Vanderpump Rules Recap – 2/16/15

Always the winner of the Douchiest of the Douchebags contest, Jax appears perplexed that Carmen is not planning on staying the night with him. No, Carmen will be leaving the reception and hopefully the memory of Jax behind and only a little bit of itchiness that she will probably have to deal with will remind her of the barely-evolved Neanderthal who once broke up with her in a sh*tty pizza place and later said that he would win her back because “girls are weak and can be broken.” And while I’m not sure if Carmen caved at a later date and allowed Jax reentry into her life, we should all take a moment to celebrate that someone on this show made a fine decision and I’d like a tee shirt made for me that has Carmen’s face on it at the very moment that she gazes at Jax with a look of pure and unadulterated disgust. I shall wear it on the high holy days with my favorite pair of skinny jeans, just as my forefathers did.

So Jax gets ditched and the bridesmaid he then tries to chat up is married and the whole thing is kind of glorious, except poor Scheana is still devastated that all of her best laid plans for her day as a cropped-topped princess are not getting laid in the way things usually get laid in her life. Where is her wedding planner? Why is the woman collecting plastic cups instead of organizing the tossing of the bouquet and the cutting of the cake and the dollar dance?

It is here that I must pause and admit that I have no clue whatsoever what a dollar dance is, but using the context of the term and the people involved, I’m imagining that it’s a kind of an unironic stripper dance where guests at a wedding throw singles at you. I could be wrong, of course, and I suppose that I could Google the term to find out for sure, but I think that I’m going to embrace my lack of awareness and take just a minute to gaze towards the cosmos and thank whatever God allowed me to achieve a modicum of education that has enabled me to live in a world where dollar dances make no sort of sense.

Also making very little sense is James, who has not listened to Kristen’s advice to wash down all of his alcohol with water. James is drunk as can be and all of his hidden fury and insecurities begin to sweat out of his pores along with the scent of tequila and he follows Kristen to the parking lot where she is planning to leave with Trevor, her bearded trainer. Furious and out of control, James begins to berate Kristen for making him into her “boy toy,” and I cannot possibly be the only person who desperately wanted to pause the action at that very moment so I could run upstairs and fling open my closet and find the white crinoline that’s stuffed in my Halloween bag and writhe around on the floor for a few minutes while singing Like a Virgin at the top of my lungs.

Kristen and James and Trevor and their cigarettes fight in the parking lot where Kristen and Trevor are waiting for their Uber (which got a sh*tload of free publicity on this episode), and James screams into Kristen’s face that he always has her back and that everyone talks sh*t about her and it’s because she is so f*cking unmanageable – and Kristen responds by punching him in the face.

Later on, James will say that he deserved that punch and I recently saw something online that indicated that the two of them are still together and what that means is that we now know definitively what true love looks like: it looks like desperation drenched in alcohol topped with thin hair and accessorized with a chin ass.

I recommend that none of us look directly at it.

Back inside the party, James tells Sandoval what Kristen just did and Sandoval has the expression on his face of a man who chewed off his own arm to extricate himself from a human albatross and is more than willing to live without a limb if it means he also gets to live a life without chaos. Then he announces to a group of his friends, “When I want to go on vacation, I just look in Ariana’s eyes,” and I’d like to take bets on whether – upon seeing this moment play out on television – Kristen’s entire head began to rotate or if she began to jab at herself with a crucifix.

The rest of the night went according to plan. Scheana tossed her bouquet. Katie danced in a fountain. Giggy didn’t wrinkle his tuxedo. And back in Los Angeles, Kristina went over to Stassi’s apartment where the two of them had drinks (has Stassi ever appeared on camera without a drink?) and continued to talk about a wedding that was taking place without them. At one point, Kristina showed Stassi a picture that Katie had sent of the reception, and Stassi marveled at how beautiful everything looked, and that “it looks like the kind of wedding I would have,” and I think it’s nice that we now have a barometer of what Stassi deems acceptable. We also find out that her eventual bridal party will consist of Kristina and her own mother and – well, that’s it.

Perhaps she should just elope when the time comes.

Back in the desert, James informs Scheana about the punch in the face and eventually the entire group goes to sleep. But the next morning, bright and early, Scheana recruits her friends to help her clean up the wedding like I used to have my friends help me mop the kitchen floor after I would throw a party when I was in high school. And it is during the cleaning process that Scheana – who didn’t see or hear a word of the fight as it went down – discusses how she is done with Kristen and how gross it is that Kristen threw punches at her wedding and, honestly, out of all the things that Kristen has done wrong that should have gotten her excessed from Scheana’s life, punching her boyfriend in a dark parking lot away from all the wedding action seems the least of her sins. Personally, I would have kicked Kristen out of my life when she strategically plotted the demise of my best friend, but I think that maybe Scheana is the kind of person who can only fully see a slight when it somehow involves herself.

And now, my friends, Scheana is married. I wish her the best and I’d like to propose a toast: may all of her future song cues occur as they should; may she always have the ability to twerk in formalwear; and should footage of her singing at her wedding exist somewhere, may it play on a loop during the reunion so we can all feel just a little bit better about ourselves for just a little while.

Cheers!

Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon. Check out her website at nellkalter.com. Her twitter is @nell_kalter.