Vive, Barcelona! The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills jetted off to Spain tonight, Annemarie somehow sneaking her way onto an international trip with a cast she’s spent five minutes with. She may be bad TV, but good for her. I, too, would like to flop at my job and get rewarded with an all expenses paid trip to Barcelona.
Fresh off their scuffle at the Homeless Not Toothless event, Sutton and Annemarie have squashed the beef, but the newbie’s beef with Crystal still looms.
Housewives trips always have superfluous explanations, the best ever being Meghan King taking the RHOC cast to Ireland to find her family, and this trip is no exception. Sutton must deliver the ashes of her former ballet mentor, Merce Cunningham, to their proper environment or something. Thus, let’s go to Barcelona.
When the women arrive in Barcelona, Sutton greets them with a game of Sutton-based trivia. Erika comes out the victor and is given a Sutton store tiara. The Southern Belles alliance is slowly but surely growing. Be very afraid, Beverly Hills bores!
The cast then arrive at their rental, a gorgeous 17th century home once owned by a prominent wine-producing family. The only catch is that it’s haunted. Has Carlton (of Season 4 fame) played the long game, her hex of Kyle finally cursing the youngest Richards sister 10 years later? It’s only fitting that the 13th episode of the 13th season would attract evil spirits.
While the host can neither confirm nor deny any supernatural activity, Erika Jayne has access to forces well beyond our purview, and she senses something awry.
“I do have the ability to smell different spirits,” Erika says, a skill she may have picked up from her marriage to an octogenarian.
The host doesn’t want to refer to them as spirits, though. They’re little people! Of the haunted variety, perhaps. The women draw for rooms, hoping to avoid the inevitable cast trip chaos, and Erika doesn’t feel a spirit in her room, so all good.
Once the women settle in, Dorit takes to rummaging through Kyle’s suitcase. Flummoxed by her risqué fashion choices, Dorit continues wondering what’s going on with Kyle.
“I don’t know this Kyle,” Dorit says in confessional. “What are you thinking when you’re packing like this? Is Kyle looking for her next husband in Spain?”
But with Dorit’s incessant questioning of Kyle’s leather fashion choices, it’s obvious a “husband” isn’t what she’s really wondering about.
Then, the scariest moment happens. As Sutton and Crystal sit in the courtyard, Crystal remarks that it’s 11 pm and they’re the only ones ready. Now, I know Europeans love a fashionably late dinner, and I certainly partake too, but what?
While Kyle is stuck deliberating over her fashion after the psychological warfare of Dorit, Erika enters the courtyard in a flowy piece, complete with her newly won crown. Many great things have been borne from the exodus of Lisa Rinna, most of all the budding friendship between Sutton and Erika.
The women are greeted by their chef, Storm, who stuns with his exorbitant hunkiness. If his cooking skills are as great, he’s worth waiting till midnight for dinner.
“Storm can feel free to rain all over me. Bring it,” Garcelle says in confessional.
But, not so fast! What if he’s a ghostly apparition, a seductress meant to lure the women into a false state of security before the spirits feast on their Earthly souls? The fact none of them even question this shows they didn’t study at the Heather Gay School of Psychological Analysis, and, thus, would all die a quick death were this a horror movie.
Think smarter, ladies.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills during their trip to Spain.
BravoAt their 1 a.m. dinner, the women are greeted by tapas—and tattletales, as the episode title goes. But first, we pull back the layers of Sutton’s ever fascinating life. Learning more about her close friendship with Merce Cunningham—who Sutton has brought along with her in a ziploc of sorts—is ever a reminder of how aristocratic and worldly Ms. Stracke is. One day, we’ll discover Sutton spent time at a friend’s estate in the U.K. in her twenties, only to inherit everything after the family’s untimely death. Suttonburn.
Annemarie’s ready to unpause the drama, apologizing again for her incessant questioning of Sutton’s esophageal issues. While Sutton’s okay, fine, whatever with that, she’s annoyed Annemarie implied she’s “lonely and insecure.” There are three divorcées at the table, so it’s classless to call anyone lonely, Sutton says.
Annemarie apologizes, but not really. That’s when Crystal grabs the baton for being called “insecure.” But, Annemarie doesn’t want to talk about that. She wants to talk about the first night she met Crystal.
