The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Recap: Bermuda Triangle of Sadness

Who would have thought this day would have ever come? The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is finally going on an international cast trip. The genuinely giddy women waste no time jetting off to Bermuda, and in case there was ever a risk of them feeling homesick, there’s a sprinter van waiting to give them all a little taste of the familiar.

And sure enough, as soon as they load in, there’s conflict over the temperature because Meredith (who Whitney tells us accidentally took an extra sleeping pill and thus pulled a Rip Van Winkle) isn’t feeling well. They wrap her in a blanket and take her to the beautiful seaside to heal like she’s Beth in Little Women. She’s so ill, in fact, that she can’t keep up when the women get to the house and immediately run off to claim their bedrooms. As a result — and it pains me to even have to write about such a devastating and unimaginable tragedy — Meredith is left with a room with no bathtub. Heather puts it best: “The trip is ruined … Meredith Marks does not have a bathtub.”

While Meredith rests and mourns her tub, the other women split up for a lunchtime status check on Lisa and Whitney’s fight. While Lisa tells Heather they haven’t spoken since the blow-up at Meredith’s event, Whitney shares her side of the conflict with Angie, whose bejeweled forehead and pink glasses make it look like she just landed from the planet Chromatica.

Heather grabs an imaginary spoon to do some very real shit-stirring, telling Lisa that Whitney has been talking about how proud she is of Lisa for improving as a person thanks to their friendship. Heather plays it off like she’s innocently repeating what Whitney told her, but she’s smarter than that and knows Lisa isn’t going to respond well to the idea that she needs to be reformed. Sure enough, she’s shocked and appalled at the idea of being Whitney’s little project to fix, saying that the only people who make her a better person are God, her husband, and her kids (she forgot to include Ronald McDonald).

While all of this plays out, Monica goes upstairs to check on a bedridden Meredith, who tells her that her feelings were hurt by the way the room selection was handled. Room drama on a cast trip? We’re home. “It shows the level of respect that I have from the women in this group, which at this point looks like zero,” Meredith says. It feels as though once something becomes a Housewife’s ~thing~ that they’re publicly known for, they become even more emboldened to demand it. It’s their trademark! Their signature! Of course, it’s fair to be outraged not to have it. Take Ramona and her Pinot Grigio, for example. After all the hours Meredith has put into making bathtubs a part of her brand, she naturally feels entitled to one — especially since she’s sick! Monica is a supportive sounding board for these grievances but notably not supportive enough to offer up her tub. “I love her, I care, I’m worried, I’m concerned … but not enough to give up my room,” she tells us in her confessional.

Next up to tend to Meredith is a medic, who enters her room to administer an IV because it’s not a successful Real Housewives cast trip without a visit from medical personnel. Best of all, as she’s being hooked up to it, Heather comes in and tells her, “I know you can rally; you’re tough.” And sure enough, rally she does, getting glam applied mid-IV while she’s laying down like a corpse getting made up for a wake.

Restored by her medic and makeup artist, Meredith joins the women in the sprinter van to dinner, where she has a question for everybody. They all wince like a classroom about to be scolded for their behavior with the substitute teacher. “Who here has a room with a bathtub in it?” she asks, and each of them raises their hands. All guilty of robbing her of a bath, they receive a stern talking to for sticking her, a famed lover of tubs, in the only room in the entire house without one.

Somehow this gives Angie an opening to instead bring up a snarky comment Meredith made earlier about Heather spreading her legs, which she says was just snowballing off of Angie’s own comment “intimating” that Heather would be bringing men home. And, she adds, “spreading your legs” was simply a callback to Angie’s accusation toward her earlier in the season. She has a sound case and the footage backs it up, but the fight devolves so quickly into chaos about who threatened whose family that we don’t get anywhere productive.

But we do get to dinner, where Meredith explains that she simply wanted to voice her hurt regarding the bathtubs, and when some of the women finally apologize, she says that was the resolution she was seeking.

But while we’re on the subject of hurt feelings, Whitney decides to bring up her fight with Lisa, telling her that all she wanted was for her to be there for her. This leads to Lisa bringing up what Heather told her earlier: “I guess you had a conversation where I’m self-absorbed, and you’re helping me be a better person?”

