The moral high ground is nearly impossible to come by on reality television, but that has never stopped anyone from trying. Once in a blue moon, the person assuming superiority can actually claim it. Case in point: Last week’s conversation between Katie and Sandoval when she pointed out that if anyone understands how hard it is to walk away from a longstanding relationship where you aren’t happy anymore, it’s her.
Usually, the only way someone can claw their way onto a high horse is through a combination of obfuscation, lying, or false equivalence. The Vanderpump cast are all too happy to drink from this muddy well so they can feel like the better person for the day — or realistically, for the conversation.
This week’s episode felt like a return to form, a messy, hypocritical tangle of sins, old and new. Everyone is pointing the finger at one another, and everyone is behaving badly. In other words, vintage Vanderpump Rules is back.
We open with James and Ally, who are discussing Jo, Schwartz’s friend-with-benefits-but-maybe-also-dating-but-also-allegedly-platonic buddy. Ally says that while she won’t be sharing her secrets with Jo anytime soon, she still wants Jo to feel comfortable, and has invited her to tonight’s DJ James Kennedy set at Hotel Ziggy. File that away for later.
Billie Lee and Sandoval are in his room, where Sandoval is arranging his brown sheets and brown comforter on his brown bed. Love a monochromatic moment, but this shade of brown just gives mud. Fitting decor for a poo-poo head, I guess. Sandoval tells Billie that he made a “top market offer” to buy Ariana out of their house and give her a check for her half, but that her lawyer has not responded.
I find it hard to believe that Sandoval can afford Ariana’s half of a $3.1 million house considering we just heard him bellyaching about having so little cash on hand he had to go on tour. But I truly do not care who gets it anymore, and considering Ariana sued Sandoval to force a sale in January, let’s just let the courts deal with it.
Lala meets up with Schwartz at a juice bar, where he shares that he’s on a “sober bender.” Translation: He hasn’t had alcohol for three days. This is not impressive at all, and the fact that Schwartz is so proud of it is really quite sad. But if we dig too deep into this crew’s substance abuse issues, we’ll be here for 10,000 words, so we have no choice but to keep it trucking.
Schwartz catches Lala up on Jax’s TomTom drive-by, and sighs that he’s well and truly sick of talking about Scandoval. “Everyone’s cheated, everyone’s done stupid shit,” he declares. “I’m a makeout slut. Like 12 years ago, I made out with Scheana in Vegas.” (For the record, everyone has not cheated. Katie hasn’t. But again, file that away for later.)
Lala is shocked. She and Scheana have gotten close in the last few years, and at no point did Scheana ever let it slip that she and Schwartz had smooched. “Pre-Katie?” she asks. No, admits Schwartz — he and Katie were together, but having a “rocky” period. What’s more, he never told her.
Of course, that’s all about to change. That night, Katie comes over to Lala’s to pregame. Lala says the thing that all women know is the preamble to hearing something we do not want to hear: “Make a drink, and then I need to tell you something.” Katie is shocked as well, but receives the news with the exhausted resignation we’ve seen on her face countless times in the last 11 years.
One by one, the group arrives at Hotel Ziggy. Ally, Ariana, and Scheana are already there when Jo and Schwartz rock up, and right away Scheana sinks her claws into Jo. She grabs Jo’s TomTom hat off her braided head, and says that if Jo is a hairstylist, she should show her work. Jo rescues her hat, then scampers away into a corner with Billie Lee where she plugs her ears so she won’t catch the girls talking shit about her.
In a confessional, Scheana tells us that she dislikes Jo because she went away to Big Bear with Schwartz, Sandoval, and Rachel when the affair was already in full swing. That’s fair enough, and I’ve been waiting for someone to bring up the Big Bear trip since Sandoval and Rachel denied it at last season’s reunion. But it’s weird that Scheana is being colder to Jo than either Sandoval and Schwartz, who respectively had and hosted the affair.
