Summer House Recap: Black Shabbat

Over the years, I’ve developed a soft spot for Lindsay Hubbard. Can she be terrible? Yes. Is she an unfillable maw of need? Absolutely. Is she a monster? Possibly, but nine seasons into this show, she is our monster, and I’m going to miss her terribly when she doesn’t come back next season. (Surely having an infant will disqualify her, right?) But I have never seen Lindsay perform poorly. Lindsay has always been an ace at playing the game of Reality-TV Show, but she totally messed this one up with her bullshit callout of Carl at Jesse Solomon’s (always both names!) Shabbat dinner.

The episode starts great with the unlikely duo of Paige and Lindsay driving out to the beach together. The editors put in a full recap of their contentious but evolving friendship, which started with Lindsay hating Paige for shoehorning onto her show and has grown into a kind of grudging respect. Paige says that Lindsay’s demeanor used to drive her insane, but “now that I’m in my 30s, I’m like, ‘I don’t owe you shit, even if I know I’m wrong. I’m not apologizing to you.’ And I got that from Lindsay. I was raised by Lindsay Hubbard.” You and me both, sister.

We see this exact behavior at Jesse’s Shabbat dinner, which is a really sweet gesture. He says that he sees everyone in the house as family (plus Imrul, hahaha), and he wants to share the family time he is accustomed to with his new reality-TV family. He makes them all put their phones in a basket so that they can be present and then sings a lovely prayer for everyone. It’s so much better than Adam Brody singing on Nobody Wants This. Can we start a Change.org petition for Jesse to do the singing voice in season two? Anyway, Jesse says that a good thing to do at Shabbat is to talk about what from the past week you want to leave in that past week and what you want to take with you into the future week.

When it gets to Carl, he says that he went on a date with Lil, and, well, he would like to leave her in the past week. Pour one out for Larl 2.0. We only see a brief snippet of the date, where Lil brings a lemon to meet Carl because he’s always “making lemonade out of lemons.” This makes him declare that her personality is too “zany” and she might not be right for him. At dinner, he says that made him want to date again, and when they follow up with another date with her, Carl clarifies, no, he wants to keep dating … other non-zany girls.

Lindsay takes this opportunity to ask some questions about Carl and his “little girlfriend,” saying that Carl has been talking to her since last summer. Lindsay’s theory is that something changed about Carl in the last two weeks of their relationship because Carl was always so weak that he never would have broken up with her unless there was some outside force. She thought Lil’s texts were enough to convince him that there would be life after Lindsay. This is a stunningly ungenerous read of Carl, but what else do we expect from his ex-financé, who still has to sit across the table from him?

Carl tells Lindsay they didn’t start talking until the fall, even though he met her parents at a soccer game during the summer. Lindsay asks why he never mentioned it to her, and Carl quips that he doesn’t feel the need to tell people whenever he meets cool parents. Lindsay also says that Carl would totally start dating a girl who was DM-ing him while he was still in a relationship because he’s a “bad judge of character.” Carl agrees with her, pointing to Lindsay and their relationship as proof that he is a bad judge of character. Oh, Lindsay. Pull the “eject” lever now. You are getting owned by Carl. Carl! This man couldn’t win a fight with an especially aggressive moth, and here he is, beating one of our most-expert practitioners in reality-television arts and sciences. It’s a bad look for Lindz.

She eventually demands to see his phone, which is not in Jesse’s phone basket but upstairs charging because Carl is a responsible boy who always charges his phone and makes his bed. He gets his phone, pulls up the DM from Lil, then tries to hand the phone to someone at the table to read the date, but everyone treats it like a pre-used vibrator. They’ll look at it, but they don’t want it in their hands. Finally, Lindsay takes the phone and sees that she DM-ed him in October after they broke up. Carl’s immediate response is, “What are you mad about?”

Exactly, Lindsay. What are you mad about? Why make this into a thing? After being proved wrong, she says that when someone is going around saying Carl was talking to them when they were still together, that is something she is going to bring up and investigate. Why? She’s moved on! That’s like if you sold your Ford Durango for a Mazda Miata and then Ford issued a recall for all Durangos. Are you going to go out, track down your old Durango, then send it back to the factory to be fixed? No. You are going to let the new owner worry about that, and you’re going to keep driving your fucking Miata and never think about that old car again.

Lindsay does wind it down after that as much as she can. She thanks Carl for showing her the receipts, and everyone at the table giggles, saying that they love a fight that has a beginning, middle, and end right there at the dinner table. After dinner, Paige, Ciara, and Amanda gather in — where else? — Ciara’s bed, and Paige says, “I’ve never seen Lindsay be so shut down.” Neither have we, but this is not Lindsay’s fault.

