Vanderpump Rules Recap: To Venus and Back

Vanderpump Rules
Crash Out Queens
Season 12 Episode 3
Editor’s Rating ★★
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The SUR photoshoot has always been invented for television rather than real life. I don’t mind that so much. This isn’t a Ken Burns documentary. We know this because the old photos from the photo shoot starring DJ James Kennedy (RIP), Jax Taylor (RIP), and Christina Kelley (RIP to both her names) aren’t sepia-toned and showed with a slow pan. This is not, thank God, PBS. I realize we need fake events to bring out the very real behavior of these lab rats, who have sold their souls so they can get you to buy their favorite protein powder at a discount with the code ChrisVanderPUMP10. 

Still, this episode has me questioning whether these kids are really fighting over silly things because they’re actually upset about them, or because they’re on the show. If these are the only fights they could dream up, are they complete idiots? Possibly. Marcus was drying off while still in the pool, leaving his towel sopping wet. Audrey says that Chris (one of the identical cousins) is so old that he probably had a Blackberry that flipped open. As someone old enough to both make that identical cousins joke and own a Blackberry, I will let you know that Blackberries might have had some slide-down keyboards, but most of them didn’t open. She’s thinking of a Sidekick. I mean, open the schools. Regardless, it’s not like we’re dealing with neuroscientists here, except for maybe new girl Angelica, who is still waiting tables with the rest of them despite her degree.

Angelica shows up midway through the photo shoot, and she was clearly hired not because of her ability to use OpenTable when serving (sorry, SURving) her section. She was hired because she’s hot, horny, and another H-word about how badly she wants to be on reality TV. (Harried? Hustling? Hungry?) At least she immediately falls when entering the room, making the best possible impression on both the audience and the new group of people she’s forced to befriend. 

That’s not the main event of the photo shoot. That happens when Venus pulls Marcus aside when he realizes that Marcus and Kim have, once again, gotten back together. “We never had a conversation about being back together; we’re just back together. Isn’t that the beauty of a toxic relationship?” Marcus asks us in confessional. Venus’s problem is that he spent the whole previous night at Audrey’s 22nd birthday party comforting Kim as she sobbed to anyone within earshot that Marcus said he was falling out of love with her. Well, he was certainly falling into something following the party. 

Marcus, who fully acknowledges that he’s in a toxic relationship, tells Venus that it is none of his business and that he should butt out of their problems. I’m sorry, but I think Venus has a legit gripe here. If they keep running to him, monopolizing his time, and talking about their bullshit relationship while relentlessly getting back together, then Venus is entirely justified in being sick of hearing about it. Marcus is so toxic he basically tells Venus to stop listening when these are the two always talking to him about it. Like, sister, I would butt out if I could. 

Then Natalie comes over to join in because she thinks that she’s the root of the problem. Well, of course, Natalie thinks that because she is a battery for the main character’s energy. She just syphons it off everyone she walks by so that she’s always at 100 percent and everything is always about her. Then Kim comes over to join in and says that the root of the problem is that Natalie crossed a boundary by texting Marcus. Then Natalie is like, “Weren’t you crying to me about this man all night?” and then Kim is like, “But he wasn’t my boyfriend then.” Then Natalie is like, “But he’s your boyfriend now?” and then Kim was like, “Why are you questioning my boyfriend?” and then Lisa is like, “You’re doing amazing sweeties,” and then Natalie is like, “But your boyfriend talks to Demy” and then Demy was like, well, she wasn’t like anything. She just walked over there and held up the NeNe Leakes “Now Why Am I In It?” GIF and then walked away.

This stupid fight escalates when Marcus texts Venus to say he saw a side of him he didn’t like and that he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. “I don’t want to be fake and act like we’re cool, so no, not to pretend like we are,” he texts. No, please. Be fake! Why is everyone on reality TV worried about being fake? We all have to be fake just to get through the day. Do I really care that the barista failed his Economics exam? I mean, not really, but I’m pretending so that he will feel better about himself and maybe spell my name without a Y on the side of my coffee cup for a change. Fakeness makes the world go around, my friends. 

Venus, not being fake, reiterates his stance that he’s tired of hearing about this relationship that is both getting together and breaking up at the same time for infinity. Venus texts back, “I don’t want to hear about your clown-ass relationship from you or Kim. You all look stupid as fuck.” Meanwhile, Marcus and Kim think there is nothing wrong with their relationship. Marcus tells her that, except for the fighting, there are no red flags. Yeah, idiot. The fighting is the red flag! How are you missing this? 

