In the Great Real Housewives of New York Prank War of 2023, the battle lines were drawn in the Anguilla sand. What was already an emotionally volatile trip to the Caribbean has erupted into an all-out international conflict, with Ubah and Erin as the opposing powers. Erin maintains that she did nothing wrong when she hid Ubah’s phone, which was her retaliation against Ubah pushing her into the pool the night before. Ubah, however, is irate about having her phone taken from her while traveling, which led to her spending an hour hunting around their enormous villa in a panic looking for it.
If you, like me, chose sides at the end of last week’s episode, you might’ve found that Episode 11 made it much more difficult to maintain those allegiances. I still believe Ubah was in the right to be upset about Erin’s “prank,” but the lengths the cast goes to when ganging up on Erin in response—however annoying she may be—seem a bit extreme and mean-spirited. While a certain level of that might be warranted for Erin’s crude remark that Ubah was “a dumbass,” this is merely a practical joke gone too far; both women could apologize and squash their beef, but we’re learning how they operate in intense conflict, and it’s not great. Well, it’s not good for them, but for us viewers, this tension is precisely the kind of thrill that we seek from Housewives at their most repulsive. Bring on the schadenfreude!
After Ubah snatched the sunglasses from Erin’s face at the end of the last episode, Erin is reduced to tears. She’s clearly both upset about her friend yelling at her and a little bit scared of how far Ubah might take this. But it’s time for those tears to be wiped away, because there’s a rum party to get to, and the group is driving two separate buggy cars to get there (which just means more time to split up and talk shit). In a last-ditch effort to shield Erin’s eyes from the sun while driving, Jenna asks Ubah for Erin’s sunglasses. Ubah refuses, saying that she’ll hold onto them for 45 minutes, because that’s about how long she was looking for her phone the night before. “Siri, set a timer for 45 minutes,” Ubah tells her robot assistant, echoing what I say every time I put a load of laundry in the dryer.
“I think it’s like high school, like what are we doing?” Jenna says in her confessional. “It just feels really petty to me.” She’s not wrong, and it’s only going to get worse as the day goes on, the rum starts flowing, and pent-up grudges start unleashing.
The group arrives at Elvis Beach Bar, but the only gyration happening here is from Erin’s stomach doing backflips. Everyone’s attempting to have a good time—Jenna’s buying T-shirts, Jessel is trying and failing to ascertain what moonshine is—but it’s not easy when the energy level is so noxious. Sai eventually hops behind the bar and starts to bartend for the whole establishment, and the editors flash to a photo of Sai in her twenties that explains more about her personality than anything that has come out of Sai’s mouth so far this season. Of course she was a bartender at a sports bar for an entire decade, she has huge “I’m one of the boys” energy. It all makes sense now: This is why she’s so annoying!
But whatever good mood the group manages to conjure dissipates when Ubah’s iPhone alarm goes off, meaning that Erin gets her sunglasses back and the elephant on the beach must be addressed. “Instead of getting so mad, talk to me like a normal friend,” Erin says to kick things off. Ubah hits her right back with a classic: “Don’t tell me what to do, I’m not your kid.” And once Ubah starts, she doesn’t stop, invoking Erin’s relentless shadiness toward Brynn, which is only the start of Ubah rallying her troops. Erin backs off and goes to the other end of the bar with Jenna, leaving Ubah, Jessel, Sai, and Brynn to limbo and laugh by themselves. It’s that familiar sensation of being in middle school, when someone is pointing and laughing at you from across the room, and you can see them doing it but can’t do anything about it. I am assuming this is a universal experience, given that if you’re reading this, you’re probably a woman or a gay guy.
The ladies all move to another bar, while Erin elects to go home to cry. Erin’s absence gives Ubah another shot to turn as many people against her phone-swiping friend as possible. Jessel tells Jenna that Erin was the one who misrepresented Jenna’s arrival on the trip two days early as a desire to fly business class—not because she wanted to even out her genetically uneven skin tone with a tan, which was the truth. Ubah then once again mentions that Brynn has been mistreated by Erin several times, which causes Jessel to basically start stroking her chin and cartoonishly peering up at an imaginary thought bubble all of the times that she was wronged by Erin.
