The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Room for Change

This episode is a perfect example of why they take the women on trips: so that they can’t escape each other and become claustrophobic like the Puerto Rican humidity so that they start to finally have frank discussions that they’ve been having behind each others’ backs for months now. Shouldn’t we have gone on a trip like five episodes earlier so that this season could have started kicking off?

The first fights in the episode are about the most Housewives things imaginable: sharing rooms, room assignments, and the definition of gaslighting. When Racquel, who is hosting this trip to her ancestral homeland, tells the women that they have to share rooms, she volunteers to share with Jenna, and all my fantasies about two of the ladies on one show hooking up are playing through my head like the best OnlyFans you don’t have to pay for … until I remember Mel back at home. Honestly, I just want her to join in. If we’re looking for lesbian hookups on Bravo, can’t they be lesbian mini-orgies? Sai offers to share, too, but no one wants to share with her, leaving Brynn to assign Becky Minkoff to share with Sai; she says she’ll take the worst room, giving Jessel, Erin, and Ubah the remaining decent rooms.

As the women arrive at their villa, we meet the super hot bartender and their liaison from the property, who are talking about how they have no idea what this show is or why these women are filming. Oh, honeys, you are about to be awoken by the worst nightmare of your lives. You are about to be set upon and flirted with by a group of entitled harpies, and you are not prepared. But this was the best staff reaction we’ve seen on cable since the kitchen staff at SUR reacted to Kristen Doute’s firing. Erin picks up the welcome cocktail, which she’s told is a rum punch, and asks, “What liquor is in it.” Rum, duh! And that is how Erin Mew Mew Lichy, in the year of our lord 2024, discovered rum and was the first person to bring it to market in America. A true pioneer.

The room fight starts when Brynn takes the second-worst room, leaving Ubah with a tiny room that still has its own bathroom and walk-in closet. The thing I can’t stand about Ubah is that she wants both the moral high ground and the best treatment. She’s making fun of the ladies scrambling for rooms like it’s a Ramona Singer Look-Alike Contest, she’s fixing herself a fruit plate, and she’s telling everyone it doesn’t matter as long as she’s with her friends. Wrong! She sees the room, and the first thing she says is essentially, “Book me into the St. Regis!”

While Jessel and Jenna excuse Ubah’s freak out, and I will accept that she is physically too big for what looks like a smaller bed as an excuse, her first instinct isn’t to try to find a way to make everyone happy or to try to stay in the house. Her first instinct is to pitch a fit, tell everyone she’s too rich for that tiny room, and demand to be taken to the nearest luxury establishment. This is not someone there just to hang out with their friends, this is someone who wants special treatment. At least everyone else was upfront about it.

Eventually, Sai says she’ll take the little room, Erin says she’ll bunk with Becky with the Limp Ponytail, and Ubah gets her own room. See, wasn’t that easy? Did we all need the fit? Couldn’t Ubah just go to her friends and try to broker peace? Couldn’t she have said to Sai, “I’ll buy you the most expensive bottle of non-Mezcalum mescal if you switch with me”? But no, she had to seem better than everyone else just to get her way out of pity. When the room scurrying was going on, she said, “I don’t understand why these women are running around like they’re immigrants, and they just let us in.” Now you do! To prevent exactly what happened to you.

But Ubah’s big fight isn’t with the room; it’s with Erin. They go outside to address that Erin told everyone that Ubah is coming for her and that Ubah called Erin a gaslighter. Erin says she is not a gaslighter based on the definition in the dictionary, but that isn’t the definition that everyone uses. Ugh, I can’t believe I have to explain this again. If I were the Terminator, I would go back in time and kill the writers of the movie Gaslight in their cribs so that it never happened. To gaslight someone is to tell them what they see isn’t real so that you can drive them insane.

For instance, say you go on a group trip, and you take someone’s bag out of the van. For argument’s sake, let’s say it’s Jessel’s. So, you take Jessel’s bag, and you hide it in your bathroom so that Jessel is running around the house looking for her bag, screaming about it on the golf course out back, and even forcing the camera operators to forget their real jobs to look for her damn cream-colored luggage with her passport, shoes, and all her bathing suits in it. Then, when she’s not looking, you put her bag in her room, and she’s like, “Where did this come from? Who took my bag?” And then you go, “We didn’t take it. It was there the whole time.”

If Jessel says, “That’s making me feel insane,” then, congratulations, you have gaslit someone. Most of this happened except for Brynn putting Jessel’s bag back in her room. She eventually just tells her that she took it, which is such an anti-climax to yet another ridiculously stupid prank on this show. This is not Lady Jackass. Enough with the fucking pranks already!

