The Man in the LED Mask
Season 2
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
The gender-segregated nights out make for extremely cursed hangs.
Photo: Bravo
Despite all of Hudson’s attempts to cozy up to her last week, Ariana is officially single and moving out. This new chapter is marked with a dramatic scene of her taking the ferry from Manhattan to her new place in Brooklyn, like the opening of Working Girl if Melanie Griffith’s mother wore Party City wigs and smoked Newports. But this is great news for Liam, who is clearly into her enough to completely disregard Hudson’s boundary request. The pair even goes on a quasi-date playing beer pong this week with Kendall and Shai, who can see right through Liam’s act. “You know what building furniture means,” Shai ominously says after Liam offers to help her move into her new place.
And speaking of new places, Gia — a star of Next Gen NYC, mind you — is moving into her new apartment in Jersey City, which is notably not “NYC.” To add insult to injury, as she walks the streets of Jersey City, she says that it reminds her of the West Village. It’s almost too much to bear. While she’s happy to leave the nest, she wishes she were moving in with her boyfriend, Christian, even though she’s not sure what exactly he does. “Like… junk removal demolition,” she surmises. In any case, she tells him that she’s planning a girls’ night, including her new friend Rowan, and tries to explain to him who her mom, Brooke Shields, is. “Hannah Montana’s mom” is ultimately the description she lands on, and you know what? Fair play.
When we check in with Rowan, she tells us that she and Ariana quickly bonded over their shared experience of growing up with mothers in the spotlight. “Obviously in very different ways,” she clarifies. Yes — “Tardy for the Party” is a very different claim to fame than The Blue Lagoon. But if this means we’ll eventually get a scene of Brooke Shields interacting with Kim Zolciak, I’m all for this friendship. While we don’t get that just yet, we do get our first Brooke cameo this week as she scuttles around her daughter’s place, and even when she’s not doing all that much, it’s such a joy to have her on my screen. I’ll need more of her stat, but until then, on to our other pals.
As we learned from her bowling alley club and various event planning endeavors last season, Georgia is a hustler. But she says that her passion for nightlife has waned after Charlie and Omar decided to swoop in and steal her club idea, so she’s directing her focus to new opportunities. She and her best friend Cooper meet with a brand consultant to talk through one of these ideas, and I’m left wondering what it could possibly be this time. What he eventually reveals rocks me to my core. “Why are you starting a cleaning product brand?” he asks these budding entrepreneurs. A what? That’s right. Georgia, after establishing herself as a non-hands-washer last year (and doubling down over and over again), decided to sharply pivot to become a maven of cleanliness. And most unfortunately, the brand (or the idea of a brand) is called “Yuck!” Now I’m not a brand expert, but I don’t want to spray a multipurpose cleaner called “Yuck!” anywhere in my home. Especially one with a “musky” scent, as she brainstormed. Suddenly, the bowling alley club seems like a really good idea.
My perpetual confusion with these kids continues when we head over to Brooks’s apartment, where he’s chilling in an LED red light mask — but not just any LED red light mask. This one seems to wrap all the way around the entirety of his head, emitting light that’s supposed to be beneficial for his scalp and hair growth. To his credit, you definitely don’t notice any receding hairline issues if he’s wearing the equivalent of a light-up bike helmet.
Over FaceTime, Gia tells him that she’s planning a girls night, but that he can go to the guys night that her boyfriend Christian is planning. Why would he ever want to do that, he fairly wonders. This is an age-old plight that gay men have faced from the days of gym teachers splitting up boys and girls, all the way up to gender-segregated wedding parties — and enough is enough. Gender is a social construct. If Brooks is better friends with the girls than the boys, he should spend the night having fun with his friends. But no, instead he is forced to bro out with all the guys, worst of which is Charlie, whom Brooks understandably has zero desire to spend any time with whatsoever. And who could blame him? Especially because Charlie — even though he happens to be unknowingly twinning with Brooks with an LED mask of his own — can’t stop himself from making homophobic comments. He refers to the group as “the boys plus Brooks,” and later bizarrely says that Brooks is “an aging gay man. He’s got a boyfriend, he’s not gonna be a party gal forever.” It’s not enough for Charlie to be fired from this show; I need him to be fired out of a cannon. I suspect that the worst torture that happened in that crypto house was being forced to have a conversation with him.
He also weirdly texted Christian ahead of the night out that Brooks better keep his name out of his mouth, which Gia stealthily tells Brooks about. The weird, vaguely threatening statement doesn’t lay the groundwork for a productive night, so naturally the vibes are just all off as the boys hang, so much so that Christian regrets planning it altogether.
The simultaneous girls’ night is only slightly more successful. I like Riley, but she can come across as a mean girl — especially towards Georgia, who she clearly just doesn’t like, and thus she can’t say or do anything right. When she tells a story about a friend refusing to touch any surface on the subway, Riley judgmentally glares at Georgia the whole time before asking the group, “How many of y’all take the train?” I mean this so sincerely: anybody who refuses to take the subway or stigmatizes it should be banned from living in New York City, let alone starring in a show with “NYC” in the name. It’s one of the biggest red flags there is, and anybody should be deeply embarrassed to admit that they don’t take the train. Go move in with Gia in Jersey City if that’s the case!
In contrast, Rowan’s contribution to this conversation just makes me love her all the more. “Some guy took his schlong out and started going at it,” she recounts, adding, “I took it as a compliment!” Now THAT’S a New Yorker.
As if this night out wasn’t already painting Riley in a bad light, when she and Ava go up to the bar to get another drink, she awkwardly tries and fails to bring up some gripe about how they communicate with one another. It was a difficult thread to follow, seemingly for all parties involved, in part because Riley was drunk and in part because she loves talking in vague, open-ended sentences that could mean anything. But what I did clock for certain was her sharp turn into mean girl territory when Ava gently asked her to say “please and thank you” instead of ordering her to get her another drink. “You expect me to say please and thank you to you?” Riley fired back in a way that made me wonder if she remembered she was on television.
With both nights devolving into chaos, Brooks and the other guys decide to call it quits on this gender experiment and plan to infiltrate the girls’ night and merge groups. Will two wrongs make a right? Of course not, things are surely only going to get worse. But we’ll have to wait until next week to see just how bad things can get.
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