The thing that I’ve liked the most about this season of Vanderpump Rules is that they’ve done away with ignoring all the underpinnings of what it’s like to be a professional practitioner of the reality television arts and sciences. Ally isn’t sure that James should post a picture of them with Graham/Hippie (Grippie?) because when he does, it will be news with a capital N. Scheana is upset that people on Twitter are saying mean things about her because she posed for a picture with a fan where she has her arm around Sandoval. Lala is upset about an interview Sandoval did with a website called TV Shows Ace. Brock is upset about stories in HOLR magazine and The Ashley’s Reality Roundup that allege that he hooked up with Raquel as well.
This is what we’re mad about? TV Shows Ace doesn’t even sound like a real thing; it sounds like what an AI chatbot would fill in for your entertainment interests in a dating app bio. HOLR is a bottle service club from 2008 in Los Angeles that Spencer Pratt got thrown out of more than once. The Ashley’s Reality Roundup sounds like a quiz night that’s being held at a Cracker Barrel. Yeah, sure, get mad, but why are you getting mad about these sites that aren’t even read by Google’s web-crawling robots?
While the reality-ness of the season has been fun, that is not what I really tuned in for, and I’m glad this episode finally brought us some catharsis, some movement, something that comes close to forgiveness but then right before it hugs you, it wallops you in the face with a banana crème pie. I, for one, am sick of being Anita Bryant (even though that bitch deserved every last one of those pies). It will be up to Sandoval to take that pie away and give us the closure we need.
This all starts when Sandoval has Shannon, a certified yoga instructor and Bene Gesserit, come over to lead some yoga and mindfulness meditation. I can’t help but roll my eyes when she shows up, but her little machinations seem to work. She starts by having everyone meditate by themselves, and we see flashbacks of everything going on in Tom Sandoval’s head, the shadows of the scandal and its aftermath. Then, she has them partner up and lean back-to-back with one of their friends. Since Brock was late from golfing, Scheana is stuck next to Sandoval. While they’re skin to skin, we see Scheana going over their entire friendship and what it means to her.
I don’t know if the editors were fooling us into thinking that either of them has any interiority other than their brains being run by a Snapchat filter, but the scene was actually moving. Jessica uses the voice to get them to check in on each other, and even though Scheana says she’s fine, she is clearly not since her eyes are misting and her nose is snottier than Ina Garten visiting Flavortown. She says she’s not okay and barges up the stairs saying, “I still fucking hate you,” which Tom should get tattooed on the inside of his eyelids because I have a feeling he’s going to be seeing this exact sentiment for the rest of his life.
After some reassurance from Brock (who is still pumped about the $150 he won at golf), Scheana returns just in time for Shannon to order them to turn around, face their partner, and imagine this is the last time they’re ever going to see them in their lives. Wait, is this actually Shannon Beador in disguise, and did she show up with her gravestone to slap these kids around a little bit?
A teary Scheana tells Tom, “I don’t want to keep hating you. I have to let go of that because it doesn’t feel good. But you did this.” You can tell that Scheana is trying to put his horrible deeds in perspective and remember a bit of what their friendship used to be. We also learn that Sandoval PayPalled her thousands of dollars during the pandemic when she was broke. Wait, how is Scheana broke? “I had nothing going on,” she says, but the show still filmed. It’s not like she had an office that closed down or anything. Where is all of Scheana’s money going? You mean the “Good as Gold” royalties have already run out?
Returning to the tears, it is nice to see someone being honest for a change rather than just stewing in the performative hate they’ve all balled up for Tom. It’s also nice to see Tom letting her be mad at him, showing what Scheana interprets as real tears and accepting a little bit of the blame for what he did. Sadly, that is the last we’ll see of that this whole episode.
The gang then goes on a gondola ride where James antagonizes his girlfriend, who is scared of heights and living a life in obscurity, by pretending like he’s going to fall out at any moment. Tom, Tom, and Brock are all in one car and start talking about Scheana, and this is when Brock brings up the articles about him hooking up with Rachel. He says that their publicist told him that Tom’s publicist planted the stories to get the heat off of him. (Again, reality acknowledging reality.) Tom immediately shouts back, “There’s no evidence of that.”
