Straight up: This is a boring episode. Not much happens, especially compared to last week’s game night. Sometimes we need a palate cleanser between shitshows, though.
Erika Girardi is shooting her video for Expensive, which means leaving the house at 6AM to be on-set with Mikey shouting into his microphone by 7AM. Not enough coffee in the world would make that easy. Lisa Rinna and Eileen Davidson show up to watch the shoot and are very impressed with Erika’s work and the sets. Eileen’s fangirl crush on Erika Jayne is still funny.
Across town, Dorit spends two minutes with her adorable son. They’re not alone, though – there’s a nanny doing the real work, as ever. Which is lucky, since Dorit suddenly has to rush off to look at herself in the mirror. She brings PK into her dressing room and starts talking about – what else? – Erika’s lack of panties like 16 episodes ago. PK almost has a visible erection at the mention of game night. This man is way too invested in finding out what happened between the women. PK so desperately wants to be a housewife, I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten himself breast implants and a non-existent autoimmune disease.
Kyle Richards, her husband Mauricio “Moe” Umansky, and their youngest daughter Portia drive out to Malibu to show one of his biggest, most extravagant real estate listings to Lisa Vanderpump and Ken Todd. The property is insane – 17 acres with its own golf course, tennis court, and complete outdoor living space right on the ocean cliffs. Let’s all be glad LVP isn’t pretending she and Ken are considering buying this mega-property. Mauricio thinks it’s worth at least $120 million, which would conservatively put his commission at around $12 million or more. Kyle’s storyline continues to be that Mauricio is out making mad bank and she wishes he’d be home by 6 o’clock for dinner every night. Our hearts all bleed buckets for her.
At lunch, Ken brings up game night and tells Kyle she should have forcibly stopped Rinna from saying mean things to her sister Kim Richards. LVP asks if Kyle was supposed to leap across the table and strangle her. Ken: “Well, Rinna would have.” Kim says, very matter-of-factly, that Rinna throwing Kim’s arrest in her face was “typical Lisa Rinna,” saying something unforgivable. She doesn’t seem worked up about it – she’s just done with their whole dysfunctional, hostile dynamic.
Lisa Rinna and Eden Sassoon are engaging in that traditional Real Housewife pastime: trying on overpriced clothes in a strip mall boutique. Talk immediately turns to how Kim behaved at game night. Eden is trying to get a read on Kyle, whom she has found to lack warmth. Rinna is shocked to hear this, and says the obvious: Kyle was playing hostess and was probably focused on that rather than making Eden feel loved at their first ever encounter. Eden says she’ll ask Kyle to lunch so they can connect. In her interview, Eden is hellbent on figuring Kyle out: “I will know her,” she says. I’m sure this seems like an innocuous, even noble goal to Eden, but not everybody wants to be analyzed and dissected like this. Kyle has been through a ton with Kim and her issues, and she probably would prefer to have some semblance of guardedness from the analysis of near-strangers. Just guessing.
Rinna asks Eden how she should handle Kim. She’s soon speculating on how sober Kim is – a nasty thing to do. When someone is struggling with recovery from addiction, it’s demoralizing and unhelpful to call their sobriety into question. Just a garbage thing to do to another person, but it’s like Rinna has no idea how gross this is. She continues to pile on, casually accusing Kyle of being Kim’s “enabler” and totally fumbling the definition of what an enabler is. After multiple seasons of drama with Yolanda and the M-word, all caused by Rinna, it’s time for her to keep her mouth shut on her evaluation of other people’s medical issues. She even claims Kim is on the verge of death. I have to wonder if production had any conversation at all about keeping or trashing this scene. It’s sickening.
Eden, with the best of intentions, intends to mow down any healthy boundaries that should exist between her and the Richards sisters. She wants to help, but is going to intrude and make them – or at least Kyle – feel violated. It’s too intense, especially for someone like Kyle who doesn’t live in the world of recovery programs and the easy way with which sober people reveal intensely personal things about themselves. Prediction: Their lunch is going to be a disaster.
Mikey is helping Erika pick out wardrobe for Mykonos, the Greek island where she’ll be performing at a gay festival and introducing herself to the European club scene. Kyle is the only woman who can come, and Erika does not seem sad about that. She says she likes hanging out with her because Kyle will have a margarita and not take herself too seriously. You can say a lot about Kyle, but she doesn’t seem stuck too far up her own backside – something she and Erika have in common.
