Can we get Gina Kirschenheiter totally fucking high every single episode? It’s so amusing watching her and Heather Dubrow wander through a technicolor tulip field, tripped out on magic mushrooms. They’re laughing at silly shit, they’re taking blurry pictures in front of clogs with tulips in them, they’re talking to the crying flowers, which the editors did us the favor of animating like they were in the classic episode of Broad City where they dose out on mushrooms themselves. What is best about it, however, is when Gina points out that the one who keeps pushing her to do drugs on this trip is none other than Fancy Pants herself. I love that she’s no longer saying “champs” but instead trying to get everyone to up their game with some mild and legal psychedelics. I’ve always been a Heather fan, but she’s ascending the rankings with this unlikely turn into Bravo’s chief drug pusher.
The trip to the tulip field is a little bit wild, not just because of the drugs, but also because it seems like the world’s biggest Instagram trap. Is this even a working tulip farm? Are they going to harvest these and sell them to florists worldwide or does this farm just grow them, charge middle-aged white women a flat fee to come make content in front of them, and reap the rewards rather than the actual flowers? Are they millionaires because of women like Gretchen who show up in ugly hats that look like the Bizarro-world version of a Devo hat and then tell people they get 20 percent off with their discount code? Is that a business model? Can I start one?
Gina’s trip continues at lunch, where she rambles so much that eventually her bestie Emily has to hush her up. It is a conversation not really worth having. The women are trying to create an issue between Jenn and Shannon because Jenn is considering going to Alexis Bellino’s wedding. I find this whole thing exhausting because I already know Alexis disinvited Jenn from the wedding, and that Jenn didn’t attend. Shockingly, the reason why has nothing to do with Shannon.
So why are we even fighting about this? I guess the point is that the ladies all think that Jenn and Shannon’s friendship is a little fake and that Shannon is spending all of this energy on Jenn because she will never hold anyone’s feet to the fire. She wouldn’t even make Shannon keep her feet in the moving hot tub they all take on the canal! I guess the point is that they think Shannon is avoiding any hard truths about her friendships with the rest of the cast and how they may be critical of her, so she can just yuck it up with Jenn.
Shannon is, after all, one of our most gifted physical comedians. Everything she does is just hilarious, whether that is hobbling around without a shoe because she has a blister or trying to steer their hot tub boat and ramming it right into another vessel. And what about the way she drives the boat? She’s sprawled out on the outer lip like Burt Reynolds on a bear skin rug, just asking to splash into that canal like a burrito turd into a toilet. In fact, how does Shannon not fall in? How is it that a woman who is so uncoordinated that she has to call emergency services to get out of her Spanx doesn’t do us the service of landing in the water and making us watch the other women fish her and her “Moisture than an Oyster” hat out of the canal?
Emily decides that she is going to have Tamra and Gretchen ride with her in her hot-tub boat, which she hilariously keeps referring to as a crock pot. Emily says this is her last-ditch effort to make the two of them get along. I fully appreciate Emily being the mediator and the voice of reason for this whole fight. And she does it while wearing a one-piece bathing suit, the garment that is the source of all her strength. This is a woman at the height of her one-piece powers, and she might have finally brought one peace to this fight.
It starts on a positive note when Gretchen apologizes for bringing up the 98 Degrees rumors and says it was wrong. Tamra reminds her that they agreed to knock it off with each other, but then we see Tamra was also saying shady shit about Gretchen the whole time. The ceasefire never held on either side. Emily says that they both feel justified in what they do because the other person hurt them, and it’s a never-ending loop of recriminations. (Heather Gay basically said the same thing to Lisa Barlow about her spat with Angie on the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and they’re both right.)
Emily then gets Gretchen to see that she had some part to play in all of this, that it hasn’t just been Tamra hammering at her for years, especially when Tamra says, “I don’t talk about you. You’re not relevant,” hitting her with yet another hammer. But it has been both of them, and it seems like Gretchen is finally understanding that her ploy of fighting fire with fire has been working about as much as her fiancé, Slade. (Ooooohhhh. Sick burn.)
Gretchen continues this revelation on the bus and starts crying. She says there’s been so much hurt that she doesn’t even realize what she’s been doing. It’s like she finally understands that hurting someone, even a bad person, doesn’t make you a good person. Gretchen is just as bad as Tamra, two boils on the same hairy ass. But it does seem like Gretchen realized that she has let the feud get the best of her, turning her into someone she doesn’t recognize. It continues back in her hotel room when she can’t stop crying, just the old and the new, the regrets and the injuries, all keep coming back. She feels like she can’t do anything to fix it; she can’t go back to the simple time of Sky Tops in Jeana Keough’s backyard and just undo every insult they’ve hurled and every bit of gossip they’ve slung.
When Gretchen arrives two hours late to dinner in the nicest food court in all of Amsterdam, it seems like she’s really ready to put this thing to rest, like she wants lasting peace with Tamra. Gretchen tells her she hates this back-and-forth, and now it’s Tamra who won’t concede. “Well, we stopped it and you started it back up again, so you can’t say you hate it, when you engaged in it,” she says. This leaves no room for an ending, no room for either of them to change their minds. Can’t Tamra recognize that maybe this is the turning point? She can perhaps choose peace, too. But they’ve known conflict for too long.
Gretchen tells Tamra, “If you feel like I’ve been bashing you for 12 years, I’m sorry about that.” She honestly, for the first time all season, seems like she means it. Tamra can’t hear it and just tells her that they talked about it earlier. The ladies were just talking about how everyone has to take accountability for their part in it, but Tamra says she feels like she keeps apologizing to Gretchen every two weeks. Yeah? So? Do it again! I do think they both want it to end (or maybe I just want it to end so badly I am projecting my desires onto two reality television characters I’ve never met). Still, for it to really end, they’re both going to need to eat some shit; they’re both going to have to say the sorrys over and over again until they both hear it, believe it, and think it could lead to a shaky resolution. That Tamra refuses to budge is just what Gretchen needs. It’s the thing that she’s been unsuccessfully trying to do all season: make Tamra look like an asshole.
Just when I thought that I would start writing a final paragraph about Gretchen staring out of her hotel room window reevaluating her past and how much she’s grown while the light on the canals tickles her smooth, smooth face we flash to the next morning and find out that the war isn’t over, that ammunition Tamra laid out a week before is finally going to explode in all of their faces. Tamra showed Gina some social media posts that Gretchen liked and Gina can’t stop thinking about them. If you’ve been following the news, these are posts that are against the LGBTQIA+ community, a community that every human who has exited Heather’s womb is a member of. Gretchen has denied she liked them and claims the screenshots are fake. But we all know what is going to happen next week: Gina will tell Heather, Heather will freak out, Gretchen will deny it, and then she’ll come for Tamra once again. This particular snake can’t stop eating its own tail, and as much as I would like both of these women to stare out their windows while the stars batter down long-dead photos to dance on the top of murky canal water, I think all of the stars will implode all at once before that happens.
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Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.
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