Love Island USA Recap: Is It Time To Start Worrying About Melanie?

Love Island
Episode 7
Season 8 Episode 7
Editor’s Rating ★★★
Previous Next
Previous Episode
Next Episode

Each season of Love Island USA is approximately 1 million episodes, and we are recapping all of them. Check back for morning-after recaps of weekday episodes and a Monday roundup of the weekend’s shenanigans. 

It’s that time of year once again. As Americans, we all have a civic duty to make our voices heard, to vote for the people we believe best represent us. Our democracy is at stake. Have you downloaded the Love Island app yet?

To be fair, the app crashed from high voter demand after last night’s episode. I was one of the many who were unable to vote until the voting window reopened today, despite restarting the app multiple times. (Disenfranchisement is still a massive issue in this country.) Still, it’s exciting to speculate about how these results will turn out — even if it’s pretty obvious how the next recoupling will go in at least two of the three cases.

“Episode 7” was all about the three new bombshells and the chaos they brought out of our existing pairings. In the wake of the previous night’s giant bed challenge, the male Islanders have weirdly gained the moral high ground, putting their partners on the defensive in a couple of cases. As we get into the meat of the season, everyone is starting to spiral, falling victim to variations of the same bad communication and “You cheated first” logic. We haven’t reached max velocity yet, but it’s pretty fun.

Jen Is a Boring Wild Card

Jen is by far the least-developed bombshell yet. She’s a model from Florida, and she likes Taylor Swift and One Direction, and that’s about it. She also doesn’t seem like much of a threat to Bryce and Trinity’s increasingly solid (and delightfully gossip-based) relationship, even though she and Bryce have known each other for years. So far, the character of Jen is more about what she represents. To Beatriz, who gets arguably the best line of the episode — “I ain’t got big titties or blonde hair, and I’m missing a leg” — it’s a matter of beauty standards. And she’s right to worry about Gabriel’s self-control, because he locked down his third make-out of the episode fast with that “teaching Portuguese” gimmick. (Did we need such a gross extreme close-up?)

There’s also potential for Jen to bring out some more good drama in Zach and Kayda’s rocky relationship. Zach irritated the hell out of me in this episode, expressing his jealousy of Kayda’s challenge behavior and even dropping the phrase “closed off” before panicking and backtracking the next day when he remembered it’s only week two. I totally get Kayda’s frustration, especially with how quickly he pulls Jen after that point. Then again, she also takes Caleb to Soul Ties, which most of these Islanders consider an act of war. 

Caleb Offers Southern Charm

Kenzie is insatiable in this episode, luxuriating in the unfamiliar and slightly unsettling experience of being a “roster girl” for the first time. She and Corbin are connecting physically, but he doesn’t seem like any match for the 21-year-old from Charleston. It’s pretty funny to see Corbin shunted into a cuck role so soon after commanding everyone’s attention with his good looks and not much else. He’s not even interested in chatting up the new bombshells, maybe because he’s still exhausted from kissing so many people the other day. But his choice to stick with Kenzie might be his downfall. 

Caleb is just clearly Kenzie’s type to a tee, to the point that briefly mentioning his elevator-mechanic job is enough to get her horny. (Kenzie’s eyes, more than almost anyone else here, are a window to her soul.) We know from Olandria last season that people who work in the elevator industry do well on Love Island, so Caleb could have a bright future.

Sol Comes in like a Wrecking Ball

Sincere and Melanie’s toxic cycle is fueling this season right now, and I hope she doesn’t go away yet. Neither of them is handling this situation well at all. Look, I’ll give Melanie some props for clocking her own self-sabotaging tendencies and admitting that swapping spit with Sincere and Corbin back and forth was messy. But Sincere is getting the ick, and in some ways that’s the real harbinger of doom. 

Because Sol does not give Sincere the ick. In fact, he’s developing a fat crush on her and even venting about his partner. They connect on hair — nothing mind-blowing here, but learning about Sol’s dead-dad-induced stress alopecia is deeper than the usual chats we see — and share a few explosive kisses. Sincere isn’t especially interested in being transparent about this with Mel until she explicitly asks if he and Sol kissed, and even then, he downplays his feelings for Sol and reassures her that he wants to be with her in and out of the villa, which seems suspect. (How good would it have been if Mel actually walked in on their hot-and-heavy Speakeasy session?) Mel might be the loose cannon here, but she’s certainly not the only one with red flags.

Sol gives everyone a chance, even throwing Gabe a bone with a Soul Ties make-out that completely turns her off. (Finally, someone who experiences his kissing the way we as viewers do.) She also says she’s intrigued by Corbin and KC, the latter of whom is on thin ice with Aniya. It’s not just about that dumb joke he made after the challenge; he also does nothing to really reassure his partner that she’s his priority. They end the episode in a decent place (and I laughed out loud at Aniya immediately repeating what Sincere said after he asked her not to), but KC seems like yet another man on Love Island who could get turned off by too much monogamy too early on. The likelihood of any of these people surviving Casa Amor is lower than ever, and we’ve still got a long way to go.