Erin Lichy.
BravoIn their buggy back to the villa, Jessel has finally had enough. “I don’t get fucking angry, I get pissed,” Jessel tells Brynn and Ubah. “I’ve been playing nice in the sand pit. There have been things that have been building up that I have said nothing about. I let it go, but now it’s time: I have a fucking checklist that I’ve been keeping in my fucking phone about this bitch, OK?” Apparently, Jessel has a system: Annoy her once, she takes a mental note of it; annoy her a second time, and she turns it into a list in her Notes app. The list is only more fuel to the fire that’s about to push Erin to the brink of a breakdown not seen on this franchise since Bethenny Frankel had a raving panic attack during Season 11’s Miami trip.
Erin has had a few hours to herself at the house, talking it out with her dad on the phone. In her confessional, she starts to tear up, and says that this situation reminds her of when she used to be taunted in seventh grade for having a pronounced jaw, earning her the nickname “Longjaw Silver.” This was clearly very traumatic for Erin, so all I’m going to say is that there was some real ingenuity in that nickname choice; bullies aren’t nearly that original anymore. It was also a horrific mistake to admit that on television, lest it be weaponized by the legions of Bravo fans who are essentially seventh-grade bullies themselves.
But no matter, Erin is ready to finally hash it out with Ubah… until that quickly goes awry when Ubah can’t find her phone again. Their talk is delayed until dusk, when everyone crams into the hot tub, which immediately goes from steaming to boiling as soon as the two conflicting factions settle in.
“[Jessel] is mad at you, [Brynn] is mad at you, [but] none of them are coming to me, telling me that I said something that made them feel like shit,” Ubah says to Erin from across the water. Erin tries to turn it back around by claiming that Ubah treats everyone badly, but Ubah calls this misdirection out as just another one of Erin’s lies. Ubah stands up to relay the gravity of her point, which weighs on Erin and turns her frantic and confused. “Enough, what do you want from me?” Erin asks, dissolving into tears once again. “I took your phone as a joke! You’re trying to get everyone against me?”
Erin begins to sob and the whole group gathers around her to apologize, telling her that they took it too far. This finally lets the air out of all of the hostility, which has gotten entirely out of control. Reminder: This is about hiding someone’s phone for an hour. I started this episode firmly on Ubah’s side, but Erin’s bewilderment and panic are palpable at this point, and no longer fun to watch, even as a viewer who lives for this kind of thing.
Ubah and Erin depart to have their highly anticipated heart-to-heart, which basically boils down to Ubah asking Erin to own the fact that she talks as much shit as she stirs, and Erin requesting that Ubah lead from a place of friendly trust going forward. They both say that they’re sorry, and everyone can breathe again.
There’s one last group dinner in Anguilla and Brynn's drunk hiccupping ensures that all of the women are going to have a good time and let loose. Everyone shares their favorite outfits that each woman wore on the trip, hatchets are buried under slabs of concrete six feet thick, and the rebooted RHONY cast makes it through their first international trip alive. Sure, the drama that filled this episode might’ve started petty, but it got real fast. There also wasn’t one disagreement that was harped on throughout the entire vacation; each episode had a different flavor to it and kept us on our toes.
But—and sure, you can be upset with me for even asking this—am I so wrong to enjoy the new RHONY the most when this group is having fun with one another, and not getting into devastating fights that ruin their whole day? The newbies have proven themselves adept at being adorably trivial, and I think I’m more amiable to their little digs at one another than I am to their blowout fights. Well, at least so far; the rest of the season promises a few more arguments that seem a bit more earth-shattering than some light phone stealing. Maybe I’ll be more game for those, but for now, I’m looking forward to the return to a bit of simple silliness.
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