There are two things we can rejoice in in this episode. The first is that Alex is back, and I know what they say about absence making the hard-on grow firmer, but I am especially firm for Alex now that he’s been away a bit. He’s still giving us nothing, but he’s cute and affable, and I’m glad Bravo is no longer airbrushing him out of the movie like Kevin Spacey in the last season of House of Cards. The other thing I love is that, for the third week in a row in the “Previously on,” we get Andrea talking about his recent heartbreak, and he says, “The loneliness is killing me.” Every time I hear it, I have to sing it to the tune of Britney’s “Baby One More Time.” I’m all, “This loneliness is killing me,” one finger to the ear, the other finger running scales in the wind, “And I must confess I still believe,” up an octave, “still bel-ieve!”
Otherwise, this was just a kind of standard-issue episode of Summer House. It’s neither here nor there, but I really do love spending time with these rascals who don’t even think twice about peeing on the vines at a winery because they’re too lazy to march their day-drunk asses inside to use an actual toilet.
The episode starts and everyone is rolling into the house, and it is a miracle that literally zero Amazon boxes greet them, but there is an ancillary miracle that literally zero people comment on Lindsay’s hair. Well, Carlito brings it up, but he does not say it is a Manic Panic in your mom’s bathroom that left stains all over the tub and her favorite towels disaster. This is a serious 15-year-old hair-dye-looking style, and it should not be on a grown woman. Lindsay should have paid to get that shit done and really rocked it. Instead, she looks like a tablecloth with Kool-Aid spilled all over it.
Paige, Ciara, and Mya take a break from the only activity they care about — lying in bed bitching about Lindsay — to lie in bed and talk about their relationships with their fathers. They are finally roused just in time to go to a bonfire on the beach that Danielle and Robert arrange. Paige arrives wearing a rust-colored dress with multiple cutouts that Jackie from RHONJ wore just last episode. Considering the amount of time Paige spends in bed, there should be an Us Weekly special, “Who Snore It Better?”
At the bonfire, Carl and Kyle go off to have a little bromantic moment in which Carl tells us he’s no longer with MacKenzie and Kyle says he doesn’t own just 51 percent of this company, he owns the whole damn thing. All of this prenup talk is absolutely insane for so many reasons. Amanda is on the other side of the bonfire talking about how if they get divorced, she’s taking half of everything that is Kyle’s, which might be why she doesn’t want a prenup that says she’ll get less. But also how does Amanda not have an ownership stake in the business? Is she just a salaried employee? This is a bad deal for her and puts her in the position of Kyle being her boss. I was against her working at that company to start with, and that was before I learned she was being underpaid. The only way this will work is if they’re equal partners, and, yes, the time to hash that out is now before they get married. I mean, the time to hash it out was three years ago, when they started working together, but this is not Back to the Future: The Musical, so I guess we’re more stuck than Marty McFly in his Calvin Klein briefs.
Also at the bonfire, Mya’s new boy, Oliver, shows up with his bestie, Ahmed, whom Lindsay met a week ago, and he is the latest dude she’s in love with. She goes through new beaux like an 8-year-old goes through Laffy Taffy. Everything is going great until Oliver and Ahmed decide to go back to their house rather than join the SH crew at their pad. When they arrive, Robert says it was the craziest 20 minutes he’s ever had in his life, and that is because he has somehow avoided Lindsay in full-activation mode.
Lindsay is upset that Ahmed went back to his place and didn’t go with her. “If you’re with Lindsay, you don’t leave her,” she says because there ain’t no issue like an abandonment issue because an abandonment issue don’t stop. She calls him up and starts hectoring him on the phone, and he tells her that he is not going to be berated like a child, and this seems over before it’s even started, which is the name of the spreadsheet of exes that Lindsay keeps on her desktop. She was particularly upset that he didn’t say good-bye to her or text or call to make plans. We find out in the morning that he had texted and called, but she didn’t get them until later, so now everything is forgiven.
