Apology Dunes
Season 10
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
2 stars
**
Kyle Cooke is making it very hard for his defenders this week.
Photo: Bravo
For years, I’ve joked about the collection of Amazon boxes that crowd the front door, and I always wonder about their purpose. We finally know. They are there to serve as an audience for Kyle McGill Cooke after he crashes out of a dinner. When Ciara and Amanda interrupt his apology, and he storms off, he goes to sit on one of the chairs on the front porch with the packages splayed at his feet like he’s a kindergarten teacher about to address a collection of antsy kids and tell them the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” But his Goldilocks, instead, is just going to serenade them with the sad tale of his romantic woes. It seems like this is the only sympathetic audience Kyle can assemble these days. As an ardent Kyle Cooke defender, it’s getting harder and harder to make a case for him.
Kyle talks to himself on camera all the time, but this monologue on the front porch reminded me not of Summer House but of Big Brother, where contestants regularly talk to themselves in empty rooms, but instead they’re talking to the cameras, they’re talking to the viewers at home. “I can’t imagine straight up laughing at someone as they’re trying to address a group of friends,” Kyle tells the boxes/the cameras/the viewers. This episode made it clear that being on a reality show for the entirety of their relationship has added a certain dimension to it that all of us muggles at home can’t imagine.
When Carl joins Kyle on the porch to talk about his feelings, Kyle says that Ciara always seems against him and that her opinions are starting to “rub off on Amanda.” But the only reason she’s always encouraged to talk about their relationship and that Kyle gets to see her opinions on their relationship is because it is filmed for a television show. It’s not an uncommon dynamic to bitch to your bestie about your spouse, but my spouse never has to hear those things or my friends’ opinions of what I tell them.
The link to the reality show becomes more explicit as the episode goes on. She talks about the DMs she gets from people about Kyle partying and doing suspicious things, which I assume means suspicious things with other female fans. Kyle talks about how he doesn’t want to be called an alcoholic “on national TV,” as if there is still local television or as if most people aren’t watching this on Peacock on a tablet at the gym. Amanda is crying to a producer about how she’s sick of having the same conversation every year. The saddest, however, is Amanda talking about how she and Kyle made great progress last summer, that they do every summer, but as soon as the cameras go away, as soon as he doesn’t have the audience to hold him accountable or the cameras to take footage of his behavior for “proof,” he always backslides.
This episode also makes it clear how much it’s not Kyle’s DJing or partying that is the issue; it’s his drinking. This all starts on a day at the beach when West, in his infinite wisdom, tells Kyle that apologizing in front of the group wasn’t the right way to go. He says Kyle thinks that a grand gesture is somehow more powerful, but what Amanda wants is a personal apology. Kyle pulls her aside to what he calls Apology Dunes, a spot where everyone on the beach goes to apologize. We see Kyle say he’s sorry to Paige, Jesse say he’s sorry to Ciara, and Mia 1.0 say she’s sorry to Lindsay in the same exact spot. Like every conversation between Kyle and Amanda these days, it quickly goes from a conversation into an argument.
The issue is Kyle’s drinking. Amanda says that she’s sick of worrying about what he’s up to when he goes out. Kyle says that once they got engaged, she stopped going out, which he’s upset about. Amanda answers, “My not going out with you should not change your faithfulness to me.” Period motherfucking dot. Kyle gets meaner and meaner as the argument rages, eventually saying that Amanda drives him to drink, which is the kind of barb that is meant to injure. However, it is also a key part of Kyle’s argument. Amanda says things are fucked up because Kyle drinks, and then Kyle says he drinks because things between them are fucked up. The whole thing is a snake eating its own tail.
Kyle keeps getting upset that all of his issues are boiled down to drinking, but there’s an easy way for Kyle to win this argument: stop drinking. If he were to stop and their issues continued, then the issue was never his drinking and he would be right. Amanda also makes the point that Kyle keeps saying he doesn’t know what it will take to make her happy, and she just keeps saying, “Stop drinking.” But he won’t or can’t do that, as if the answer is somehow mystical when she has been making this same point since the first moment we met Amanda way back in season one.
While Amanda is increasingly snippy with Kyle, she never gets as mean as he does this episode. He tells her that she drives him to drink, but also tells her to get some motivation and personality, which cuts so deep that one of the guys (I think Jesse Solomon, always both names) tells him to knock it off. Kyle goes for a dip in the ocean and comes back, and finally apologizes meaningfully to Amanda. He tells her that he loves her, and she returns the sentiment and says something has to change. Knowing that they do love each other is what makes all this hard to watch. We see Kyle get into bed, talking about how anxious and lost he is. Amanda says, in confessional, that she still loves the way Kyle lights up a room. Knowing that, seeing that Kyle is stuck, that Amanda can no longer accommodate him, that love doesn’t necessarily always win is even sadder than Kyle sitting on the front porch trying and failing to even get the Amazon packages on his side.
Ugh, can we talk about something fun? There is a lot of fun in this episode. Kyle’s idea to make cardboard cutouts of everyone for the house VIP room is absolutely hilarious and leads to some great bits. Kyle and West make it look like the Lindsay cutout is jerking off the Carl cutout in what is going to be a killer social media video when West drops it on Tuesday after the episode airs. Amanda puts the Ben cutout right in front of West’s door so that the first thing he’ll see when he tries to leave his room is a hot Aussie hunk that even the dudes in the house have crushes on. (Too bad Bailey steals the cutout for her own fiendish purposes, which probably include using it as a voodoo doll to enact a love spell.) Finally, Ciara hangs the West cutout from the balcony into the foyer, and it is one of the funniest images I have ever seen on Bravo TV dot com. (Speaking of which, Wirkus twin cutouts would have been hilarious, Kyle. I can’t believe you missed this gag.)
Speaking of West and Ciara, their relationship continues to be confounding. Even when she tries to get his attention with the cutout, West is in the kitchen and wonders if she actually called his name after she blanked him (justifiably!) for an entire summer last season. West still doesn’t know what to make of it all. He says, “I never even know if we’re friends, if we’re flirting, or if she hates my guts. She could be joking, and I could be being a wiener, or she could mean it, but I don’t know because we never talk about anything … but I never really know.”
Ciara is getting in on the action, too. She says that West is on probation and she’s the strictest probation officer around, but even she needs to clock off sometimes to flirt with the man. Can you blame her? He has the perfect body, he’s good at sports, he’s nice to his friends, he always sees the best in people, and he looks as edible as a dozen Cadbury Cream Eggs both in his undies as he does in glasses and an academic tie in his confessional outfit. We need to sit Ciara out on the front porch, the cicadas screeching in the breeze, and have the Amazon boxes talk back to her and tell her it’s time, let him back in, we all want it. We all want it badly.
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