Summer House Recap: Crushing Defeat

Guys, I’m really worried about West. No, not because fans and Ciara still hate him, though wandering around in his pajamas with a lit candle in a candleholder looking like a hunky Ebenezer Scrooge seemed to win him points with both. I’m worried about how wasted he’s getting. After the Snooze Fest, West got all the guys to go outside and lie together in the trampoline bed for a little cuddle puddle and Zootopia screening. He even had his arm around Jesse and Jesse’s head on his chest like they were the gay dudes in your freshman dorm that everyone on the floor wanted to get together.

Eventually, everyone else goes into the house, leaving West alone outside. It starts pouring down rain at 2 a.m., and it takes West two hours to finally wake up and go inside. Two hours! In the cold and the rain! In the morning, Carl brings in West’s laptop and speaker, which they were using to watch an animated masterpiece. Did West leave them outside in the sopping-wet sheets all night? Are they ruined? Will that speaker ever pump out slow jams for a girl he brought back from a bar ever again? I have so many questions, but mostly, I just want West to be okay.

That isn’t the only humiliation to happen in the backyard in this episode. As we saw in the previews, Carl confesses to Ciara that he has a crush on her, and honestly, it goes a whole lot better than I originally anticipated. He gives her a whole barrage of very deserved compliments and then says, “I’ve always thought you were an amazing person, but I don’t have a shot in hell.”

Ciara tells him, “What is meant to be will be,” which is as kind of a brush-off as I could imagine. She also adds that she doesn’t want to activate Lindsay (wise) and that she should probably give up on dating white guys for a bit. When Ciara tells Amanda and Paige what happened, Amanda, who is always right, says that Carl just sees her as a supportive friend who is also beautiful and that he’s a little confused in his feelings but that he’ll be glad to have her as a friend for life. Good saves, everyone.

The good news is that Carl seems to be getting his confidence back, though he admits that he didn’t perform quite that well with the rebound girl that he met in Montauk the previous weekend. We’ve seen Carl beaten down all season (and for most of the last one), so the fact that he could even speak these words to Ciara seems like he’s headed in a healing direction and will soon find someone who likes him as much as he likes them. Just, please, don’t let it be Lil.

Most of this episode is yet again about the quick implosion of Lesse, mostly at the hands of Jesse Solomon, always both names, but never any blames. Jesse makes the mistake of taking on all of the girls at once and goes to talk to Paige, Amanda, Ciara, and Lindsay, a united front that is not going to let him get away with one single thing. Jesse says that the girls are taking the worst of what he says and repeating it to Lexi. But Paige is right; he can’t confide in them about what is going on and then also say, “You’re not involved.” He involved them! They’re here now! And they’re just reporting back his words.

Finally, he asks the girls what he did specifically and Lindsay is like, “Um, what about when you told Ciara she could have gotten with you instead of West?” Jesse says he only said that to make Ciara feel better, and now Ciara is pissed because she thinks that Jesse pities her. As he walks away, Amanda is right again when she says that Jesse expressed his real feelings to Ciara, and saying it was a joke or to make her feel better was his only out.

That night, Lexi is upset so she calls her sister, Tiffany Liner. What? You didn’t know that Lexi’s last name is Liner? Oh, it’s as evident as the mouth on her face. Anyway, Tiffany says that Jesse is, and I quote, “fucking shit,” and she might not be entirely wrong. Lexi is so upset that she can’t join the group when they order McDonald’s delivery (brought to you by Uber Eats). Lexi, don’t let that McDonald’s sit. There is nothing worse than cold McDonald’s. Maybe the only thing worse is trying to get into a wet bathing suit or out of a too-small condom. She spends the night alone in bed, and Jesse is cuddled up with West, wondering why he can’t just marry him.

In the morning, Jesse really feels it, and it seems like everyone is feeling it, too. You can feel the hangover and the McDonald’s gut rot right through the television. Lexi says in confessional, “I feel very manipulated. Jesse is allowing me to fall for him, and then he’s saying these things behind my back, which is inevitably making the rest of the house not want to connect with me.” She’s absolutely right, but not just the people in the house; everyone watching the show, too. I certainly took Jesse’s side at first, and it made me not want to open up to Lexi. I don’t think he did this intentionally, but it certainly happened.

