Oh, yes, baby. [Cracks knuckles and hunkers down over the keyboard.] This is just the kind of Housewives that I absolutely love, the kind of thing you can’t fake, the kind where the darkness is bubbling up to the surface, oozing through the cracks in the façades these women so readily erect. I’m talking about the final scene of the episode when Alexia, her fiancé, Gringo Todd, and her oldest son, Peter, a stretched-out bracelet to a Diplo concert that someone tried to pass to their friend to get into the VIP section, finally confront not just a recent incident but years of pain, anguish, and dysfunction. This is the kind of scene that Tennessee Williams could write, where everyone is right and everyone is wrong at the same time and the only people who win are us, because we get to watch it and revel in their despair.
Peter comes over to the apartment that Alexia and Todd share with Alexia’s younger son, Frankie, who has never fully recovered from a car accident he had as a teen. Peter and Todd are supposed to hash things out because if they can’t get along, then Alexia isn’t going to marry this dude. She and Frankie leave them to talk but then perch right outside the room like she’s one of the bakers on the Great British Bake Off (screw you, Pillsbury!) peeking into the oven to see if their Kouign-Amann is going to rise. As they begin to talk and things get heated, Frankie comes and joins her, the two of them holding hands like they aren’t the king of the world on the Titanic, but petty baronets with a glass and steel fiefdom to lord over. When Peter starts to get emotional, Alexia comes back into the room and hugs her son, putting her body between him and Todd, not saying anything. She has stayed out of this conversation like Putin stays out of Ukraine.
Everyone’s side of the argument is fascinating. Todd says he hates it when Peter gets his brother stoned and drunk or takes him out partying because then he has to clean up the mess. But, at the same time, he’s saying that Alexia and Peter need to do something to help Frankie, and he won’t because it’s not his problem. Um, yes, it is your problem. If you’re going to marry the kid’s mother and live with him, it is very much your problem, and Todd can’t take halfway responsibility for him or be resentful of the responsibility that he’s given himself.
But he is totally right that Alexia and Peter need professional help to deal with the “Frankie situation” that they’re both in denial over. Peter won’t even let Todd say he’s disabled without threatening to beat him up, but there is Frankie, if not disabled, certainly not able to live a full and responsible life without necessary supervision. It’s as if Peter and Alexia are both in mourning for the person Frankie could have been. Alexia says that he was a “normal kid,” and then after the accident he was never the same. Their expectations for him never seemed to realign either. Peter seems to be treating him like another one of his 24-year-old friends, getting faded and talking about crypto. While I don’t think that Frankie needs to be smothered to the extent that Alexia does, he also can’t be treated just like any old dude, and, yes, I think Todd is right that he probably shouldn’t be getting fucked up.
But Peter is also right. Todd doesn’t know that he shaved his brother’s armpits and wiped his ass after the accident. He doesn’t know how devastating the aftermath was for them. When he claims that Alexia and Peter do “nothing” for Frankie, the mere act of keeping him alive in the months after his accident surely is something. Could they do more now? It seems like the universal answer is yes, and that something needs to include Todd, even if he doesn’t see it as his problem.
A lot of the trouble here comes from Alexia, who seems to be a rather permissive parent who refuses to admit that either of her sons have any problems. Naturally, she takes Peter’s side when he’s up against Todd, but Peter needs more than one stern talking. I think he could use some sort of adult military school. What do you call that? Oh, it’s just the actual military. Yes. That will fix it. #DraftPeter.
This scene was so complex, so many parts, so many years of bad decisions. So much love for one son and love for a brother that was robbed from you, and love of a new partner trying to correct the sins of an old one. And at the end of the couch, Frankie perched and staring off into the middle distance, knowing that this whole thing is about him and not knowing how to fix it other than by loving everyone in the room with all of his might.
As for everyone else on the show, they’re not bringing it nearly as hard as Alexia, particularly the returning women. Lisa is giving spaghetti Western vibes because whenever she totters onto the screen, it’s like a tumbleweed blowing by an abandoned saloon. Larsa is just as bad. Her chat with Adriana and Kiki about signing up to OnlyFans was the most interesting she’s been all season, but she even managed to make a conversation about selling pictures to foot fetishists feel like eating an edible that was one dose too strong and left you passed out on the sofa for 12 hours. Marysol is giving us excellent confessionals, so at least she’s good for that, and Adriana is only giving us hats, hot boyfriends, and a mediocre gay-baiting subplot that I wished included way more actual girl-on-girl action.
As for the newbies, it is their fifth episode, so, by the power vested in me by the Eileen Davidson Accords, we can finally say what we think about them, and I’m 50/50. Based on what we knew of Julia before filming — being the last Miss USSR, being married to Martina Navratilova — I said she was my new favorite Housewife. I like her and her weird paint-splatter car, but I don’t know that she knows how to Housewife. She seems a bit too refined for this universe, not willing to get down into the muck and fight it out in the way that the best women can. She’s gorgeous, I love watching her and the (slightly awkward) Martina, so I’m happy she’s around, but I don’t know that she will be the unifying personality that the show needs right now.
Guerdy could definitely be that person. She seems like she has real connections with a lot of the women, and the ones she doesn’t, she seems to have real beef with. She talks a lot, has swings of emotion, and married a hot firefighter who is carved out of a block of cream cheese that never seems to talk. These are all classic ingredients for a great Housewife. I can see some feuds building between her and the other girls, namely Adriana, who has already gotten into it with her, and Alexia, who does not seem happy with how Guerdy is planning her wedding. No matter what happens, so far she gets Rookie of the Year from me, and that’s not only because I want to see her husband dressed up as a baseball player.
Finally, there is Dr. Nicole, who got a lot of screen time this episode talking about her splintered relationship with her father, who went to prison for seven years when she was 14. The way she talks about the trauma, though, makes it seem like she was a lot younger. She talks about realizing that her mother had no money like she was a wee sprout in Angela’s Ashes. She was a teen. She could have been babysitting to help out around the house. The girls in that Netflix show even started a club. Dr. Nicole could have been in the club. I’m not saying the trauma wasn’t real, but I feel like it’s being marketed a bit incorrectly.
I like Nicole — despite the fact that she says, “I’m a foodie,” which is the second-worst personal descriptor in the world after only, “I’m a hugger” — but I don’t know how she fits in here. Alone she’s smart, pretty, ambitious, and wealthy without being a Dubrow about it, but she doesn’t seem to mix well with the others. Maybe she’s too busy holding down a real job. I think the key to figuring out any of the women is to see why she’s on the show, and for Dr. Nicole, I can’t figure it out. It’s not like she’s going to have more anesthesiology patients because of the show. It’s not like she is looking for love or launching a business. She doesn’t seem as thirsty for fame as Kiki or Adriana. What is she doing here? Hopefully, when we find the answer, it will be at least a sliver as interesting as what the Echevarria clan is bringing us.
Update: An earlier version of this recap that Guerdy Abraira is the first Haitian housewife when, in fact, Garcelle Beauvais from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is.
