The Real Housewives of Potomac Recap: A Huge Drag

We’re five episodes into the season, and Potomac is approaching an early impasse. There seems to be a collective understanding among the ensemble that they are quickly barreling toward the point of no return and need to correct course. Cast members are bravely trying to make all-cast events work with Ashley drawing the short straw this week and dragging everyone to Austin, the land of craft beer, daisy dukes, and bachelorette parties (meaning she would fit right in). The glaring problem, however, is that the cast is still sorely divided. Getting them to speak to one another, much less film one-on-one scenes to wrap up prior conflicts and move on is not going to be resolved by Karen Huger being sauced on one of her “early bird cocktails” and trying to force the gals to hash it out in the reality-TV-scene version of a “Get along” shirt. I applaud her efforts, though. They are too entrenched in their positions and, ironically enough, fully detached from reality.

Take Candiace and Gizelle. Both have severed ties with each other and declared a blood feud that will extend throughout their entire clan. Both have legitimate and illegitimate reasons for their position. Gizelle has completely downplayed the significance of the claims she made against Chris, the various ways she implied them and changed her story, and the potential repercussions it may have had (as well as the way she and Robyn have continued to speculate on his infidelities on since-debunked allegations). Candiace, while she has toned down her social-media behavior, is still prone to immature statements out of anger (see the cringeworthy clip of her calling Gizelle “white looking” that Potomac continues to replay, a ridiculous instance where Candiace truly lost the plot in the colorism conversation). It gives runway for Gizelle to play the victim, particularly since she doesn’t hop on Twitter and carry on weekly. Candiace is correct in assuming that Gizelle believes that if she ignores her long enough, she will disappear; what Candiace does not understand, however, is that if she continues to play up her histrionics the way that she has, she will end up on the Deep Space Extended EP tour permanently. Candiace is right to be infuriated, but she has handled everything incorrectly, including declaring on Robyn, who could have helped her navigate some path through; now she must figure out a way out, or she will find herself off the show.

In any case, we start to look inside at the breakdown of Mia and Gordon’s marriage. In a development that should surprise no one, money is a major factor, but apparently, it is Gordon who is obsessing over it more so than Mia, who would like for him to retire and be a family man. Apparently, they have taken some major hits recently due to his materialistic appetite — his being pushed out by shareholders was apparently due to him “pushing hard to get those last few nuggets,” which brings up more questions than it answers for both a family business and a business that would ostensibly be interested in the idea of more profits. They took another hit by managing the sale of a business via a lawyer who kept the funds held in escrow for himself, filing to have him disbarred only for him to apologize and commit suicide afterward. In Austin, Mia confides the recent series of events to Robyn, who had gone through something similar with a close family friend who took all their money. I think it’s clear that Mia is rattled by the recent news and concerned that Gordon may create irreversible family damage with this continued litigation over finances. That said, I am not convinced, considering her newest confessional look that is giving “financed with Klarna,” that Mia is about to accept a more modest lifestyle. As we already know, Mia and Gordon’s union will not last much longer; I am certain that whoever her new paramour is, they are making sure that she and her family will be well taken care of on top of her Bravo check and co-parenting relationship. Mia is an industrious lady.

All throughout the episode, of course, the girls are making sense of the Wendy-versus-Nneka of it all. I am reluctant to call it the “shrine” drama since I think it adds to a cheap stigma already being layered into what is otherwise a pretty straightforward Housewives drama. Whether or not she had the call-log evidence, I don’t think Nneka is lying about these calls at all. I think the intention being read into those calls is a combination of “How much fourth wall can we allow here?” and “None of this group really likes Wendy, and we’re going to give the worst read possible.” It also doesn’t help that Wendy is doing a bad job of defending herself (also known as lying).

By the time Wendy and Eddie sit down to debrief one another post-pickleball, she has her ducks in a row. She has had a chance to chat with her sister, her mom, and whoever she needs to speak with to understand whatever has happened that she wasn’t fully privy to. She makes her angle plain in the confessional: “I think Nneka’s sole motive is to attack me within this group; the only time Nneka pipes up is if it involves Wendy Osefo.” I don’t think she’s totally off base; Nneka claims that she “wishes she could have just sat down with her privately … but the only reason someone submits your name to a shrine is for death and destruction.” So you couldn’t help yourself because she was being fake, but you weren’t being fake for pretending not to have an issue when you were hanging out with someone who allegedly wished “death and destruction” on you? The problem is that no one is being completely honest, which gives space for the peanut gallery to speculate based on their biases, and that largely falls against Wendy.

