The episode opens with a shot of one of the roommate's alarm clocks -- an acrylic rooster that holds a guitar and squawks, "Heeeeeey, baby, wake up! Come and dance with me!" I know this alarm clock well. My college roommate Jen had exactly the same one, and my other roommate Phung and I loathed it, because Jen had to get up at, like, dawn, and while she had the ability to sleep through the alarm, Phung and I did not, so our morning routine became a round of Phung and me taking turns sharply telling Jen to turn off the damn rooster, and moreover, for some reason, that rooster scared the shit out of me, so I'd generally have strange nightmares involving barnyard animals all morning after it finally shut up, and Phung and I started hating the rooster -- hating it with all the passion we could muster toward an inanimate object -- and then something weird happened to the inner workings of the rooster, and it used to go off at unpredictable intervals -- sometimes when I was alone in the house, and I'd have to go into the dark bedroom, and pull it out from under the bed, and try to turn it off, and it wouldn't turn off, and I had to take out the batteries and it still wouldn't shut up and it was all starting to feel like some potentially gory Stephen King story, so I finally just threw the alarm clock away in the dumpster behind the apartment and when I told Phung she was all, "Thank God," and Jen didn't really even care, because she's really easy-going like that. I think Phung and I pitched in to buy her a new alarm clock though, since, you know, we put out a hit on her old one. Anyway, I really don't appreciate being reminded of The Great Alarm Clock War of 1996, Bunim-Murray, and I'm adding that to the long, long list of grievances I have with the two of you, which also includes "launching, more or less, the reality-show genre, thereby inadvertently leading to my agreeing to recap Big Brother" and "Glenn."
Anyway, the roommates are getting ready to go, en masse, to Mexico, on MTV's dime. Dom and Aaron discuss the number of shoes they're bringing ("Two," Aaron says). Banthony has brilliantly lost her ticket, and searches the house, looking in her lunchbox and the trash can. Beth, Jon, and Tami play rock, paper, scissors to decide which of the three of them is going to have to pay for their communal sunscreen, because they're cheap; and I don't know what Glenn is doing, and, wow, do I not care.
Eventually, Banthony finds her ticket, and the kids get taxied to the airport to catch their flight to South America. This season has had more shots of the airport than any other season of The Real World, I think. I mean, nothing caps the Seattle Space Needle Count, but there's a whole hell of a lot of LAX in this season. I told you, the airport rocks! Dom finds a condom tucked inside his passport, and looks at it like, hey, this might be useful. Once they get on the plane, Dom celebrates his finding by ordering "a cerveza," and it turns out that the beer on the plane is free. For those of you taking notes about where you can score free booze, this is Mexicana Airlines. Long story short, Dom orders a ton of free beer and gets wasted. Can I see a show of hands from those of you who are surprised by this? I didn't think so. A bit later, Dom leans over his pyramid of beer cans to toast Aaron, who's in the seat in front of him. Banthony looks on, all holier-than-thou, a tight-lipped smile on her face. "I can't recall after drink five," Dom says. "Not that I was drunk after drink five. I just don't bother counting." He's surrounded by empties. Dude, how long is the flight from Los Angeles to Mexico? It can't be more than a couple of hours. I guess Dom really does like to drink. I had no idea!
The plane touches down in Mexico. As the roommates file onto the concourse, Aaron voice-overs that they're all going to try to "get to know one another better." Dude, by this point, why bother? How much time do they have left with each other? Personally, if I lived in this house, I'd be trying to stay as far away from everyone as humanly possible. I'd spend all my time at, like, the library, or something. Or a bar. Or the street corner. Beth flips her hair and hopes that the housemates don't break up into their usual cliques.
Tami gets stopped at Customs, but they don't find any blow in her bags, and let her through. While her bags are being searched, Dom and Aaron amble up to the airport bar and order "two Dos Equis." For some reason, they get served Corona. The boys don't care; they just pound the drinks. Elsewhere, the girls are welcomed to Cozumel by a bottle blonde in pleated white Bermuda shorts.
So, the kids all get loaded into a spacious mini-van-type taxi, wherein Tami and Beth giggle and ask the cabbie where they can find "los chicos." He laughs and laughs at the stupid American girls.
