overnights

Vanderpump Rules Recap: A Brock and a Hard Place

Vanderpump Rules

Drink the Tea, Spill the Tea
Season 9 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating 3 stars

Vanderpump Rules

Drink the Tea, Spill the Tea
Season 9 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: Bravo

What are we going to do with Brock, an OnlyFans page waiting to happen? It seems like our thick/thicc Australian friend made a terrible miscalculation about joining this here “friend group.” But what about how Scheana is handling it? What about Lala bringing up these allegations on-camera? What if we are just going to relitigate this argument repeatedly for the remaining 15 episodes of this season? I have so many questions.

But before we can answer them, we have to do a little public service announcement: Has anyone seen Charli? She’s 24, about five-foot-five, just lost 45 pounds, has brown hair, brown eyes, and an aversion to pasta/“pasta.” She was last seen wearing some tacky Rachella gear and cuddling a makeup mannequin about 16 weeks ago, and no one has mentioned her, tried to hang out with her, or otherwise brought her along for a drink since. She should be considered unarmed but still extremely dangerous. There is a $0 reward for information about her whereabouts, but I would like to solve this mystery sometime soon. Thank you.

Brock’s whole thing started at the Drink From Home party Ariana had so she could see if idiots could make her at-home cocktails based on her written instructions, and the answer is that two out of three idiots support these cocktails. Sorry, Brock. Katie did not attend this party because she and Sandoval got into a fight, so Katie stayed home and baked cookie. No, that’s not a typo. It was one giant cookie. I am both disgusted and impressed at her ingenuity and laziness because why bother making a dozen small cookies when we all know you’re just going to house them all in one chocolate-smeared handful anyway?

After the cocktails, Scheana takes Brock aside and tells him Lala asked about what was up with him and his kids when they went shopping. I hope she also told him at home, but she had to do this for story line purposes. When all the couples get together for dinner, Brock sits next to Lala and apologizes to her for talking about his family and it “triggering” her. Um, that is a weirdly passive-aggressive way to start this conversation. What he wanted to tell her is that there is more to the story than she knows, and maybe she shouldn’t be so concerned about Scheana. However, he’s like, “Sorry if you got your feelings hurt.” Weird, bro.

That’s the thing. Lala didn’t know the full story, and while Scheana says she does, she’s keeping mum. During this conversation with Brock, Lala asks why he can’t see his children because she has learned at Lisa’s knee and knows how to be both star and producer. He says he doesn’t want him and his family up for discussion “in this group of friends” and says he’ll tell Lala later. We all know what that means: Brock has something to hide and doesn’t want to talk about it on-camera. Okay, now I’ve gone from “We don’t know the whole story; maybe the kids’ mom is really a piece of work like Brock says” to “Oh yeah, this guy screwed a Yulin Dog Festival of pooches.”

It all comes out when Lisa invites all the girls over to Villa Rosa for tea. Well, all the girls except Charli, who was sitting for her milk-carton portrait that day. When Scheana brings up how Lisa has never met Brock, Lala sees that as an opportunity to say she wasn’t “trying to put anyone on the spot” by bringing up his kids, but then she goes about telling us exactly everything Brock told her off-camera. What it boils down to is that Brock couldn’t see his children because his ex made a domestic-violence claim against him. Scheana tries to make it like the ex is lying about that and then says that isn’t the reason Brock can’t see his kids. Yes, the reason he can’t see his kids is because he hasn’t paid his child support, so Scheana is technically correct but also she is entirely wrong.

I don’t know who in this trio is behaving the worst. Actually, I do, and it is Brock. Domestic abuse and not paying child support are awful, and the statistical likelihood that someone committing domestic abuse will do it again is quite high. I get that Lala is concerned about Scheana, and I think we all should be, but the way she goes about describing it is so condescending. “It’s not just you. You have a child now,” she says. Like Scheana doesn’t know that?

Scheana, as usual, is trying to make Brock seem perfect and wonderful and like she made the best choices in life. Um, we all met Shay. Remember him? Not a good husband. We all met Rob, who could put up a TV in seven minutes but would never emotionally fulfill her. Know that. We met that weird bartender she wanted to be in a relationship with, but he only wanted to be friends. Oh God, remember him? This is Scheana once again making bad choices and then trying to plaster them over with a man’s lies. No wonder Scheana’s mom hates Brock. I think I do too.

