Pour Decisions
Season 12
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Photo: Bravo via YouTube
There is a brief moment with Marcus that reads like an aside, but I think it tells us everything we need to know about this floppy-pompadour man. He’s in the hallway at SUR during his shift and he’s tasting the specials for the evening. As another employee (the kind who actually works there without the cameras) walks by, carrying an armful of plates for one of the expectant tables, Marcus says, “Can I get a spoon off you, papi?”
“You have hands, no?” the expediter says without even slowing his pace.
“You want me to eat this soup with my hands, asshole?” Marcus smugly asks before diving in for another bite.
This says a few things. Marcus, who is taking what amounts to a break, asks someone who is actually working to do even more work and throws in a casual “papi” as if to make that work seem like a favor. Then he entirely misinterprets the response. His coworker is not telling Marcus that he shouldn’t need a spoon because he has hands; he is telling him that he shouldn’t have to do any more work to get Marcus a spoon because Marcus has hands (and feet, legs, knees, and other functioning limbs and organs) and can get the spoon himself. Then Marcus takes that misunderstanding and turns it into a fight, somehow making himself into the victim of someone’s cruelty, even though he started this whole thing by asking for an inappropriate amount of labor from someone else and not appreciating their answer.
This is exactly what happened with his altercation with Venus in the SUR alley, a future UNESCO World Heritage site that has returned to the center of the Bravo universe, where it belongs. Venus pulls Marcus out back to engage in some very normal behavior: ending a friendship in the middle of a shift. Though deciding to end a friendship with someone and then telling them about it may seem insane, Venus remains very composed during the conversation and has many valid points. He tells Marcus that he has overlooked a lot of his bad behavior because he knew that he was going through some things, like the death of both of his parents and being in the worst relationship on Bravo that does not involve a member of the Osmond family.
Marcus, once again, focuses on the wrong thing. “Why now?” he shouts at a calm Venus, who answers that it was the last straw when Marcus sent him a text about not wanting to be friends anymore. Marcus says that Venus got his feelings hurt with the text and then his emotions came to light, like that is some kind of irrational or insane response. Yes, dude, that is the sequence of events. Marcus sent him a shitty text, Venus got mad about it, and now he doesn’t want to be friends. Like, what about this isn’t he grasping? Does he need a spoon to pick up the logic? Marcus says that Venus is looking to have a problem with him, painting himself as the victim again, but Marcus forgets that he started all this. This is the inevitable result of his own actions. How is this all so mysterious?
Venus tells him he doesn’t want to be friends with him anymore, and this is when they have the standoff we’ve been seeing in the trailer, where they lock eyes, and they both refuse to leave first. There they are, staring at each other in the SUR alley, the electricity from the stars falling over them in humming waves as they mug back and forth, each waiting for the other to back down first. Finally, it’s Marcus who caves, going inside and trying to give Venus a pat on the ass, maybe? I don’t know. It was such an awkward gesture. He hits Venus in the one-inch space between the upper thigh and the buttock, a part of the body that is so obscure that it doesn’t even have a name for it, but I’m sure it has at least one Tumblr dedicated to its lewd appreciation.
The thing that makes Marcus the standout of the cast, to me, is that he doesn’t seem like he’s trying; he just genuinely seems this terrible. Shayne shows up on a date with another SUR employee while Natalie is working and says it’s because his AA meetings are convenient to the bar. This seems like something drummed up by producers. Chris and Audrey’s flirtation also seems egged on, but Chris is so entrancingly boring that it’s not giving me stakes. I’m on the fence about the other SUR alley altercation, the one between Jason and Angelica. These identical cousins really are a trip. Like Glen Powell in an Omega ad, they reek of trying too hard. Behind those eyebrows, so much labor is happening to make it happen that it is not happening. It’s mis-happening.
The story with Jason and Angelica mostly happened off-camera. She says after the pool party in the last episode, where they were flirting the whole time, they went to Barney’s afterwards. She means Barney’s Beanery, which has become a young person’s hot spot thanks to TikTok, not the sadly departed department store chain. Angelica says he knew every girl at the bar, and he went to say hi to one girl who then climbed into his lap and started flirting with him inappropriately. She left the bar and he then unfollowed her on Instagram. Yes, you know it’s serious when a real-life incident influences how these children are living their lives on social media. Chris says he can come back from unfollowing her but I think he is woefully misunderstanding what an impossible slight this is.
I describe the events from Angelica’s perspective as if they are in dispute, but they are not. Jason gives the exact same recap of their night out, so there is no misunderstanding by either party. Jason, however, says that Angelica should have gone over to him, grabbed him by the collar, and planted a kiss on him. Chris says if she had done that, “I would have been like, ‘Fuck yeah, that’s mommy.’” Okay, hold the phone, the modem, the fax machine, the camcorder, the Commodore 64, and that weird robot you used to play Nintendo with. What is this man even talking about? I don’t even mean that he said, “mommy.” Is that how straight people say she’s “mother”? Like what? I mean, how does this guy think that he’s going to disrespect a woman that he’s been flirting with all day and then expect her to come over there and end it? Like, he wants her to get over her feelings and then come assert her dominance over another woman to prove to him how attracted she is to him? What?