Montage of the beautiful Mexican countryside. Fish swim in the sea. Gila monsters roam on the land. Banthony sits in the taxi and shoots Beth an irritated look. Does she ever run out of variations on that look? I mean, my own stable of irritated looks is limited; there's my "whatever" look, and my "what an idiot" look, and my "you disgust me, don't touch me. I mean it. Don't touch me" look, and really, that's about it. But Banthony...just when I think she's run out of disparaging expressions, she ups the ante. This one appears to be a "you appall me, plebeian," sort of expression, with a touch of "is appearing on this show destroying my alternative cred, and, if so, how can I get it back?" tossed in for good measure.
Finally, the cast arrives at the hotel, and the editors try to make it look like they're being greeted by Noel, their "Activities Director," for the first time, although she's clearly the woman who met them at the airport. "Welcome," Glenn drunkenly slurs in Noel's direction. She laughs at him. Aaron shakes Noel's hand for about twelve minutes longer than any normal person would. And then everyone has to check in and decide with whom they're staying, and, of course, chaos ensues. Banthony perches on a rock formation, wearing a pair of black nylon biker shorts and a puffy pirate shirt, and simpers into the camera, "Glenn and I decided we wanted to share a room because we wanted to enjoy ourselves and we didn't want to have to worry about anybody's hang-ups or head trips." Hang-ups or head trips? Is this 1969? Did I accidentally just flip over to Hair? Who talks like that?
"Beth A. and Glenn have discovered their weirdness together," Dom explains from the beach, wearing ripped jeans, a bright yellow shirt and a backwards Newsies cap. "Both of them are just wacked out of their minds," he explains. I can buy that. In fact, it's the only reasonable explanation for Banthony's adoration of Glenn: she's clinically insane.
Back in their hotel room, Banthony and Glenn laugh uproariously, tucked into their separate beds. Glenn caterwauls something nonsensical about cats and alarm clocks. I don't know.
Naturally, Dom and Aaron share a room. Aaron hits on Noel a bit more as she walks him to the door. She's about fifteen years older than he is. Not that there's anything wrong with that. She gives him a tolerant "down, boy" look, and leaves the two of them to their own devices, such as they are.
Jon bunks with Beth and Tami, who are more than happy to have him. They haul their mountains of bags into a much nicer room than Glenn's and Banthony's -- one with a balcony, and a view.
Jon, Beth, and Tami decide to go swimming in the hotel pool, in the middle of the night. Tami, for some reason, is wearing what looks like a t-shirt and a pair of panties, which is strange, to say the least. "I will be the first to admit that, at first, I didn't always get along with Beth S. At first, she annoyed the heck out of me, too," Tami admits. It's like she's speaking directly to me! Tami goes on to say, however, that since she's really gotten to know Beth, she likes her. She wishes more people in the house would give Beth a second chance. "She's gotten a bad rap," Tami's voice-over muses. Okay, okay. I have to admit that I've moved from loathing Beth with every fiber of my being to just vaguely disliking her. I sort of feel sorry for her, now. She's not evil, like Glenn. She's just irritating. Really, really, really irritating. Anyway, Jon takes it upon himself to teach Tami to swim. Who doesn't know how to swim? Isn't Tami from southern California? I took swimming lessons every summer for fives years, and we had swimming in P.E. for three. No matter. Tami hangs onto the wall and looks at Jon pleadingly. He tells her to float, and then move her arms and legs. Well, that's basically all there is to it, I suppose. "Somewhere in Barstow, Tami swore she would never speak to me again," Jon chortles in an interview, before launching into a huge long speech about the importance of second chances, or some shit. He reflects that there don't seem to any second chances in the cards for Beth or Tami as far as Glenn and Banthony are concerned.
The gang heads off to dinner together, and Dom is completely wasted. "Shocker," Beth drawls in an interview. Oh, okay: ha. The thing is, we've all seen Drunken Dom before, but this Drunken Dom is really, really loaded. Like, he can't compose complete sentences. As he stutters something nonsensical, Tami points and laughs. That Tami, so sensitive. Aaron makes some crack about Dom's having lost his cognitive reasoning skills, and how Dom's neurons are all firing weird, and Dom sort of rolls his head around like Stevie Wonder and makes "zoom, zoom" sound effects. Later, a bunch of total strangers take tequila shots with their backs to the camera, and Bunim-Murray tries to make it look like these strangers are the Real Worlders, but one of the men is completely bald, and the other has really, really bad back hair, and it's clearly just an entirely different bunch of drunken guests.
I think this has got to be some kind of Club Med resort, if not actually Club Med, proper, because every single person at the hotel is pale and flabby and clearly on some kind of vacation, and all the activities are so darned planned. For example, in the list is a "bikini contest," which Activities Director Julie -- I mean, "Noel" -- explains in a hushed tone to Banthony, Beth, and Tami is actually a clever gender-role-reversal- joke-type thing, because they're actually going to make the boys the contestants, rather than the judges. What an original concept!
The boys are a bit flabbergasted by the bikini contest. "Why would our girls be in a bikini contest?" Jon wonders in a chair on the beach. Why, indeed. Anyway, Noel calls the Real World boys and two other random dudes up on a makeshift stage near the pool to be "judges." Aaron, Jon, and Glenn amble up to the stage, waving at the extremely unenthusiastic crowd. "I wanted to be a judge for a bikini contest," Glenn says in an interview, but he clearly wasn't done speaking there; Bunim-Murray totally cut off the end of his sentence. So he may have actually said, like, "I wanted to be a judge for a bikini contest like I wanted a hole in the head," or "I wanted to be a judge for a bikini contest, because I really dig big, fake breasteses." We learn that Dom, showing good judgment in the middle of his drinking binge, is absent from this activity. The audience of bored-looking middle-aged people with bad haircuts and sunburns stares as Tami, Beth, Banthony, and some random women who are probably Club Med employees, file onto the stage, wrapped in bath towels. Noel gleefully explains the switcheroo to the audience, and turns around to smile demonically at the duped contestants. The audience claps half-heartedly. The boys, however, seem pretty good-natured about the entire thing, especially the two random dudes.
Once the boys are all gussied up, Noel makes them introduce themselves to the crowd -- in their female persona. Random Dude #1 enthusiastically shakes his moneymaker. Glenn, however, gets up there and aggressively grabs the microphone from Noel. "My boss drugged me and brought me down here. I'm his secretary," he says huskily. The audience sort of titters nervously, because, you know, roofies aren't funny, but Glenn looks like he could go mediaeval on their collective asses if they don't laugh. Noel attempts to regain the reins of her rapidly-spiraling- out-of-control contest, but Glenn plays keep-away with the microphone. "I'm not done yet!" he barks. "Stop it!" he yells at the audience. "If you need to go to the bathroom, go to the nearest pool!" he hollers, and then cannonballs into the pool in front of him. The audience has no response. None. They just stare. Glenn is such a tool. As he climbs out of the pool, Jon mugs for the audience. He tells them his name is Bertha, and he's from Orange County. Beth and Tami laugh from the sidelines. Aaron is . He tells the audience that his name is Ashley, and he deals with plastics. "With prosthetic sexual organs," he explains. People laugh half-heartedly. Then Aaron dances around the stage, finishing up his parade of humiliation by thrusting his pelvis all around poor Noel. She daintily looks away. The audience is informed that they'll be picking the winner with their applause. Glenn gets no applause. Jon gets no applause. "God bless you," he calls out. Aaron gets no applause. One of the random dudes wins in a landslide. The prize looks like a bottle of water, but I think it must be vodka. Or something. As Noel is presenting Winner Dude his prize, Glenn leaps out of his chair and grabs the microphone, again, and starts bellowing that the contest is fixed. The winner starts to say something tongue-in-cheek about Glenn's cheating. "Sit down, you asshole, fuck you," Glenn snarls at him. In an interview, Jon looks down at his lap and admits that he was pretty embarrassed when Glenn "started screaming the F word. But that's Glenn for you." That is Glenn for you. He puts the "ass" right back in "class."
After the contest, Aaron and Jon take off looking for Dom. They shortly find him -- surrounded by a camera man, a guy with a boom mike, another guy with some lighting, and a producer, frantically waving his arms. Despite the hot lamp stuck right in his face, Dom is passed out, face down in the sand. The fade to commercial implies that Dom has dropped dead, right there on the beach.
We come back from the commercial to see that Glenn has joined Aaron and Jon in staring impotently down at Dom. "This is not a good scene," Aaron says, flopping down on a nearby box. "There's sand in his nose and his eyes," Jon points out. "Yeah, that's happened before, believe me," Aaron says wearily, before leaning over and shaking Dom. Dom sort of half-opens his eyes and mutters something. Aaron tries to talk Dom into getting up and going back to their room. Dom just sputters. In an interview, Aaron enables Dom's alcoholism by reminding us that Dom is Irish and has been drinking beer since he was nine years old.
In an interview, Beth sighs that she feels sorry for Dom. Her voice cracks like a fourteen-year-old boy's. She then points out that Dom's doing irreparable damage to his health, drinking the way he does. "If he doesn't watch it, he's gonna be dead before he's thirty," Beth says, before commenting that the whole Dom Is Irish And Irish People Drink A Lot scenario is crap. And, for once, I agree with her. Tami explains that you can't tell Dom anything, because, like most people, he's just going to do whatever he wants. She muses that Dom needs to hit rock bottom before he'll be motivated to do anything about his drinking problem.
In his yellow-shirt-wearing interview, Dom spouts some crap to the effect that he doesn't have a drinking problem. "The beach is one of the most ideal places to take a nap, and that's where I decided to take a nap," he says. Okay, Dom. You know, in the middle of the night, most people refer to "taking a nap" as "going to bed," and they generally do it inside.
So, the morning after his nap on the beach, Dom wakes up feeling pretty hung-over -- no surprise there. He's good-natured about it, though, and he and Aaron laugh uproariously from under the flowery coverlets on their beds. "You looked like you did a face plant, dude, in the sand," Aaron says. That's a very advanced use of the word "dude," by the way. "Oh God, we're in paradise and it's a nightmare," Dom mock-screams from under his covers. Aaron chortles and strokes his tan and hairless pecs.
The day -- I guess -- the group goes snorkeling. While they're checking out their gear, Beth gets teased by one of the Club Med employees about all the sharks they're going to see. Beth's all, we're going to see sharks? And he's all, no sharks. She's all, sharks? He's like, dude, no sharks. This goes on for fifteen minutes. Then everyone hops in the boat and heads out to the open sea. Glenn takes a nap and Tami surreptitiously ties an anchor to his ankle and tosses him overboard. I wish. The editors toss in a whole lot of shots of fish, and waving coral reefs and seaweed and plankton. Enya wails in the background as the roommates swim around. There are several voice-overs about the beauty and peace of the underwater world, and how neat snorkeling is, and what a good bonding experience it was, and how memorable and how they're all never, ever going to forget it, never!
After the snorkeling, Noel rounds up the kids and takes them horseback riding, piling them all onto the world's most placid ponies. Beth, however, somehow manages to land the wildest trained pony ever, which she tries to control by squealing like a cable modem, and, of course, fails utterly. Everyone else plods along, tranquilly, on his or her ancient Club Med domesticated petting zoo ponies, while Beth somehow gets hers all turned around. She screams. I think her pony can smell her fear. Then Banthony makes this huge fuss because she doesn't think people who don't know how to ride ought to be riding, and hello, it's not the Olympics, it's a trained pony at freaking Club Med. While Beth is highly annoying, it's not like she's flogging the horse with a branch of prickly pear, and she's certainly endangering anyone. Not even herself. Unless you count the possibility of her dying of embarrassment. In his seaside interview, Glenn calls the horseback riding the "worst experience" of the trip, and spits out that Beth scared all the other horses. Cue a shot of all the other horses standing around and looking thoughtful. "She's a mess," Glenn spits. Banthony spews some kind of psychobabble about Beth's not wanting to control situations, instead wanting people to control situations for her. Whatever. I hate them both. Not that I'm turning into some kind of Beth lover, or anything. I just think Banthony and Glenn are so sanctimonious and self-righteous and so in love with themselves, and they're totally just making themselves feel that much cooler by constantly talking about what a total dork Beth is all the time. Because Banthony and Glenn are in junior high school.
, everyone hops on scooters and rides around town. Aaron looks like a pro on his scooter, and everyone else looks perfectly competent, even Beth. Hair blows in the wind. Bugs smash into windshields. And then, Beth voice-overs, "an evil devil force" pulls her around a particularly sharp curve and bang! Right smack into the curb. Beth's scooter cam shows her leaping off the scooter and plopping right down onto the grass. She moans and holds her hands. Noel scoots up behind her and sighs, and says she'll take Beth to the doctor. How hurt can Beth be? She wasn't going that fast, and she landed on grass, not cement. See, just when I start feeling bad for Beth, she goes and acts like a total drama queen and completely erases any sympathy I might have felt for her. So, yeah, the détente between Beth and me? Over.
Noel and Beth are both wearing skirts that are far too short and too full for their bodies. They look like squat little multi-colored Russian nesting dolls. Noel chatters while Beth holds her wrist (her own wrist, not Noel's) and makes a dramatic pained face. Noel tells Beth that the local doctor has a slight conflict of interest; he's also the local mortician. Beth doesn't respond to this.
Beth gets in to see the doctor right away. He flicks her fingers and taps her hand and whatnot and tells her it isn't broken. "I break my fingers a lot," Beth protests. He raises a brow, and twists her hands around some more. Still doesn't hurt. He repeats that her hand is not broken. She's all, I think it is, and, he's all, it's not broken, and I'm all, it's not broken if doesn't hurt when he's pulling it on it, brainiac. "I think it's at least a fracture," Beth whines. The doctor is all, please go back to America, stupid girl. He shakes his head. "I really think it's broken," Beth repeats. "Is not broken," the doctor insists. He wraps up Beth's hand and sends her outside and thinks about how much he hates Americans. In her interview, Beth says she still wants an x-ray, because she finds it hard to believe she didn't fracture something. I'll fracture something for you, Beth.
The group heads into town, and promptly splits up into their regular groups, despite all the noise everyone made about sticking together. Banthony whines that she's embarrassed to be seen with Beth and Jon. Insert a shot of Beth yelling "hola, chicos," at some other tourists. Everyone involved in the "hola chicos" incident chortles. Somehow, however, everyone in the group ends up at the same reggae bar, where Aaron and Glenn and Banthony and Dom are embarrassed by the antics of Jon and Beth, which, in all honestly, are not all that embarrassing. They're just dancing. Badly, but no more badly than most drunk people dance. Aaron says something about Jon not showing proper respect for a foreign environment. Dude. It's a bar. He was dancing. People dance in bars. It's not like he was doing the funky chicken in the middle of St Paul's Cathedral.
So at dinner -- when, I don't know, since most people don't go to dinner after they go drinking, but whatever -- Tami opens up a big old can of worms by asking Dom and Aaron why they're avoiding her, Jon, and Beth. Aaron repeats the "respectful to foreigners" manta, very condescendingly. Tami dismissively waves her hand at him. Banthony pipes up that she's embarrassed to be seen with "you guys." "Don't say 'you guys,'" Tami says "because I did not walk in [the bar] and scream." Banthony sneers at Tami and looks at her plate. "How dare you, Beth," I hear Glenn say at the other end of the table -- probably to Beth S., rather than his beloved Banthony. Everyone is talking at the same time, and I have no idea who's talking to whom, and about what, and in response to what. "I don't want to deal with it," Glenn says, about...something. Jon's dancing, I think. "So, you're above Jon, now," Tami says sharply. "Not above -- beyond," Glenn says and smiles like he just found a cure for cancer, so clever does he consider his own bon mot. I loathe him. Loathe him. Dom half-heartedly tries to chill people out, but fails, mostly because he's drunk and babbling. Then Beth says something I can't hear and Glenn goes, "Beth, you're an idiot actor," and someone -- Banthony, I think -- starts murmuring at him to shut up. "You're so pathetic," he continues. "Either that, or you're an idiot. You make me sick." Wow. I'm mean to Beth. But that's pretty harsh. And to her face, no less. Anger issues, much, Glenn? Banthony quietly tells Glenn to "slow down." Aaron stands up and just looks down at all of them.
And this is the part where I fall in love the Bunim-Murray editors, because they finally start to use their powers for good, and not for evil. Glenn, in an ocean-side interview, sneers into the camera. I wish a wave would just swoop up and wash him away. He snips that his mother and father taught him to "be respectable" in a foreign country. He totally stole that line from Aaron. "I always had to be respectable [sic] when I was young," Glenn continues. He claims that he isn't loud, and that he never tries to pull attention to himself. Here, the editors insert a shot of Glenn calling the winner of the "bikini contest" an asshole, then screaming and leaping into the pool. Go editors, go! See, Glenn is a total tool! The editors have proved it! Dom tells the camera that he didn't enjoy Beth's "behavior" on the horse. Aaron leans against a scooter and repeats that he, "personally," was embarrassed. "And I have the right to do that!" he squeals nonsensically.
Back at the table, Aaron and Jon argue about something I can't catch. "Shut up and don't talk to me in that tone of voice," Jon says to Aaron, and pushes away from the table and walks off! Go Jon!
On the beach, Beth says she can overlook Dom's drunken antics, but she can't believe that he's holding the chicken dancing against Jon. I hate to say it, but that's a good point.
Aaron and Dom talk about something in their hotel room, but it's all muttered and nonsensical. Seriously, I have no idea what's going on here.
Finally, each of the roommates look into the camera and say something along the lines that Mexico made them realize that they're never going to get along, ever. Well, I could have told them that. "The same old baggage came with us into paradise," Beth narrates, and then goes into her room and writes that sentence down in her diary because it's so very clever. And then they all pile into a tiny little taxi and drive to the airport and go home, hating each other more than ever.