Last night, after our Real Housewives of Miami had taken their final bows and faded to black, I briefly considered whether or not it would be possible for me to replace my weekly recap with a video of me running them all down with a tank. Because of the logistical issues inherent in securing a tank and rounding up our gaggle of SoFla broads in approximately 12 hours’ time, I wasn’t about to make that happen, but I hope that you appreciate the sentiment.
Instead, we’ll have a plain ol’ recap of the show’s season (and hopefully series) finale, which was the length of a feature-length film and spanned enough parties and petty tiffs that it likely would have taken up three or four episodes in regular Real Housewives time. In that sense, I guess we can thank Bravo for keeping things mercifully brief.
We started with Marysol and Mama Elsa, who was wandering around her daughter’s house, disoriented and carrying a Balenciaga clutch and wearing socks with heels. Mama Elsa as style icon? Someone needs to start a Tumblr about that. Ostensibly, the scene was about Marysol’s brand new marriage and her struggles with balance and the pressure to get pregnant, but all I could think about was how Mama Elsa picked out her outfit specially for filming and strode into that scene like she was facing her adoring public on a red carpet. If nothing else, I appreciate the existence of Real Housewives of Miami just because it brought Mama Elsa to the broader pop culture consciousness, something that sorely needed to happen.
We visited Larsa next, who called up a gaggle of girlfriends, including Cristy, Alexia and Lea (but NOT Adriana), to go to a shopping party. Adriana showed up anyway, probably because the producers told her to. While Larsa and Adriana were having some stern word with each other, Cristy took the opportunity to complain about Lea and how she’s not from Miami and no one knows her beyond being Roy Black’s wife, although she didn’t explain how that was any worse than being known as an NBA player’s ex-wife. All of the other ladies insist that Lea runs Miami, and they don’t laugh when they say it. Instead, they seem sort of vaguely terrified, so methinks that Cristy is so utterly intimidated by her that she doesn’t know what else to do but pretend like she doesn’t want her approval. But she does! Oh, does she.
Cristy continued her complaints when Adriana modeled a swimsuit at the shopping party. Adriana wasn’t the first person to do it and she looked objectively great in the reasonably demure one-piece that she chose, but that didn’t matter. When Cristy has a grudge, objective reality doesn’t doesn’t exist. Actually, reality never matters to Cristy. The only thing that matters to Cristy is Cristy, and I bet she’s utterly delighted that I’ve said her name five times in this paragraph. Cristy. There’s six! She must be feeling nearly orgasmic at all the attention.
The next thing we knew, Adriana and her boyfriend were checking into a resort together for a romantic weekend of sucking face by the pool and wiping mud treatments on each other. Adriana chose that delicate moment to bring up her son and their hypothetical wedding, and Frederic agreed to both adopt her son and set a date for their nuptials. He might have just said those things so that they could get in the hot tub and the cameras would fade to black; I wouldn’t put it past him.
In a later scene, we saw Adriana emerge in pink lingerie and a g-string and smash her boobs up against a glass door like a bug who had just hit a windshield (the butt-smooshing was somewhat more successful), which may in fact be the crassest thing I’ve ever seen on Real Housewives. And if it is, that’s kind of an accomplishment in its own right, no matter how much I didn’t want to see it. She gave Frederic a bit of a half-hearted lap dance and then hauled him into the next room, and she didn’t even make him promise to pay all of her son’s school tuition before she did it. Charitable of her.
Elsewhere, Marysol got together with Philippe to plan her cooking party, which would be the last of the season (except for the extra one that Lea tacked on the end of this episode). Instead of hiring a chef or buying out a restaurant like the other housewives, she asked Philippe to cook and she used a friend’s event space to hold the dinner. She didn’t just invite the other cast members, though; Marysol also had Mama Elsa come and visit. She was toting no less than an Hermes Kelly in vert anis ostrich, just in case you weren’t aware that she is fabulous. And if you weren’t aware, where have you been for the past month and a half?
Someone had the great idea to tell Larsa that Mama Elsa is a psychic, and being a shit-stirrer by nature, Larsa couldn’t resist declaring that she doesn’t believe in such things and then asking for a reading. Because Mama Elsa is a boss (and don’t you forget it), she waltzed over to Larsa in her floor-length caftan and completely blew up her spot. Mama Elsa told Larsa that she’s worried about men, and Larsa did the whole nervous-laugh, avert-my-eyes thing that people do when things hit a little too close to home. She tried to pawn off the prediction as part of her concern for her sons, but Elsa insisted that she wasn’t talking about a child.
Larsa must have been relieved when it was time for the cooking lesson, but everyone else was a little irritated. Instead of actually cooking something, Philippe took the opportunity to promote some sort of food company that he’s launching where you can boil stuff in bags. And that’s exactly what he did – threw a bunch of bags of pre-cooking salmon in boiling water and then arranged them on a tray with some parsley. It made Cristy’s crockpot chef look positively gourmet by comparison.
