The Secret Ingredient

Darling, it's another RHONY recap

Sep 27, 2023

Support my professional TV-watching career by becoming a paid subscriber today.

Before I’m an American, I’m a Pisces. Conflict of any kind scares me. Do I still find myself in conflict quite often? Yes. I suppose it’s a similar situation to men, where I’m kind of afraid of them, but I nonetheless keep finding myself inside of… Hmm… Scratch that whole line of thought. Let’s start again.

What I’m getting at is that while I found the most recent episode of RHONY difficult to watch on a personal level, I thought it was the strongest one to date. It seems like the social experiment of it all is setting in. The cast’s brains are finally cracking and sizzling under the hot Anguilla sun, and we, the audience, get to eat up the crazy omelet. Sai would probably enjoy that metaphor. I know she’s hungry.

We begin this episode where we left off, with Ubah snatching Erin’s sunglasses off her face and telling her she will be holding on to them for 45 minutes, the approximate amount of time that Erin had Ubah’s phone without telling her. This reduces Erin to tears, introducing a motif that will recur for the next hour or so.

The women pile into what appear to be go-karts to make their way to Elvis Beach Bar for a rum party. There’s a lot of driving around in these things this episode, and it made me vividly imagine Mario Kart but with the cast of RHONY. I would play as Jenna, because I think she’d have the funniest sound effects. I can see her being like, “Goodness!” when hit by a blue shell.

Anyway, tensions are high at Elvis Beach Bar. Sai does her best to cut through it by getting behind the bar and serving shots, like she used to do at the sports bar where she worked. I can absolutely see Sai working at a sports bar. It really fits with her whole thing (derogatory). Alas, such distractions can’t forestall the inevitable, and Ubah’s alarm goes off and she returns Erin’s sunglasses.

“Instead of getting mad, talk to me like a normal friend,” Erin says, to which Ubah responds, “Don’t tell me what to do, I’m not your kid.” It’s here that Ubah officially rallies the Resistance against Lord Vader, saying that Erin mistreats Brynn and telling everyone that Erin once called Brynn a social climber. I mean… yeah, I am watching The Social Climber Show on the Social Climber Network.

But the tactic pays off, and Erin is forced into a tearful retreat while everyone else plays limbo, sans Jenna, who stays with Erin. This was an incredibly funny scene to me, watching Jenna Lyons in an Elvis Beach Bar souvenir shirt joylessly playing Giant Connect Four with Erin while Ubah, Jessel, Brynn, and Sai gleefully fall in the sand trying and failing to shimmy under a pole. Reminds me of a recurring melatonin dream I have, which looks exactly like this, but with Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky instead of Jenna Lyons and Erin Lichy.

Anyway, back into the go-karts we go to move the frontlines of battle to a new location. I must stress that this episode felt like it went on forever. Not in a bad way. It was just incredibly emotionally draining to fight this hard and for this long. I really felt like I was riding in that buggy, rain splattering against my face as I plotted out my next move in the skirmish.

Oh, speaking of, it’s in that buggy that we get a fun piece of information about our favorite cartoon character, Jessel Taank, who tells Ubah, Brynn, and Sai that Erin has been pissing her off for a long time and so she has started keeping a list on her Notes app about all the times Erin has rubbed her the wrong way.

I was a bit inebriated, so maybe this episode isn’t actually as funny as I remember, but I laughed so hard when she read out her list. I don’t remember exactly what was in it, but I do remember she brought it up like it was a major act of spiteful vengeance, and then the items in it were like, “You called me a pampered princess. Oh, really? Well, I happen to disagree. Bitch!” It definitely has shades of her “Queen of Assumption because you assume shit” insult. You better hope Jessel doesn’t have a list about you in her phone. It might say stuff like “I rather dislike her.”

Erin, meanwhile, has done what she usually does and stormed off, giving her some time to talk to her dad on the phone and misrepresent her situation with Ubah somewhat, telling him she only had her phone for two minutes and now Ubah is making a whole thing about it. We also get a confessional from Erin about hardships she’s endured in the past, where she says that in the seventh grade she was cruelly called “Long Jaw Silver.”