I really don’t want to play into gender roles and be like, “He’s a man and he should treat her like a lady.” If you spend the whole day flirting with someone and go to a second location, you’re basically on a date. If you then leave that date to flirt with someone else, that is disrespectful, and it should not be up to the person who has been disrespected to correct that disrespect and lavish affection on the perpetrator. But also, he’s a man! Treat her like a lady. When they talk about it in the alley, he says that he wanted her to save him from this woman. Um, why? How would she know? He can’t be like, “Sorry, I have to go to the bathroom?” And then go back to Angelica and be like, “That woman is insane?” What is wrong with him?
Lots, apparently, because their conversation gets even worse. When Angelica tries to explain that she was hurt, he interprets it as her trying to jump into a relationship, which she says she doesn’t want. He makes it clear he has options and doesn’t want a relationship with her either. “Why are you treating me like I’m your boyfriend who cheated on you?” he asks. Um, because you disrespected her! Her being upset about that does not make her “clingy,” it makes her an actual human person. Ugh, I can’t. Thank the Catholic Jesus that I am old, decrepit, and gay because I could not be out on these streets dealing with these boys.
Angelica rightly storms out of this conversation and seems determined to give this guy up. Later, when he finds out that she is out at girls’ night, he decides to send her a text to try to revive things. He says it’s like “rocket science” trying to write a text. Yeah, of course it is. When you are so bullshitty that you smell like a barnyard and refuse to own the terrible shit you did, the verbal and mental contortions you have to go through to send a text are enough that it could be an audition for Cirque du Soleil. And what does he come up with? “Hey heard your [sic] out with the girls having fun if you wanting to come through after with Kimberly…Me and Marcus are gone have a drinking [sic] would be good to seeyou.[sic]” Reader. She fell for it. What is wrong with women?
Speaking of what is wrong with women, what about this girls’ night where Kim gets the ladies into a party bus and takes them all the way to Orange County to sit in a restaurant and ride a mechanical bull. We had to drive 90 minutes (without traffic) for that? Couldn’t they have dined and bulled somewhere in Los Angeles and saved the party bus antics for another day? I’m less interested in these antics because they’re the kind of alcohol-fueled brawls that we saw the Witches of WeHo engage in way back in the day, and, honestly, they did it better.
Kim and Natalie have issues: Kim hates Natalie because she texts her boyfriend, and Natalie hates Kim because she called her a psycho. Why did she even invite Natalie to girls’ night then? Kim has a great rationale: if she didn’t, then every conversation she’d have with her subsequently would be about how she wasn’t invited to girls’ night. Kim is absolutely correct and did the right thing. But having her there is a chore as well. Natalie decides she wants to talk about these issues and goes over to Kim’s seat to hang off of her and discuss them. Kim says she’d rather focus on having a fun night and talk about them when they’re not wasted out in public. But Kim, you’re in the OC. These people don’t matter. Fight away.
Just kidding, Kim’s is a real and rational response, but Natalie is not having it. She throws a fit, saying that Kim isn’t a real friend if she doesn’t want to sort out their issues and basically forces the issue by creating the fight Kim wanted to avoid. It’s like Natalie is Veruca Salt, and she wants an Oompa Loompa now, daddy, but the Oompa Loompa is a reality TV career, and the only way to get it is to pitch a fit that absolutely no one wants or cares about. Audrey tries to shut it down and fails. Angelica tells Natalie to “pause her feelings,” which is exactly correct, but Natalie gives her a little shove and tells her that she just joined this friend group as if they both aren’t in the fourth episode. At the bull riding, no one can have fun because Natalie is pouting because her fight attempt failed. “Why do they keep making me out to be the bad guy?” she pouts. Um, maybe because you are. This is what you are doing. This is the role you chose. Now you’re mad about it and crying outside because no one cares about your feelings.
Back in the valley, Katie Maloney Schwartz Maloney is sitting on her beige sectional under a cashmere blanket and waiting for the next episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to load when she gets a text from a friend who waits tables in the OC. “Those new girls are fighting. Do you want to see a video?” she says in a text, with the video below. Katie didn’t want to see the video, but it’s there, and she tapped play. She recognizes it all, the yelling, the pointing, the back and forth, the tears, the finger pointing, the stumbling in too tall heels and too tight dresses. She doesn’t need to turn the sound on. She knows what they’re saying, she knows how it ends, and she knows it doesn’t matter. Katie looks at her phone, then back at the TV, then back at her phone again. She throws the phone on the sectional. She shuts off the TV and then throws the remote next to her phone. At this point, she’d just rather sink into the quiet of her bed.
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