When Lala and Katie arrive, Scheana starts going off about the hat again. Ally tells the girls she thinks Jo “comes in peace,” but seeing their utter disinterest in a kumbaya moment, pivots to revealing that at Jo’s astrology reading, Jo said she had emotional feelings for Schwartz like she does for her dad. “Does she fuck her dad?” Ariana asks to peals of laughter. I’m not saying Ally has to be Jo’s friend, but her stated mission of making Jo feel comfortable in the group does not seem to be going all that well.
Ariana declares that nobody better “boohoo” her for being mean to Jo, because Jo is a “mean girl bully” who spent Thanksgiving at Ariana’s home while knowing about the affair. This is valid beef, but it is not exactly bullying. On the other hand, shooting looks at Jo and laughing at her is quite clearly mean, even if it might be justified. As always, I appreciate Katie’s willingness to own exactly what she’s doing: “I don’t want Jo to feel like she can come anywhere or be comfortable.”
Katie pulls Scheana aside to talk, and Scheana reveals that Schwartz tried to kiss her when she and Ariana were in Vegas for Scheana’s sister’s cheer competition. The kiss happened slightly after her and ex Michael Shay’s engagement in late 2013. I find this story pretty confusing and am not sure what Schwartz was doing at Scheana’s sister’s cheer competition, but in any case Katie only wants to know why she’s never heard about this before, given that Scheana was a bridesmaid in her wedding.
Scheana says she never told anyone because not only was Katie very scary at the time — my thanks to the producers for resurfacing Katie’s legendary “My own boyfriend is sticking up for that whooooore in thereeee!” rant — but that she also wanted Katie and Schwartz’s relationship to work and to be part of their love story. This is a wild thing to say considering that withholding information about infidelity is exactly what Scheana is upset at Jo for, and Katie wonders whether she’ll ever be able to really trust Scheana.
The next day, James, Lala, Schwartz, and Sandoval meet up. There is not much point to this, other than for Sandoval to mention that Ariana’s dog Mya has “eaten something weird” (we’ll come back to this later) and to invite Lala to a breath work session. While Sandoval and Lala were never really friends, he’d apparently like to build something new.
Lala arrives at Tom and Ariana’s house the next day while Tom is wrapping up his session. He has a blindfold on and is lying on his back on a yoga mat, convulsing and gagging like a dying fish. Maybe this is what breath work is supposed to look like, but all I could think about was whether Sandoval was about to choke to death on his own spit.
After a final few spasms, Sandoval and Lala decamp to the backyard. Lala lays out her beef with Sandoval. According to Lala, this isn’t just about the affair. She notes that throughout the years, she’s reached out to congratulate Sandoval on his various endeavors, and not once has she gotten a response. What’s more, he never asked Lala once how she was doing at her lowest point. Personally, I haven’t forgotten his invective last season that Lala “should have known better than to get knocked up by a fucking guy like that.”
Still, Lala is open to moving forward. “What happened in my life really, really fucked me up,” she admits. “I don’t want you paying for my experience with someone else. I’ve been held prisoner to my experience for way too long.”
Hold up. We know Alex Baskin hauled the cast in and demanded that the group reintegrate, and Scheana has made it clear she misses the old Sandoval. Now, I guess, it’s Lala’s turn to provide some kind of narrative bridge to explain why he will be invited to events from now on. But it’s still jarring that we went from Lala calling Sandoval a groomer to deciding to explore a friendship with him, a person she has barely any history with.
It’s doubly strange to watch Lala acknowledge that her years-old betrayal still reverberates through her life when we remember that just two episodes ago, she was telling Ariana to let go of resentment. It’s fine if Lala doesn’t want to be held prisoner by her trauma, and she will surely benefit by moving past her pain, but she should know better than anyone that Ariana, who is still going through it, is in no position to be letting go of anything yet.
Some time later, the gang heads to SUR after a second Something About Her sandwich tasting, where Lala shares her conversation with Ariana. Unsurprisingly, Ariana is skeptical. She also tells Lala that she wasn’t home earlier because she was at the emergency vet with Mya. It seems Ariana left chicken satay out in her room, and Sandoval let Mya in while an air-conditioning tech was at the house. Mya ate Ariana’s leftovers, skewers and all, and had to get her stomach pumped, leading to a $6,000 vet bill.