The other point they miss is that Venus is somehow out of line for reacting to Marcus saying he wants nothing to do with him. What did you think he’d say, “Okay, cool. I’ll totally ignore you at our next shift”? Then they go to all the people that Venus talked shit about and tell them exactly what he said, which causes problems for Venus with a bunch of people that we haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet because they were either too boring, too thirsty, or too chopped to have made the final cut for casting. When Audrey explains to Kim that they started it and shouldn’t have betrayed Venus’s confidence, Kim says that’s not her problem that they feel that way. Yeah, but they wouldn’t have any feelings at all if she and Marcus didn’t start this whole thing. 

That is why part of me thinks this drama is just made up for the cameras. It’s so dumb. It’s so obvious. It’s so ubiquitous. It’s so low stakes. But then I also think it’s real because it has to be. It’s one thing if it were like Selling Sunset, where Christine Quinn basically decided she would be the villain and take one for the team. But here they all look like villains. They all look stupid. Is it cool to be the villain now? Are they trying to out-awful each other, or are they all actually like this? That’s what I can’t figure out.

The final scene of the episode showcases what these kids do best: fight on rooftops. Venus tries to talk to Kim about how she told everyone he talked shit about them. Now, let’s be clear, I fully believed that Venus said all of that shit. Of course he did! I only met him three weeks ago, and I already know that there is no one shadier, and, honestly, this is what gay liberation looks like, and I fully support it. To (mis)quote the ultimate gay liberator, Oscar Wilde, what people say about you behind your back is none of your business.

Kim walks away from the conversation, Marcus pretends like he didn’t start this whole thing and is entirely blameless, and we’re left with Venus going after Gabby, a girl with extensions so bad she couldn’t secure a reality TV bag. Again, is this real or is this Memorex? (So, Audrey, Memorex was this brand of tape that we used to record songs off the radio and … know what? Never mind.) I can’t believe it’s real because it’s so dumb, but it’s so dumb it has to be real. 

Thank the Catholic Jesus for these stupid friend fights because the romance they’re trying to push on these kids is boring. Chris and Jason are fun to look at, but their personalities give me an intense case of the yawns. Chris goes on a horse-riding date with Audrey, and my loins were leaky the whole time, but you might as well have just put it on mute and diddled a bit because otherwise the scene gave nothing. Jason flirts with Angelica on the rooftop and it was like visual melatonin. I just didn’t care at all. 

We’re having a bit more luck, and only a little bit, with Shayne and Natalie. They go on a rock-climbing date and it was super snoozy except Shayne told us a story about his past and it was a doozy. Apparently, right after he signed his first modeling contract, he and his best friend were “meeting with some guys,” and they got in a fight. His friend took out a gun and started blindly shooting, and instead of hitting the other guys, he shot Shayne three times, puncturing his lung, breaking his spine, and paralyzing him. Not since we heard Katie Maloney Schwartz Maloney tell us about the time she fell through a skylight and broke her back have I had more questions that will never be answered. Like why were they meeting? What was the fight about? Why was the friend shooting without looking? Does any of this have to do with why Shayne is sober? I mean, I need to know it all, but also have no interest because I’m afraid of the answers. Shayne says he busts out this story to make girls feel for him and lure them in, but, honey, this story has more red flags than a souvenir shop at the Zurich airport. I would hear this story on a date and ghost him in real time. 

That’s basically what happens when he talks to Natalie at the pool party and wonders why she is flirting with other guys. He says he thinks that communication is key in a relationship. She says that she just falls for guys and gets into a relationship immediately, and they never have to communicate. I mean, they are both clearly wrong. I agree with Natalie that they’re at a stage where they should just be flirting and seeing what happens, but I think Shayne is right that Natalie ends up in these short relationships because she never talks about her emotional needs. Still, I don’t really care about any of this. It seems like this romance was determined not by lust but by Lisa Vanderpump with her producer’s cap on. (Her producer’s cap is an overly realistic mask of Ken Todd.) What annoys me about these scenes is that it feels like Love Island, where it’s people talking more about how they are in relationships than showing us what their relationships could actually be like. At least Kim and Marcus are showing us the mess rather than playing it out in slow motion, in bathing suits, lying by a pool, like the only celebrity they know is Nicolandria.

As Natalie walks away from Shayne, possibly for good, and as Venus and some entity named Gabby lunge for each other, Katie Maloney Schwartz Maloney plucks out her earbuds, pulls her sunglasses off her cunty little bob, closes her copy of The Shards, and packs up her bag. Her favorite rooftop is, once again, ruined. She puts her manicured feet into her slides and half shuffles toward the elevator, wondering who is going to validate her parking. She doesn’t have any time for this. She knows how this starts and, more importantly, she knows how it ends. As she’s making her way out of this melee, away from this group forever, she spots a skylight just behind the glass wall that encloses the pool area. She stares at it like she knows its soul, like they’re old friends. She knows the crash is coming, but this time, she doesn’t want to be anywhere near it.