The Summer Showdown
Season 4
Episode 10
Editor’s Rating
2 stars
**
Photo: Bravo
Ladies of London made for a delightful season of television. We got to see a real group of friends come together, have a joyous good time, make a few new connections along the way, and all make fun of Margo’s clothes. But it did feel like it limped to the end a little bit. Not even a single person cut on Margo in a crop-top sweater without a bra, a skirt that looked like a million hobo handkerchiefs tied together, and a giant heart necklace that looks like she won it from a claw machine at the Brighton Pier. Hearts were a bit of a theme of the episode with the necklace, Martha’s fascinating fascinator at the final fashion show, and the cutout in Myka’s Joshua Kane blouse at her etiquette event. The real heart of the episode, though, is the fight with Margo; to be honest, it was the heart of the whole season.
Our first event is Myka’s etiquette lesson, where she teaches a room of people that when they are at a party, they should hold things in their left hand so they can shake hands with their right, which is good advice if not a tad intuitive. Mark and Missé — who went from fighting with Kimi to being everyone’s emotional support Swede in the course of 10 episodes — are in the front row of the event, and Missé asks Mark what is going on with him and Margo. Mark says he doesn’t want to talk about it and ruin Myka’s day, but he relents and starts talking about his past. He recalls that he was the only gay person in a school of 1,000 boys, and they were always cruel to him. When he graduated, he could be his true self again among his friends and people like him, but as soon as he left the circle of trust, someone like Margo could hurt him. He’s mostly embarrassed that he let that happen and that he’s feeling any emotions.
Missé is so great here, telling him that he’s loved and a great person just the way he is. Mark does something remarkable for a stuffy English person: he starts to cry. I have never seen a face strain against its Botox more than Mark’s in that moment. I thought for sure that his limbs were going to start snapping and popping like one of those mushroom zombies in The Last of Us. He excuses himself from the room to go cry in the hallway, and Missé is hot on his tail. I get that she wants to comfort him, but let Mark go cry alone in the hallway for a minute. The presentation is about to start, and they’re going to make even more of a scene if it’s two of them going to sit down in the front row, all puffy-eyed. Missé, you’re being rude at an etiquette event. Do they not have irony in Sweden? Luckily, the event was a success, everyone learned how to show up, and we finally got to meet Myka’s husband, Marco.
Lottie and Joshua go out to dinner, and Lottie orders for them both because he hates ordering food for some reason. Is he that much of a sub? Is he caged and plugged under all of those polka-dot suits? (Straight people do not Google that.) Kimi goes with Missé to visit her brother’s grave. It’s a full-circle moment for these two, and I was touched. I also really need to know where Kimi got those glasses. (Hey Kimi! Can I borrow those glasses?)
Then we are right into our first Margo confrontation of the episode, where she and Mark have sparkling waters over the sparkling waters of the Thames. She says she’s sorry for calling him a freak and that she hasn’t been kind or a good friend, and she takes responsibility for that. Mark opens up about how she made him feel at Longleat and how he hadn’t felt that shunned and belittled since he was in school. It all starts very sweet until Mark says, “I didn’t want that all thrown back in my face by someone who has narcissistic tendencies.” Is this America’s Next Top Model because no one is here to make friends?
This is clear to Margo, too. As the digs against her mount, she realizes that Mark does not want reconciliation of any sort. Of course, he doesn’t. Mark wants to be right, sure, but mostly Mark just wants nothing to do with Margo. The thing he won’t say is that he just doesn’t like her, or he thinks she’s beneath him, or he doesn’t like her and thinks she’s beneath him. Instead, he’s just passive-aggressively against her.
Margo’s way out of this is… well, there’s no way out of it. I was going to say that she could tell Mark that she didn’t intend to hurt him and that she’s sorry she did. Then she could have told Mark how hurt she was by some of the things he said, but she knows he didn’t mean it either, and they should just move on from a civil place. But Mark wouldn’t react to that. More emotions aren’t going to melt him. His brain must have its own glam squad because his mind is fully made up. What Margo does instead is fascinating. She decides to blow it all up. She just goes after him, saying, “You were cycling through all of these different personalities, and you came, and you touched me, and you tried to be flirtatious.”
Does she really think he wanted her? Is she joking? Please tell me she’s joking. Please tell me she was also joking in confessional when she says, “Mark wants to fuck.” This is all sarcasm, right? It’s not quite reading as if it is, which means either it’s not, or Margo is an even worse actress than we imagined. Mark barges out of the conversation and later tells Emma that Margo had no interest in listening and that she’s not all there mentally. I can’t wait for next season (please, to the Bravo gods, we need another season) when they can just openly hate each other and snipe for the entire summer.
Everyone converges at the Joshua Kane fashion show, which has the oddest runway I’ve ever seen. It’s like everyone just comes out of a door, poses for the camera, and then turns around and goes back through the door. It’s like a collection of fashionable people in the same house, each leaving to pick up the newspaper on the front stoop one after another. How many Daily Mail subscriptions can one townhouse have? The clothes were cute though, if not a little costumey.
Finally, the big showdown we’re waiting for happens: Martha and Margo’s sit-down. Martha, who says she hates confrontation, gets right into it. “I feel like you came back from America with a very different character than the one I’ve known for 20 years,” she says. “You’ve been quite often ungracious, quite often bitchy, and quite often arrogant, Margo.” But isn’t this the gossip that Mark got from his friend, that she has been very different ever since she got married? Has Mark been right all along?
Margo says that Martha has it all wrong. She says she approached Mark with humility, and all he did was talk about himself and not take any accountability for what he did. Well, she never brought it up. She just responded to his stories about growing up gay by acting like a crazy person. She is the outsider in this group and in this country. While I don’t think she’s necessarily the narcissist that Mark does, she needs to dial it back a little bit to try to make friends. She needed to coax Mark to a place where he could take accountability. Martha says that Mark made fun of her shoes, and Margo made fun of his character. That is true, but I think what everyone is missing is that Margo didn’t care about him making fun of her clothes; she cared that he was saying one thing to her face and another behind her back. That seems like a point that keeps getting missed.
Then Margo makes the rest of the conversation about people making fun of her clothes. She says that Martha is the one who started it, and, because she broke the seal, everyone thought they could be mean about her to Martha. Martha correctly points out that Margo has been the source of all this conflict, that she is the one who puts herself in these impossible situations and then blames Martha for them, and then wants Martha’s help in extracting her from them. You can tell that Martha, in the perfect hat and a gorgeous dress, is well and truly done with Margo flitting in from Malibu to screw up her friendships on her home turf.
It seems like Margo’s biggest sin is trying to settle her scores, to bring up her emotions, and to try to get other people to bring up theirs as well, which, to be honest, is the enterprise. She may be annoying, grating, and more poorly dressed than a McDonald’s salad, but she is the one making this here reality television program. I love watching all of these gals (and Mark) have a great time with each other, but for it to be anything like what we’re used to watching on Bravo, we need Margo.
Martha tells her, “We handle things differently here. No one talks about anything. We just bitch about each other behind their backs. That’s English society.” That’s not English society, that’s every society, at least every polite society. Sure, sometimes those conflicts will spill over because someone is caught off guard or the tension gets too high, but that’s how we all get along, that’s how we all get through the day. No one could like everyone, and, honestly, I don’t want to be friends with someone who did. Imagine that your friend felt about you the way they feel about everyone else. How dreadful! We need to know our friends are discerning, that they see a quality in us, that there is something about each other that’s connecting, like a radio tuned to just the right frequency. And that’s what we’re all here to do, walking through the world throwing out our own unique radio waves and looking for the people uniquely tuned to pick them up. Sadly, now and again, you’ll get some feedback, but once that connection is made, those radios are locked, and the only way to keep the station humming is to enjoy it. Even when a bad song comes on you say to everyone else how terrible it is, but you keep tuned, you stay on the station, you continue the connection because, in the end, that’s all we have, radios caught on each other, playing the perfect melody so that we can always sing and, on the best occasions, when all the variables alight, we can dance.
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