This is a public service announcement: Do not Google “Puerto Vallarta parasailing accident.” As Vicki, Heather, Taylor, and Jenn are headed to the boat they will be dragged behind and held aloft with a sunglasses-emoji parachute, Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. said that there was a horrible accident where a woman’s parasailing line snapped and she ended up floating to a whole different town and landing on a roof. I was like, Vicki, you are fuller of shit than the porta-potties on the last day of Burning Man, so I looked it up. Um, bad idea for anyone who likes water sports. (No, not what you’re thinking.) There is a buffet of terrifying videos, and I don’t know why Vicki ever let herself go airborne.
Vicki and Heather gliding through the air is my favorite moment of the whole episode, though. Vicki starts screeching like a jungle full of monkeys on molly and Heather tells her to go to her happy place. “You’re at Coto Insurance. There are Post-it notes. There are legal pads. There are staplers.” The hilarious thing about this is that anyone who has ever watched this show knows that, yes, that is Vicki’s happy place.
Speaking about Vicki and Heather, this episode really was about the two of them. Well, there were some other highlights, like Emily and Gina trying to figure out what turtles eat and deciding that it’s salad. Why not just ask Kim Richards or Ramona Singer, Ms. Turtle Time herself? Speaking of turtles, the guides for the women’s turtle swimming trip were both named Diego, which sounds like it would be a racist joke if it weren’t entirely true. There was also more drama about Jenn and Ryan, but of all the dead horses that I have encountered in my professional career, this dead horse has almost turned into a rescue dog named Lucy Lucy Apple Juice, so I’m just going to skip it.
We’re going to talk, instead, about Vicki and Heather. I’ve been working on a new theory about Vicki. I would consider her, along with the first-season casts of New York, New Jersey, and Atlanta, “first-generation Housewives,” the women who started filming their shows before they even knew it would be called Real Housewives or what a Real Housewife is supposed to do. These women showed up on-camera just being themselves and not playing any sort of role. Vicki signed onto this show as a lark and didn’t think this would have any impact on her life. Boy, was she wrong.
She was so successful at being herself that she never tried to be a Housewife. The same goes for Teresa Giudice, Ramona Singer, NeNe Leakes, and other first-generation ladies. They didn’t have glam squads, they didn’t self-produce, they didn’t hunt for story lines, they didn’t try. Of course, the results were spectacular. They didn’t know that you could be a Lisa Rinna, a Gizelle Bryant, or a Kenya Moore, someone who isn’t just great TV but makes great TV.
What’s annoyed me so much about Vicki this season is that this is what she looks like when she’s trying. She gets on the bar at Andele’s and whoops it up and talks about her love tank, keg stands, and family vans, running through the greatest hits. This is not a Vicki that we know and love. This is a Vicki desperate for attention and to have her orange back.
In this episode, it seems like Vicki lets go of her antics and starts to be herself again, and, know what, I like it! I think it starts when Gina takes her to task for saying that Jenn ruined her family for a loser. “You don’t know the history here, Vicki, so don’t come into our vacation and attack one of the girls on our vacation,” Gina says, basically abolishing the fourth wall. What she’s saying is, “Vicki, you don’t work here anymore; don’t show up and tell us how to do our jobs.” I mean, she’s like Bob Iger refusing to give up her role at Disney.
Then Vicki finally gets honest with us. “I left my husband for a loser and I will never forgive myself, and I hope that’s not you.” There she is! That’s our Vicki. Sure, she’s hypocritical, self-involved, and completely delusional, but when you get a flash of brilliance like that, you realize why she is the very deserving first recipient of the Wifetime Achievement Award.
Crazy, silly, old-school Vicki is there for the rest of the trip, from not being able to walk across the roped-off section at their treetop restaurant to having no clue what a shaman actually does. (The answer, Vicki, is to make white women feel better about themselves.) The most Vicki thing, however, is when the fight breaks out with Heather at the final dinner and Vicki gets up and goes to apologize to the waiters. “It’s very uncomfortable for me to be around people who are fighting,” Vicki says, with so little self-awareness that I don’t think she remembered her Social Security number at that moment. Thankfully, the editors give us four squares of Vicki yelling at people over the past two decades to show that this woman has no idea who she is, what she represents, or how she got there, and we fucking love her for it. Welcome back, Vicki. I don’t think she needs an orange, but maybe in future episodes, she’ll stop trying so hard and just be Vicki, the one who originated the game.
