What better way to ring in the new year than to watch Angie walk into a platter of glasses face-first? Opa! I’m eternally grateful for the mounted camera that happened to catch that run-in, which shattered several glasses, stained the walls, and left Angie with a busted lip. But as Bronwyn points out, her lip filler probably saved her from chipping a tooth. I’m just worried that, between this and her broken finger on the yacht, Bravo’s insurance policy isn’t going to cover her for next season’s trips.
Once Angie pulls herself together and stops the bleeding, the women all don matching gowns to do a photoshoot in front of their scenic Greek view, on the way to which Heather briefly has what she refers to as a nip slip. But slipping a nip is putting it lightly — her entire boob was out. And rightfully so, it’s vacation! And it’s yet another example of how closely related this show is to the golden days of RHONY, which similarly gave the edit bay’s blurring department a run for their money. Meanwhile, Lisa doesn’t understand why every trip has to involve matching outfits or costumes, which she (of course) only enjoyed the time they all dressed up as her.
It’s at this little photoshoot that Heather and Whitney have a whispery debrief about how remarkable Meredith’s 180 has been. She went from raging at them all to being happy as a clam in no time flat. But why question these things? Shouldn’t they just enjoy this newfound peace and joy? Heather seems down to just ride the wave, but when Whitney gets lunch with Bronwyn and Mary, she insists on investigating this change of mood, which is a pretty typical pattern for Meredith. “She has too many highs, too many lows, too many mediums, and it’s not adding up,” Mary says, and I’m immediately gripped by the concept of having “too many mediums.”
The tone that this conversation takes is so serious that it’s almost jarring. I thought this was a fun, silly girls’ trip, and now suddenly the whole table is crying out of genuine concern for Meredith and her mood swings? Ultimately, the driving force behind this concern, particularly for Mary and Whitney, is the experiences they’ve had watching their sons’ and fathers’ addiction, respectively, and how that behavior mirrors what they’re now seeing with Meredith. Mary even says that there were patterns that she missed the first time around with her son, that she now doesn’t want to miss with Meredith. But are these fair comparisons to make? Or are their intense personal experiences with addiction making them perhaps hypervigilant now when it comes to Meredith?
We’ve watched a lot of people on these reality shows who have genuinely been struggling with very real addictions, but we’ve also watched addiction be thrown around as an unfounded dig time and time again. But what is it this time around? Ultimately, the behavior we’ve seen from Meredith (who we’ve been watching for six seasons now) doesn’t seem all that crazy or remarkable enough to warrant such a serious conversation. Sure, we didn’t get to see what happened when she allegedly almost downed a flight during Crazy Rich Asians, but generally speaking, Meredith seems to be the same way she’s always been. Her two modes are either disengaged or bellowing — and that’s not really enough to tearfully deem someone an addict. But if they want to see a real mood swing, I can only imagine how she’s going to react at the reunion after seeing the implications being made in this scene.
And if that conversation wasn’t enough, Bronwyn chimes in to pile on, saying that a few months ago she was in New York and ran into Seth out to dinner with a female “investor.” She said she thought nothing of it at the time, but now feels that Meredith is acting so defensive and fearful that there might have been more to it. I’m yawning. When I die, I want a comprehensive report of how much of my life was spent listening to people accusing Seth Marks of cheating. I fear it will add up to days, if not weeks. Enough already. If there were anything there, we would have gotten to the bottom of it by now. All respect to Seth, but he doesn’t necessarily seem like a discreet mastermind. Bronwyn even says he’s the one who came up to them at the restaurant! Why would he do that if he were with his mistress? And besides, people who live in fart-filled glass houses shouldn’t be throwing stones.
Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, Meredith is cutting up with the other ladies at the spa, without a care in the world. At least until Britani takes the fun time a little too far with some playful splashing, and they decide that they have no choice but to kill her. Well, sorta kinda. The jovial camaraderie comes to a screeching halt as they all scold her for getting their hair wet, even though, as Britani points out, on the last trip, they poured an entire pitcher of water on her and she didn’t make a fuss. But my favorite part of this fight, which largely feels like the other women just hazing Britani to entertain themselves, is that they’re all whispering because they have to be quiet in the spa.
Angie complains that her hair now feels crunchy because the water probably had people’s piss in it (alright, sure), and laments how long it took her to do it, despite Britani countering that it shouldn’t take her an hour for it to dry because she’s a hair expert. “Your hair is synthetic, it doesn’t take as long,” Lisa fires back and you can catch a glimpse of the childlike joy in her eye as she says it.
After a brief digression on the way to dinner in which Lisa waxes poetic about her love of trees and how she tells them that “it’s okay to tap me on the shoulder” because “it’s their way of giving hugs,” she returns to tormenting Britani for sport. With a gleeful Regina George-like cadence, she casually asks Britani if she’s an alcoholic because she heard that she was alternating between throwing up and downing drinks the whole yacht trip. Where could she have heard this, you might wonder? Cut to two hours earlier, where we see Meredith submerged in a bubble bath relaying the rumor to Lisa. “I honestly don’t know who said it,” Lisa says when pressed for a source. Eventually, it gets traced back to Meredith, who heard it from Bronwyn. But again, there’s no weight to these allegations — they’re simply passing the time, like a couple of bored cats terrorizing a little mouse.
But eventually it feels icky, and the table points out how hypocritical it is that Meredith got upset at being called an alcoholic, and now they’re doing the same thing to Britani. “Nobody called her an alcoholic,” Lisa says, and the show immediately flashes back to her saying, “I outed alcy!” mere minutes earlier. Perfect television. “I’m sorry, I don’t think you’re an alcoholic,” Lisa eventually says, after her fun little game started to get too real.
Heather tries to restore some balance by pivoting the conversation to compliment Britani instead, which naturally brings up her star turn in the 2012 ABC Family original movie The Mistle-Tones, alongside Tia Mowry and Tori Spelling. Lisa even chimes in to acknowledge her Broadway bona fides, but things take a turn when Heather casually says Britani has accomplished more than a lot of them. “What?” Bronwyn snaps, and suddenly the whole table takes that throw-away compliment to Britani as a dig against all of them, and they accuse Heather of being her mouthpiece the same way Lisa is Meredith’s.
When Whitney starts saying this is a false equivalency because Britani is an underdog, Lisa snaps at her, and they start yelling back and forth, during which wine is spilled. “That was an accident! That was not on purpose!” Lisa quickly says, as if she’s worried that the reality television police are about to swarm and take her away. And in a sense, something like that does happen.
In fact, it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. A member of the staff approaches the table and not only informs them that the restaurant is now closed and they have to leave, but doubles down when he can tell that they’re intent on finishing their conversation. “We’ll leave in five minutes,” Angie tells him in Greek, but no, he tells her that they have to leave immediately. Her face upon hearing this will forever be burned into my brain. She was shocked, appalled even, upon the realization that she was being thrown out of a Greek restaurant of all places by one of her fellow countrymen. “This is my country, sir,” she tells him, echoing the infamous dash cam footage of Reese Witherspoon’s wrongful arrest. But the restaurant had simply had enough of these women, and with food still on the table, they were forced out. “Thank god they left,” the server says in Greek.