Horsing Around
Season 4
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Bravo
One of my favorite jokes to tell Americans is, “Do you know what they call Thanksgiving in England?” Okay, now you have to say, “What?” (“What?”) “Thursday.” It’s so funny experiencing American holidays somewhere else, where your friends and family back home are posting pictures, and you’re living in a world where it just doesn’t happen. That’s just what Fourth of July is like in London. Everyone in America is not only celebrating but basically taking off most of the week, and we’re just here in Charles III’s England, not at all independent, sweating away with no air conditioning as vines grow into our houses. It’s very disconcerting. The only time it’s good is when it’s Super Bowl Sunday, and I can just live in blissful ignorance that squads of men are giving each other CTE so that the billionaires behind Fan Duel can make even more money.
It is a sad little Fourth of July celebration that Margo has with her husband, Jacques (who is very handsome, but I still don’t know what he does for a living), her stepkids, and her daughter. They have some American flags, some party poppers, French fries, and “posh dogs,” which is what Margo calls the hot dog substitute. You just can’t buy good, authentic American hot dogs here, and when you try to get decent ones, they’re more like sausage. Strangely enough, every supermarket in London has an “American section,” and it’s just sugary cereal, Pop-Tarts, Nerds, and these gross footlong hot dogs in a glass jar and some indeterminate liquid, like they’re on display in a museum. Gross. But Margo is right, the most American thing about this party is filling up their glasses with ice. Whenever anyone comes to visit my house, I offer them a glass of water “American style,” which just means with lots of ice. Gotta represent for my people.
Speaking of visitors, Myka’s brother, Bron, is over from the States for her birthday. How do I put this delicately? Bron is hot. He’s an absolutely stacked personal trainer who has a handlebar mustache, so he’s one striped singlet away from looking like an olde timey strongman at the circus. Myka and Bron meet the ladies for a workout class in Richmond (which is so far west it might as well be Ireland), and I can’t believe that Martha Sitwell showed up with a yoga mat to exercise. Missé and Margo, obviously, are no strangers to working out, and I would guess their FYP is at least half Pilates content. But Martha? She does not look natural when exercising, but she did seem to enjoy the part where Bron took off his top. Even Mark, who would rather paint peonies than peenies, probably would have enjoyed that as well. Shocking absolutely everyone, the next scene is also Martha exercising, and it turns out she has a trainer? I would guess that Martha had seen the inside of a gym as many times as Kimi had seen the inside of an AA meeting (and the answer to both is: once, but only by mistake), but apparently, she is working on her fitness. I love it when a diva surprises me.
After the workout class, the talk is about Martha’s picnic, where Margo made Kimi cry by doing nothing of her own, and Mark and Kimi made Margo pout with literally every single thing they did. Margo says she feels “bullied and attacked” because the two of them teamed up on her and no one else did anything, but did she miss when Martha was coming to her aid and telling Kimi to knock it off? Margo does have some good insight into Mark, claiming that he’s insecure and he thinks the clown part of him is better than the real him, and that is what he shows the world, even if what he has to do to make people laugh is be mean to them. However, she goes a little too far to call him a “psychopath” and “liar” and even goes so far as to say that he’s “gaslighting” her, perhaps the most abused word in the English language. Can we declare independence from “gaslighting?” Can we light it all on fire with our sparklers?
We learn a bit more about Mark when he goes to visit his antique dealers, or mural painters, or just the workshop of some gay fairies that he’s employed to remake his villa in Italy. He says that he was bullied for the first 20 years of his life, so he knows that Margo wasn’t bullied; he just made a few quips about her clothes, which were horrible. Mark loves to be thought of as untouchable, but that’s a defense mechanism. Margo is wrong about a lot, but she was totally right about Mark’s insecurities, probably because she has the same ones herself.
The odd thing about this show is that the conflicts seem to play a game of telephone. Kimi talks shit about Missé and then ends up getting in a fight with Margo. Kimi and Margo go at each other at the picnic, and now Margo is mad at Mark. It’s like Myka is going to try to stab Emma, and Lottie is going to get injured. Just kidding. That won’t happen. That means Lottie would have to do something. (Sick burn!) Myka has her birthday party at a polo field so that everyone can take lessons and her hottie brother can wear cowboy boots and look like the most American thing in England outside of a McDonald’s soda cup that is overflowing with ice. (Why did Missé, who is single, hot, and throwing her boobs around willy nilly, not even have a little flirt with Bron? Does she not know what a great storyline this would be?) When Kimi arrives, she and Margo make up almost immediately when Kimi says she’s wearing a white flower crown for peace and then jokes about being a “piece of shit.” Margo says, “Finally, we agree,” and they all laugh about it. See, this is the way to deal with the mean girls, Margo. Show them their own tricks, make them laugh, and they won’t care at all.