Mya’s hospital visit is 95% Tom’s fault for going into Ariana’s room in the first place, but it also seems unwise to leave leftovers out in a house with a dog that has eaten everything from 500 laxative pills to box hair dye. I’m still side-eyeing Lala for her inscrutable decision to bond with Sandoval, but she has a point when she tells Ariana this is exactly the kind of thing she should talk to Sandoval about.
As Ariana leans into her indignation that Sandoval has endangered her baby, I can’t help but think of Lala and Randall, who communicate through an app about their daughter, and how Lala will have to co-parent with that man for the next 15 years whether she likes it or not. Ariana doesn’t need to be buddies with her ex, but surely some precautions and coordination with him — or even Ann! — are worth it for Mya’s sake.
The final bombshell of the night comes when Schwartz vents to Brock about getting “roasted” for his kiss with Scheana. Brock, who seems more upset by this than Schwartz is, drops that Katie spent the night with Max. As in Max Boyens, former TomTom manager, disgraced Vanderpump Rules cast member, and fuckboy extraordinaire.
Scheana, who has 56 friends’ locations tracked on her phone, noticed that Max’s little dot was at Katie’s apartment late night after Hotel Ziggy, then checked it again in the morning and realized it was still there. When Scheana joins them at the bar moments later, she is not happy to learn that Brock has spilled the beans. It’s not entirely clear whether Scheana is more upset at Brock for outing the hookup or her own nosiness, but either way she is pissed.
Scheana storms back to the group, who of course ask her what is going on. This gives Brock the perfect opening to reveal that Scheana is upset because he told Schwartz about Katie’s late-night hookup. Nobody sees this coming. The pan around the group — Ariana’s drunken confusion, Below Deck Dillon’s stifled laughter, Lala’s side-eye, Scheana’s huffy silence — is truly a Renaissance tableau.
Brock and Sandoval are incensed on Schwartz’s behalf, who either does not care or is too stunned to react. The men work themselves into a lather about the “double standards” in the group. In case you forgot, Sandoval defended Schwartz and Rachel’s flirtation last season because they were “two single people,” despite the fact that divorce papers hadn’t even been signed and that Sandoval and Rachel were actually already together. God forbid Katie, an actually single woman, have some casual sex.
There is really no parallel between Katie having a one-night stand with Max years after her divorce, and Schwartz going after a woman on the Vanderpump cast, a group he promised Katie he wouldn’t date in. Lala correctly points out that if there is any beef to be had, it is between Max and Schwartz. As an aside, I did not realize Max and Schwartz were besties, but I know Sandoval is going to cry himself to sleep over being dethroned.
The episode ends with Lala, who declares that everybody is lying and everybody is messy. She says Ariana is lying about being stuck with the house, Scheana is creeping on people’s locations, Schwartz is hiding makeouts, and Katie is doing revenge bangs. Even though I’m side-eyeing Lala’s fake friendship with Sandoval, I have to agree.
Of course, Lala is no exception. Just because she’s telling Ariana about her meets with Sandoval doesn’t make her producer-driven moves any less shady. Everyone is writing their own narratives for the show, and so this episode comes to a perfectly hypocritical close. Unlike Lala, I am thrilled that we have returned to the muck.
Last calls
- Ann Watch, Week 9: This week, Ann attended Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and throws her hat in the ring to be considered as Ariana’s assistant.
- Did anyone else feel like Ariana knew about the Vegas kiss already? Her shocked face was just a little too shocked, and it was certainly a coincidence that she immediately identified the weekend the kiss happened without prompting or comparing stories with Scheana.
- As usual, Lisa and Ken added nothing to the equation, but I do laugh each time we see Ken walk in with another one of the sedated Vanderpump-Todd dogs. I don’t know what drugs they are giving their pooches, but as an owner of a cat who gets violent and scratchy every time we have to go to the vet, I would like some for myself.
- I enjoyed when Katie told Schwartz, “I’m very happy we’re no longer together for exactly this reason.” A little part of me will always wish Schwartz could have stepped up and become the man Katie always saw within the disheveled boy, but insofar as that does not seem likely to happen anytime soon, I’ll settle for her reminding him exactly why he fumbled her in the first place.