“The first thing Crystal said to me about this group of women was that you ladies were not intelligent, nobody was educated, and you’re very shallow,” she says.
The entire table is shaken up, most seeming to believe the claim. Dorit takes to her confessional to slam “child bride” Crystal. Say it in person, Dorit! Start a fire and throw some gasoline. Beverly Hills loves a confessional warrior.
Maybe the women are right to believe it, as a production flashback shows Crystal saying the women “clearly are not highly educated” in her first season.
Annemarie digs her heels in further, claiming Crystal called the women “fake socialites.”
“We all know that I am a socialite, so who cares?” Sutton says, cutting through the drama to remind us of her elite ziploc ashes. And Sutton continues to be the only one defending Crystal when Annemarie says Crystal has to feel like she’s better than all of them, donning her repeating tactic for good with a dozen “no, she doesn’t.”
Crystal adopts the repeating tactic, too, yelling at Annemarie to give her an example. When Annemarie tells Crystal to calm down, Sutton reminds them of the real enemy: the spirits in their walls. Maybe Sutton would survive the movie, after all.
Then, Annemarie drops a rehearsed line out of nowhere, that barely makes sense in context, and is laughable out of it.
“You know what else I want from you? I want a thank you, for giving you something to talk about and making your ass relevant,” Annemarie says.
So, there’s some merit to that as Crystal had four minutes of screen time before the last episode. But… Annemarie is the most preemptively fired new Housewife in history, so blatantly disregarded in the edit, that it’s really not the dig she thinks it is. If Crystal is irrelevant, what is Annemarie? Kyle points out the two should have this argument one-on-one so she doesn’t have to hear it. This OG said she has no time for Beverly Hills betas.
And, for what it’s worth, Crystal gets the last laugh. As Annemarie randomly says “Don’t take my kindness for weakness,” Crystal scoffs. “When have you been kind?”
The women go to bed, Garcelle deciding to sacrifice her room and sleep with Sutton to avoid the deathly spirits. But in the morning, Garcelle commiserates with Sutton’s enemy, Annemarie, to rehash the night before. As do Sutton and Crystal, though Crystal’s not worried the women believe Annemarie.
Mmm, they do. All of them—maybe even Sutton, given her perplexed look as Crystal says this.
“Something has a little ring of truth for me here. I can see where she would say to others, ‘Oh, these women are uneducated. I’m really different.’ I don’t think Annemarie would pull that out of nowhere,” Erika says in confessional.
Sutton gives Crystal a pep talk to stick up for herself. It’s kind of shocking to see Sutton in this mentor role, one she’s never gotten close to before, but it’s one Crystal needs. Sutton’s probably her only true ally in the cast, and I’m not saying she’s the best ally to have, but an ally is an ally.
Glammed up and ready for the day, the women are all ready for church, but Erika has a gospel of her own to spiel first. Erika has won her appeal in the court case over her $750K diamond earrings allegedly purchased with stolen money by her infamous ex-husband Tom.
But, no one really cares. The women all just sit there with blank faces, partly because they have no idea what this legal jargon really amounts to, and partly because this doesn’t change the issue at hand. As Garcelle succinctly puts in her confessional, “I wish she would just let the earrings go and give something back to the victims … even though you’re not guilty.”
Erika’s bummed by the tepid reaction, though, expecting fireworks and a parade in the Barcelonian streets. Look, it’s understandable Erika feels some level of excitement over this, and at this point it’s clear she’s not some criminal mastermind, but leave it to Ms. Jayne to poorly read a room. Crisis PR can only do so much, thank God. I love her villainy.
And finally, the church trip commences—but with a major hitch. As they veer through the narrow roads, Crystal begins to feel seriously ill. Production pulls over, realizing she’s too sick to go on. With her veins popping out and hands swelling, Crystal arrives at the destination in shambles. But it’s nurse anesthetist Annemarie to the rescue, perhaps.
“The world works in mysterious ways,” Kyle says, no doubt she passed Carlton’s hex off to Crystal, who is now feeling the curse of the Barcelonian castle. Now we know why Crystal was in a hospital bed in the midseason trailer. It really wouldn’t be a Housewives trip without at least one medical emergency, now would it?
Next week, Kyle and Sutton find healing in a Spanish church, while Dorit and Garcelle look to move past their issues once and for all.