Then there is Brock. I mean, how are you going to go on reality television with a domestic-violence charge and a debt to your children’s mother and not realize this will become a story line? How did he not square up his child support before filming started so he could say, “Oh yeah, I took care of that”? The stupidity of these people should not astound me after watching Sandoval think his goatee is a good idea, but here we are again, marveling at how one of our TV dunces has only two brain cells and they seem to get along like Solange and Jay-Z in an elevator.

While this is going down at Lisa’s, Brock is with the boys at Schwartz’s house, and Scheana is texting him about it. When Brock finds out, he blows up and almost spits a stale Big Mac all over Schwartz’s modern farmhouse that he can’t even get a home-equity loan against because his interest rate is too high. He calls Lala an asshole for sharing what he told her in confidence on-camera. How naïve! What show did he think he was signing up for, My Little Pony: Everything Is Sunshine? Then he gets all teary saying she should never fuck with his family. Oh, you mean the family you haven’t paid your child support to? He says Lala shouldn’t make him out to be a deadbeat dad because he hasn’t seen his kid. Um, how about making you out to be a deadbeat dad because you’re a deadbeat dad. The stupidity is powerful with this one.

Aside from Brock and Scheana looking even worse than usual, I’m sort of coming around to everyone else. Even Katie Maloney — the woman inside my television whom I hate most, and that includes Selena Gomez barely acting in Only Murders in the Building — had a moment this episode talking about how she had an abortion ten years ago. I thought it was powerful and necessary, and thank you to Katie for speaking up for all the women who might need to get one at some point in their lives. Ugh, give it up for Katie Maloney, a one-woman bad-haircut factory.

My love affair with Raquel, the pink dog on Paw Patrol with eyelash extensions, also continues. She went to play pickleball with Lala, and the two of them had a cute scene where Lala sincerely apologized for the way she treated her in the past and explained that she was blaming Raquel for her falling out with James. I mean, I think we should just all drop James and keep Raquel at this point, and I can’t believe I have to say that out loud and also scrub the internet of all the mean things I ever said about her.

Because Raquel lost a bet with Lala in a game of pickleball — and I must say that Section 3 of California Penal Code 1492 states that any wager made on a game of pickleball is void due to secondhand embarrassment — Raquel has to make a speech at their next event, and she does it with aplomb. She not only mentions how James’s proposal made her wet; she also makes a decent dick joke, and that, ladies and homosexuals, is when I finally came wholly around on Raquel. And I hate myself, and it is the meanest trick Caroline Calloway ever played.

Finally, we are left with Tom and Katie and their visit to the fertility doctor, to which Katie wears a T-shirt with marabou-lined sleeves that I can say is the single most unflattering thing I have ever seen on television, and we are still only halfway through Kyle Richards’s RHOBH reunion outfit. We discover that her uterus is pristine and that it is Tom Schwartz’s sperm that are misshapen, perhaps due to the amount of alcohol and psychedelics regularly consumed by this one-man Dave Matthews Band tailgate party.

“All of my sperm have weird-shaped heads. Or two heads. Who knew that sperm heads were that important?” Schwartz asked Sandoval later when they were alone in the house, their fingers smeared with chicken-wing grease.

“Listen, there’s only one head that I’m worried about, and it’s this one,” Sandoval replied. He undid his belt, unbuttoned his pants, and pulled a chubbie over the elastic of his boxer briefs. “Get over here.” Schwartz complied and sank to his knees, smiling up at his friend before diving in. Sandoval leaned his head back and moaned, his hands running through Schwartz’s hair, resting eventually in the little divot at the back of his skull. Then, suddenly, he grabbed Schwartz by the shoulders and forced him to stand up. “You said double head, right?” he said, grabbing for Schwartz’s waistband, as they both smiled and thought all about the sperm they’d be wasting in just a few moments.

Vanderpump Rules Recap: A Brock and a Hard Place