“These hills have eyes, and they’re all staring at me,” Kyle Richards mutters as the paparazzo she (allegedly) called snaps a photo of her and country ministar Morgan Wade for the umpteenth time, despite her insistence The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills respect her privacy and say nothing.
Beverly Hills is the land of pearl-clutching, where women gasp and guffaw at any perceived slights while hiding their true intentions behind a thin veil of glass. Drama only emerges by accident, slipping through the smallest of cracks, immediately to be suffocated.
That’s how we’ve made it through 15 episodes of the season without Kyle’s ever-absurd double standards reaching a head. Despite the many highs (and Kathy Hilton-induced lows) of Season 14, it simply feels like we’re getting played for fools once again, all as another annoying attempt to takedown Sutton Stracke manifests—one that cements Sutton as the star of new-age RHOBH.
In the aftermath of Sutton’s “sustainable” fashion show, the ladies are split once again: Erika, Dorit, and Boz irritated as ever with Sutton (and by proxy, Garcelle), while Garcelle and Sutton begin planting seeds against Kyle, and Kyle… well, she’s just moping around.
First, Erika invites the girls over to see her renovated home, which still looks the way it did last week. Too bad. As they ignore Levain cookies and some cawfee cake, the ladies go in on their growing disdain for Sutton, Erika still irked at her Season 11 and 12 hazing. And sure, I get it, she got it decently bad by RHOBH standards. But get over it! Seriously. Get over it. That was years ago, and it was the first—and only—time Erika was ever interesting on screen.
As Erika and Dorit continue wondering why Sutton would be mad at insinuations she has a drinking problem (even if she very well does!), it’s like… well Erika you’re still mad about what was said about you two business years ago. I enjoy hypocrisy on my screen, but only when it’s funny. Erika’s boring.
As for Dorit, keep poking and prodding shamelessly at Sutton without introspecting at all, girlie. Next week’s boat meltdown looks so fun.
Meanwhile, Garcelle tries to snipe from the side by pushing Sutton to address the Morgan Wade elephant in the room, while Sutton tiptoes around the truth in fear of those hills and their eyes. It’s great we’re finally acknowledging Kyle’s hypocrisy (even if it needs to be to her face for real results), but it’s almost too Beverly Hills how they go about it.
Sutton is a scaredy cat who avoids intentional confrontation. She may always be in drama, but that’s simply because she has foot-in-mouth syndrome and speaks faster than she thinks. Garcelle, on the other hand, has picked up the Lisa Vanderpump role of pushing her beta to do her dirty work for her while she waits to dig in the confessional.
So it’s a funny scene watching Garcelle push Sutton while Sutton argues even asking Kyle “how was the concert?” is a straw too far, but it’s also indicative of the problem.
It’s hard to even be annoyed with Kyle when her ground game runs circles around her peers. People wonder how she gets reelected as Speaker of the House year after year, but she’s simply a masterful social strategist. She’ll always have the numbers on her side, which is way more important than having the truth.
This week, Kyle gains an important ally in Boz, inviting her over for a tear-filled performance. She cries over the photos of Mauricio and that random woman, wondering if her marriage is truly over. Boz, ever the marketer, sticks to the business memo, coddling Kyle while ignoring the elephant in the room.
Maybe it’s the journalist in me, but I’d just ask: How is this different than you and Morgan? The abundance of Daily Mail photo-ops seems like an open invitation to simply ask some questions. That’s all.
That’s the thing about Boz. She’s not exactly a fan of digging deep, her solo scenes constantly seeming like business meetings. Tonight, she invites her boyfriend Keely over to have a formal dinner with her daughter, and it just… feels corporate.
For one, it’s confusing how this is their first true one-on-one time, when she’s discussing marriage and babies with this man. But it’s also confusing how Lael asks such trivial questions like “Would you two live together before marriage?” and “How many babies do you want?” and Boz acts like they’re not softballs. I get that Lael doesn’t know those answers, but Boz certainly should. She’s either not great at relationships, or it’s all for a storyline. Time will tell.
Last but not least, we get some final footage from our divorcées before the ladies embark on their trip to St. Lucia. First, Dorit meets with PK, showing face for the first time since very early in the season, for a mostly civil conversation about their impending divorce.
It’s still so absurd that Dorit doesn’t want this divorce and PK does. It’s so humiliating and degrading to even admit that. But it is interesting to note that, as of today, neither one has formally filed for divorce, despite separating last May. That big conversation at Kathy’s about PK wanting to rush to file seems to have amounted to nothing, as the two return to their status quo of eating Caesar salads and doing accent work.
Over on the Kyle front, she and Mau finally hash things out now that he’s home from Europe. Every Mauricio moment is so perplexing these days. He’s just a shell of a man, stirring his coffee as loudly as humanly possible while he and Kyle act on screen like they’ve never met, yet alone shared a decades-long marriage.
“The photos really did say to me: ‘He’s moving on.’ You can live in this, you know, lala land for as long as you want, but that was, you know, a hammer on the head, saying, ‘Hello, Kyle! He’s moved on.’ It’s okay. You’re both entitled to live your lives,” Kyle shares in a confessional, seeming as close as she’s come to admitting the honest truth. “Seeing these photos, I think it makes it pretty clear that this is permanent, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy coming back from that.”
Maybe it’s not that Mauricio has moved on. Maybe it’s that Kyle moved on well before he did, and him moving on means she has to commit to that decision. Kyle can’t return to the safety of her doldrum marriage, one she no doubt would’ve been happy to stroll around lovelessly in 99 percent of the time.
Image is everything in Beverly Hills, and no one carries that weight quite like Kyle. Being a late-in-life lesbian with a girlfriend half her age is too unconventional, and far too unpredictable, an image for someone like her, even if it’s her reality. Your image has nothing to do with who you are. It’s what you project.
To that extent, it’s why Sutton’s old-money wealth and lavish lifestyle won’t ever mask her clumsy, friendship-seeking awkwardness. She doesn’t project an image of aspiration, and she’ll always be the runt of the group.
That’s also why she’s consistently the shining star of RHOBH. She constantly shows herself in an unsavory light, keeping the engine moving even when people like Erika want to move it to a halt. It may be embarrassing for her to tearfully admit she just wants the ladies to like her, but it’s authentic. That desire to actually integrate into the group keeps Sutton’s character dynamic, as opposed to Housewives who treat their fan favorite status like an untouchable shield.
So, yes it’s annoying that Kyle’s hypocrisy is being swept under the rug for an end-of-season shift against Sutton, but we’ve learned by now that the more pressure, the brighter the diamond.
