Ladies of London Recap: Dueling Dinners

Ladies of London
Martha in the Middle
Season 4 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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This week’s lesson about life in Britain is about driving. I do not recommend it. I’m with Emma and Mark: London is best experienced from the back of a cab. Not to be pedestrian (pun intended), but it’s actually best experienced by foot or cycle. Traffic is terrible, it takes too long, the streets are two-way even though they’re usually only wide enough for one vehicle, and they all have funny names and zig and zag and change names every ten seconds like a goth teen who just came off antidepressants. I’m sorry, but they also drive on the wrong side of the road. I’ve adapted to a lot of things living in England, but the Catholic Jesus intended us to drive on the right side of the road. That is why he named it right. (Other I will never adopt: Celsius and “stone,” which are bullshit and created by the British devil himself, James Corden.)

As Myka points out, this country is also covered with CCTV, and they’re constantly filming cars and their “number plates” and sending you infractions in the mail. If you park in the wrong place, don’t pay a fee to drive in a certain congestion zone on a specific day, or go too fast down the wrong street, an envelope with a £60 fine is on its way to your house. Thanks, Big Brother. In Britain’s defense, however, roundabouts are totally the way to go. Americans should look into importing roundabouts, universal health care, and Nando’s. End of list. 

I don’t know why we had to learn about driving at the top of this episode because it has nothing to do with either our ongoing storylines or the new events that unfold. Lottie and her husband, a marionette that lives in Elton John’s guesthouse, have a gender-reveal party. This is a bad idea. We all know that vow renewals on reality TV mean that a couple is headed for divorce, but gender reveals, no matter where they’re held, spell ecological and bodily destruction. You don’t do a vow renewal for the sake of your relationship, and you don’t do a gender reveal for the sake of humanity. Anyway, it’s a boy and no one died. Phew.

Myka films her puppet show, Mini Manners and, well, I have notes. First of all, it looked like she had her assistant as one of the puppeteers, and the other was, I don’t know, one of Sonja Morgan’s interns? Can’t we get some pros here manning these muppets? She’s trying to get the puppet to hold a fork correctly, except the puppet can’t actually hold the fork. What good is that? Also, can’t we make a pun with manners and manors? Can’t it be called Minding the Manors, and there’s a stately English home full of kids running amok, and Super Nanny comes in and shows them how to behave correctly? I’m just spitballing here, but I feel like what took Myka years to do took me about 30 seconds.

Margo finally moved into her house in Notting Hill, and it costs $60,000 a month to rent. I understand that she’s not going to be in London full time, but couldn’t she put a deposit down on a two-bed flat with that money and be done paying off the mortgage in a year, and then rent that flat out and be a landlord for the rest of her life? I don’t know. I didn’t study economics. I also didn’t study design, but I know better to move into a house where each room is themed around one color. There is an all-yellow hallway, an all-pink living room, and an all-green bedroom. It’s like living inside a Starburst. Who designed this place? The Museum of Ice Cream? 

Margo has Myka, Missé, and Lottie over to see this box of Crayolas she calls a house for a dinner that she didn’t prepare and still struggles with. Relatable. Not relatable (and this comes from a non-drinker) is not having any real alcohol to serve her two guests who drink. Instead, she had 19 varieties of nonalcoholic wine. What is the point of that? It’s like serving vegan desserts. It’s just taking the best things out of there. Why not make them some dirty sodas or some interesting juices? Why not make them an American delicacy like lemonade or sweet tea? Margo, my sober sister, I expect more. 

There is a dueling dinner party across town when Emma hosts Mark, Martha, and Kimi at her London flat, which looks like it is ensconced in the most gorgeous private garden in all of West London. The opposite of Margo, Emma has no problem preparing a nice dinner, having a number of different drinks for her guests, and regaling them with stories of the dinner parties she threw with Diana Ross riding a hippo or some shit. I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention. I was dreaming about her real estate. 

While the dinners are different, the topic is the same: Kimi’s ongoing feud with Margo and Missé and how Martha is stuck in the middle. Kimi says that Margo is like Martha’s bird, that she’ll get close to you and then peck your eyes out. This is why, no matter how you feel about the fight, Kimi is kind of winning. Margo only wishes she could be that witty. Martha says Kimi is just upset that Margo outmaneuvered her by sitting on the couch while she apologized to Missé in the last episode, and that Kimi is mad she was bested. This is an excellent point, and I feel like it definitely has something to do with Kimi’s feelings. She thinks that if only she could have talked to Missé just the two of them, she could have resolved it. 

Then Kimi does what any slighted person in a friend group would naturally do: She starts making fun of Margo’s clothes. Is it juvenile? Yes. Is it a little mean? Certainly. Is it the best part of the episode? Absolutely. Kimi especially hated Margo’s velour jumpsuit, which we didn’t get to see properly in a scene but is as hideous in person as it sounds on the page. Even Martha, who dresses like the person about to be murdered in an Agatha Christie special, thinks it’s ugly, but she says Margo came from Los Angeles, where people only wear Lululemon, and, well, she’s onto something. Mark says she should learn how to dress, but he also has some gossip for the group. He talked to someone at his garden party, which kicked off the series, who has known Margo for decades and said that ever since she got married, she’s become narcissistic and obsessed with money. But is that, I don’t know, new? Maybe that’s something that his friend just missed the first time around? And, even if it is new, do we care? To me, this seemed like the meanest thing said all episode. Leave it to a gay. 

Meanwhile, at Margo’s Prismatic Palace, Lottie is saying she doesn’t like Kimi’s aggression and would want to know if her friend was talking shit about her like Kimi was about Missé. Margo tries to follow up with Myka about what Kimi and Martha were saying about her at lunch the day before, and Myka is far too polite to get right there in the much and roll around in it. Where is the University of Florida sorority girl inside her? Can’t she come out with a too-short skirt and a red solo cup to mess around a bit? Margo leaves it by saying that she has no issue with Kimi, per se, and “If she wants to bark at me like a deranged Corgi,” then she can’t stop her. Okay. Good insult. Point for Margo. 

In the final scene, Kimi goes for lunch, and we’re waiting to see who is going to join her. I thought it would be Margo traipsing in wearing a jacket so large it could fit all the colors of the rainbow just like her house. Instead, it’s Missé wearing her accent like a cunty little hat. Just as I predicted after the last episode, Kimi is pissed at Margo and ready to move past things with Missé. She said she didn’t expect her comments to get out of the car and that she didn’t like that Margo was sitting next to her at the naked painting party when she tried to apologize. She says that Margo, like a bad pair of panties, was creating friction when there shouldn’t have been any. Missé seems willing to bury the hatchet after letting Kimi know that her feelings were hurt and she didn’t like it when Kimi said she was only telling the story of her brother’s death to get attention. But they laugh and cackle and try to get to know each other. They sit back in their seats, the tension gone, gathered up by Kimi, like a witch in the woodlands, and transformed into a bird that flits off through the door of this infernal fish-and-chip joint, over the trees and terraced houses, over the roundabouts and byways, over the parks and the swans and the fountains and drains of the city, as far west as Notting Hill, where Kimi’s enchantment will find a way to peck Margo’s eyes out.