Now that we did Vicki, let us move on to Heather. Many of you in the comments have accused me of hating Heather, and, well … I kind of do. That’s not true. I actually like Heather, and I have always found her shtick to be amusing, but what I can’t stand is how she refuses to accept how she has any part in how the women are responding to her. Emily and all of the other women (but mostly Emily) have told her that she can come across like she thinks she’s better than everyone. In the immortal words of (checks notes) Heather Dubrow, “If everyone keeps telling you you’re dead, it’s time to lie down.”
When Heather talks to Taylor in the Tulum boutique, Taylor says that she thinks the reason the other women are against her is her money. Heather is correct: She shouldn’t have to apologize for being rich, but it’s not just being rich; it’s something else. It’s encouraging the name Fancy Pants. It’s calling Champagne “champs”. It’s having a tagline that says, “If you’d like to reach my standards, I suggest you get a ladder.” Heather’s brand is “better than you.” She may not think she is actually better than anyone, but by acting like it for so long, that’s how they all feel about her. That is as much Heather’s fault as their own.
I’m sorry, but Emily was right when the women were on the bus. Emily and Gina make it into a big joke that Heather just followed Emily on Instagram, but that is a thing. If you’re friends with someone, if you’re on the show with them, then you follow them. Period. This is why Emily thinks Heather thinks she’s better than everyone, because of things like that. Heather complains that she doesn’t feel part of the group, but she’s always keeping one pump in the action and the other pump in hoity-toity land where no one else is involved. If Heather wants to feel included, she needs to do something other than show up with gifts every time they hang out. (Yes, Gina is right; this comes from her mother and is deep-seated, but I’m not a therapist. I’m a reality-television recapper, so I don’t have to fix this problem; I just have to describe it.)
I did love Heather’s explanation for it, though. She said when she “left this friend group,” she unfollowed everyone because she got FOMO. (Um, the fourth wall this season has been so chewed up that it could be the one destroyed by raccoons in Grey Gardens.) I wish Heather had explored that more. Told the women how much it hurt to be fired, how she couldn’t even look at them having fun because it made her feel left out. But she didn’t. Heather has to keep her composure at all times; she has to keep it cool, and she won’t really let us in. Have the other women been coming for her this whole season? Absolutely! But I think the reason she can’t conquer this break with them is that she can’t find her place in the group without being above it.
At the final dinner, everything completely falls apart, and I somehow end up totally on Heather’s side. It starts when Shannon mentions what Emily said earlier, that Heather told her that Shannon was talking shit behind her back. It turns out it wasn’t Shannon who said it; it was Tamra. Here’s the sequence of events, at least as far as I can decipher it: I think that Heather mentioned something to Tamra about how the people on the cast when she joined back up were “fucking losers,” but she meant Dr. Jen and Noella, the new women from last season. When Tamra saw Heather hanging with the whole crew at BravoCon, she said, “I guess you’re hanging out with fucking losers.” (This marketing for BravoCon is so genius I can’t believe Bethenny Frankel didn’t think it up.)
So when Shannon brings this up, Heather turns this onto Tamra and says she was the one talking shit, even though she was just repeating Heather’s comment. The story, however, comes out in dribs and drabs and makes Heather look horrible when I don’t think she did anything wrong. Gina gets upset because she thinks that Heather was calling her a “loser” the whole time when she thought they were friends. “I called Noella a loser,” Heather says to Gina, putting both her fist and Noella’s vagina stack through the fourth wall.
That is the distinction that is lost in this game of telephone. Heather wasn’t calling the cast losers, she was calling Noella a loser. (Poor Noella, out here collecting strays like she just got a job at Vanderpump Dogs.) What’s bad about this is that it feeds into the narrative that Heather thinks she’s better than other people. However, to be fair, she is better than Noella, who was (sorry again to Noella) kind of a loser. Where she’s wrong is that Tamra wasn’t really talking shit, she was making a joke to Heather. Yes, Heather is as bad at jokes as she is not wearing a ponytail.
Gina is inconsolable at this point, thinking that Heather was always phony with her, but that’s not the case at all, and Heather got caught in the trap that she laid for Tamra. Since the fourth wall is down, she says that she hates the show and doesn’t want to be on it anymore, which follows a hot-mic moment earlier in the episode where she says she hates all of the women.
Does Heather hate them all? No! I don’t think she does. She is sad, frustrated, far from home, and sending her kids off to college. She’s retrofitting a Roberto Cavalli penthouse so it doesn’t look like an Italian grandmother’s boudoir. She’s trying to find a new forever home in Orange County that is close enough to her kids’ schools but far enough from Shannon Beador so that she doesn’t run into it drunk in the middle of the night. (More strays for Shannon!) Heather has a lot going on, and not being right about anything and not being able to make herself fit in is the least of her worries, but maybe it should be before Vicki comes in here and “woo-hoo”s her way into snatching Heather’s orange.
