Vanderpump Rules Recap – 1/30/17

Here’s an important lesson to internalize, my friends: people rarely change. While it’s possible for someone to maybe tweak his or her mindset and behavior and become, say, more patient, more reflective, or less quick to anger, an entire personality overhaul is never going to happen unless you’re dealing with someone who’s just spent a year surviving on bark and rain water in the wilderness – and even then it’s a slippery slope because you just know that person’s conventional behavior will slide right back in the second he swallows his first Hostess Sno-Ball. Change is hard. Change is inconvenient. And that inconvenience is why the committed liars will always lie, the horrifically selfish will never morph superhero-style into selfless crusaders, and a person who registers in the negative range on the emotional intelligence scale will very likely never fully understand (or care) that his actions lead to painful effects for which he is completely responsible. It’s a messy world out there and assh*les who have no problem being assh*les will rarely volunteer to remain diapered in padded rooms. They will continue to walk amongst us, and I’m really starting to hope they all get stricken with the sort of potent rashes that lead to puss-filled blisters if only so the rest of us can start identifying them by sight.

Our Vanderpumpers – and those foolish enough to love them – should probably go ahead and purchase stock in some Adderall-spiked-diaper-rash-destroying-Desitin because assh*les abound in Vanderland. We’re five seasons into this series and what’s abundantly clear by now is that not a single one of these people is willing to change or capable of change. Strategically speaking, I get it. I mean, the only thing someone like James has going for him is his ability to be a staggering prick. That’s his brand now – being a prick – and we exist in a world that weirdly celebrates this sort of bullsh*t behavior and so something tells me this little weenie-like emotionally-stunted man-child will never choose to overhaul his persona and risk getting kicked off the only real opportunity he’ll ever have to exist in the proximity of show business. Yes, he’s got that incredibly impressive residency spinning records at an empty hotel, but we all know he’ll f*ck up even a nothing opportunity like that in no time.

Now that we’re talking personal branding, let’s admit what we’re dealing with on this series:

Schwartz will forever be The Doomed One, a man so terrified of his now-wife that he’ll never be able to gnaw his way to freedom.

Katie, The Cruel Drunk, will never stop drinking because someone (I’m guessing it was Stassi, Kristen, or one of their collective imaginary friends) seems to have convinced her that her alcohol-induced fury is part of her Bravo-endorsed charm – and if you don’t agree with me, just remember that little bottles of tequila served as favors for her bridal shower, the one Scheana – that bitch – refused to pay for.

Speaking of Scheana, she is The Desperate One. There is something sad (besides a tapeworm) that currently lives inside of Scheana and that sad thing desperately wants to be friends with people who continually prove that they do not value her. I really hope that sad thing crawls its way out of her eventually, even if it makes its escape by shooting clear through her stomach like that ravenous critter in Alien. While such a scenario – a creature bursting forth from one’s stomach – sounds incredibly unpleasant, it can’t possibly be any worse than a life in which you hope that one day Stassi and Kristen will decide to like you.

Ah, Stassi. She will always be The Girl Who Is Right. And the reason she will always be right is because she surrounds herself with fawning idiots who mistake a raging personality disorder for loyalty. Stassi will forever be on some crusade to bury whomever it is she’s momentarily decreed needs to be destroyed because she is a person who gets her daily cardio by inhaling and exhaling hatred. And if there’s nobody around to fight with, I guess she’ll just fight with herself in the mirror. In the past that fight ended with her getting a brand new face, so it’s nice to know that some of her brawls actually end with clear resolutions.

Kristen is The Stalker and she will always be The Stalker. She takes great pride in the fact that she actually has nothing better to do than sift through the social media of people who appear to be content with life until she is able to locate what she believes is a nugget of information that will prove something dark and duplicitous and then she will expose that person in as cruel and public a manner as is possible and later that evening she will crawl into bed and smile at the dark ceiling because she is a f*cking insane person.

Despite Stassi’s best efforts to diagnose Jax as a sociopath by using a Buzzfeed quiz, I’m going to go out on a limb here and declare that the guy is not a sociopath – he’s just The Douchebag of the group. Jax is a guy who used to be really good looking and he used those looks to get whatever he decided he wanted or thought he needed from men and women alike and, when caught in a lie, he’d announce to the world at large some sordid secret he’d heard or made up as a clumsy attempt at deflected projection. This little plan of his often worked like a charm because that’s what happens when one surrounds oneself with dummies. Jax is no longer a kid, but he’s still a douchebag. His attractiveness, though, has faded and he now looks like a very sweaty ram with t*ts. I pray nightly that he never procreates.

Still willing to associate with such cretins, Sandoval is The Solemn One. I believe that he truly solemnly believes – deep in his solar plexus – that he can take terrible people by the hand and beckon them to make better choices. And you know what? Maybe Sandoval does have the gift of helping people in his midst to transform into something better and wiser than who they once were, but in a world bracketed by the context of a reality show where antagonism reigns, our solemn buddy doesn’t have a f*cking prayer.

What I’m saying here is that alliances may shift and the participants will grow older and sweatier, but these people will never change – and every single incident in tonight’s episode proves it. We begin with Sandoval and Ariana showing up at one of Lisa’s other restaurants so they can provide a tutorial about how to make drinks the Sur way. The one time I made a drink for someone else, I filled up half the glass with vodka and almost killed the poor guy as a result, so I’m going to give these two credit for actually knowing what they’re doing. But nobody ever really shows up to one of these producer-mandated appointments with only one purpose in mind. The teach-the-Villa-Blanca-bartender thing is clearly just a clever way to get Sandoval to reveal some exposition about James and his walking hideousness. Seems The Solemn One is taking young James to hypnotherapy in an effort to get him to behave like an evolved human, and that’s a very nice thing for him to do. But it might be even nicer if Sandoval waits for James to be hypnotized and then, while the guy is under, steals his green card and runs far away with it because if mass deportations are going to take place in this chaotic nation of ours, I think James Kennedy should be in the first wave of people to be banished, don’t you?