Susan and Mike move back into Paul's house now that he's gone, but the other ladies are so consumed with their own dramas that they ignore her return. Eventually, in apology, they throw a progressive dinner that moves from house to house. It's awesome, because Susan is the center of both hours, but in this finale everything's just sort of happening around her, so all she has to do is look pretty. (Actually, they all do this week. It's weird.)
Renee has a bit of a breakdown upon learning that her ex is getting remarried, and immediately falls in love with the hottest cater-waiter bartender in the vicinity. There's this whole sort of amazing 30 Rock-vibe where they go through an entire relationship in the time it takes to have dinner, which is actually fun. Kind of like with Renee's magical child-repelling powers, it's the best when they just go for it.
Dumbass Bree goes to stalk Dreamy Detective Chuck Vance's soon-to-be ex, immediately blurts out the situation, and ends up costing him way more than the ex was originally going to settle for, so finally they have sex while everybody else is having salads... And then fuck their way through ruining the main course, leading to an embarrassing moment for everybody.
Tom leaves Lynette, and then immediately feels like a jerk and comes back -- but she so enjoyed the hour of being single that she asks him to please leave her again. I love how they can even make the ugly business of getting separated into this huge asshole hassle. Lynette spends the rest of dinner feeling sorry for herself, despite Tom literally explaining that her shrewish nastiness and condescension is the problem, and simultaneously despite the fact that she hates him even more than he hates her.
Gabi starts the hour by leading her stepfather/rapist Alejandro to a wooded area, and comes narrowly close to killing him, but tells him to hit the bricks instead. It's pretty powerful stuff -- especially with Tony Plana's gifted and just ridiculously terrifying menace happening everywhere -- and by the time he, inevitably, corners her alone in her house during the dinner, you're pretty much ready to shoot him yourself. Luckily, Carlos accidentally knocks him dead with a candlestick, leading the ladies to hide the body in a coffee table and form a big coverup conspiracy. Which, considering they are the four sketchiest people you've ever seen, shouldn't really throw anybody off.
So that's the score: Bree's going to be lying to her cop boyfriend about her friend Carlos's manslaughter of a rapist intruder, so they're friends again. Susan is back on the Lane and acting ridiculous again now that Paul's no longer around to make her awesome. Gabi, well, Gabi had a rough hour but I think she'll be okay. Renee is now free to marry Tom Scavo, and Lynette will, as usual, be eating worms and complaining about things. See you fall!
THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS SEASON
At the end of this episode, the four main Housewives will be covering up the murder of Somebody, which as we'll see actually wraps up a lot of the season's stories pretty elegantly. It's fairly flimsy with regard to year's setup, but there's probably going to be a lot more going on there. I know Detective Chuck Vance will be joining the show, which is excellent news, and maybe Susan Lucci*? I think there's a Tuc Watkins joke to be made there, if that rumor is true, but I don't know about daytime TV at all so I can't make the joke. If there's even a joke to be made about that.
*Here's one: What if they said every year that they might give Susan Lucci a regular role, and then kept giving that role to other actresses? That's kind of a daytime TV joke. From the '90s, true, but I didn't know more about soaps back then either. It does weird me out that this show is still doing so great while the daytime soaps are dropping like drunks. Is everybody watching shows about aggressive baking now? I think that's probably it.
LISTERIA WANE
Susan acts totally retarded and skives off unpacking so that she can go play with her friends, pulling Mike into this bullshit infantilizing "Fine, go play with your friends" scenario that would get your ass three divorces in the face.
ENTRÉE: VAN DE KAMP
Bree: "That was so much fun going running with you."
Dreamy Detective Chuck Vance: "My crazy sick body requires a lot of cardio because I am fifty thousand years old."
Bree: "Tell me about it! I went into menopause six times just now."
Detective Chuck Vance: "Why are you putting your hand down my shorts?"
Bree: "Because I have no boundaries and don't believe in your ability to make choices."
Susan knocks on the door.
Bree: "Susan, go away. I've almost got him where I want him."
Susan: "I think you mean welcome home Susan. Please don't make me backtrack and regress to being the asshole I've always been, until this kidney made me awesome."
Bree: "I have no choice. And low expectations of everyone."
Susan: "I can actually feel my asshole nature welling up inside me."
Bree: "Ugh, this."
Bree slams the door; Susan can't understand that life didn't stop on the Lane the second she left. Undaunted, she bounds off to the house: Her own personal Progressive Dinner of Building Resentment.
Detective Chuck Vance: "Bree, would you like a ridiculously contrived reason to do some stupid shit in this episode?"
Bree: "Hit me."
Detective Chuck Vance: "Okay, well, I won't fuck you until this divorce is final. But this divorce won't be final until my gross wife's boutique sells some clothes."
Bree: "I will consider those my marching orders."
Detective Chuck Vance: "Are you by any chance planning on going over there and ruining everything with your complete lack of social skills?"
Bree: "Mmmmaybe."
Detective Chuck Vance: "Cool. I'm too horny to notice, and don't yet know you well enough to understand the crazy look in your eyes."
SALADS: SCAVO
Tom: "Lynette, would you like a ridiculously contrived reason to do some stupid shit in this episode?"
Lynette: "Hit me."
Tom: "God, I wish. But no, I just wanted to alert you to this packed suitcase I'm going to leave in the corner of our bedroom."
Lynette: "Wow, that's even more passive-aggressive than the kind of shit I usually pull."
Tom: "Right? It's like a nasty, empty masterpiece."
Susan knocks on the door.
Lynette: "Susan, go away. I've almost got him where I want him."
Susan: "I think you mean welcome home Susan. Please don't make me continue to regress to being the asshole I've always been, until this kidney made me awesome."
Lynette: "I have no choice. And low expectations of everyone."
Susan: "I can actually feel my asshole nature welling up inside me."
Lynette: "Ugh, this."
Lynette slams the door; 0 for 2, Susan still can't understand that life didn't stop on the Lane the second she left. Undaunted, she bounds off to the house: Her own personal Progressive Dinner of Building Resentment.
Tom: "Anyway, I'm probably leaving you."
Lynette: "How about if I make this totally scary face?"
Tom: "I just thought that was your regular face."
Lynette: "Okay, I'm unpacking your suitcase. This is stupid."
Tom: "Everything I do is stupid. Hands off the motherfucking suitcase."
DESSERT: SOLIS
Gabrielle: Spots the car that's been tailing her for three episodes and loads her gun to take the motherfucker out.
Susan knocks on the door.
Gabrielle: "Susan, go away. I've almost got him where I want him."
Susan: "I think you mean welcome home Susan. Please don't make me continue to regress to being the asshole I've always been, until this kidney made me awesome."
Gabrielle: "I have no choice. And zero interest in just about everyone."
Susan: "I can actually feel my asshole nature welling up inside me."
Gabrielle: "Ugh, this."
Gabrielle: Slams the door, waits for Susan to GTF, and then gets ready to kill herself a dead fella. But he is gone.
WELCOME HOME, LOSER
0 for 3, Susan still can't understand that life didn't stop on the Lane the second she left. Daunted and ungrateful, she bounds home to whine at Mike about her Progressive Dinner of Building Resentment. He rolls his eyes, sighs, and unpacks the entire house while she makes horrible pouting faces. Such is life, when you've married your caretaker. And vice versa.
SENSING THE SHITSTORM HEADED THEIR WAY
Sensing the shitstorm headed their way, the three other Housewives converge on Susan's House of Pouting & Sulking.
Susan: "Get your own ride, bitches!"
Housewives: "Sorry, we forgot how you are. So to shut you up, we're throwing you a party. In keeping with the Welcome Home theme, it will be a progressive dinner."
Renee: Cocktails first, since she'll be doing that anyway, because all she does is constantly drink and be an ex-wife and make dangerous sculptures from the shards of glass that she regularly births out of her dusty cold vagina.
Lynette: Will do salads, because she is overworked and generally contributes the least possible amount while complaining the most and/or starting riots that kill her friends. If she could have volunteered for Paper Towels & Plates, she would have. And then bitched about the money.
Bree: Will do the entrée, because of course she will. It's her entire personality.
Gabrielle: Desserts. Because she cannot be trusted. Too pretty to cook. Or read. Store-bought, just like her entire life. Tastiest and best part of the whole thing, just like with this entire series.
THEN, IT'S TIME FOR THE SUSAN SHOW!
So much Susan for Susan to talk about! So many adventures.
Susan: "This is the best fucking day of my life!"
Renee: "My ex-husband keeps calling me. Probably for a booty call, because I am a slutty drunk."
Susan: "Ahem."
Renee: "By all means, continue."
Susan: "So then I put on my left shoe and then I put on my right shoe and the whole time Felicia was killing Paul but then I put on my left earring and then I put on my right earring and then these are all the things that were in the box I was taking over to my old house that we live in now..."
FLEE!
Bree: "God, I can't believe Susan finally finished her boring story."
Renee: "To be fair, she's only had MJ and Mike to talk to. The two people on Earth less fun to talk to than her."
Bree: "You'd think constantly climbing around on Paul Young like a jungle gym would have chilled her out, but no."
Renee: "I'm just glad she didn't start talking about chicken. That is a perpetual motion machine when that happens. A carousel that never stops turning."
Bree: "Hey, will you go with me to buy clothes at this random boutique?"
Renee: "Um, are you spying on Detective Chuck Vance's wife that you should not be talking to?"
Bree: "The Rules were made to be broken!"
Renee: "No, I mean you legally and logically should not be messing with that woman. You are going to cost him a lake house, I can feel it."
Bree: "So be it! I just hope she's secretly borne him a mulatto baby I can take on my dates with me and never tell him about."
GROSS DOREEN'S GROSS BOUTIQUE
Renee: "Just kidding, these clothes look like Taylor Momsen threw up."
Bree, verbatim: "Dinner [party]? I wouldn't wear them to a drive-by shooting!"
Hilariously, Renee talks Bree into selling the lie by putting on a caveman jacket, a denim beret, a kinderwhore top, what Bree calls "beautifully ventilated" cigarette jeans, and this amazing purse shaped like a human skull. Somewhere in the makeover, she also got pigtails. Frankly, she looks amazing in a certain way, like, if you saw her out at a club you'd be like, "Check that shit out. We are about to do the best drugs we have ever done."
Fast-forward about three seconds, and Bree's managed to spill one hundred percent of the beans, and Gross Doreen has figured out that Chuck's honorably deferred skellington fetish means the whole divorce is balanced on the tip of his tumescence, so she gets grabby.
ONE LAKE HOUSE, PLEASE
As scary as Tony Plana's lurking is, once Alejandro starts talking he's ten times scarier. It retroactively makes the whole tent thing ten times more frightening when he talks, because he's just that good. (And, of course, because Eva Longoria is always that good.)
So she lures him out to this wooded area and pulls the gun and asks firstly why he is in town and secondly why isn't he dead. The answer is that he left Las Colinas on a faked death because of the stink about his creepiness, and that he's back now because he heard she went there and yelled at nuns about it and stirred it all up, and he's afraid of getting witch-hunted again. Poor dude, right?
He does that "I don't even remember what you're talking about" thing, which gives Gabrielle the opening to verbalize not only that she is no longer a defenseless doll (feel me?) but also to verbalize what happened, which is that he raped her when she was a child, specifically taking her virginity.
I don't remember well enough -- I'd put it aside, frankly -- to know if she's ever gotten that specific about it before, but in either case it's very powerful here. I've been calling him her molester because I couldn't remember the details and had no interest in finding out, so either way -- whether we explicitly knew this or the show just let us assume until today -- it's pretty harsh, and moving.
Seconds away from shooting the bastard execution style, she gets him to admit aloud that what he did was rape her, specifically, and he apologizes, and this moment takes off just enough of the pressure that she lets him crawl away, like a dog. Maybe she knows he'll be back, but we hope for the best.
It's not possible to describe a person in a single sentence. Our scars are not ourselves. It's not Abuse Survivor Gabrielle any more than it is Mall Barbie Gabrielle or Cheating Wife Gabrielle or I Love The Gays Gabrielle. But part of creating a character is looking at the big events, and the show's always been pretty honest about how Gabrielle's abuse, and her beauty, led to a particularly bad combination of factors that defined her life from there on out.
We don't really like to be sympathetic about the burden of physical beauty, because it's easier to define ourselves sometimes by our lack of sympathy for those we consider luckier than us, but that doesn't mean being a pretty woman is a picnic. Every single one of us is objectified by the way we look, and as non-straight males, every single one of us is objectified as a matter of course. There are obvious ways in which being a beautiful woman means being treated like even less of a human being: It makes some things easier, some harder. Just like with any other quality, from intelligence to hair color: Those things are not ourselves either.
(Thinking they are is an express train to hell. Priding yourself on your intelligence is undercutting your wholeness just as much as priding yourself on any other one thing, and it makes you weak and it can turn you crazy. Probably if you're reading this, you should think about that. Because I swear to you there are more wonderful things about you than your great big throbbing brain. No matter what you've been told.)
But when you're pushed into that particular pretty-object box, which all of us are to some extent, you have the choice of going completely dark inside, and being just a pretty thing. And that's what was going to happen to Gabrielle regardless, for the sin of being beautiful. Add Alejandro into that mix, and I'll be damned if I can find much of a reason to blame her for much of what she's done. The fact that she's still kicking and trying to find a way to negotiate with the outside world -- while still, it's true, being just as cartoonish as the other characters on this show -- is one of the reasons she's always been my favorite.
I'm not a woman, but I think it might be easier to find sympathy for all of this as a gay man, because as a gay man you get pushed into that same exact box no matter how pretty you are. You are pressured to be infantile, volatile and snarky from the time that other kids start noticing that you're different: It's the only way out. You have to be a silly pretty object, or risk getting the shit beat out of you for speaking up or having thoughts, because you're not a man in the same way that other men are men, which is at least as threatening as looking like Eva Longoria. You have to agree that certain labels are worth killing yourself to avoid -- that having no word and no label, sometimes, is better than having a name to call yourself -- and keep your trap shut about it. You have to play along.
And I think that a lot of the time the Gay/Straight Alliance stays focused on that bitter common ground, which can lead to a festering crabs-in-a-barrel situation, where we reinforce each other's worst shit instead of supporting each other in breaking out of that box and leaving the whole antiquated patriarchy thing behind. Which is how you get a Renee, or a Lee, which is why the gay storylines and Lee bother me so much on this show, because it's as instructive ("This is how gay men should be treated, this is what they are like, this is how we interact as adults") as any of the awful things Lynette does, or Bree ("Men/other women/our children are the real enemy").
That actually getting your hands dirty, risking the displeasure of men, disagreeing with the loudest voices in the room, that these things actually mean you are intrinsically a bad person. Or at least irrelevant. Which goes beyond simply describing our culture to entrenching the unnecessary bullshit of our culture: The system that says if you're not playing the game, you'll be left out entirely. It's a blurry line, not very often but sometimes, between serving the masses what they want and telling them it's okay; but that's one step closer to telling them they're not.
All of which is to say, there are several levels on which personally I respond to this story, and the ways it's been told, and to the character of Gabrielle in general, and the way she is portrayed and performed, that may be at least a little surprising but are certainly more complicated than a bunch of snotty jokes might get across. And for that -- for her, and for this particular ending, and this particular season -- I'm actually profoundly grateful.
BACK TO BITCHING NOW
Gabi: "So No because you don't wanna go, or No because you don't know what a progressive dinner is?"
Carlos: "Both. Especially since That Woman's gonna be there."
Gabi: "Oh my God, give it up. Your dead mom isn't coming back no matter how much you bitch. Also, this is about Susan. Think about how much bullshit you'll be dealing with if you don't go to her thing."
Carlos: "...Um, fuck is a gun doing in this house?"
Gabi: "Right. Well. Alejandro is alive and stalking me."
Needless to say, he holds her immediately. Of all the men in the world, she keeps coming back to him. He's so big, and so strong. Imagine what that feels like right now. He's another one I like way more than I usually get a chance to say, because this season has been about popping so many of her blisters and it's meant he's the Bad Cop most of the time. But obviously he's the only one you'd actually marry. (Besides Bob, duh.)
Carlos: "Any chance I can kill the shit out of him?"
Gabi: "No, I took care of it."
Carlos: "Um..."
Gabi: "Almost. Guess it was enough just to know that I could."
I just wish that was a feeling you could send yourself, back through time. If you could know what it's like to be okay, before you actually figure out that you are okay. But that's like sending yourself plans for a time machine, I guess. You have to tell the story to get to the end of the story.
COCKTAILS: RENEE
Renee's bartender is famous from like every TV show, the only black person we've seen all year, and hot enough that even if you didn't know where this was headed you would know where this was headed.
Bartender: "Hey, is this is a picture of you with [ex-husband she's always on about]?"
Renee: "Don't touch my shit."
Gays-As-Accessory: Arrive; fawn all over her like all gays always do; it's totally stupid; it's their purpose for existing.
Bob: "Sorry about your ex-husband you never shut up about. ESPN says he's getting remarried."
Renee: Loses her shit.
Lee, and I'll allow it: "This is what comes from watching sports!"
Renee: "Hot bartender, get me Naked Wasted."
SCAVO
Teeny: "Mommy, you look really pretty. And resentful."
Lynette: "Thanks, Sweetie. Where is your rat-bastard dad? And his symbolic suitcase?"
Teeny: "No idea. The more you guys use me as a football, the more likely I'll start pulling out my own hair and eating it. Trichotillomania. Bezoars. Bright orange, ginger bezoars."
RENEE
Is now sitting on the piano, drunk as shit and singing "My Funny Valentine" for the third time. It's always fun to watch a fantastic singer pretend to be a shitty singer. They really know how to do that. Bob & Lee start out gazing at her like she's one of those singers people like them just adore, but eventually it gets gross and Lee, like a good gay lapdog, pulls her down for a sassy little heart-to-heart.
Lee: "Honey, Doug is a dog. He's not even worth thinking about. Trust me, you will meet someone else. Look at your life, look at your choices!"
ibid.: Snaps his fingers in some kind of formation, swings his neck around, does all the things.
Renee, to coin a fresh new lament: "All the good ones are either married or gay!"
Lee: "Honey child, aren't you sweet."
Renee: "I was talking about Bob?"
But for real, though.
BREE HAS FUCKED UP EVERYTHING
Has fucked up everything regarding Detective Chuck Vance's divorce. Offers him sliders in recompense. Calls them "mini-cheeseburgers," because this show respects you even less than you thought.
COCKTAIL DECEPTION
Lynette: "Tom can't make it. I am lying."
Gabrielle: "Same with Carlos. I am also lying."
Lynette & Gabrielle: "Our husbands are really hard workers, which is why we're rich."
Susan: Is poor.
Gabrielle, hilariously: "Oh, sorry."
MOMENTS LATER
Susan: "Lynette, is Tom really working? Or is that something you wouldn't want to talk about at a party?"
Lynette: "Susan, I am the worst. I am happy to tell you at this party in your honor that my husband has left me. Please don't make this all about me."
Susan: "I am like the one person you can always count on for that."
One cool thing mixing up the whole plot-progression is that different pairs and groups of them keep going to the house to get things ready, so you have the perfect antidote to the problem this show has where it needs two or three storylines every episode that basically isolate the ladies from each other each week except in random groupings. This way, anybody can have a scene with anybody else, which really changes the shape and feel of the show. I like this episode in many ways, but that's a big one, and it's been going on the whole time even before the party started, and it's how shows like this should work.
Susan: "Um, Lynette? Your husband Tom that left you is standing in your kitchen making a salad. So what the fuck? I could be at my party about me. In fact, laters."
Lynette: "Didn't you totally leave me earlier?"
Tom: "No, you nagged me to death about getting mandarin oranges, so I went and got them a day late."
Lynette: "Exactly. Freakin' exactly you did."
Tom: "Are you actually disappointed that I didn't leave you?"
Lynette: "More like irritated."
SALADS, I THINK: SCAVOS
McCluskey: "I don't know if I've told you this, but it's nice having you back on the Lane, kid."
Susan: "Thanks, Karen! That's sweet coming from crusty old you. Hey, let's talk and talk and talk about my feelings and shit."
McCluskey: "Yep, fuckin' there it is. Three seconds. My husband owes me a Pepsi."
Somebody: "Where's Renee?"
Somebody Else: "Losing her shit somewhere, I think."
Renee, busting in: "How's it hanging, losers? This is my bartender boyfriend. He's a male model. He does tricks."
Bartender: Does a hilarious model trick where he pretends to check the time.
Renee, verbatim and agog: "It's like he really needs to know what time it is!"
McCluskey's Husband Crankshaft: "I am annoying and unnecessary! I should just drop dead."