Okay, I’m an awful person, I know, but… oh, man, my sides were hurting. I thought I was going to die. Erin, do not give TV audiences this sort of thing. Although, I guess I’m not one to talk, as I once told the world about the time I lied in middle school about being half German because they were calling me a beaner (not sure where I got ‘German’ from) and they simply adjusted the insult to “beanerschnitzel.” There. I feel a bit better now. I give you beanerschnitzel, you give me Long Jaw Silver. Some honor among pirates there.

We get a preliminary confrontation between Erin and Ubah after the latter arrives back at the villa (Erin summons her by saying, “Ubah, come,” which made my skin crawl. Ew!) but it all falls apart because Erin flatly refuses to acknowledge her part in anything and Ubah isn’t budging either. Ubah also has to cut their conversation short because, I shit you not, she lost her phone. For the sake of transparency, I am team Ubah in this debacle, but this part really did make me go… Girl…

The fog of war shifts yet again, leading us to the hot tub where Ubah rallies the troops once more, pointing out that Erin seems to always have something bad to say about everyone else. Brynn chimes in about the whole “you accused me of flirting with your husband” again. Call her Lot’s wife, because she’s a little salty looking back at it. I didn’t really like this out of her. For one, I mean, yes, you did flirt with her husband. We saw it on TV. For two, we already hashed this out, and all it does is turn the whole thing into a pile-on where Erin can wiggle out of the consequences for her actions.

And, to be clear, I do think she needs to face the music on some things. Ubah brought it up at Elvis Beach Bar, but there is a lot of “angry Black woman” rhetoric being pushed on her here. Erin keeps throwing around how afraid she is of Ubah, even staying “I’m terrified to be your friend,” and in turns yelling in Ubah’s face and calling her all sorts of names before crying and running away. It’s also the case that, yes, she does stir the pot with everyone! She arranged the dogpiling of Jenna at the beginning of the trip by throwing her under the bus with the “I don’t want to fly coach” debacle. I’m not saying Ubah is being mature about the situation, but Erin does need to be checked!

But after the hot tub becomes the hot seat and the confrontation becomes more like a public stoning, Erin crumbles, and the group acknowledges things have gotten out of hand. Ubah and Erin kiss and make up in a more private conversation, and the denouement lands us at a final dinner among friends wherein everyone names their favorite outfit they saw on the trip and Jessel is wearing some sort of Little House on the Prairie dress if you ran it through an AI art generator with keywords “tropical, coconuts, beach vacation.”

You get the sense that the underlying resentments that surfaced during this trip are far from diffused, though, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of Jessel’s list or Erin’s treatment of the other women. We may finally be setting sail from Anguilla, but we’re not out of hot water. In fact, the temperature only seems to be ratcheting up with each episode.

The secret ingredient? Darling, it’s prolonged exposure to a group of people you barely know who’ve all been drinking rum. Bravo knows this.

And now, the power rankings.

Sai De Silva

This episode really cemented the “why are you here” of it all when it comes to Sai. She also did this thing I can’t stand, when I’m having a heavy or tense conversation with someone, and a third party butts in to be like, “I’m done talking about this!” in an attempt to squash it. First of all, you were not in the conversation to begin with, and second of all, who are you to be playing referee about it? Sometimes conversations get serious and we need to hash it out. Let it happen! Especially if we are on a TV show!

Erin Lichy

Oh, Erin, it was bad for you. One of my little triggers is seeing someone get ganged up on. It makes me instinctively want to defend them. I didn’t like seeing Erin get attacked on all sides in the hot tub, but, well, she has orchestrated this scenario for both Brynn and Jenna. I hope she remembers it doesn’t feel great! The way she talked to and about Ubah also made me feel icky. Icky Lichy. Not as devastating as Long Jaw Silver, but I don’t have the inventive mind of your average seventh grade bully.

Jenna Lyons

“Your outfit today is my favorite.” - Jenna Lyons, lying to Jessel Taank.

Brynn Whitfield

One thing Brynn is going to do is engage with the situation. I don’t think it was very called for this time around, and I wasn’t a huge fan of her telling Ubah to work on her delivery. But she didn’t choose the losing side of the war like Jenna, and she wasn’t Erin Lichy, and she wasn’t trying to play referee like Sai, so, there you go.