Naturally, Whitney accuses Heather of meddling, and spinning that conversation to get between her and Lisa. The fight that erupts over appetizers quickly becomes a muddled deconstruction of their friendship web. It’s like watching three rats with their tails all tangled together try to break free, and Whitney ultimately tells Heather to “shut the fuck up,” which instantly infuriates her.

They somehow get back on topic, with Whitney telling Lisa that she was hurt that she didn’t acknowledge her at Meredith’s party, especially since she’s grown to expect Lisa to comfort her. This completely throws Heather for a loop, who says Whitney is delusional if she thinks Lisa’s the person to go to if you’re looking to be comforted. Ultimately, they find some closure when Whitney tells Lisa that she just doesn’t want to be ignored, that she’d rather be told to fuck off than be ignored.

“Yeah, just say shut the fuck up right in her face,” a still-scorned Heather says, and when Whitney tries to make a playful toast at the callback, Heather shoots her down. “You sat here like some kind of weird devotee to the Lisa cult,” she snaps (where do I sign up?), and wonders when they suddenly became so close. Whitney says nobody knows how close she and Lisa really are, and if they did they’d be triggered and try to ruin it. Lisa can’t help but fully giggle at this, visibly giddy at having these two grown women fight for her affection.

This triangle of Whitney, Lisa, and Heather is far more treacherous than the Bermuda Triangle ever could be, and it’s so bizarrely entertaining to watch this dynamic play out. So much of this season has turned out to be about who’s better friends with whom, with them all in competition with one another, and for what? I don’t know, but I want to find out.

They trek back to the house, which gives us some great footage of Whitney passed out in the back of the van, and they all retire to their luxurious bathtub-filled rooms — except for Monica and Meredith who hang back for a glass of wine. Meredith says that Monica is the only one that’s been there for her on this trip — an M&M alliance, if you will. But will that alliance melt in our hands?

Once they’re alone, Monica brings up an Instagram account that we’re hearing about for the first time, so she walks us through it in a little game of catch-up in her confessional. Apparently, a few weeks ago, Monica and Meredith were talking about how the main street in Park City used to be run by the Greek mafia, which led to a conversation about whether Angie could be involved in the Greek mafia. I’m less interested in Angie’s unlikely involvement and am more wondering why we haven’t gotten a mob movie where John Stamos and Nia Vardalos flush gallons of contraband Oikos down the toilet during a raid. Anyway, not long after that, Monica says that Meredith called her, saying that a random account messages her dirt on Angie and asked if Monica got the same messages. Sure enough, Monica did.

So as they sit in the kitchen in Bermuda, Monica tells her that she’s gotten even more DMs, including legal documents, and she wonders if Meredith got them too. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I’m really far behind on my DMs, I haven’t even looked at them … I don’t know anything about it.” This uninterested response from Meredith is odd to Monica, especially since she was the one who brought this to her attention in the first place.

This is where Monica’s genius really shines through. She knows this is going to blow up, and she’s getting her ducks in a row to keep her hands clean right from the jump. In her careful account of how this all went down, we can see her conspiracy theory begin to take shape. It seems clear that she’s leaving the door open for the possibility that Meredith was the one who sent those DMs in an attempt to keep her own hands clean and have Monica do the dirty work of bringing it up to the group and cameras. And it would have been a masterful plan if Monica hadn’t been so savvy.

When these DMs were sent, Monica wasn’t publicly announced to even be cast on the show — and even if this mystery person was aware that she was filming, how would they know where she stood with Angie? Were Meredith and Monica, the only two with real issues with Angie, the only two women who received these messages? It feels like the call is coming from inside the house. It would be entirely plausible that someone could drop a dime on Angie via DM to Monica, the newbie eager to create mess, hoping that she’d run with it. And when that DM didn’t get opened, maybe a phone call as a nudge specifically asking her to check if a particular account messaged her anything …

Monica weaves a compelling tale, and she’s smart to have her alarm bells going off. It is even smarter to strategically discuss this on camera with Meredith to cover her bases. But Meredith doesn’t engage with the Instagram drama beyond simply saying that karma always comes back to bite.