Viva Los Hamptons
Season 10
Episode 11
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Bravo
There are two ways to watch this episode and talk about what happened — and like the Sex and the City movies, neither of them is good. The first is to take the show on its merits, to adjudicate what happened as it played out last summer in the Hamptons and look no further into the future. Then, of course, there is digging around in it, looking for clues, and reevaluating the past based on everything we now know about West and Amanda are exploring their “connection” and Ciara out here posting spon con reading both of them to filth. Carl is, after all, a mess, but he was a mess back then for entirely different reasons.
Let’s look at what goes down at Jesse Solomon’s party, which is vaguely Vegas themed because he puts a VIP rope around some couches and throws an inflatable cabana into the pool. (Okay, the cabana is cool.) Based on the guest list, it looks like a slew of girls that Jesse and West (Wesse? Jest?) invited the night before when they were at Hampton Social or wherever the youths consume their BuzzBallz these days. (No matter where it is, I have a feeling Danielle Olivera is on the dance floor.) West tells Jesse in their bedroom that one of them is “hot.” She quickly finds him in the kitchen for a little flirt, and she looks like the missing Nader sister. (I pray for your mental health and your FYP that you do not get that joke.)
As the party is going on, Ben and Ciara sit in the fake VIP section to talk about Sabrina, who is definitely not a teenage witch because I love that Sabrina and I hate this Sabrina. West comes over and sits next to them, and Emmie Nader shimmies over to sit on his lap. She says something I can’t quite understand, but the words “make out” are definitely in there. West says, “I used to date the girl sitting next to you … but, like, who cares.” Emmie Nader, a real girl’s girl, asks if she should get up, but West tells her that it’s fine, and she stays right there. Ben comments about how stupid it is and doubles down in the confessional that West talks about how he regrets things he did in the past, and then he behaves like this in front of Ciara. He’s correct: West is crazier than the Joker on bath salts.
They have a little smooch sitting there on the same sofa (or two sofas jammed together), and then Ciara gets up and goes inside. Then West and Emmie Nader take it to one of the sun beds. Amanda walks over and asks if she can get in for a cuddle. (I know. I know. I’m trying to just describe events right now, but I died.) After annoying them for a few minutes, Amanda gets up and says, “Watch my butt while I walk away.” Sabrina, who swallowed all the water in the pool and still could not quench her thirst, then goes over and tells West that Ben needs him in order to break up his clinch with Emmie Nader, whom they send home because the party is over.
West them passes out in the fake VIP section outside. Because he’s passed out with his shoes on, they can draw on his face, so Amanda literally writes “DICK” on his forehead. Well, we all know what she thinks of when she looks at West’s face. When West comes to, with most of the house barring Ciara and Mia around them, Amanda asks why he decided this was the party where he should make out with a girl in front of Ciara. West says that he’s been behaving for the past two years and that Ciara has been cuddling with Jesse in front of him, that this should be chalked up to a drunken oopsie. He does make a valid point when he says that, while he and Ciara have been flirting, they haven’t had one discussion about their friendship — so Ciara could be fully dating someone right now, but they’re making him feel like he cheated on his wife. Even Ciara agrees with him a bit when she says, “It’s like weird because on the one hand he doesn’t owe me anything, but I would never sit right next to him and make out with a guy.”
Kyle is trying to agree with West, but Amanda tells him to shut up. She’s defending Ciara and thinks Kyle should, too. Amanda says, “If you want to progress in your relationship with Ciara, then there is a level of respect that we have to have to live together.”
Bailey also adds that she is on West’s side until she finds out they were sitting on the same chair when he was making out with Emmie Nader. “The same chair thing is just crazy,” Bailey says. These are the points exactly, along with what Ciara said about how she wouldn’t do this to him. If we’re looking at it just as what happened, West is a little right that Ciara should have taken him off probation enough to talk about where they stand as friends. (It looks like that convo is coming, a bit too late, next episode.) However, what he did showed a lack of respect not just to Ciara but to everyone in the house. Emmie Nader gave him the opportunity when she asked if she should get up for him to say, “Yeah, let’s just go over there.” It’s one thing to flirt with another girl or make out with her at a party but, but to quote Bailey, “The same chair thing is just crazy.”
Once Kyle and Amanda start squabbling, Amanda leaves to go up into Ciara’s bedroom to talk to her about everything. Amanda, Ciara, and Mia then do a stealth mission to sneak out onto the balcony to try to hear what West and the others are saying about the situation. They’re like Charlie’s Angels if they never got out of their pajamas or left the house. Back inside, with Amanda wearing a “Boys Lie” sweatshirt, Ciara spells out her relationship with West perfectly, “I know I had this gut feeling of why I didn’t want to be friends with him, and this is why. This is the reason I don’t trust him. He can’t be a friend to me. He doesn’t see me. How can you be a friend to someone you can’t see?”