I’m sorry, but all of this is because of Gaby and her failure to ask good follow-up questions. At the Soft Bar launch party, when Imrul and Gaby are talking to Lil, she tells them how she met Carl. Gabby asks when Carl met her parents at the soccer game, and Lil says it was last summer. Gabby never asked when they started talking, then Gaby told Lindsay that Lil was saying she was talking to Carl last summer, but that is not what was said at all. Lindsay could have avoided this whole situation if she approached Carl with questions rather than accusations, but saying Lindsay should have done that is like thinking about living in a timeline where JFK was never assassinated. It is just contrary to her very nature. This is why it is all Gaby’s fault for feeding this particular beast a lot of disinformation.

Now, we must move away from the continued implosion of Larl to talk about what seems to be the slow dissolution of Lesse. Even in the car on the way to the Hamptons, Jesse tells West about how Lexi blackmailed him to introduce her to his family. Guys, they have only been dating for a month. They are not even “boyfriend-girlfriend” at this point, and she’s sitting down for dinner with the entire Solomon clan? No, this is wild. Lexi, obviously, is very close with her family, and meeting them seems like something that happens early in many of her relationships. That’s fine, but she needs to be respectful if that isn’t how Jesse rolls. Also, it seems like Jesse didn’t want to do it, but Lexi was so upset post-toe-sucking and Ciara-flirting that she made him go through with it.

It gets even worse later when they’re at Kyle’s inaugural DJ set in what looks like a very fancy backyard. (Did anyone peep the Danielle cameo? She didn’t even get a name-check!) Jesse is talking to West and Paige and says that Lexi remarked on how he’s followed a bunch of girls since they first met. He jokes that he doesn’t even know how to track that and, honestly, same. He then says he felt bad so he unfollowed all the girls and then Lexi thanked him for unfollowing them, like she was tracking that too. Okay, that seems very concerning, but thank the Catholic Jesus that Paige is in this conversation. She points out that Lexi is 26 and this is very 26-year-old-girl energy. Paige says at 26, she was showing up places to confront guys, so this sort of online-stalker energy is “tame” in comparison.

I think many viewers (especially the dudes) will think that Lexi is nuts, that she’s insecure, and that she’s trying to keep too much of a leash on Jesse. And this all may be true, but she’s also just young, had her heart broken a few times, and doesn’t know any better. Lexi needs some time to grow and figure it out, and if Jesse wants to stay with her, he will have to wade through these waters until she figures it out. But I think Paige’s other point is even more valid. They’ve been dating for a few weeks, and they’ve already had a huge fight that they had to get over. If things are this difficult now, just imagine how much worse they will be in six months once the novelty of Lexi’s wood (and Jesse’s ZING!) has worn off.

The episode ends with Ciara and Paige first tumbling out of a hammock so comedically it would have won America’s Funniest Home Videos back in the Bob Saget days. After settling at a picnic table, they talk about Craig. Paige reiterates some things we’ve already heard this season, that she needs to “dim her light” for Craig to be comfortable and that he wants the kind of patriarchal, heteronormative lifestyle in Charleston that Paige wants about as much as she wanted to read Lil’s DMs to Carl.

These are the real revelations in this conversation. Paige says that if they were to get married and have kids, Craig would expect her to work less, which would be a major hit to both their incomes and their lifestyle. That’s because, it turns out, Paige makes more money than the pillow magnate. She says she’s convinced him to move to New York to raise a family there, but even then, he would expect her to work less. Ciara does a great job in this conversation, telling Paige she needs to stop just accommodating her partner, figure out what she really wants, and see if Craig still fits into that equation. Paige says she truly loves Craig and doesn’t want to break up with him, but she is having a hard time squaring their differences.

But let’s not end on a bummer. Earlier in the day, Carl goes for a run on a sunny Saturday morning and then goes into the backyard for a little cry. Imrul, the orgy beast, awkwardly joins him, but Carl tells him it is the anniversary of his brother’s death and he is struggling. The girls start looking for Carl because his bed is unmade, and he’s such a good boy that an unmade bed is a sign of trouble. When everyone sees him teary in the backyard, West and Kyle immediately go back and give him some bro hugs. Carl apologizes for getting so weepy, but Imrul puts it perfectly: Most guys won’t even show emotion, and other guys certainly wouldn’t support that emotion. Good on the collective Y chromosomes in the Summer House crew for giving us a new template for masculinity.

That is all Carl needs: a few clutches from the boys and a little bit of time. Because the sadness doesn’t just go away; there will always be another day, another week, another year, but collected like that, it seems daunting. Carl doesn’t need to face any of that, just today, just this minute, just the fraction of a second it takes a photon to travel all the way from the sun down to this little corner of the Hamptons where it can collide with Carl’s face so he can feel a warmth that spreads all over his body.