Jesse is in the kitchen making breakfast with Amanda and Lindsay, and Jesse asks Amanda why Ciara is mad at him other than the one joke he made about getting with her before West. Amanda, who must be exhausted by being right all the time, says, “Your coping mechanism of jokes in serious conversations doesn’t help anyone.”

As everyone heaps into the kitchen and Jesse and Lexi’s discussion heats up, Jesse doesn’t like being branded as having “talked shit” about Lexi. Gaby makes an excellent point and says that if he was seeing these “yellow flags” about Lexi, he shouldn’t have brought them up to everyone but Lexi. Jesse says he understands, but Lexi adds that he doesn’t really understand, so she doesn’t want to date him. She doesn’t want to be boyfriend-girlfriend; she doesn’t want to be exclusive, she doesn’t even want to be in his Instagram Stories anymore. She’s done.

When Jesse enters his room with West, he says he doesn’t agree with what Lexi is saying. I think Jesse and West are having the same problem. They can’t separate having done something bad from being a bad person. Jesse thinks that Lexi is calling him a two-faced shit-talker. She’s not really. She’s just saying that he did something two-faced and talked shit. Both he and West are internalizing that negativity and can’t differentiate between being bad and doing bad. They both did something bad, but that doesn’t make them bad people (and fans could stand to remember that, too). They’re both struggling because they can’t seem to figure out why it is bad, how to apologize for it, or how to stop doing it, and I think that’s because they’re both too hung up on being considered nice guys.

West tells Jesse, “I wish I could sit here and be like, ‘fight it and go tell your story,’ but the easiest thing is to say you’re sorry and keep your head down.” But that’s not it either. You can’t be sorry for something you don’t understand, and you can’t understand why the women are hurt until they can put themselves in their shoes and maybe learn some of that empathy that Erika Jayne has worked so hard on in therapy. They need to understand what is wrong and do better, and until that happens, they’ll just be two clueless bros sitting there telling each other, “Exactly,” and getting it all wrong.

Jesse and Lexi meet up and have a talk in the city, but it seems to go nowhere, with Jesse only apologizing for getting his toe sucked, which, honestly, Lexi doesn’t seem to care about. She says she doesn’t fight for people and that if things are going sour, she’ll just cut that person out, and it seems like that’s where she and Jesse are headed. I guess we’ll find out in the next episode and definitely at the reunion.

I’d like to switch gears and talk about the John Updike novel that unfolds between Kyle and Tom Schwartz at the end of the Snooze Fest party. Tom mentions that there is a hole in his life and that is not having kids, and Kyle says that never in his life did he imagine he would be 42 and not a father. It is a sad but honest moment for the two of them, and Tom gives us a few more of those before the rest of the cast leaves him sitting on the front stoop all alone like a forgotten Amazon package. On Sunday morning, he goes into Paige and Ciara’s room, finds them in bed together (not like that), and says, “You need to cherish this. I used to have a happy family in L.A., and now everyone hates each other.” It’s so true, and that made me want to shed a little tear for the Pump Rules of yore.

The convo about kids comes up again in the final scene when Kyle and Amanda go on a little date. Kyle talks about how he might be sterile, and Amanda says that might not be the end of the world. She says that she always expected that she was going to have kids, but after struggling with her mental health last year, she now wonders if she would be capable of taking care of another human being.

Okay, I need to stop Amanda right there. She has always been the emotional heart of the show, hasn’t beefed with anyone except Kyle (who almost always deserved it), and, as we see throughout this episode, is so right that she can’t even turn left. I have never seen anyone on reality television (or in my real life, really) who would be a better mother than Amanda Batula. Know how I know? Because we’ve been watching her do it with these yahoos for almost a decade. Who cooks the dinners and cleans the house? Who tells all the unruly people when it’s time to go to bed and when they need to get up and do their chores? Who cleans up their sick, plans their birthday parties, and makes sure they have their costumes for whatever silly theme has been selected that week? It’s Amanda! She’s keeping this whole motherfucker together, and we wouldn’t even have a show without her. She’s allowed to feel her feelings, obviously, and is right to have her concerns about being a mother. Whatever she decides (with Kyle) is the right choice for her. But if the question is whether or not she can take care of another human, oh, sister, you got this.