Even without knowing everything that has transpired in recent weeks, West looks bad for blatantly disrespecting Ciara in her own backyard and not taking her feelings into account. Knowing what we know now, things still look bad for West, but they look even worse for Amanda. Remember how bad that drooling goo monster at the end of The Substance looked? She looks worse than that. She looks worse than every gangrenous foot and popping pustule on this season of The Pitt combined.
But during the summer, Amanda does the right thing, and she sticks up for her friend. She tells West that making out with a rando next to Ciara at a party is a crime. That means, like West seeing Ciara and not caring that she’s there, Amanda knew that she and West getting together would hurt Ciara. She knew that Ciara still had some kind of feelings for him, that she would be uncomfortable watching him have a drunken make-out with another girl. If she knew that, then she knew, she knew all along. Couple that with her telling West to look at her ass as she walked away, couple that with West in the kitchen talking to Amanda about how Ben wants to smash her, couple that with Ciara’s continued support for Amanda, and we not only have polygamy (too many couples!) but we also have the beginnings of a scandal.
Ciara’s support of Amanda happens earlier in the episode, from the fallout from the Ben and Sabrina drama, when Amanda talks to Mia and Ciara about it. Ciara tells Amanda that she’s been beaten down so much in her marriage that she has let her magic die, that she doesn’t trust how amazing she is anymore. Ciara says that Amanda thinks her feelings and opinions are stupid, but half of everything Kyle has accomplished belongs to her. They’re so real and so true that they’re making each other cry, which, in that moment, looks like the true bonds of sisterhood, but, knowing what we know now, looks like a million daggers into Ciara’s perfect back.
Speaking of the Ben and Sabrina drama, that whole thing is dumber than an eject lever in a helicopter. As I said before, I do not like Sabrina. She came into that party at Lindsay’s hotter than a Dunkin’ coffee to the crotch, pretending like she knew everyone, saying that they’re going to be besties, getting an invite to the share house with the swiftness. Sorry, but I just can’t. I also agree with all the guys in the house that Ben was acting super single just two weeks ago, and now he needs to protect the sanctity of his love from Amanda’s offhand comments at a housewarming party? To quote my great-great-great-great-grandmother, “Girl, please.”
I don’t know the context Amanda said it in, but I would have to assume that it was some kind of joke or at least she was trying to make light of the situation, and now Sabrina is being uncomfortable because of something someone she just met said? How about how uncomfortable the rest of the cast was that Sabrina, whom they do not know, was commenting on their relationships. Sorry, but I hate her, I hate him, I hate cheese (not relevant, but I wanted to put it out there), I hate this whole situation.
What is strange to me, though, is how Amanda talks about it in the moment and how she talks about it in the confessional. When Ben brings it up to her at the golf night, Amanda says that she’s sorry, she didn’t mean it like that, and she’ll apologize. When Sabrina gets to the house wearing suede boots that go all the way up to the knee, which probably gave her shin acne, Amanda again says she’s been sick about it and apologizes. Then Sabrina, who made a huge deal about it, says it’s no big deal, they’re going to “make memories” and, ugh, get her out of here.
For someone who is so deferential to this whole situation, months later, when she films her confessionals, she’s all upset about it. “I don’t know what is going on,” she says in a confessional about Ben bringing it up. “I don’t know what is happening. This girl just showed up, and we’re supposed to be like [starts clapping], ‘There is love, welcome.’ No. This man has been so fucking single all summer. He showed up single, he’s acting single, and then she came back into his life, and he’s like, ‘Amanda, I’m falling in love. How dare you?’ It’s like how dare I what? How dare you? I’m married. How dare you, sir?” Okay, so what happened for Amanda to go from “Oh, I’m so sorry,” to “How dare you, sir?” I don’t know. I’m asking you. Do you know? Do you know, sir? (That extra sir is so Paige DeSorbo coded.)
What else happens in this episode? KJ debuts a confessional look that none of us can see because it is entirely camouflaged. Jesse Solomon (remember when it always used to be both names?) is dating some girl he met three weeks ago at a party at the house, question mark. Oh, Carl and Bailey. Just as everything seems like it’s falling apart, Bailey talks to Amanda about how much she likes Carl and how she gravitates toward him, and it’s so cute and adorable and the kind of nerd-based love that we haven’t seen since Zooey Deschanel married a Property Brother and went into retirement. He talks to her about how he needs to be more honest with Kyle, but he has a hard time doing it because he used to get the confidence he needed from drugs and alcohol. She is sweet and supportive, and he is opening up like a flower in the springtime. It’s wholesome, it’s lovely, it’s everything we needed, and while they’re on the same chair, we wish that they were in the same bed because it’s their love that might just save us all.
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