At lunch with Kyle and Rinna, Eden immediately starts interrogating Kyle about her late mother. You can tell Eden thinks this is a totally innocent line of questioning, but Kyle artfully evades her probing – for a while. Then Eden asks her point blank if her mother was the drinker in the family who passed alcoholism along to Kim. Kyle has zero poker face for this and her eyebrows fly up to her hairline. Yeah, she really asked you that.
When Eden says that Kim reminds her of her sister Catya who died of an overdose, Kyle is puzzled and wants to know how she got something that extreme from a game night. Eden rapid-fires questions about Kim’s sobriety at Kyle, asking if she works a program of recovery, if she works with a sponsor and sponsees, wanting to know the details of Kim’s sobriety. As honorable as Eden’s intentions are, this is not an appropriate line of questioning. Rinna looks very satisfied to be watching all of this, and Kyle very diplomatically handles it. In her interviews, she’s as agitated as we have ever seen her – and rightfully so.
Eden continues to project her issues and her late sister’s situation onto Kim and Kyle. She sheds real tears, and Kyle is obviously doing her best not to flip out at her when Eden comments on Kim’s “energy” and “anger” toward Rinna. Kyle points out that Kim and Rinna have a long history of conflict, and Rinna says Kim has conflict with everyone. Why on earth she thinks it’s okay to put this on Kyle is anyone’s guess. Anyone else would go to great pains to spare Kyle feeling responsible for her sister’s difficulties. Kyle says everyone just needs to move on, but Rinna will not drop it. Kyle deserves an award for not storming out of this lunch in a huff.
LVP’s adopted son Max, 24, is interested in discovering the whereabouts of his birth parents. She and Ken are going to their adoption lawyer’s office to meet him and get the ball rolling, and Lisa is very emotional about it all. She admits as much, saying she felt threatened by the idea when he was younger, but she’s somewhat more comfortable with it now. Lisa and Ken adopted Max from foster care, and she is deeply moved as she recounts how much she wanted him and the moment she and Ken introduced baby Max to Pandora for the first time. This is LVP at her best: vulnerable, humble and real. She can’t take it and has to leave the room. When she comes back, she cries some more and is clearly overwhelmed with gratitude and love for her children. Can we have more of this genuine LVP, please?
Erika and her crew of 10 are staying in a fabulous $50,000 a week property in Mykonos. Kyle flies in from LA and joins them. Erika is thrilled, saying Kyle isn’t rude, judgmental or ugly to her – unlike other women.
Speaking of whom…Dorit holds her infant daughter and marvels at the way one of the nine nannies irons her baby’s onesies. She quickly disposes of the child to go into another room and call Eileen and Rinna to invite them to lunch. They accept. The most interesting and amusing revelation from this scene is that Dorit, who prides herself on coming from an “upper middle class” Connecticut family and claims to have integrated the highest pedigree of European society into her bloodstream, has curtains that barely touch the floor. This is as downmarket as you can get in Europe – the equivalent of serving dinner on paper plates. Someone with truly upper-class sophistication would know the bottoms of curtains are supposed to puddle on the floor.
At the lunch, Dorit arrives looking stunning, as she frequently does. Her all-cream outfit and ‘editorial’ hairstyle is much more interesting than what Rinna and Eileen are wearing – but Eileen looks especially beautiful. Dorit immediately tells them she wants to fix what happened at game night, and says she had a few too many drinks. Yeah, we noticed. Dorit points out – not incorrectly – that Eileen has revived the topic of Erika’s missing panties several times lately, and she’s not letting it die. Eileen is taken aback, but even though she didn’t intend to revive the issue, the facts are on Dorit’s side. Eileen brought it up in Malibu, at Camille’s lunch, and again at game night. To her credit, Eileen says that while she doesn’t see it the way Dorit does, she apologizes. It’s safe to say that Eileen’s need to be understood – to “get clarity” – gets her in more trouble than it solves.
Rinna brings up the topic of Dorit and PK’s dinner party and their expressed opinion on how Eileen should have handled her mother’s death. Dorit says she’s sorry that she doesn’t remember the conversation. Rinna says in an interview that apologies are validating because “everybody hates me for it, but I’m always right.” She is delusional.
The three women agree to “hit the reset button” with each other, and in the future, always come to one another directly if there’s an issue. How many times have we seen this vow made between Real Housewives cast members from every franchise? Just as many times as we’ve seen it fail to happen. This shitshow is far from over.