Mya doesn’t seem that interested in Oliver, and I can’t tell if it’s because she has some kind of issue getting with guys or she’s just not that into him. She’s like, “Don’t make plans based around me because I don’t know what I want to do after the bonfire.” What she meant to say is that if she, Paige, or Ciara is not lying in a bed in comfy clothes by 10:30, they will turn into a pile of goo with some extensions stuck on top, so they need to leave immediately. Sister, if I rented a car, drove all the way out to the Hamptons in traffic, and lined up a room in someone’s house, and you just wanted to see me for an hour at some bonfire, there would be big problems. I mean, you can’t at least invite him over for a “swim” the next day? Same goes for Lindsay and Ahmed, who we find out later told Oliver he’s in love with Lindsay. Oh, man. Kids these days.
On the way to the winery, the crew gets a party bus, and they play a game in which they have to answer every question they are asked for two minutes, and if they don’t want to answer they have to drink. We learn some great information. Danielle is saving anal for marriage. Mya masturbates every day. Kyle’s favorite part of Amanda’s body is her vagina, and the biggest penis that Paige has ever been with is Andrea’s. Yes, this all tracks. But Andrea also asked this question, so was he just dying to get this little bit of savvy marketing out into the world?
At the winery, we get two divergent timelines, both of which are kind of wild. First, Amanda asks Lindsay if she’s okay because she seems just not to be, jumping from boy to boy, which is totally cool, but crushing on them hard, falling for them, and then being upset when they “break up.” Paige, Ciara, and Mya, who all know their Serta Sleep Number, are sick of Lindsay’s escapades, but mostly I think they’re annoyed she was playing like she was so into Austen when she clearly just wants to live it up all summer. Amanda’s concern is a little bit different and a little genuine. When she confronts Lindsay away from the group, she says, “Lindsay, you almost had a family,” insinuating that she thinks Lindsay is getting over her miscarriage by throwing herself into various and sundry relationships that are bound to fail.
Lindsay, protesting too much, says this is the best summer she ever had. She says she always dives into the deep end and gives her whole heart away, and this will never change. She’s not wrong about that, but Amanda is onto something. The pace seems a bit more frantic this summer, as if she’s trying to prove something or escape from something. I do love Lindsay, our everlasting gobsmacker, but I wouldn’t say I liked the way she treated Amanda in this instance. She’s attacking Amanda like she was bringing this up to be adversarial, when really Amanda had Lindsay’s best interests in mind. She wanted to check in on her, and Lindsay saw this as some kind of affront. Maybe there was another setting or another venue where this might have been better. Maybe Paige’s bed?
The other debate is about Andrea and his heartache over Lexi. I’m not saying it’s not real, but it does seem a bit inflated considering their relationship was quite short. The story he tells is that Paige started talking to Craig, so he shifted to Lexi, but then when the Summer House was coming up, he told Lexi he didn’t want to be exclusive, which seems like a professional decision as much as a personal one. But I don’t get why she won’t talk to him at all. There’s something here he’s not telling us, and I want Lexi to go on someone’s podcast so that someone will take her best comments and post them on Reddit for us all to learn.
As it is, everyone at the table is questioning the timeline of when he was with Paige, when he got together with Lexi, and when he started flirting with Paige again so heavily that she considered cutting off her relationship with Craig to go with Andrea. She says she feels a bit used, and I want to say that she’s being Mountain Dew X-Treme, but I think she’s actually being pretty Mellow Yellow about it. Even if he was just turning on the charm with her to get over Lexi, she was still using him. What Paige and the rest of the crew are telling Andrea and Lindsay is that the people that they’re toying with have feelings too. That their choices have repercussions. Of course, Lindsay either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about this, but the capital-R Romantic that Andrea is trying to sell us on should already know this. He’s feeling it now. His loneliness is killing him. I must confess, he still believes. When he’s not with her, he loses his mind. Give him a sign. Hit him, baby, one more time.