Back to gaslighting, I don’t think Erin gaslights them. However, I do think that Erin likes to revise history and spin events. When Erin asks the group if they think she gaslights, Sai raises her hand and uses the Becky Minkoff Is a Swinger prank as an example. Yes! Thank you, Sai. In this instance, Erin says that even though she told Brynn that Becky hadn’t slept with another dude, she wasn’t “in on” the prank. Erin is trying to finesse the definition of “in on” so that she looks better so that she doesn’t look like an asshole who started this prank and then told everyone but also didn’t tell everyone. This isn’t gaslighting, it’s not even lying, it’s something else, and Erin does it all the time, and if I was her friend, it would drive me insane. Wait. Does that make it gaslighting?

Gaslighting, in the classical definition, is about trying to make someone else insane with lies. The thing about Erin’s “gaslighting” behavior, much like everything Erin does, is that it has nothing to do with other people; it has to do with her. She’s lying not to try to provoke a reaction or change the minds of others; she does it to make herself look better, to get herself out of a tight spot, as a way to argue how she has never, not even a single time in her life, been wrong. She has nothing to apologize for because people are just misinterpreting what she is doing. This isn’t gaslighting. It’s just … I don’t know … being a jerk. But Ubah does the same thing. Brynn says that Ubah was “campaigning” against Erin. Ubah says she wasn’t doing that. She says, “[Erin is a gaslighter] is what I always said, and I am going to keep saying it.” Um, isn’t repeating the same message to sway someone’s feelings about someone a, I don’t know, campaign?

The other big fight of the episode is between Becky Minkoff and Brynn. When Brynn brings her nauseating queerbaiting into Jenna and Racquel’s room to show off her flesh-toned bikini and claim that she’s the third lesbian (in the immortal words of Sex and the City, “If you’re not gonna eat pussy, then you’re not a dyke,”), Becky comes in to join them. Becky says she wanted her own bedroom because she has four kids, and they always come in and bother her, so she never gets a full night of sleep. Brynn says she never gets that either, and Becky says, “You’ll know when you have kids.”

Brynn freaks out and says this is the worst thing someone could say to her. As much as Becky said that to get Brynn’s goat, Brynn also plays it up because she hates Becky. What makes this especially crazy-making is that Brynn could totally have children if she wants to (as far as we know). She has eggs frozen. She could get a sperm donor. She has the means (even though we still don’t know what her job is). There is nothing keeping Brynn from having kids other than Brynn’s own decision not to do it yet. If Brynn hadn’t been able to have kids or had been trying desperately to have them and failed, and Becky knew that, it would have been more messed up than Jenna’s bodysuit wedgie situation. But it’s not, so it wasn’t.

When Brynn discusses the slight in the pool with Sai, Ubah, and Racquel, she says that she doesn’t need kids to understand. “I know everything about life,” Brynn says. I’m sorry, but she doesn’t. None of us do. I think that Becky saying, “You’ll get it when you have kids,” is annoying, but she’s right. It’s like saying to a single person, “You’ll get it when you’re married.” There is something about certain life experiences that you won’t understand until they happen. As many times as we’ve seen footage of it, as many biographies we read about Neil Armstrong, none of us will know what it is like to walk on the moon until we do it.

The same thing is true with kids, with marriage, with lots of things. For instance, I will never know what it’s like to have a period. I can sympathize, I can learn, I can imagine, but until it happens to me, I will never know, just like Brynn won’t know what it’s like to have a boner, no matter how many times she claims Jenna Fucking Lyons gave her one. I think Brynn saying that she knows what it is like to have kids because she has puppies or that she’s really busy or that she can’t get a full night’s sleep is naïve at best and willfully deceptive at worst, and one of the mothers in the group should really tell her that.

But it’s not like I’m letting Becky off the hook, either. Yeah, it was a shitty thing to say only because she said it to knowingly hurt Brynn. It’s the kind of passive aggression I can’t stand in life and really can’t stand on the show. Earlier, when discussing the room assignments, Becky says of Brynn, “Here she goes again trying to get me to give her a reaction, but guess what she’s not going to get from me: a reaction. Because this is petty ass shit.” This, right here, is why she is terrible on the show. Housewives is all about reaction, especially to petty shit. It’s about being in a space with these people, about engaging with them on an emotional level and trying to work through their differences for our entertainment. If you think this is petty, if you think this is above you, then get in the Sprinter with Ubah, go check into the St. Regis, and never come back. At least at dinner, Becky is finally standing up to Brynn, telling her she has never been nice to her and that her bullying needs to stop.

I fear this is like Tom Cruise showing up to a play at intermission: too little, too late. Becky has never stood her ground, and there is no way she is going to out-argue or out-mean Brynn, a woman who has been sharpening those particular talons since middle school. Becky is like a palm tree in Puerto Rico; the winds blow and blow on it, trying to take it down, and it just bends, it sways, and it says it is waiting for the storm to be over. But the storm never ends and one good gust is going to send its roots into the air, its trunk rolling down the dunes into the choppy surf where its bark will be slowly eroded away, slowly washed off until there is nothing but a splinter of driftwood sitting on the beach making some poor tourist think it’s a broken bone.