Continue reading “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: Crazy Yacht From Hell”

This week, on our favorite television program, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They went on a trip to St. Lucia, and they all brought their assistants, and … I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to stop the rich women right there. Glam I understand. Or even Erika bringing her assistant, Laia, who also doubles as her makeup woman. However, Avi has no point there, and he’s not nearly as cute and amusing as he and Sutton think he is. I enjoy looking at Boz’s right hand, Nico, who is twice as cute and amusing as he thinks he is, but again, taking pics of Boz in the world’s most complicated bathing suit for her socials does not necessitate a whole journey to a Caribbean island. What else did the rich women do? They told their brand managers to hold while they got undressed and then left them sitting on speaker for 15 minutes while they took pills and powders, applied balms and salves, and drank potions and Kool-Aids.

But mostly, what the women did was point out what is wrong with one Ms. Sutton Stracke, and, as someone who never really cottoned to her on the show, I couldn’t have been happier. The first dinner in St. Lucia was especially illuminating, considering we were again watching Sutton make the ladies’ points in real time as they were saying them.

The dinner starts with a great little story from Jennifer Tilly about how she had to get fully naked on Broadway back in the 2000s, and that was the first time that her boyfriend had ever seen her naked. But we can’t have nice things here on this show, so Dorit goes for Sutton and tells her that she’s been very mean-spirited for the past several months, and Dorit wants to get good with her again, but she won’t let it happen. Sutton goes for some false equivalency, saying that everyone in the group has failed each other at one point. Okay. Sure. But just because everyone has behaved badly in the past, it doesn’t mean it excuses her bad behavior now.

Dorit then brings up the sisterhood that Sutton forced everyone to enter earlier in the season, one that no one asked for and that she forced on everyone. She wanted the group to talk about their differences without tearing each other apart. Dorit then points out that hypocrisy, saying that every time she’s tried to talk to Sutton, she has shut down the conversation. Sutton then immediately tries to shut down the conversation. “I’m not going to do this again. We’re not going to beat me with a stick,” she says.

I can’t stand the way Sutton argues on the show. She is always saying she wants one thing and doing another. She says she wants to be able to talk about things, but when people bring them up, she says she’s not going to talk about it. However, this statement then morphs into her other defense: victimhood. She is the one being beaten with a stick, but when she forced Erika, Kyle, Dorit, and others to sit around and listen to her (and Garcelle) go after them, it was just “asking questions.”

Dorit clocks this turn immediately and says that Sutton becomes the victim every time. Dorit, to add some hypocrisy of her own, says that any time that Sutton should take some responsibility, she suddenly becomes the last of the Catholic martyrs. Rich coming from Dorit, who did this exact same thing to Garcelle for seasons upon seasons, but with this group there is enough hypocrisy and Jen Tilly Suitcase Candy to go around.

Sutton apologizes for the comment she made a few episodes back about Dorit’s wallet not matching her own. Dorit also apologizes for the bad joke she made at Sutton’s expense about her drink not having any alcohol in it but says she would have apologized immediately if Sutton hadn’t called her a bitch. Sutton says she could have handled herself better.

What stands out at the moment, though, is that Dorit doesn’t want to take Sutton’s apology. I’m sorry, but she’s right not to. In confessional right after the wallet comment, Sutton says, “I don’t regret it. I won’t regret it. In fact, I’m proud I said it.” I’m not quite sure when the confessionals were filmed in relation to the action on the screen, but I would assume that Sutton is saying this after she apologized. So which is true, the apology or being proud of herself for saying it? Erika says that Sutton takes so many digs and follows them up with apologies that the women never know what is real with Sutton, the low blow or the apology.

During this whole dinner, I have to give mad props to both Boz and Garcelle, who are both holding their besties’ feet to the fire and trying to get the two of them to come to some form of détente. Garcelle tells Sutton to her face that her comment about Dorit’s wallet was terrible, so thanks for finally owning that. Boz tells Dorit that Sutton is trying to apologize and that Dorit needs to take that apology rather than trying to move on to other things, but, as Kathy erroneously says, “Rome wasn’t conquered in a day.” No, Kathy. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Building takes forever, but as Real Housewives has shown us time and time again, conquering can happen quite quickly.

Boz continues to hold Dorit accountable later in their room. Once she’s done giving Erika the stink eye for taking out her tracks and laying them on the coffee table, she tells Dorit that she railroaded Sutton even after she apologized. Boz says in confessional something that we’ve always known: that Dorit isn’t good at issuing apologies or accepting them.

Things are slightly different for Garcelle and Sutton in their room because Garcelle feels like Sutton didn’t have her back. At dinner, after Boz tells the group she ran into Mauricio and some hoochie at Soho House in Malibu (so glitzy my Soho House membership won’t get me in), Garcelle brings up that none of them can really talk about Morgan and Kyle, once again, shuts it down. Sutton then has Kyle’s back, basically telling her it’s fine not to share that aspect of her life with the group and therefore the public.

Back in the room, Garcelle says she feels like Sutton let her down and adds that Sutton always talks about Morgan in private but won’t say it to Kyle’s face. That’s my most consistent complaint about how Sutton plays Housewives: She’ll say a lot to Garcelle or in her confessional (like calling Dorit “Poor-it”), but she won’t say it to someone’s face. This time, however, I will give her a pass. Sutton explains that she talked to Kyle about it and heard that Kyle wasn’t going to divulge anymore, so she’s kind of not pressing Kyle in the way that Garcelle continues to.

The next day, on the boat, Sutton brings up her apology to Dorit again, but she does it in front of a group that doesn’t include Dorit and Kyle. This proves Dorit’s point that Sutton wasn’t apologizing because she was sorry; she was apologizing to save face with the other women (and I would also add the audience). If Sutton wanted Dorit to believe that she was sincere, she would have said this just to Dorit. That doesn’t matter to her, and Erika picks it up, saying that if she really meant the apology, she wouldn’t have to sell it to the group again unprompted.

Erika is taking this as her opportunity to point out Sutton’s behavior pattern. Erika says Sutton likes to come for women when they’re at the lowest point in their lives. (Erika didn’t make it clear that she meant in the group, which is a tactical error that Sutton goes on to exploit as a way to weasel out of the allegations.) Erika points out that she did it to her, she did it to Kyle, and now she’s doing it to Dorit. We get a nice handy compilation of all the times she did it to each of the women. Some of them deserved it more than others — especially Erika and Kyle, who were less than forthcoming — but the parallels are undeniable. Erika also points out that Sutton starts off like a nice sister but then ends as an adversary, and again, we get clips of Sutton giving Erika divorce presents and then turning on her. What we don’t see is her offering Dorit all this nice advice about her divorce the last time they were on a boat, only to turn on Dorit the next chance she got.

Everything these women have said about Sutton is true: that she’s erratic, that her words don’t match her actions, that she plays the victim, and that she shuts down conversations. We see that all again here. Sutton tries to end the conversation saying that she won’t be judged by these women when we’ve seen Sutton do just that on different occasions. Then she goes with a line she’s used so often it should be her dance single, “Pick on someone else.” But if Kyle, Dorit, and Erika are all saying they’ve had the same experience with Sutton, shouldn’t she at least consider that they’re right? It doesn’t make her a bad person; it doesn’t make her a horrible human being, which is what she always thinks people are saying. It makes her human, it makes her real. We all need to look at our patterns, some of which might be harmful, and find ways to correct those things. But Sutton, who is equally as terrible at taking a joke as she is at taking criticism, can’t handle that at all.

Eventually, Dorit asks Sutton if she wants to move forward, and Sutton, after mocking Dorit’s ever-changing accent, which honestly was funny, says she does not. She wants to be on ice with her. Sutton has canceled the apology because, as Erika and Dorit pointed out, she never meant it in the first place. Sutton is too concerned with how she will look, both to the women and the audience at large, that she’s always trying to do what she thinks is right, always trying to hit the target. But if the target is her truth, she will hit it every time. If she didn’t feel sorry for saying it, then say what she did in the confessional to Dorit’s face. It’s always wishy-washy, always back and forth.

Sutton shouts at the group, “This is not going to be Sutton on trial at sea,” but it should be. It was Erika on trial at dinner, Kyle on trial at dinner, and Dorit on being too poor at a caviar event at a now-shuttered eatery. That’s the thing about this show: Everyone is stuck holding the hot potato at one point or another, and it’s all about how you handle that potato. Erika surely didn’t handle it well, and Kyle is still trying to pass it off to someone else and failing. Dorit isn’t doing horribly, trying to take as much accountability as she can, which, honestly, is less than the bubbles covering Jennifer Tilly in her nude scene. But Sutton refuses to believe that she could ever get the potato. She is perfect; there is nothing wrong with her, and she won’t hear otherwise.

And when all of her deflections, going low, stopping the conversation, and playing the victim fails, she goes with her only other strategy: storming out. She goes down into the depths of the catamaran, opens a window, and lets the sea air blow across her face. She tells herself she can do it over and over again. She tells herself that she’s perfect; she tells herself that they are wrong. She repeats them repeatedly like a mantra, like the waves crashing on the shore, like the jolts of the boat as it hits the wake of a cruise ship that departed hours ago. Maybe the repetition is the bad thing, perhaps the waves keeping her afloat aren’t helping, maybe she needs to let herself go, sink deep, deep down to where the light won’t even shine anymore, and just as she is about to gasp for air, as the tightness restricts her chest like a million boa constrictors, as she’s finally lost all sense of time, direction, and self will she finally have something close to a revelation.