Sandoval can’t be wrong, take any responsibility, or give anyone a pass. Would it have been so hard to say, “I never told my team to do that, and if they did, I’ll fire him. I’m sorry that you got dragged into this and that it affected your marriage and your reputation.” He doesn’t need to admit that it happened, but he does need to admit the carnage that he unleashed on the entire group. He says to Brock that he’s not trying to discount everyone’s feelings, but that seems like what he’s doing at every turn. Brock is absolutely right; Sandoval is currently at 10 percent accountability and 90 percent blame on other people, and I think that those percentages need to be reversed.
Then the gang gets on a boat, and the only two in the whole crew who are drinking are Tom and Brock. What a difference a year makes. After some swimming (and Brock in his budgies again, drool emoji), Lala sits in the boat and asks Tom a very casual but pointed question. She asks how he could say that she wasn’t being real in an interview he did the day that the world found out about the seven-month affair he had been hiding from his partner, his friends, his coworkers, and the nation at large.
Just like when he sat down with James at his birthday party, Sandoval immediately turns it on Lala, saying that he lied about his affair for six months, and she lied about her relationship with Randall for six years. I get Sandoval’s point that everyone on this cast is a horrible person who has done horrible things to each other. However, what Lala did was like throwing a pebble at someone; what Sandoval did was dropping a nuclear bomb on them. Yes, they’re both attacks, but this has always been a question of magnitude. We can use the same analogy for his line about how neither he nor Rachel meant to hurt anyone when they started their affair. Well, I’m sure you didn’t mean to set off that nuke, but it still went off; everyone is an atomic shadow, and you’re the one who punched in the codes. Even if you didn’t mean it, there was still a fucking mushroom cloud, bro.
I have a problem with how Lala argued with him, though. She says that he isolated Raquel and groomed her. Okay, Tom Sandoval is a grade-A asshole, a person so horrible that even PK looks down on him. All of this is true, but I just don’t think he’s some criminal mastermind that many people, including those on the cast, make him out to be. He’s just a jerk who is doing jerky things to get what he wants. It’s not like he sat with some manual about how to be a sexual predator; he’s just a garden-variety asshole who has done the same garden-variety asshole shit that a million garden-variety assholes do.
It’s Scheana who steps in and tells Sandoval what Lala is saying. He finally comes around and apologizes, but once again, his reflex is to attack the person coming after him. He needs to change his knee-jerk attitude and learn to forgive, apologize, and try to make it better.
After everyone returns to the house, Scheana and Lala crawl into bed together (no baby bottles this time) to recap Scheana’s earlier conversation with Ariana. When Scheana calls and tells Ariana that she’s confused about what to do to Tom, she just tells Scheana that Tom is a bad person that she shouldn’t mess with. Ariana also tells Katie that she will not have mutual friends with Sandoval. She says this is not an ultimatum, but it is. Considering Ariana’s popularity and stature at the time, the undertone of all this is, “If you’re friends with Sandoval, then I won’t film with you, and you will be off the show.”
But the funny thing is that it’s Katie and Ariana who have isolated themselves by refusing to participate. The whole cast is on a trip working and Katie is talking about how she went on a date with a dude who didn’t know what penne is. When she broke up with him he texted, “Is it about the pasta?” Ladies and gentlemen, it was.
While everyone is at the lake, Katie and Ariana are interviewing people to work in their sandwich shop which we all know still isn’t open so this whole exercise is for the cameras and entirely mute. As they sit in the garden of a WeHo restaurant, a familiar figure walks in. “Ann?” Ariana says as she gets up and hugs Sandoval’s assistant. “What are you doing here?”
“Get me out, Ariana. Please. You don’t understand how bad it’s gotten. The other day he made me write ‘I Feel Fine’ in wonky letters with a Sharpie on a T-shirt. He said he’s going to try to mass-produce them. Then he wants me to book more shows, find him a podiatrist appointment, start the shower for him five minutes before he wakes up so he can walk right into it, cut all of the crusts of the bread that he never eats but just in case he wants a PB&J it will be the way he likes it. Help, Ariana. You’re my only hope.”
Brian Moylan , 2024-03-06 02:47:07
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