Vanderpump Rules recap: Return of the Jax

Who’s worse: A terrible man who knows he’s terrible, or a terrible man who thinks he’s really a good guy? This is a central question of Vanderpump Rules, one the show confronts anew every time one of its men is caught in a new lie, a new criminal charge, a new allegation of abuse, a new affair. 

In my opinion, it’s the latter. A man who is fully aware of his awful behavior deserves no praise, but it’s nice to know that what you see is what you get. A man who can’t even admit to himself that he is dishonest, manipulative, and abusive will not only grind you down to a nub, but will also tell everyone that you’re the crazy one.

Unfortunately, Tom Sandoval is just such a man. Something very dark is happening with this guy. It’s not just the affair and coverup, which were bad enough. There’s something more insidious at play. It’s gotten so bad that the show’s original villain somehow comes off looking good in comparison.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

After last week’s blowup, Katie and Lala have dinner. Lala says she feels like Katie is looking at her like the enemy, and Katie admits her proclivity to hit below the belt. Lala says her intention isn’t to make things about herself; Katie says she understands but that it can be received that way. Lala pledges to work on it, and Katie promises to soften her tone and delivery. They hug and come up with a safe word — ‘croissant’ — if they ever get too testy. It’s calm and mature. Good job, everyone. Let’s move on.

Sandoval is hosting a tragic “sexy singles pool party,” where he is drinking shots of nonalcoholic whiskey. “To staying positive and testing negative,” he cheerses. Schwartz flees so he won’t be seen as “complicit” in Sandoval flirting with women under the roof he shares with Ariana, which is nice in theory but seems too little, too late.

What Sandoval does at the party could not really be described as flirting. It’s more like an awkward standup routine performed to an unfriendly room. He rambles to Kait and Michelle, two women he met at See You Next Tuesday and invited to this shindig, about going to Burning Man as a single guy, clumsily brings up ‘his roommate’, and jokes about crushing up potato chips to shove under Ariana’s door. The women could not look less into it and spend much of their screen time throwing each other “why did we come here?” looks.

The next day, Scheana comes over to a wreck of a living room to see Ariana, who gets right to the point: “People are telling me you’re upset with me.”

To Scheana’s credit, she doesn’t waffle or deny. She says her agents were in talks for Dancing With the Stars and that losing the slot to Ariana was a “punch to the gut,” but that she’s still genuinely happy for her friend and just wanted to hear the news directly. Ariana apologizes for not telling Scheana herself, but says that between Lisa and Lala, she’s worried Scheana isn’t being honest with her in the moment and is talking to other people instead.

Scheana, god bless her, says the thing you absolutely should never say to your friend, unless you are on a reality show together, in which case, it’s about damn time: “You know better than anyone who Sandoval was to me before March 1^st. I miss that person.” 

Ariana admits she sometimes misses that Tom too, but that all the insidious things he’s done have since taken over and it’s hard to listen to her best friend say she misses the man who betrayed her. Scheana asks how Ariana would feel if years from now, if Sandoval does the work, she decides to be his friend again. Ariana raises her eyebrows and quips, “you in danger, girl.” The two still haven’t quite gotten to the root of the thing, but this is the closest they’ve come to telling the truth to one another, so good for them, I guess. 

The next night, the entire cast get together for drinks, and Ariana actually shows up. “I cannot let my ex prevent me from hanging out with my friends for the rest of my life,” she explains. 

I assume this is her spin on Alex Baskin’s “come to Jesus” directive where he hauled the cast in to remind them that they are all getting paid to film with each other. Still, it’s great to see Ariana make her presence known. She may think she’s getting the upper hand by skipping any events Sandoval’s at, but the opposite is true. This guy will never stop filming for the show, and Ariana has only been making herself marginal. It’s about time she returns to assert dominance over the friend group and make Sandoval uncomfortable.

While Sandoval is pooping in the bathroom (redemption arc where? Don’t tell me the editors left that in because it made for compelling television), Scheana says hello to Schwartz and asks him about the pool party. Before Schwartz can fill her in, Sandoval returns, and Scheana brings up his comment at guys’ night that Rachel “abandoned” him. She asks Sandoval why he can’t just acknowledge that maybe without even meaning to, he hurt and manipulated people. Why can’t he admit that the way he treated Katie during the lead-up to the Schwartz and Sandy’s opening contributed to the demise of her marriage? “Put the ego aside and take one baby step forward,” she cajoles.

Sandoval takes this about as well as you would expect. He blusters that he’s sick of being the scapegoat and of the group is intent on picking through the last 10 years of his life. “Just the last year,” Scheana reminds him. Stay on his neck, Schea-Shu! 

James, famously a hothead, implores Sandoval to see reason, to not burn every bridge he has. “I’m not fucking groveling anymore,” Sandoval snaps. (If anyone can recall a single time when Sandoval ever groveled to anyone, please let me know.) “We’ve all made mistakes, we’ve all fucked up. I’m fucking over this. I’m out.” And away he goes.

Sandoval’s blowup is all too predictable, but I actually found the scene clarifying of Scheana’s motives. All season, I’ve been squinting at my TV, trying to understand what Scheana missed about this man. In one of her confessionals, Ariana speculates that Scheana “one hundred percent has plans to become friends with Sandoval and is trying to soften the blow.”

But I don’t think that’s true. Scheana seems to be grappling with something deeper: the question of whether there is any good even left in Sandoval. Ariana concluded last season that the Sandoval she misses “is not real.” Scheana still wants to believe that he is not a lost cause, that there is some part of him that is capable of living up to who she thought he was. Because if she’s wrong, it’s not just that she’s lost a friend — it’s that she literally can’t trust herself to judge people. 

