Who would have thought that a group outing to a location literally called the Anger Room could have gone so poorly? To aid in their collective recovery, Stephanie is hosting a spa day in her beautiful new bathroom, which, in case you’ve forgotten since RHOD’s last half-Architectural Digest, half-porn montage introduced us to it, features a $45,000 hot tub, a $40,000 steam room, and a $10,000 Japanese toilet that opens itself up to greet you like gobbling your turds and guzzling your pee is the unequivocal highlight of its day, please, can it have some more? (To be clear, I love this toilet.)
With Brandi’s help, Stephanie auditions male models — who are, almost uniformly, very buff and very gay — to serve as their massage-adjacent eye candy, putting them through a gauntlet of gentle and loving sexual harassment: parading shirtless, feeding Brandi grapes, withstanding a series of industrial-strength hugs. And then, for some reason, a baby kangaroo wearing a diaper appears. We get no explanation for its presence from its apparent owner, a conspicuously skinny man whose relatively unexceptional physique does not spare him from having his nipples stroked by Stephanie. She hires them all (including, especially, the kangaroo), on the grounds that each and every one was “so stinking nice.”
Even more than your average Housewives episode, this week we’re in for an extended commercial for our gals’ various business ventures. LeeAnne poses in look after look after look during a video shoot for her convertible Infinity Dress. For a moment, I am racked with terror at the prospect that they are going to make me sit and watch as LeeAnne demonstrates every single possible permutation of the dress, in every possible color, including some wavelengths that can only be perceived by mantis shrimp. I will die here, my only legacy the blob of thigh fear-sweat stained into my couch. Fortunately, it’s over soon, and while I actually do like many of her miscellaneous sleeves and poofy skirt add-ons, she has at least one regrettable piece of shoulders-to-elbows fabric, which evokes Michael Scott tearing up his suit in the wilderness, but make it fashion.
Kameron hails the garment as “genius,” and coming from the creator of SparkleDog, that really means, well, something. We get only a few precious clips of Kameron manning her booth at the Global Pet Expo (no contract for licensing or a distributor just yet, though), but they do include her telling a group of pups, “You guys are all SparkleDogs inside! You guys are sparkling every day!” Which happens to be the affirmation I say aloud to myself in the mirror every morning.
Most pivotally, we’re all off to a party for a pop-up for Brandi’s Brandi Land clothing line. Think caftan wrap dresses in jewel tones and foliage prints. I like them! But this event is not so much about the merch as it is a social Large Hadron Collider, in which everyone ricochets around the shop at the speed of light and immediately finds a reason to fight with whoever they happen to smash into. First, Kameron decides she’s angry at Cary for “playing both sides” as to whether she or Stephanie was in the wrong during the Battle at Beaver Creek (best remembered for how unbearably annoying Kameron was being about Brandi’s adoption). Um, “you were both wrong,” Cary replies without hesitating.
Kameron accuses Cary of pointing a finger at her, then moments later points her own finger at Cary. She gets up in a huff, only to collide with D’Andra and LeeAnne, who are just raring to continue their fight over D’Andra’s $200 shopping account. D’Andra says she’s especially embarrassed about Kameron, what with her judgmental society connections, having heard about her supposed poverty. Thank God this isn’t transpiring on a nationally broadcasted television show and is instead a secret that we’ve all sworn to take to our graves! Anyway, LeeAnne apologizes profusely to D’Andra, with a Terms of Endearment-esque catch in her throat: “I would rather hurt myself than hurt you.” (In a pretty delightful confessional, D’Andra waves a purple unicorn piggy bank around and accuses LeeAnne of wearing $4 hair extensions from China, so it’s safe to say this isn’t over.)
Cary and Kameron make up, too. Kam explains that, deep down, she’s still hurt that no one defended her from a crazed, dildo-wielding Brandi in Mexico. Cary earns points with Kameron by telling her that she stopped Brandi from giving her a “Stressticles” gag gift in Colorado. COLLISION THE THIRD! Brandi is quietly distraught to hear Cary say this, given that it was her decision to withhold this year’s crop of rubber genital simulacra. While I’m less than thrilled to be spending some of the waning moments of my youth litigating over a gift that was never actually given, I don’t necessarily think either Brandi or Cary is in the wrong, here! Cary correctly remembers that she advised Brandi against whipping out the Stressticles, whether or not her counsel was ultimately what changed Brandi’s mind. For her part, Brandi is generally exhausted and overwhelmed, not to mention, as she’ll tell Stephanie later, frustrated that she’s continually painted as the “bad influence” in their group.
The sun rises on spa day. Flanked by hired hunks clad in togas, self-described madam Stephanie greets each of her four “horny queens” in attendance with a tiara and a monogrammed robe, to match the monogrammed private-jet PJ’s Kameron got them just a few weeks earlier. Does every woman in Dallas have a closet full of monogrammed, impossible-to-regift party favors?
Callie-Roo the kangaroo constitutes the marsupial branch of the welcoming committee. I have so many questions. Who is the kangaroo keeper? How did they find him? Why did he come here? Why does he have a kangaroo? Is he some kind of professional exotic wildlife handler, humiliated for one day into wearing a toga on the job? If not, why did he bring the kangaroo? If so, why did he bring the kangaroo? Is the kangaroo okay? Do I, personally, need to be calling some kind of Texas animal control agency? As LeeAnne says, “I am 100% sure that this ain’t legal.”
Brandi and Cary split off to get manis; LeeAnne and Stephanie get massages. After Brandi and Cary make amends (“I did feel upset and shocked about the Stressticles thing” is a sentence I have never heard before, but with any luck, I will one day hear it again), Brandi speculates that LeeAnne has poisoned Kameron against her. I give Cary “Guess What? I’m Literally Going to Tell Every Secret You Tell Me to Everyone Else and You Can’t Even Be Mad About It” Deuber ten minutes before she spills to LeeAnne, or maybe five, if Stephanie’s bathroom also has a pneumatic tube messaging system ($50,000!) they forgot to include in the final cut of the episode.
