Vanderpump Rules Recap – 2/23/15

Over at Pump, the Lucky Puppy event is underway, and maybe nothing made me happier than watching all of those precious doggies find owners who will love them. I wanted to reach through the screen and grab the dog who had its tongue hanging out of his mouth as a permanent feature, but that technology has not been invented yet, which means that both Apple and Google are slacking.

Sitting together at the event, deep in conversation, are Jax and Sandoval. Jax tells Sandoval about how Kristen has been in constant contact with him recently and that it’s all about the Miami situation.

“Should I just ignore her calls?” Jax asks Sandoval.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about me to Kristen at all,” Sandoval tells his stupid friend, and he reiterates that both he and Schwartz have felt rather betrayed by Jax because of his continuous habit of telling tales about the men he claims are his closest friends in the entire world.

Jax puts his head in his hands, devastated that he has been such a sh*tty friend and Sandoval speaks to him quietly and with a solemn tone while wearing a knit beanie on his head and the entire scene is maybe the least classically-masculine thing I have ever witnessed in high definition or in real life. To be certain, I grabbed a hold of the testicles of the man closest to me and shook them like a Magic 8 Ball while asking if this moment on Vanderpump Rules was in fact the least classically-masculine vision I’d ever been blessed with gazing at directly.
The answer? Ask again later. F*ck those Magic 8 Balls…

Before we can skid our way into the biggest scene of the night – Kristen orchestrating a confession from Jax whilst surrounded by witnesses – first we head over to Stassi’s apartment so Kristina can pick out a dress to borrow from her friend and get to appear on camera in the process. Win-win! Stassi tells Kristina all about her meeting with Kristen, and she doesn’t change or embellish the story in its retelling. She explains that she gave Kristen the advice to try to move forward, but there’s very little chance of that happening since Kristen has essentially devolved into a human cadaver stuffed to the brim with pathos, the likes of which Aristotle could never have conceived.

Stassi also informs Kristina that she has been asked by Lisa to style the annual Sur photoshoot, an event that always makes me laugh because it just strikes me as the kind of thing a producer suggests doing as a way of shoving everyone in the cast into one setting so truths, lies, and hair-pulling will ensue, but perhaps I’m just cynical and every restaurant holds elaborate photoshoots for their staff. Stassi ends up earning a few more points from me when she tells Kristina that she is turning down the opportunity because she simply doesn’t want to be in a room with people she despises, and not even the sweet suggestion by Kristina that Stassi could choose clothing ten sizes too small and then stuff Scheana into it so she feels badly about herself all day long serves to get Stassi to change her rather rational mind.

Hopping onto a metaphorical pendulum that will swing us from rational to batsh*t-out-of-her-f*cking-mind crazy, we finally join Scheana, Shay, Kristen, Rachel, and Jax for dinner. These five people collectively look like the most miserable group in history ever corralled to eat a meal together, and it’s one of those glaring times when I cannot help but think that there’s no way that Scheana would sit at that table if she were not contractually-mandated to be there. I’d like to say the same thing about Jax, but food is being served and I’m pretty sure that Jax goes where the meat is.

Kristen’s plan is this: she will get Jax to admit that Sandoval did sleep with Miami Girl, thereby confirming that Sandoval has cheated on Ariana. And by getting confirmation, Kristen will be vindicated from being called a liar – which again, I have to mention that I can’t recall too many of these people harping on Kristen’s dishonesty as the core of her troubles. I have personally called this girl a “limp-haired beast” and compared her to the equivalent of foreskin, but I don’t think I have ever called her a liar.

Scheana is at that table and she is sipping wine and looking simultaneously bored and a little nervous and that’s when Kristen bursts out with her tired diatribe about how Jax has told her about Sandoval’s indiscretions and all she wants is for Jax to admit it to a crowd because it’s not fair that she has been judged for cheating when Sandoval has cheated and Schwartz has cheated and everybody has cheated, so why should she be the one who is judged for being crazy? Then her head spins in concentric circles and her eyes bulge out of her skull and she laughs maniacally and levitates over the table and pukes out a pea-green substance and tucks a thin lock of hair behind her ear and nods serenely when her friend Rachel says, “I don’t want Kristen to look crazy anymore – because she’s not.”

“Kristen,” Scheana explains calmly to the camera in an interview, “people think you’re crazy because you slept with your ex-boyfriend’s best friend, got your friend punched in the face by a stripper, had some girl fly across the country to confront Sandoval, yelled at Lisa, got fired, and punched your boyfriend at a wedding.” She sums up Kristen’s lunacy in a rather concise manner, but this horribleness will not end due to logic; it will end by imploding after Jax, a tortured moron of a soul, reveals the truth.

“Okay,” says Jax, fully breaking under a little bit of pressure and feeling the need to betray someone close to him because he hasn’t done so in the last twenty-four hours. “This is what happened. The girl was in the room with Tom. They were having sex. Do I think it happened? One hundred percent.”

As the words left his grotesque mouth and then hung in the air so that Scheana, Ariana’s best friend, could grab a hold of them and drag them back to Ariana and destroy her life in less than a minute, Kristen’s face broke out into a smile so sinister – so vicious – that it was difficult to also concentrate on the fact that she raised her hands in the air and snickered, “Yes! Victory is mine, bitches!” and proceeded to look happier than she ever has before because she was finally surrounded by other peoples’ pain.

But Scheana is not reacting the way that Kristen wants her to react, which would be by calling Ariana from the table to tell her that Sandoval does not love her and never has and that – by the way – Kristen is Scheana’s new best friend and she’s planning to redo her entire wedding so that Kristen can be the real Maid of Honor. No, Scheana bursts Kristen’s maniacal bubble by telling her that she’s still not so sure that she believes what anybody is saying about Sandoval cheating and that Ariana doesn’t believe it and that’s really all that matters. And that, my friends, is when Kristen brings out all the evidence in her sticky arsenal: that Miami Girl has all kinds of information on the defining characteristics of Sandoval’s d*ck, and her incredibly accurate knowledge of the telltale markings prove that she saw it in close-up and I really hate myself that a part of me cannot stop wondering what the f*ck is on Sandoval’s d*ck? Is it a tattoo? Is it a freckle shaped like Kristen? What is it that makes that penis so identifiable? I fear that I will go to my grave never knowing the details.

Sick of Kristen’s glee over the impending pain of her friend, Scheana and Shay get up to leave, but before they can make it to safety in the parking lot, Kristen confronts Scheana to tell her that she will never stop hating Ariana.

“I’m so sorry that your best friend banged my boyfriend,” she sneers. “I don’t feel bad. That b*tch is lucky that I’ve been really f*cking cool.”

To translate Crazy into English, what I think Kristen is saying is that she has not a wee bit of regret that Ariana will soon find out – due to Kristen’s successful manipulation of a moron – that she has been betrayed and that Kristen believes that plotting her death and bringing random girls into bars for confrontations illustrate just how f*cking cool Kristen has been to Ariana this entire time.

On that note, the episode ends. Scheana looks spent and like she wishes she had thrown herself brows-first into a volcano in Hawaii so she would not have to deal with this insanity; Jax is congratulating himself for holding onto a secret for more than fifteen minutes and is already plotting how he can make his verbal betrayal somebody else’s fault; and Kristen will probably fall into a deep and dreamless slumber later on, knowing that at least she has truth on her side. Then she begins to drool onto her pillow and the pattern that her drool creates looks exactly like Sandoval’s one-of-a-kind penis.

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.