From that perspective, I have a lot more compassion for Scheana. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Sandoval is capable of recognizing that he needs to grow, let alone do the hypothetical work Scheana referenced to Ariana. At every turn, he’s doubled down, refusing to give even an inch lest his admission that yes, he fucked up, proves his haters right. So this all seems like a bit of a lost cause to me.

The next day, Sandoval seems to have realized how poorly he came off. He decides to apologize to Katie, though as usual his effort is clumsy and transparent — he explains that he’s doing so in order to “prioritize what’s important to Scheana.” In his mind, this probably sounds like a mature and generous thing to say, a display of how much he cares for his friends. But for the rest of us, it’s just another admission that there’s no real remorse behind any of his gestures at repair. Indeed, once Sandoval parrots Scheana’s line about the divorce, he is clearly at a loss for what else he is supposed to be apologizing for.

Katie, the only member of the cast who has always seen Sandoval for who he is, clocks this immediately. “Apologies are just words,” she shrugs. She will not believe Sandoval is truly sorry until he starts “moving differently.” He tells her to just give him a little grace, to which she curtly replies, “No.” Sandoval, who whines in a confessional that nothing will ever be good enough for Katie Maloney — a decade-old gripe — stalks off.

Some time later, Schwartz arrives. (Was he there the whole time? Who can tell?) Sandoval shows off his journal, which he’s been keeping since April 5, the day Rachel entered the mental health facility, and some photos of them that unfortunately are blurred, preventing eagle-eyed viewers from figuring out when they may have been taken. Sandoval compares himself to Scott Peterson, who murdered his wife and unborn child, then retreats to the closet to shake and sob in an uncanny pantomime of last season’s Villa Rosa hyperventilation, while Schwartz dissociates in a chair, unsure what to do. He doesn’t know how to help, and declares that it’s time to bring in someone who has been here before.

That someone is Jax motherfucking Taylor, the number one guy in the group. Jax is the guy Sandoval hid behind for eight seasons, a convenient target of his whataboutism. Sandoval likes to think of himself as someone Jax was “competitive” with, but the reality is that he always craved Jax’s effortless alpha status and desperately wanted to overtake him. 

Sandoval and Jax are mirror images of one another. Like Sandoval, Jax is horrible. Unlike Sandoval, Jax has zero qualms about admitting it. Jax spent most of his time on the show happily declaring he was a bad guy, incapable of better due to a “broken brain.” With Jax, what you see is what you get.

Jax walks up while the rest of the guys are at TomTom, much to Sandoval’s horror, and immediately starts ripping into him. Jax is a pathological liar when it comes to himself, but he’s rarely off when it comes to the Toms. When he’s on, he’s on, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch. 

He starts by telling Sandoval he saw a picture of him on social media where he looked 50 years old, but that he looks better now, “minus the white nail polish.” Before Sandoval can recover from this dig, Jax pirouettes to the affair. He admits he’s done the same or worse, kneecapping Sandoval’s favorite defense, and says only his problem is with how Sandoval handled the aftermath. He tells Sandoval to humble himself and come back to the group with his tail between his legs. Sandoval sputters about how Jax dogpiled him on his podcast, something he never did to Jax (he obviously did), but Jax barrels on. “I own my shit,” Jax declares. “You’re just me seven years ago. Worse, even. You’re literally a disgrace.”

Times are tough when you find yourself agreeing with Jax Taylor, and if I were a betting woman I would guess that the two have kissed and made up — no one loves an awful man like another awful man. But for one brief moment, he laid it out perfectly. This is a group that has forgiven all manner of sins to keep the paycheck associated with their show. All it requires is a little performance. And Sandoval is so pigheaded, he can’t even give one.

Every week, people hand Sandoval the blueprint for his redemption. And every week, he refuses to take it. It feels like he’s at a crossroads right now, and every day is choosing to become an even worse version of himself. If the midseason trailer is any indication, he is only going to get angrier and angrier, and as someone who loves to see men suffer, I cannot wait.

Last calls

• Ann Watch, Week 8: Our girl had a baaaad week. Not only did she have to act as bartender-cum-shot-girl at the sexy singles pool party, she also had to clean up crusty bowls, sticky floors, and somebody’s hair extensions the next day.
• In case you were wondering, the other central question of Vanderpump Rules is: Who hates women more — the men on the cast, the women on the cast, or the women who watch the show? (Hint: It’s the fans.)
• Jo and Schwartz’s swan boat date-that-wasn’t-a-date was painful to watch. I am liking Jo more than I expected, despite her decidedly spooky post-divorce text to Katie: “Bieber loves you / I love you, and I’m so supporting of your inner thoughts and visions / live in the moment, you’re a gem and I’ve always respected you. I love You. Xo Jo”. Anyway, Jo seems like a pretty good match for Schwartz, who is leading her on to a painful degree. It’s one thing to tell a girl who is clearly into you that you don’t want anything serious. It’s entirely another to tell her that while sleeping with her and going on “rom-com” style hangouts with her. 
• Ally and Jo were the odd couple of this episode. Jo reaches out to Ally for a reading, whose dedication to her astrology business trumps any friendship she may have with the girls. Much to Jo’s dismay, her chart suggests a “friendship bond” between her and Schwartz, but Ally quickly adds, “friends date too.” Ally tells Jo she wants her to feel welcomed in the group despite the girls’ opinion of her because she’s Schwartz’s friend, and Jo admits that it’s been hard to be called an “anorexic crackhead whore” when she hasn’t said one bad thing about any of them. I think moving in with someone’s ex-husband after you’ve sent that kind of text is probably reason enough for Katie to dislike her, but it’s nice that Ally and Jo stumbled into a genuine moment anyway. Considering Jo attended the reunion, I think we should expect to see much more of her.