Reunion Part 1
Season 10
Episode 17
Editor’s Rating
5 stars
*****
Photo: Jocelyn Prescod/Bravo
The devil works hard, but a Bravo producer works harder. This reunion is everything we wanted — ever since the scandal first broke, we wanted to be in the group chat, to see how everyone was reacting as the statement dropped, to discover the emotions that rippled through the group. Thanks to the machinations of In the City confessional filming, Lindsay was on a coach in front of a green screen, and Kyle was in the building. He tells her to pick up her phone, and they read West and Amanda’s statement and give their reactions in real time. Then Jesse calls Lindsay, then Mia, and they’re all joined in. Then Carl enters the chat on Kyle’s phone. This is what we wanted, and we got it. They did it, Joe. How many spells were cast, how many virgins were sacrificed, how many first-borns were murdered so that this could happen? No matter how many, it was still a bargain because, wow, what great television.
“This is so fucked up,” both Jesse and Mia say. Kyle says that he heard from Amanda the night before and got a “check the box” text from West before the statement went up. They all wonder how Ciara is doing and who is going to check up on her. “You don’t fuck your friend’s wife of 10 years,” Jesse says, as if it’s some kind of revelation and not, you know, the most basic, standard friend etiquette.
As everyone piles into the reunion soundstage, it is still like the experience that we, as fans, have had since the statement landed with a Nagasaki-sized thud. Carl is in the dressing room with the dudes, saying that, in 10 years of the show, this is like nothing he has experienced, with West and Amanda in a dressing room of their own, sequestered from the group. He says he can’t believe everything West and Amanda have been doing, like making out publicly at a baseball game. KJ tells him he was supposed to go to that game with West, but they’re not friends anymore, so he took Amanda.
The boys are tittering about West’s nudes, which all ended up in their inboxes somehow, and wonder why anyone would take a pic of a flaccid dick and, if they did, why they would send it to anyone. Then, as everyone sits down, West gets a text that his nudes have leaked, but he hasn’t seen them. Jesse tells him he has, and West’s first question is, “Am I hard?” Why do you have to ask that? If my dick pics were leaked, I would immediately know that I was hard because I have never sullied someone’s inbox with my softie. Also, I would know it was mine because I probably leaked them myself. (Who wants the alt?) Jesse shows it to him, right there, on the show. West says it’s him. Everything we wanted, everything we needed from this reunion we got, and still it gave us more. Remember to send thank-you notes to each of the dead virgins’ families.
Sitting backstage, Amanda says she can’t breathe and doesn’t know if it’s because she’s nervous or because her corset is too tight, but she says it emphasizing the second syllable. “Cor-SET,” she says, rather than COR-set. Damn you, Snooki, for teaching a whole generation of people to mispronounce the word. As Lindsay says, Amanda looks great in her butter yellow dress with the flaps fanning in the breeze. She does not look as good as Lindsay in her swooping red dress that shows off her amazing body, or Ciara in a bra top and fringy skirt that looks like what Tyla should wear on her next album cover. Bailey and Levi — who they pull up a folding chair for at the end of the couch — also look fantastic in coordinated mint green, which Andy dubs, “Soft Bar Green.” The worst dressed isn’t on stage. You know the worst dressed is Ben’s girlfriend, Sabrina, sitting at home in knee-high boots, a choker, and some Fashion Nova monstrosity that she bought on the off chance that she was invited to the reunion. Luckily, I sacrificed my firstborn to prevent that from happening. Sorry, Jacob Peter Moylan. You will be missed.
Andy gets right into the West and Amanda bombshell, which is strange because it’s not recapping what happened this season. This isn’t a reunion to talk about what we’ve already watched; it’s a reunion to talk about everything that has happened since. Ciara says that she first suspected things were going on between West and Amanda on January 17, when she called Amanda to invite her to drinks with her and Mia and noticed her location was at West’s house, and she didn’t respond to her for 30 minutes. That’s when we find out that she had been being very shifty with her location, often turning it off because she knew she was up to some shady shit. Ciara accuses Amanda of investing more in her friendship with West than she invested in her friendship with Ciara and Mia, who also supported her all summer through her breakup. When Amanda tries to interject, Ciara shouts at her, “Shut the fuck up!” We’ve known Ciara for years, we’ve seen her get rowdy at a reunion, but, oh honey, this is something different.
Jesse says he didn’t know anything about their relationship before the statement, and West and Amanda clear him of this. They both admit to lying to Jesse, both to his face and by text, and to lying to everyone about this whole thing. Ciara brings up that West had a girlfriend. He admits to seeing someone and that he spent the night with her the night before he went on WWHL and denied his relationship with Amanda, and both he and Amanda say she knew about it. My jaw is already on the floor, but then Mia says, “Amanda, why are you doing this? You went from being married to being one of West’s side bitches,” and my jaw falls through the floor, through the basement, through the subway tunnels, through layers and layers of rock to the molten core of the Earth where it gets a little singed and then comes back to rest on my face again.
