The past few months of the Bravo series The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City have been a Stefon SNL sketch of chaos, a Mad Libs of reality-TV drama. There was a live Homeland Security raid and arrest, countless rumors about extramarital affairs, allegations that one housewife is secretly a cult leader, an ugly fight between dueling racists (neither is returning to the show next season), a manufactured sister-wife plot, and multiple explosive confrontations in a Sprinter van. And then, two episodes ago, there was Lisa Barlow’s instantly iconic hot mic rant in which she says about co-star and former BFF Meredith Marks, “She’s a whore, she’s fucked half of New York.”
And yet, Sunday night’s finale was eerily uneventful, with the women still individually reeling and recovering from the disastrous group trip to Zion that dominated previous episodes.
We watch Jen Shah sort out the logistics of her move from the grand Shah Chalet into a measly 4,500-square foot home. The Shahs are downsizing in order to pay for Jen’s legal fees as she prepares for her impending fraud trial, including her attorney’s $2 million retainer. In her confessional, she shares her anxieties about potentially having to leave her family, as she is the person who takes care of everyone. “This is why I can’t sleep at night,” she says. “This is what keeps me up.” Hmm… Or maybe you can’t sleep at night because of the whole (allegedly) stealing money from unsuspecting elderly people thing, Jen? Just spitballing here.
In the next scene, ex-Mormon Heather Gay hosts a memorial service for her late father, who died last year and did not have a funeral due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She and the few family members that still speak to her since she left the church gather in a field to share memories and eat waffles out of Styrofoam takeout containers (???). “I want him to know that I lost my faith, but not my faith in other people, and most importantly, not my faith in myself,” Gay says in a rare truly poignant moment.
Gay’s reckoning with her complicated relationship to faith and her estrangement from most of her family in the wake of her public shirking of Mormonism has consistently been one of the most compelling storylines of the season. Gay is undeniably the most likable of the bunch, thanks to her hilariously self-deprecating one-liners and, more importantly, her genuineness. Watching her grapple with self-discovery, while also trying to give her teenage daughters space to explore their own beliefs, is a welcome reprieve from the petty, alcohol-fueled screaming matches that tend to monopolize this franchise. More of this next season, please!
Meredith and her stone-faced, Instagram-filters-come-to-life offspring put on matching neon silk suits and pose in the middle of a frozen lake to promote her gender-neutral jewelry line. The purpose of the photoshoot is apparently to raise money for GLAAD, as Meredith has used Jen Shah’s early-season feud with her son Brooks to repurpose herself as a gay-rights advocate.
All of these side plots are just filler, however, building up to a quintessential Housewives finale event: Lisa’s 1980s-food-court-themed Vida Tequila party. Because everyone knows mall food courts historically serve Blanco in crystal-encrusted bottles. The catering is inspired by “mall eats, but on a luxury scale,” which means there is pizza and churros. We would expect nothing less from Lisa “I love Taco Bell and I also love fine dining” Barlow.
The fights at the Vida party were just more rehashing of the same issues, begging the question of whether this episode even needed to exist at all. Meredith Marks is in her flop era, choosing to align herself with the probably evil Mary Cosby, and constantly threatening to spill dirt on everyone else’s alleged affairs without actually following through. Whitney is sorry for saying Mary’s church is a cult, but actually, no she’s not, because it definitely sounds like one. Lisa is back on her bullshit of being fake nice to everyone, gushing about how beautiful they all are, and shilling her tequila as if she had not been recently caught on tape unleashing an unbelievably vicious, personal string of insults about her supposed best friend. And still, none of the women are at all concerned with holding Jen accountable for the horrible crimes she’s been charged with.
It feels insane to say that nothing of note happened in the episode or at the party, during which Jennie threw a glass at Mary, Heather stormed out of the venue muttering, “Let’s fucking go, I hate these bitches,” and a House Husband unironically wore a Reagan/Bush ‘84 shirt. But these things are all par for the course with the ladies of Salt Lake City, and when the entire season has been an over-stimulating clusterfuck of one jaw-dropping twist after another, viewers are bound to get desensitized.
Next week, the three-part reunion airs, and Andy Cohen certainly has his work cut out for him.