When they all sat down for dinner, Elsa did some mini-readings for everyone else. She said that Lea has no problems, Alexia is more mature than she looks and that Adriana needs a man. Maybe more than one. Larsa pushed for even more information, all the while saying that she didn’t believe in psychics or that Mama Elsa could possibly know anything about her, and then she lost her mind when Elsa said that she would be poor in ten years and that this wouldn’t be her last marriage. Whoever sat Elsa and Larsa next to each other was brilliant, because the more Larsa pushed Elsa, the more Elsa let everything out, and the more of a sputtering, panicking mess Larsa became.
After Larsa made a totally mean-spirited and off-topic jab about the number of times Elsa had been married, Elsa tried to move on and talk about the other ladies, including telling Cristy that her divorce was her own damn fault (a piece of information which Cristy, in all improbability, took like a total grown-up), but Larsa just couldn’t quit. She blamed Marysol for not telling her mother to stop talking, but Larsa did most of the jabbering during the dinner party. Which is not only indicative that Mama Elsa was probably righter than she was wrong, but is also incredibly ironic when you consider how much Larsa whined and pouted when Adriana “ruined” her dinner party last week.
We got a bit of a break from the drama while Alexia took her son Peter to see an agent at Next Model Management, which is a totally legit agency that actually represents plenty of famous models. They had a bit of a creepy discussion about Peter being ready to take off his shirt at all times (and when he did finally disrobe, it made me feel like a dirty old woman), but Peter got signed to a two-year contract despite feeling fat. And really, he does seem to have the look to get some work, particularly in a smaller market like Miami.
After that small respite, right back to the drama we went. Larsa and Cristy got together to eat grapes poolside and make fun of Marysol’s mom again, saying that she could never meet Scotty because he’s not used to being around ugly people and he’d have nightmares. They went on to discuss that Cristy was hiding from her kids at Larsa’s house and Larsa encouraged her to give away all of her kids’ dogs, and that should probably tell you all you need to know about those two.
In another part of Miami, Adriana and Frederic went out on Frederic’s boat and we all learned a lot more than we ever wanted to about Adriana’s bikini waxing habits. I found myself wishing that the boat would suddenly jerk to the side and they’d both fall off, but that didn’t happen. They threw down the anchor and had a picnic on the shore, at which point Adriana again wanted to discuss marriage and convinced Frederic to agree by slowly untying her bathing suit. Let’s all hope that that’s the end of the story line and that we don’t ever have to see that much of a Real Housewive’s crotch ever, ever again. All of Adriana and Frederic’s scenes in this episode made me yearn for the relative demureness of Tamra in the bathtub.
Our next get-together was a lot less skeevy. Alexia threw a high school graduation dinner for her son and got all weepy while reading him a letter about the trials and tribulations of raising him, including a shoulder injury that Alexia seemed to have mistaken for a devastating paralysis or a bout of Ebola or something. Methinks that if this god-forsaken show gets renewed, Alexia might be booted from the cast. She’s not nearly as dramatic as the other ladies, and she didn’t even manage to get herself involved in one interesting spat all season.
At some other party that Lea was throwing to close out the season, Larsa showed up and immediately started roasting Marysol about her mother, but nothing interesting came of it. (And really, couldn’t every sentence I’ve written about this show end that way?) Pretty soon it was time to get in a car and go to the secret party location, which was…a farm. All of the housewives had shown up in stilettos and cocktail dresses to traipse through fields on the way to their lunch, and they were all annoyed that Lea hadn’t given them any advance warning about the particulars of the setting. I wanted to think that Lea’s little prank was funny, and it sort of was, but mostly it was just kind of annoying and distasteful. Kind of like our housewives.
When they finally got there, after a two-hour limo ride and a bit of a hike, Michelle Bernstein (Top Chef crossover!) was there to…help them pick flowers? And mix them up in a bowl with some greens. And…that was the meal, as well as Prank Part Deux. Sure, I would have been irritated too, but all of the ladies managed to grin and bear it. Well, except for Larsa, who acted like a freakin’ toddler toward everyone, including the people who had been gracious enough to host them and didn’t have anything to do with all the inane housewifery on display. And then she told Marysol that her mom was a bitch, but the only bitch I could see in that scene was Larsa. Well, Cristy was there too, but she mostly behaved herself and had a good sense of humor about the prank. For once.
The best part of the entire episode was the “where are they now” bit, not only because it meant that the whole awful ordeal was over, but also because it revealed that none of our ladies are up to anything at all. Larsa moved to Chicago for the time being because her husband is working for the Bulls. Cristy is “keeping her options open.” Lea is going to eventually start planning another installment of her annual charity event. And hopefully, we’ll never have to see any of them ever again. Except Mama Elsa. She can stay.
By Amanda Mull
