to eat any of the cake filled with more hash than sugar because she needs to be on her game in front of these women, which makes me laugh because Brandi and her game have both sailed and capsized. Kyle doesn’t want to eat any of the cake because she knows that she’ll get paranoid, which makes me realize again that Kyle would have been that girl in high school who would have annoyed the f*ck out of me because of her constant posing and her preening and the way she pretends that she is stoned out of her skull because of all the second-hand smoke and how she can sometimes suck the silliness out of any scenario like a long-haired superhero who has no real powers. Eileen also initially refuses to eat the cake, but then she takes a nibble, laughing that she is weak and that she succumbs to peer pressure. And Lisa V. eats some too, shrugging at what the others might think of her because she has a nice little quality within her called self-confidence that usually enables her to walk through the moments of her days and her nights with a dismissive wave at most of the nonsense around her.

But outside of the café and back in the gutter where she feels most comfortable, Brandi can no longer take all the hypocrisy.

“You guys can all have an opinion about me and you can say whatever the f*ck you want, but God forbid I say the truth about you and the world ends,” she rages to everybody, especially to Kyle. She then maintains that Kyle has said that she’s not a good mother and that she has a drinking problem and while Kyle tells her directly to her face that she has never said a word about Brandi not being a good mother, I think that every viewer can agree that there is nothing that any of these women need to say in order to convince anyone that Brandi has a drinking problem; it’s Brandi’s televised behavior that indicates that she has a drinking problem.

I’m not sure that Brandi is an alcoholic, but it cannot be denied that Brandi drinks a lot and that her behavior becomes even more despicable than usual once some of that sh*t is running through her bloodstream and most of her conflicts have in some way involved her consumption of alcohol. So really, it’s not Kyle who is causing other people to react to Brandi – it’s Brandi who is causing people to react to the most uncouth behavior seen outside of an episode of Mob Wives.

You have brought this perception upon yourself, Brandi. Own it.

As Brandi screams in the streets, Yolanda links her arm through her brother’s and looks mortified while Eileen simply looks exhausted.

“Where is this coming from?” she wonders. “Finally we have a reprieve, but no – here it comes…walking down the street…screaming bloody murder,” a sentence that really made me laugh.

“What happened?” Yolanda asks Brandi, but that’s a useless question. See, what happened is what always happens when a woman who has made a career out of being “unfiltered” is contractually obligated to be around people that she hates. And I cannot stop wondering if any of these women will one day choose to forgo the paycheck and the silly endorsements and the semblance of fame that comes with being on this show so they can return to a life where nobody is threatening to smack or expose them. What exactly will it take to make that choice?

According to the previews, Brandi slaps Lisa across the face next week. As Brandi has been symbolically dead to me for some time, I will therefore commemorate her upcoming disgusting behavior by symbolically grabbing a shovel and digging up her symbolic corpse so I can have the symbolic pleasure of burying her again.

And in the meantime, I call absolute shotgun on the idea for a screenplay in which a woman who greatly resembles a limp yellow balloon animal that has been left in the sun for too long pretends to embrace sobriety while hacking through the doors and the windows of women who have no idea that they are so vulnerable to attack. And this blonde monster will wear a sweater that looks just like the one Chucky wore and she will turn directly to the camera right before she commits a murder and she will whisper, “Everybody will know” before she giggles demonically and slices a woman into three.

Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon. Check out her website at nellkalter.com. Her twitter is @nell_kalter.