Bree: Is saved from having to tell Detective Chuck Vance what a meddling fuckup she is by him having a shit-fit on the phone and giving Gross Doreen the stupid lake house. He whirls around on her with the terrifyingly needy eyes of the recently divorced -- red flag, y'all! -- and reminds her that now technically they can fuck, so they run off to go do that. In the middle of the party. Which is coming to their house.
Alejandro: Stalking and scary and a minority on Wisteria Lane in the middle of the night unaccompanied. Only during The Festival Of Susans would this go unnoticed.
Renee: Jackassin' it up.
ALMOST PRIVATELY
Lynette: "Why did it take you two hours and an extra day to get mandarin oranges?"
Tom: "Because I was leaving your ass, clearly. But then I thought how weird it would be for you to be at the party alone and having to immediately spill the beans about me leaving you in the middle of the party. So I guess I'm not leaving you."
Lynette, and get this shit right here: "My biggest fear about marriage was that someday you'd leave me. I... Grew up in a home where people left, and I had to clean up after, and I just couldn't go through that again. And so when I didn't see your suitcase, I thought Well, here it is. My worst fear. He's gone. And then I thought, Oh, damn! Paige's car seat is in Tom's car, and I'll have to get a new one. You had just left me, and I was thinking about a car seat. It was so weird*. I kept waiting to feel devastated, but instead, I felt... I didn't know. I couldn't put a name to it. Then, when I walked in and you were back... I suddenly realized what I had been feeling the whole time you were gone. It was relief. I was relieved."
BECAUSE LYNETTE IS THE FUCKING WORST & NOW WE HAVE PROOF
*("Weird" is one word for it. Anyway, they're "really" separating. Except I'm so sure that will actually stick. Mostly, I can't believe how fucking hateful that little speech was. I get it, and it was a complex and intriguing moment, but Jesus lady.)
VAN DE KAMP
Bree: "That was some intense and missionary-position fucking!"
Detective Chuck Vance: "Did you have an orgasm?"
Bree: "Literally in the time it took my friends to eat half a salad? Yeah I came like thirty times, thanks a bunch."
While these five minutes of bliss were going on, the chicken burnt. Of course, they immediately run downstairs naked to put out the fire/chicken, and of course everybody walks in on them, and of course there's some ludicrously half-assed attempt at explaining themselves, and of course the gay ones slobber all over Detective Chuck Vance (of course that one, can't really blame them) and then they just kind of run off half-clothed to pick up more chicken from the All-Night Gourmet Dinner store down the block. Renee and her new boyfriend work through their entire relationship over the course of this episode. I mean, it's not really there but it's suggested well enough that you go with it, and it comes off pretty clever:
Renee: "Are you counting my drinks now?"
Bartender: "I don't think I can count that high."
Renee: "You knew I drank when we met. You were the bartender!"
Y'know, it's like that. Kinda cute. So then they break up, and that's kind of cute too.
KITCHEN
Lynette: "Sorry. You'll always have the salad course."
Renee has some kind of meaningless epiphany about how she didn't really just marry a bartender -- it was all about her ex getting divorced. Like anybody, including Renee, needed that little enigma nailed down.
Lynette: "I don't really care, but listen to me! Tom and I are separating."
Renee: "Of all the people on Earth, you're telling me this? Isn't that just like salting the ground of your marriage to make sure nothing will grow back?"
Lynette: "No, I'm just awful and I know rubbing my relationship issues in the face of somebody who's in love with my husband will make me feel better."
Renee: "...Annnnnd that's how Tom got his first blowjob."
I swear to God, just pull the trigger. Make Lynette have to watch Renee and Tom negotiate a marriage and all three characters will turn amazing. Think about the richness of that soil. It'll make Lynette actually sympathetic slash give her something to bitch about for once, it'll be funny to watch Stepmom Renee deal with raising not only one hundred gingers but also Tom, and you have a million awesome ways it could play out:
If Renee and Tom are the perfect couple, that's a juicy conversation that could turn Lynette human and actually be really touching. If Lynette tries to break them up, that is hilarious and plays into the Women Are Bitches thing this show loves so much. If Tom realizes he was in love with Lynette all along, that will be sad and bring the focus to Lynette and Renee's relationship, where the show keeps trying to go anyway.
Downsides: Black lady marrying a white man? Not on this show. Alfre Woodard'll lock your ass in the basement for even thinking about that. Break up a core couple? Not since Karl Meyer fucked his way up and down the entire street. Justify Lynette's bullshit even slightly? No, that would imply that angry women have reasons to be angry. Not happening. But if it did, that would rock the fucking mic. Wouldn't it?
SUSAN GIVES A SPEECH
Susan: "Susan Susan Susan, Me Me Meeee. The entire history of my life. How I'm feeling right now. How I felt this one time. How I will feel later. What's going on with my hair. I can't cook, but sometimes I can! Jokes about me! Statements about my friends that are either wildly off-base or secretly about me!"
Everybody: Gets bored.
Susan: "I'll burst into tears, if that keeps all eyes on me. I'll fuckin' do it."
GABRIELLE MARQUEZ SOLIS
Gabi heads home alone to get dessert ready, and is immediately cornered by Alejandro. It is once again seriously scary, and he says some really upsetting things, and it's just awful. She can't manage to shoot him, but thank God Carlos arrives just as things are getting triggery and bashes Alejandro's head in with a candlestick.
Gabi goes post-traumatic about how she didn't even fight back this time because it was so scary, and then before she can call the cops they realize that Alejandro didn't even have a gun. Logically, you kind of just have to plead the Fairview on what happens , because defending yourself against rape is a thing you should do regardless of whether or not he's pretending to have a gun. But they talk about how she didn't even tell the cops she was being stalked, etc., and whatever. It gets there, in the diciest way possible, but that doesn't really detract from what went on before, or the fact that the main point is this:
The other three Housewives show up, assess the dead body, get the scoop, and then they circle the wagons in a believably quick way to save Carlos before the rest of the party -- including Bree's detective boyfriend -- shows up. Awesomely, they are coming down the street in a mob like zombies. The music does a great deal of the heavy lifting here, but it's still pretty awesome. Carlos is like, "Whatever, I killed the guy who came back to attack my wife, prison is fine," and Bree gets very tall and very beautiful and looks him right in the eye and goes, "That's not gonna happen."
THE SISTERS OF MERCY
So they fold Alejandro up and shove him in the coffee table, just like in Rope, and by the time everybody gets there everything is okay. Detective Chuck Vance notices Bree rubbing blood off the candlestick but she sparkles at him distractingly, and Mike and Chuck make friends, and Lee is sweet with Renee, and Carlos holds Bree's hand, and Gabrielle chuckles with McCluskey, and they all eat cheesecake.
Which, somehow that just seems like the most iconic thing this show has ever done. I don't know if I can really explain it, but I remember pushing really hard to cover this show when it first debuted and we weren't sure we were going to cover it, but I've always kept this sort of image in my head of this show -- before we ever even saw footage -- of them being like this sort of glamorous, hardcore... Coven? Not the right word.
Conspiracy, maybe. A coalition of women who knew what they were giving up to have the lives they had, and who knew they had to stick with each other or they would drown. (It's silly, but the only reason I'm remembering this is that the song "Barons Of Suburbia" by every young gay boy's best friend came on shuffle yesterday, and I've always associated that song with this particular thing. This imaginary show.) Humorous, sure, slapsticky even. But sexy too, and packing heat.
And the promo art for the show every year trades on that, whether there's an Edie or a Renee for them to align themselves against, it's always the same imagery every season: Beauty and danger and family and friendship, all at once. Roses becoming knives. Secrets becoming weapons. Women lining up.
This idea that every single cul-de-sac has secrets, and pain -- and that it's up to us to be strong enough, and smart enough, to keep everybody alive. That the desperation of the housewife is not only understandable, but eminently conquerable. That the desperation of the housewife is a healthy response to the desperation of our country, and our men, but only tells the beginning of the story.
And you know, in seven years I've never felt that from the show itself. And while I don't think it's possible for this show to be as good even as that first season, I do find it a little satisfying that we're finally looking that conspiracy in the face. Because honestly, it's what's going to save us in the end: Absolute loyalty, and the willingness to get our hands dirty. The two things they've been training out of us since we were little.
Even just a little glimpse, through the cracked doors and shuttered windows and general dumbness of this mean, hateful show: That's worth something, right?
I just wish that was a feeling we could send ourselves, back through time. If you could know what it's like to be okay, before you actually figure out that you are okay. But that's a little like sending yourself plans for a time machine: You have to tell the story to get to the end of the story. You have to drop the word, before you can get to the end of your sentence.