Eddie and Iyke did not know each other from school, that much is clear. But they do know of each other, from general adult socializing and being cast on this show, and it’s annoying that we can’t just say that. Additionally, Wendy is lying poorly about Eddie’s unfriending on Facebook; it is simply not that serious. Who monitors Facebook follows anyway? When Nneka sits down at the first group drinks gathering in Austin, she says, “Ivy told her in-laws that Wendy was upset that I had allegedly used her name, and I am telling people that she and I are friends to be amongst a social circle.” That is housewives speak for “I was scouted for Potomac, and I mentioned that I knew of Wendy and my husband knew Eddie, and they brought it back to Wendy to see if they would both confirm and be open to bringing me on as a friend.” Wendy declined because she already had a planned ally in Kiearna and got suspicious of how familiar this woman presented herself. More than likely, Ivy ran interference to gauge intentions, and things escalated from there with her mom getting involved.

Most of Wendy’s moves make plenty of sense in context if she just stopped hiding them. She has a planned ally she wants to bring on in a sea of co-workers who don’t trust her; why abandon that to support Nneka, whom she only knows of socially and is overstating their relationship? Both of them admit they don’t know each other like that, but through using their family intermediaries to vet their true intentions, everything has escalated. Nneka has used that as her true opening to get on the show and start drama. I am not opposed to a newbie coming onto the show and trying to leave a stamp by creating chaos, but it’s overly dramatizing fairly standard-issue TV politics through the lens of making a boogeyman out of African spirituality and Christian performance that I have a major issue with. I am sure that the same people on the show who are doing all of this caterwauling about invoking shrines and non-Christian references being nothing worth joking about also would have had Beyoncé’s Lemonade at the top of their Spotify Wrapped if it existed in 2016.

The reality is that there is a lot of information being buried for the sake of pretending that the audience needs a bit of mystique behind the casting process, which creates plenty of room for nasty speculation. Gizelle is now calling Jamal, and he’s telling her that demonic spirits are real. Now we are revisiting how Wendy’s mom spoke to Mia; a nasty read that, in my opinion, crossed a boundary. That said, it is not an incantation; it’s just Nigerian evangelist blustering that you would find in many places, and Nneka knows that quite well and could easily defend Wendy against the gasps around “holy ghost fire” if the theatrical reactions didn’t move in favor of her argument. She had enough of a point with the fact that her cousin-in-law was shouted out at Wendy’s sip-and-see, showcasing that those families have a relationship.

The mystical elements of this are deeply frustrating because they distract from the heart of the issue, which is a tried-and-true housewife trope: Nneka wanted to make a way for herself to get onto the show, and Wendy seemed to be the easiest path. Wendy closed that route for her own reasons and did her investigations to see if Nneka would be a friend or foe, which led to a conflict. Nneka made it through Ashley. That is classic housewifery! Instead, we are navigating witchcraft and wizardry, and personally, I gave up J.K. Rowling and her shoddy writing sometime last decade. I desperately hope that this story line is abandoned soon and that Ivy speaks her piece or T-Mobile releases the transcripts. Until next week!

Cherry Blossoms

• Nneka and Iyke are going through a fertility journey. I don’t have much to say about it right now, but at least they are trying to give us other sides of them outside of the early drama.

• Robyn got assigned a penthouse suite in Austin because of everything she was going through. What exactly is she going through? Blog rumors? Being cheated on? Being suspected of being cheated on? Ashley was better off just saying that she got it for being a newlywed because Robyn can’t keep insisting that nothing is happening, but then she gets brownie points for pain and suffering that she is insisting is not happening. They all endure press speculation.

• We are now at a second metaphor that makes sense to no one but Karen Huger. We are freezing pies, thawing pies, cutting pies in half, and putting them in our mouths? Do we leave the last quarter of the pie on top of the fence that everyone is riding for the neighbors to try?