Then we get the part with the leaked audio where Amanda says you can’t help who you fall for. Everyone tells her that she can, Ciara calls Amanda a snake in the grass, and everyone questions if Amanda is still legally married. Of all the arguments against their coupling, this argument is the silliest one. Amanda and Kyle were separated, they were living apart, and they had decided to end it. People are going to get mad because the paperwork hasn’t been filed yet? Come on.
The most devastating piece of evidence is when Ciara goes through her texts with Amanda, and we see every denial, every opportunity she had to say something, every single lie that she told her best friend for no good reason. A lot of questions are answered, but the biggest remaining is why, and specifically, why lie? There isn’t one good reason they give for it; in fact, they don’t even give a reason, they just say they are sorry for it. That they lied and don’t give an excuse for it means they knew what they were doing was wrong, and they didn’t care about hurting any of the people in that room. They don’t owe us, as an audience, anything really, but that display of callousness to their friends is damning.
Andy asks who made the first move, and West says that he looked at Amanda one night and wondered if something could be going on. Yeah, but that’s not a move. Who made a move? They say the first time they kissed was after that brunch when West was with all the boys, including Kyle. Amanda says that they didn’t have sex until after the statement. Not that night, as if it was a celebration, but in the subsequent days. Amanda is trying to sell all of America the most beautiful bridge. It goes all the way to Brooklyn! They try to tell us, in the days after the statement, when the internet was coming for them, the tabloids were hounding them, everyone they knew was checking on them, those were the days they were feeling horniest? That’s when they decided it was time to P in V to see if this thing was worth it? Guys, I hope you like the new bridge I just bought.
After this whole section of the super-sized reunion, Andy asks Ciara what her intentions are for the rest of the reunion. She responds, “We might as well discuss the details before I put them in the ground and cover them in dirt.”
Andy moves on to some other topics, and we get a few surprises. Mia talks about her relationship with grief after her parents’ deaths, Ciara talks about her mother taking over renovation duties on her grandparents’ old house (how is no one filming this for a show?), and Carl tells Lindsay she looks great and seems to mean it. KJ talks about his relationship with his big sisters Mia and Ciara and then tells us that he’s been struggling with his mental health. In the fall, after the season was filmed, he tried to self-harm, ended up in a mental health facility, followed by rehab, was diagnosed with BPD (which I assume is borderline personality disorder), and is in therapy and getting help. Oh, I just love this KJ, and my heart breaks for him. It is so touching to see the support he gets from everyone on the couch, but I can’t help but worry. He says the audience has helped and has been supportive, but that isn’t always the case. We all know they can go from love to hate to love again to hate again. Just ask West! Is reality television the place for KJ? Is he just too damn good for this grubby, terrible world and all our out-loud opinions?
Know who might be better at this world than I initially gave her credit for? Bailey (don’t know her middle name yet) Taylor. She expertly clears Ben right off the end of that couch. We revisit the joke she made about how he and Amanda wanted to sleep together, and he says that they had never had a conversation before, and she lets him know that was not true at all. Then she gets to the real truth: that he likes to reprimand women. She didn’t like how he talked to her, how he talked to Amanda, and how he talked to Sabrina, and when we see all of these put next to each other, there is a pattern, and she is totally right. She asks, “Why does he only pop off at women?” and then supports DJ Kyle Cooke when he’s more wrong than wearing shoulder pads to the beach. Ben gets upset that Carl’s yelling turned Bailey on when he pissed her off. “He wasn’t yelling at me, a woman, you jackass,” she says. In that moment, a hand materialized from behind the couch with a pen and a season 11 contract.
The conversation turns not back to West and Amanda, but back to West and Ciara. Andy asks about how Ciara softened toward West and what West did when he got back with Ciara. This is where West looks the worst. He essentially says that he had dinner with Ciara after they made out multiple times the final weekend to let her know that they weren’t going to be anything romantic. He says they didn’t have sex together, and he thinks that means he handled it better this time: He made it clear they were friends. Um, sure. That is until we learn that he still made out with her, slept over her house twice, and was sending flirty texts. That is not how you break up with someone. This is not letting them down easy; this is leading them on. Seriously, does West have no idea how relationships work? He seems emotionally intelligent, but does he not get how what he is doing is cavalier at best and cruel at worst?
Lindsay says she sees his charm, how she’s being pulled into him right there on the couch, and that fits West’s pattern: that he pulls women in so he can climb the ladder and chase their clout and then disposes them when he doesn’t need them anymore, which is just what he’ll do to Amanda. Ciara isn’t letting Lindsay get all the best licks in. “I honestly think that the best woman for West is like someone who is not going to check him on anything, and that’s totally Amanda. She is very mute, she’s going to be that weak figure that he needs, and he can always be the star in the relationship, so maybe that could work.” The hole is dug, the grave assembled, and Ciara is doing what she promised: wielding her tongue like a shovel and piling the dirt right on top, and you can hear every rock, every clod, every speck hitting the wood as she drops them.
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