The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Moskito Nets

The Real Housewives of New York City
Trouble in Paradise
Season 16 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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As the ladies get off of their (commercial) flight and take a speedboat to Moskito Island, we intentionally get The White Lotus vibes with a group of squabbling besties approaching the staff on the dock, waving until their arms ache like they just got the second dose of the gonorrhea vaccine. Erika described this place to the women and viewers as “our island” and a private island, like they were Tom Hanks and Winston in Cast Away but on purpose. What we discover is … not that. Moskito has signage, flags, and a corporate-looking logo. Each of the rooms in Erika’s house is labeled with a different name, including “Sunrise,” “Reef,” and “Crown,” making them look like the bunkhouses at a summer camp where no one is murdered for skinny-dipping in the lake. (Boring!) I’m not saying it looked bad — if someone invited me for a free weekend on Moskito, I would definitely go. But it wasn’t as advertised.

Erin and Daisy, who are sharing one of the two-bedroom suites, are the meanest about the situation. Erin’s bed looks like a fancy pullout couch. I have a feeling Erin is no stranger to the pullout method, but this is entirely different. It also warms the cockles of my polar-ice-cap heart that Erin “Mew Mew” Lichy is the one who has to sleep on a fancy cot. That is called karma, and I love when she comes to town. Erin and Daisy sit somewhere in this house talking about how it’s not that great. Erin says it’s a letdown, and Daisy says her boss, Martha Stewart, would think it’s a dump. She also doesn’t understand why they didn’t fly private. She was at a dinner just a week ago with Erika, where she talked about going to Costco. She’s on the $1.50 hot-dog-and-Sprite meal but wants a G6? The entitlement here is just beyond. However, I can’t get too mad at them because as I watched the episode with my husband, we were cutting on the décor ourselves, as it is such a bland person’s idea of what luxury looks like. It feels entirely impersonal, like you had Claude render a space that would offend no one and inspire just as many. 

Erika wears an electric-blue dress with a silver starfish in the middle that she definitely bought at a gift show at a Hilton Head resort as she gathers everyone for a dinner in the pool. Yes, she set up a table on the Baja shelf. Okay, this isn’t a terrible idea for lunch. If it’s hot out, you’re all in your swimwear by the pool, and no one is wearing shoes anyway, this could be fun. It’s hot out; wouldn’t it be nice to cool your tootsies? But at night, when it’s so cold and windy they need the staff to bring shawls? No, mama. This is not it. At the pool dinner, Daisy starts asking questions about who owns the island, why there doesn’t seem to be any food (they haven’t yet killed the peasants they will be feasting on), and what exactly the story is. In confessional, Jessel says they’re on a free luxury vacation and should not get too “granular” about the details of who owns the island. She is correct. They should be thankful that they’re there without question. More importantly, Erika described it as one of her “happy places” and they shouldn’t spoil the special way she feels about the island. Jessel is right. The dinner table is not the place for granularity.

Know where the place for granularity is? Vulture recaps of reality shows, bitches. So let us scrabble around in the sand for every last grain and talk about it. As Erika explains at dinner, while it is a private island, they are not the only ones there. There are eight families who all own a house on the island, and they each own a “stake” in the island. Moskito is basically one big condo, and they all own a bit of it and share the pools, tennis courts, staff, and other amenities. Richard Branson is one of those owners, and he bought the whole thing for only £10 million (about $13 million based on today’s conversion rate) back in 2007. It was previously the site of a remote diving resort. Branson also owns the entirety of nearby Necker Island, which you can rent. (Fun fact: Kate Winslet met her husband, Ned Rocknroll, while fleeing a house fire on Necker Island.)

You can seemingly rent out the houses on Moskito as well. It appears that this isn’t a time-share but instead like one of those hotels where the people own the rooms and can use them whenever they like, but when the owners aren’t there, the rooms are rented out. Erika tells a story about the first time she went to Moskito and met Ankur’s whole family. She bought them a beach blanket, but they obviously didn’t need one because they can afford the whole damn beach. That got me thinking about why the entire family was there. It turns out, Ankur’s father, Naveen Jain, created InfoSpace, one of the giants of the early internet, and is also a billionaire himself. So in the words of RuPaul, she already done had hers-es.

There’s a lot happening on this not-so-private island that has nothing to do with my (and Daisy’s) fixation on money and status. Sai found out the night before she left that her husband, David, took the kids upstate, filed for divorce, and maybe alerted the press about the filing. Sai found out thanks to a text from Erin and a screenshot from TMZ. I’m sorry, but that is colder than a nighttime dinner sitting in a pool. She’s dealing with the fallout of that and, strange for Sai, being open and vulnerable about how hurt she is. 

Carole is vacillating between worrying that she didn’t pack enough cozy tube socks and still being mad at Jessel for the Carolyn Bessette thing from a few weeks back. Carole opens up about how hard Love Story has been on her, and Jessel finally seems to get it. She starts to tell Carole about how difficult things have been since she lost her father a year ago, and in the middle of this, Carole leaps up because she thinks there are drones outside their windows filming them. Has Carole been watching too many of her old frenemy Bethenny Frankel’s TikToks about “Dior bags?” Then she realizes they aren’t drones; they’re just birds. Oh really, Carole? Doesn’t she know birds aren’t real and they’re all drones anyway? Just because you’re on a private island doesn’t mean the man can’t getcha. Jessel makes up for it by calling her Carolyn, which isn’t a Freudian slip so much as it’s a whole damn tumble.

Jessel has bigger fish to fry or birds to defeather or drones to deblade. (I don’t know. What do you do with drones?) Daisy and Erin, suddenly closer than Richard Branson and Marysol Patton, chat, and Daisy tells Erin that Jessel made a crack about her house flooding maybe being some kind of insurance scheme. I’m not going to lie, I hate Erin more than Daisy hates having to fly in 17C, but that was a pretty low-down, dirty thing to say, especially because we all know that is not the Real Housewives preferred method for insurance fraud. Erin, of course, gets upset about this and talks about what a horrible day she’s having to Sai, who just got served divorce papers via a post from Pop Crave.

Talk at the soggy-toes dinner turns to Daisy’s popcorn ceiling, and she says she didn’t like Jessel joking about it and razzes Jessel by saying she shops at Shein. We know that’s not true. Shein would never sell Jessel’s latest confessional look, which seems like 17 talismans having an orgy on her chest. Erin, who keeps saying she doesn’t want to bring it up, then brings it up but also won’t say what she’s actually mad about; she’s just letting it be known that she is poopy pants about something so the rest of the women will have to draw it out of her. 

Finally, Erin comes out with it and tells Jessel she is “despicable,” a word she uses so often you know she just tore it off her Word of the Day desk calendar. Two things are happening at the same time with Jessel — one is amazing, and the other is terrible. The first is that she turns it back on Daisy, who implicated both Jessel and Erika. Jessel says, “But she left herself out.” Yes, that’s right. Daisy was part of the conversation and had a lot more to say than Erika did, who just kind of smiled on Daisy’s couch and dreamt of Taco Bell. Jessel draws Daisy into the fight, and Erin says Daisy was defending her, which Daisy then ridiculously denies. She did paint it that way to Erin, and now she’s going to stand on the moral high ground of not defending her but telling her about it? I’m sorry, but I do not understand Daisy’s moral code. 

The terrible thing Jessel’s doing is denying the implication that Erin would be perpetrating insurance fraud because she, like her Hamptons house, is underwater. Well, at least financially. Jessel says, “I didn’t say it was a scam; I said it was an insurance thing.” Okay, what is the difference? That’s like saying, “I’m sorry if I said you were dumb; maybe I meant you were stupid.” What could an insurance thing be other than a scam, a fraud, or something untoward? Does she want us to think the “insurance thing” is that they’re going to pay for a remodel? Come on.

Hailey, who hasn’t said much because she’s probably been eating Xanax like Pez, keeps warning everyone it’s about to rain, it’s about to rain, but they just keep fighting, oblivious that they live on a planet with weather that doesn’t revolve around them. Suddenly, the force field the billionaires built to keep out the weather fails, and actual rain hits the actual pool and the actual house and the actual people, whose feet are getting prune-y while they wait for actual desserts. They all scramble for shelter, trying to get out of the shallow end. Carole, trying to get on the patio, falls over the edge and straight into the bushes. She thinks back to where she saw this before, to her previous life with a group of shrieking women and one of them slicing up her forearms while wrestling with gravity in the middle of a bush. It was torture, she thinks, such beautiful torture, but while she lies there in the rain and the bramble, the past and the present colliding, one a real memory and one a simulacrum, she feels just like she does while watching an episode of Love Story. She can’t get out because she’s in it; she’s always been in it. Life just keeps repeating in a way that keeps her down, keeps her in it, keeps her comfy, like a big woolen sock wrapped around her heart.