Because the fights on the show transfer, that means that Margo and Mark are now fighting even though they won’t talk to each other. In this instance, I really think that they’re both wrong, that Mark is being mean to Margo for no good reason, that Margo is taking it far too personally, and the more that she cares about it and talks about it, the more cringe Mark thinks it is and just gets madder. What is also strange is that, when the rest of the group reports back to Mark, they’re basically telling him that Margo is upset that he said something mean about her feather coat at the party. That’s not quite it. She’s mad that he’s nice to her face and then talks shit behind her back, which I think is a much worse infraction than the one he thinks he’s being accused of. He keeps saying that she’s overreacting, and he’s right, if it were just his comments about her clothes, sure. But I do think Margo is right that there is a pattern of behavior between her and Mark that needs to be corrected. However, Mark is also right, they don’t have to have a big chat about it, Margo just needs to dish it out to Mark a little bit, show that she can take a joke, and build some mutual respect, and they’ll be happier than Bron in a protein bar factory.
At the party, Mark and Emma have a sincere moment where Mark talks about his father being in the hospital and how he’s going to Italy to be with him the next day. He’s also tending to an auction for chairs on his phone, and Emma comments they all have ways to escape, “I go running. You buy chairs.” This might explain why, when Missé approaches Mark to try to get him to reach a détente with Margo, he just says, “So many things matter right now, but this doesn’t matter.” No, it doesn’t matter, but finding out that he hurt someone’s feelings and that there is an easy way to repair it does matter, or at least it should. Yes, he doesn’t know Margo that well, but given they’re in this show together, can’t he at least pretend? Instead, he doubles down on, “She is of no consequence to me,” which, I don’t know, is kind of a shitty and callous way to live, especially from someone who says he understands bullying.
Martha, meanwhile, was having a great time at the party. We find out that Marth is an expert rider, once the best side saddle rider in England, which is sort of like being the best In-N-Out Burger in California. She is more adept on horseback than any of the other polo aspirants, including Myka, who had the whole idea for the party and got engaged on a polo field. We also learn that Martha has a horse daughter, Daphne, named after Paige DeSorbo’s cat. Well, it’s not really a horse daughter; it’s the daughter of Martha’s late horse, so it’s Martha’s horse granddaughter. However, after Martha’s divorce, she couldn’t afford to keep her horse granddaughter, so now her horse daughter lives in some kind of horse orphanage somewhere in the countryside, and Martha hasn’t gone to visit her because she’s too embarrassed. Daphne only reminds her of her failures.
After riding the polo ponies all afternoon, however, Martha is invigorated. She says she needs to go visit her horse granddaughter and, while she can’t afford to bring her home, she can at least take her horse granddaughter out to a movie and buy her a toy like an absentee father who drops in only once a year. The horses, in general, are making Martha feel strong, like her old self, invigorated in a way that she never feels after exercising. “Life is all about beautiful moments,” Kimi says.
Martha lets out a sigh and answers back, “I want it all to be beautiful.” Of course she does, Martha dresses like a war widow whose husband hasn’t died yet, of course she’s a romantic who is holding out for the best version of the universe.
Kimi answers back truthfully, “But it isn’t, but it’s about appreciating the ones that are.” These are really the two ways of looking at the world. Martha’s view, where everything can and should be great and then is disappointed when it’s not, and there’s Kimi’s where everything is shit but occasionally, on a sunny day in the middle of summer, with your friends around you just barely fighting, with plentiful champagne and birthday gifts and a hot trainer from Boston who no one is flirting with, life will surprise you and something golden will fall in your lap. What Kimi is seizing on is what to do when that happens. You have to cherish it, you have to grab at it, you have to hold onto it as long as you can. These moments are like horses, like Daphne far away and forgetting her human grandmother, and you have to hop on them like a horse that is yet to be broken, wrap your fists around its fiery mane, and hold on while it trots you around the field for a full time, your heart bursting with love and your thighs bruising with pleasure.
Sign up for the Housewives Institute Bulletin
Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice