Loose Lips and Deep Rifts
Season 11
Episode 5
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
As the tension between Salley, Molly, and Venita finally boils over into a full-blown fight, it’s becoming clear that the women are taking over the show.
Photo: Bravo
GIRRRRLLLLL FIIIIIIGGGGGHHHHHTTTTTT!!!!! This is the moment I’ve been waiting for since the trailer, when Molly finally takes Salley and her extra E out behind the woodshed for a good, old-fashioned reality TV whoopin’. The fight itself, if you can even call it that, was amazing, but it also epitomizes why this is turning into a great season. Just like when Summer House finally flourished when they added West and Jesse Solomon (always both names!) and figured out how the boys could support the always fascinating girls, it seems like Southern Charm is finally flourishing now that they’ve added Molly, Salley, and, to a lesser extent, Charley and figured out how the girls could support the always fascinating guys. Okay, fascinating might be too strong a word, but you see my point.
Southern Charm has always been a show about terrible men and the women who tolerate them, and that is largely still true. However, the Austen, Shep, and Craig triumvirate is starting to get stale, as they keep having the same fight season after season. Meanwhile, it’s the ladies who are bringing a fresh dynamic, and, while some of it is fueled by how they’re dealing with the men, some of it has absolutely nothing to do with it. With Molly, Salley, Venita, Madison, and Rodrigo (who is not a girl but has a bigger impact on their relationships than the boys) cooling themselves with American flag fans in Craig’s overly hot kitchen, I thought, could this be the show? Is this the new heart of Southern Charm? I sure hope so.
The relationships of the women, and the fight specifically, do have something to do with the boys, but that’s only because Salley can only justify her existence in relation to being desired by men. Her dogged pursuit of Craig, who she sees both as a good catch and her ticket to staying on the show for a long time, is upending everything that’s going on with the gals. When she has Charley over to make a coffee cake, she makes it incredibly clear that she is interested in Craig. The whole thing is her passive aggressive way of saying, “Back off my man.” Salley is proving to Charley that she can cook for him when Charley can’t. Then she says that she and Craig were talking about the kind of life they want together on a farm, and so Craig is going to help her pick out some chickens for the backyard.
This is a huge mistake. Do not bring living creatures into this debacle of an imagined romance. If a guy says he likes bangs, you go and get bangs. If a guy says he likes farms, you don’t saddle yourself with the care and feeding of a bunch of stinky, shitting, gobbling poultry for the next however many years. Wait, I take it back. All of those chickens will probably be dead by the time you adequately outgrow your bangs. Still, Salley is making the same mistakes she made before, with her ex-fiancé, who talked her into getting breast implants that she didn’t want and then had removed last season.
Salley’s centering of Craig is upsetting two of her relationships. Charley says that she’s walking on eggshells around Salley, but adds in her confessional that Charleston is so small that if she kept away from every guy her friends had a crush on, then she’d have no one to date. And, let’s face it, Charley is clearly winning this fight for Craig’s attention. He made terrible, runny piña coladas for her. He even got his assistant Jack, who is also in love with him, to buy a slushy maker just for the occasion, even if he couldn’t figure out how it works.
There is more tumult between Salley and Venita over Craig. Salley tells Charley that Venita seems worried that she is going to date Craig. Um, doy! Of course she’s afraid of it. Salley is actively pursuing him. She’s all like, “If he makes a move, I’d be interested,” but she is literally going chicken shopping with this man. I’m sorry, she’s trying to play it cool to not piss off her friends, but she’s working harder for him than all the beehives in his backyard.
It’s the relationship between Salley and Venita that kicks off the big fight. Venita is talking to Molly and Rodrigo about Salley at Craig’s Memorial Day and Shep Rose Speedo Humiliation Party, and Molly mentions that Salley was talking about Molly’s vaginal reconstruction. The way the story is told in the episode is not in chronological order, so I’m going to spell it all out for you now. Venita heard from a “source” that Molly had her front bottom redone and that it was paid for by a sugar daddy. Venita told Salley this in confidence when she was trying to earn enough points with Salley to keep her from dating Craig, whom Venita hates. This, obviously, didn’t work. At Whitner’s birthday party and scream-a-thon, Salley told Rodrigo this information. Rodrigo, in his important role as Chief Bone Carrier, brought this information to Molly, who then passed it back to Venita, unaware that Venita was the original source of the gossip.
Venita, now realizing that Salley sucks more than a Dyson vacuum factory, immediately apologizes to Molly and says she won’t do it again. Molly forgives her because she likes Venita and, well, she doesn’t care that everyone knows she has a pretty little kitty, but she did correct the record and said she paid for it herself. Rod also reminds Venita that he was the first to tell her to be “wary” of Salley.
Salley goes into the kitchen looking for Venita, whom she hasn’t seen in a while, and Venita is like, “Be nice.” And Salley immediately thinks she did something wrong. Salley approaches Venita’s comment like someone who knows she has done a number of things wrong to Venita but can’t figure out which one she’s mad about. She’s quizzing her to find out what she should apologize for before she apologizes for the wrong thing and gives Venita two things to be mad about.
She eventually figures out that it’s something to do with Molly. “Molly and I were both bitches to each other,” Salley tells the room, which also contains Molly, Rodrigo, and Madison, always happy to be in the right place at the wrong time. Molly says it was true, but then Salley kept talking shit about her. Salley asks what she said, again, not sure which of the terrible things she’s said about Molly would have gotten back to her. Rodrigo admits that he told her about the vagina comment.
“You were being shitty,” Molly says.
“You’ve been fucking shitty,” Salley says to both deflect and project it back onto Molly.
“You are shitty always, you fucking asshole,” Molly says, leveling all five of them: the entire kitchen, the broken drink machine, the ceviche station in the backyard, whatever horrible outfit Kory has, the beehives out back, the Piggly Wiggly down the street, and practically all of Charleston. “You are malicious and you need therapy because you fucking suck,” she concludes, surveying the rubble. Salley, seeing stars like she’s Elmer Fudd and just had a piano dropped on her, decides to mollify Molly and sort of apologize. Molly says she thought they were cool, but even Venita is “wary” of her now.
This brings the fight back around to Salley and Venita. Salley thinks she’s been “a damn good friend” to Venita. Um, is she sure, because the next sentence out of her mouth is, “I love you, but I don’t want to stop hanging out with Craig.” Right! Then you are not a good friend! I want to differentiate between what Charley is doing to Salley and what Salley is doing to Venita. Charley knows that Salley is into Craig, but she’s hanging around the group and flirting with Craig so Craig can make his own decision about who he wants to date. Salley knows that Venita has a problem with Craig and his character. He’s said some not-nice things about her and wants nothing to do with her. Venita has warned Salley that she has a problem with him and has enumerated the reasons. If Salley is still actively pursuing Craig, she is choosing him over Venita, showing that she doesn’t trust Venita or care about her opinion and is a terrible friend.
She’s even worse when Venita goes to leave the party and kisses Craig (their host!) on the cheek to say thank you. Salley says, out loud to the whole group, “You can kiss him on the cheek, but you can’t let him hang out with me?” This is the worst thing Salley does all episode. Now she is outing to Craig and the entire group that Venita still has a problem with him. She’s exposing things Venita told her in confidence to score points with a man who doesn’t even want her! Molly is right, Salley needs therapy because she sucks. In confessional, Salley accuses Venita of being two-faced. Um, no. It’s called being polite! Maybe Salley should look into it.
Craig, obviously, is oblivious to the whole thing. All episode, the boys were just concerned about Austen, how he is still pissed at them, and how he went to Charlotte to hang out with his girlfriend rather than go to Craig’s party on a Wednesday afternoon, and I can’t stress this enough. Who can go to that kind of party? This is a party for influencers! Whitner, the Vicki Gunvalson of the show, has to leave in the middle to take a Zoom in the living room. He’s like, “I have to work, and you people come second.” This man makes me love him more each episode.
There is one great conversation with Craig, and it is, not surprisingly, with one of the ladies. Madison corners him and tells him that she didn’t like him wasted on tequila and yelling at the party like he used to. She just flat-out asks him, “Are you okay?” The boys are always concerned with who is mad at whom and why, and whether or not it’s justified. Madison cuts through it all and asks the foundational question: Why is Craig acting like this, and does he need some help? Craig, finally, admits that he slipped, he didn’t like the way it made him feel, and that he called his therapist afterwards to get back into treatment after two years away. This info is coming from Craig, so enough grains of salt to cause a slug genocide, but I think Austen and Shep would have loved to hear this, which is as close to an admission of guilt as Craig is ever going to give. They just needed to take a minute and ask the right question, as Madison did.
Speaking of questions, Craig, Salley, the mess, the girls, and everything we’ve been talking about this entire episode, I am totally unsure what we were seeing in the final conversation that Craig, Salley, and Kory have in the hot tub while Charley is running around the poolside doing their errands. Craig says he and Salley have had a lot of good times in the hot tub, then recounts a night in the rain in the hot tub, and it’s unclear whether that was the night Charley was also in the hot tub with them. Craig said that the morning after the rainstorm they went to breakfast together. To clarify Kory asks, “Did y’all stay over?” This is where that dastardly Southern contraction is not our friend. Does Kory mean “y’all” like just Salley, or does he mean “y’all” like Salley and Charley? Either way, Sally and Craig both seem to confirm it, winking and nodding their way to acknowledging that something went down between them sometime in the recent past. But it’s unclear, and between the whirr of the hot tub jets, the blur of the melty piña coladas, the buzz of the beehives, the batting of Salley’s eyelashes, and the rising in Kory’s swim trunks, I don’t know if we’ll ever hear the truth.
VULTURE NEWSLETTER
Keep up with all the drama of your favorite shows!
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice