Tag: The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

Did Mary’s church service help to heal (or “hill” if you’re Whitney) our fractured group? Of course not, but one can dream! Maybe they’ll have better luck at the post-service Sunday Social that Mary is hosting for them all at our favorite Salt Lake jaunt: Valter’s. “Oh, your guests are here,” Angie tells Mary when Meredith and Lisa walk in, so then again, maybe not. But at least Mary is gifting them all beta fish as party favors!

The only person missing from the lunch is Britani, whom Mary called ahead of time to explain that she was snubbing her because she called her ungodly. Britani ultimately apologized, and while it didn’t earn her an invite, it did inspire Mary to think that there might be hope for this group yet.

So let’s get into it. We’ve heard what all the other women say happened, but Meredith maintains that they’re blowing it out of proportion — so where do we go from here? When Meredith says she couldn’t have tormented Britani the whole flight because she watched two movies, the women begin investigating. What movies? “Crazy Rich Asians, and one other movie I don’t recall the name of,” she says. Rough start. And what happened at the end of Crazy Rich Asians? Genius question. “I don’t remember,” she says. Meredith, you shouldn’t be answering any more of these questions without a lawyer present! “Crazy Rich Asians has a big ending. It’s a big moment, you’ll remember,” Heather says. This is one of the funniest gotcha moments I’ve ever seen on Housewives. Since Lisa watched it too, they ask her if she remembers how it ends, and without hesitation (but with a spoiler alert warning from Bravo), Lisa rattles off the movie’s ending. “I obviously fell asleep before the end because I didn’t see that part,” Meredith chimes in, trying to cover her ass.

Since Lisa continues to downplay the situation, they tell her that she clearly realized how big a scene it was, and that’s why she didn’t go through customs with them. But Lisa says that was just because she didn’t realize she had Global Entry. Alright, if we’re investigating whether Lisa Barlow has Global Entry to get to the bottom of this mystery, I fear we’re too far gone.

Meredith then directs her ire to Whitney (as she is wont to do), after hearing that she was gossiping about this incident behind her back (as Whitney is wont to do). Specifically, Whitney told Bronwyn that she was drinking before the flight and wondered whether she blacked out. She proposed three explanations for the incident: “she has hatred in her heart, an anger problem, or a problem mixing substances.” She’s like if Hercule Poirot were a Real Housewife.

The lunch leaves them with little resolution, and leaves Meredith ally-less, apart from Lisa, whom she meets up with for manicures in spa chairs that I’m convinced get bigger each time we cut back to them. They debrief the lunch, with Meredith expressing her frustration with Heather and Whitney, especially, before Lisa tells her that she met up with Britani to hear her side of things. We flashback to that sit-down, where we hear Britani say, “It was literally, like, the sixth worst thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life.” It’s a sentence that stopped me dead in my tracks. The level of specificity instantly grips me. What were the other five things? And does she have a notes app ranking them? All in all, Meredith basically says she pities Britani and thus is fine to move forward from all of this.

Then, in a jump cut for the ages, we find ourselves in a U-Haul that Whitney is driving to Heather’s house, where she finds her buzzin’ cousin dressed for a funeral. Specifically, the funeral for her marital mattress, which Whitney is helping her haul away. While she assures us that the stains aren’t from sex, I’m more disturbed by her confession that she’s had the mattress for 20 years. That seems like much too long. She talks about Meredith being mad at her, and Whitney talks about being angry at Bronwyn for ratting, but all I can think about is that geriatric mattress.

While Britani is still recovering from the plane ride (and I suspect will be for seasons to come), she says it helped her focus on what’s truly important: healing her relationship with her daughter, Olivia. And now, thankfully, they’re getting professional help and are deciding to give a family therapist a real run for her money. It’s mostly a rehash of what we already know, but Olivia says she feels better hearing her mother take accountability, and Britani is happy to finally get the chance to make things right, so this situation seems to be looking up.

Speaking of mothers and daughters, Bronwyn, Gwen, and Muzzy (and their bobs) spend the afternoon trimming Bonsai trees. Both Gwen and Muzzy say that they’re getting ready to spread their wings and move out, which sends Bronwyn — who has never really lived alone in her entire life — spiraling. You might be thinking, well, doesn’t she still have Todd? But perhaps that’s the problem. Without her whole family under that roof with her, she’s left taking a cold, hard look at her marriage, and she might not like what she sees. After all, if she’s mourning her emotionally abusive mother of all people moving out, then you know things must be rough.

The episode concludes with a meeting so shocking that I wondered if perhaps I was the one who blacked out after combining substances. Meredith and Britani reunite — on the ground this time — at a park, as if producers were afraid they’d destroy a home or place of business. Meredith kicks things off by apologizing to Britani for being overheard talking to Lisa on the plane, saying it was the wrong place and time and that she didn’t intend to hurt her feelings. This feels almost too good to be true, as if a Bravo HR representative is standing just off camera, holding up cue cards.

While Britani says she still feels traumatized, she’s choosing forgiveness. And for her part, she apologizes for bringing up the TikTok in the first place, admitting that it was a shady move meant to hurt her. I almost can’t believe what I’m watching. After all this hubbub sent shockwaves throughout the group, the two of them can sit down and communicate in the name of civility. This kind of resiliency and ability to move forward is what makes this show so successful. As I watch them sit across from one another, I’m reminded of a song made famous by Britani Bateman singing it on TikTok…

And just to clear the air, I ask forgiveness for the things I’ve done you blame me for…
But then, I guess we know there’s blame to share
And none of it seems to matter anymore. 

Leave it to Britani to bring up Seth’s alleged infidelity and then act completely shocked when Meredith gets angry about it. Better yet, over yoga (where everybody but her gets a mat), Britani even describes bringing up the accusation as well-intentioned. Meanwhile, Meredith is still fuming in her room, where she’s telling Lisa that Britani “thinks she’s a Disney Princess,” but to be fair, she did play Ariel and Belle at Disney World. Seeking an even better comparison, she then asks Lisa to remind her who from The Wizard of Oz didn’t have a brain. “The Tin Man,” Lisa confidently replies, and Meredith deems Britani “The Tin Woman.” What a missed opportunity for Wicked: For Good cross-promotion!

But luckily for Meredith, Bronwyn arrives at her door with an opportunity to get out some of this anger. She kidnapped Britani’s stuffed unicorn, and goads Meredith into throwing it overboard with her. But we should have known that more than anything, this was really just a ruse for Bronwyn to make use of those dumb inflatable costumes yet again — and she and Meredith don them so they can be “incognito” while tossing the unicorn off the ship. Gone forever is the only surefire way Britani could hear Jared say he loves her.

With the unicorn slowly floating away, Meredith turns her ire toward Whitney at breakfast for seemingly cosigning the TikTok allegation. Meredith tells them all that she’s done with Britani, and she’s done with anyone who supports her. Heather correctly thinks this is absurd, because you can’t operate on a show with that attitude. Bronwyn even tries to bring the temperature down by asking Mary for help: “Mary, can you say something as a mother, as a woman of God here?” But some things are just out of God’s hands.

As they disembark and apologize to the crew for their behavior and volume writ large, one of the crew members rushes out to return to Britani something she thought was forever gone: the unicorn … soaking wet. “Who threw this over?” she asks everybody, as if it’s some big mystery. Meredith eventually cops to it, while also throwing Bronwyn under the bus for good measure, and then hauntingly says, “Uni wanted to swim. You got tanner and makeup all over him. He needed a little dip in the ocean.” Chilling.

What happens next is an all-too-familiar phenomenon that Housewives fans will immediately recognize from the sudden shift in editing. Something happened when cameras were down. It’s a producer’s nightmare, and yet they have to think on their feet to cover whatever incident happened off screen, usually filling in the gaps via confessional retellings and dramatic B-roll. All in all, it’s cobbled together like an episode of Dateline or Celebrity Ghost Stories. We’re told that Meredith’s rage continued at the airport, and then when they boarded, she and Lisa were seated directly behind Britani — and a scene erupted. The way these women tell it, you would have thought Meredith was about to bring the plane down. Apparently, she was calling Britani names, grabbing and shaking her seat, splashing her with wine, pulling her hair, demanding to see the TikTok, and reducing her to tears. For Meredith’s part, she says she was simply venting to Lisa, and adds, “Obviously nothing was that deep, because I would have been arrested by an air marshal.”

While it’s a good point, none of the other women (apart from Lisa) are backing her story up. While very few people were on Britani’s side on the trip (or ever), this mid-air incident seems to have really turned the tide, and now they have no choice but to sympathize with her. When Britani meets up with Heather after the flight, she tells her that what hurt the most was Lisa egging her on the whole time, which she felt was the ultimate betrayal — especially since she had her back so strongly earlier in the season. “I keep saying that I’m the unsinkable rubber ducky, but I feel really broken right now,” Britani says, showcasing her ability to string together a truly insane turn of phrase in even the darkest of times.

Since Bronwyn was on a different flight altogether, Whitney has to fill her in on what went down, and she brings up a good point. Bronwyn questions how this could have happened on a commercial flight without anybody talking cell phone footage of it? Firstly, you would have thought that at least one other passenger would have wanted to record this scene playing out, especially if they recognized the players. But what’s been annoying me even more is that these women should have been trained by producers to start recording on their own cell phones if drama starts to unfold after cameras go down. Then again, secretly recording Meredith last year was what first got Britani in this whole mess, so I’ll cut her some slack there.

But then Bronwyn hits us with an even crazier curveball. “Apparently, Todd and Meredith need a reminder of fight etiquette,” she says to awkward silence. “I don’t know if you’ve seen on Twitter or not that people are accusing Todd of getting caught on a plane cheating on me.” She learned from this trip and is bringing it up herself, not only to get ahead of it, but because she believed it to be true. She says that this person claiming that Todd was getting sent lingerie photos knew too much accurate information about the flight and where Todd was sitting, so she confronted him about it and temporarily kicked him out. This leads to a fascinating conversation between her and Whitney about being open to the idea of being open, and that this wouldn’t be as much of an issue to her if it were something they had discussed or agreed upon. This conversation cements Bronwyn’s place as a phenomenal Real Housewife.

We then see Heather arrive at a coffee shop, and a chyron appears that reads “11:10 a.m.” — we all know what that means. Someone is about to be late. Sure enough, we watch a montage of Heather sitting there for over an hour until Lisa finally arrives at 12:26 p.m. without apology. Most interestingly, though, is that Heather doesn’t make a single mention of her tardiness, which is either incredibly mature, a power move, or is focused on the more pressing matter at hand.

Lisa is shocked when Heather tells her how upset Britani is with her, because, as you might have guessed, Lisa maintains that she did nothing wrong. All she did, according to her, was tell Britani to show Meredith the TikTok in question, and she denies that a big scene erupted. She explains away the jostled chair as Meredith using it as leverage to stand up, and says the the spilled wine really landed on her, not Britani. But all of these explanations do sound a lot more like confirmations. Nonetheless, Lisa says she was trying to diffuse Meredith, not egg her on, and is annoyed to once again be getting the blame for something she maintains she’s innocent of.

Meanwhile, Mary gets the unenviable job of sitting down with Meredith, who continues to deny. “What is it that you think happened?” she asks Mary, who quickly responds with, “I don’t think anything happened; I was there.” Meredith maintains that she was simply venting to Lisa, for maybe 15 minutes. Mary says it was much longer than that, and then they start doing math. Meredith says she was asleep for over an hour on the flight and watched two movies, and there’s only so much time on the flight, so how much longer could this incident really have been? I, for one, would like to know what movies Meredith was watching. Fight Club? Snakes on a Plane? She thinks that this exaggerated story started getting spread to women who didn’t actually see it for themselves (because they were either on the other side of the plane or sleeping). In any case, if Meredith really did wait to pop off until they were airborne with no cameras rolling, it makes for the perfect crime.