Photo: Bravo
It was the absolute perfect ending to an absolute perfect season. No, I’m not talking about the inevitable implosion of Larl, but all the girls coming together for a group hug. While they might have slight disagreements how it all went down, they all had unequivocal support for Lindsay, one of reality TV’s great villains who has earned herself something of a reprieve. Making it even more perfect was Paige breaking the group hug and the tension by saying, “This is what you get for not inviting me to your wedding.” One last chance for her to prove why she was the MVP of the season despite having no storyline other than the umpteenth season of “Will Craig move to New York or not?”
This conclusion was amazing because it wasn’t about the bust-up, it wasn’t about what we knew was going to happen, it was about some deeper miracle that motivated the women in this house to unite. This is about acceptance, this is about being a family, this is about loving someone in distress more than hating them for petty reasons. It also made me a little bit pissed that the cameras didn’t follow the whole crew to Mexico for what should have been Lindsay’s wedding trip. I wanted them to go full Sex and the City with Ciara sleeping with a bellhop and Gabby shitting her bathing suit because she wouldn’t drink the Mexican water or whatever nonsense Charlotte got up to.
I’m also a little mad that the cameras went down after the final day of filming, with the whole crew headed to Montauk. Carl and Lindsay were cued up for the greatest fight of their career. This is not the time to let the camerapersons go home. This is when you call the dark lords that oversee Bravo and tell them you need emergency overtime because the kids are going to Montauk to see some band called Montana or Maine or Yukon Territory or some shit, and Lindsay and Carl are about to tear each other limb from limb like the world’s meanest wood chipper.
Before we can get to that fight, Larl has to conclude their fight from the Backyard Burning Man party. It’s basically over but Lindsays goes to join the revelers, leaving Carl alone in his Michael Jackson jacket. A lot was happening: a fire-breather, Amanda and Paige posing in Furiosa’s car, and Danielle going for round two with Joe the Balloon Guy in the upstairs bathroom. (Here’s to Joe the Balloon guy for “friend of” next season.) Then we get to Paige’s favorite part of every party when she gets to go on the microphone and tell everyone to leave so she can take off her fake lashes and crawl into bed with her friends.
This was obviously and necessarily an all-Larl episode, but I don’t want to overlook West and Ciara’s conversation while cuddling in bed that night and catching up on Love Island. West says that Ciara called him “baby” at the party, and she wants to know if it’s a big deal or not. He says not really. He compares it to telling Ciara he loves her and everyone would have noticed but he says it to Kyle and it’s just another Saturday. Sorry, but there is a difference. First of all, he’s not going to fuck Kyle (though if he does I would really like to be the cameraman), but he wants to fuck Ciara. There’s the notion of romantic love that is way deeper than platonic love; it just is. Ciara says she can’t understand where West’s priorities are because he seems casual about everything. I guess that’s the problem with a guy who’s too chill; you want him to get worked up over something — preferably you — but he just can’t manage it.
The next morning, the hot tub is covered in what looks like soggy hay bales, and every flat surface is covered with three-quarters-empty Loverboy cans. Everyone decides to go for a dip in the pool, and Lindsay and Carl decide to get into it in the kitchen. At one point, they are deep in a fight, and Kyle goes inside because he has to poop. He lingers in the general area trying to overhear what they’re saying and you can tell he is pinching that loaf for his dear life. He’s going to hear as much as he can even though he is, as the English would say, touching cloth.
The fight is the same one that Lindsay and Carl have been having all summer and it mostly has to do with Carl’s career, how anxious he is about it, and how he feels like Lindsay doesn’t support him. Carl tells her that when it comes to his career, he wants less questioning and feedback and more blind support. Lindsay says that is not realistic and that’s just never the person she’s going to be. Carl, point blank, asks her if she trusts that he can make enough to support them and their family. Lindsay says, “You could be successful.” Carl only hears the word “could.” Still, I think Carl would agree that he is currently not in the position career-wise that he wants to be. He wants Lindsay to say, “Yes, babe. You’re a rock star.” Well, she could say that, but she’s lying. Even Carl knows he’s not currently a rock star, and if he wants to be, he needs to do something about it.
This brings up something Lindsay says to Danielle after the fight while talking upstairs. (It was hard for me to hear because I couldn’t focus on anything other than Lindsay’s sleeve-less T-shirt that seemed to have shoulder pads.) Lindsay says that Carl relies only on her to boost his confidence, and she can’t provide him with that. I think she’s absolutely right, and you see it when Carl asks for a hug at the end of their conversation, and Lindsay can’t even do that right. “Harder. Squeeze me. No harder,” he says to her. It was the most dynamic expression of the end of a relationship I’ve ever seen on screen, scripted or otherwise. But after that fight, Lindsay says, “I have nothing left in the tank for him.” Just like Vicki Gunvalson, her love tank is empty and that’s when shit really goes bad.
The crew, sans cameras, goes to see Alabama or Chicago or Florida Georgia Line or some shit in Montauk, and Lindsay finally agrees to go, but only if she doesn’t have to ride with Carl. We hear about what happened three days later when Carl meets Kyle for a coffee in a rainy sidewalk shelter. He tells Kyle that they barely spoke the whole way home and that when they got home, Lindsay smashed a bunch of water bottles or something. It was unclear, but they were being mean to each other and saying horrible things, and they still haven’t really talked about it.
Lindsay elaborates on the fight later when she and Carl have the breakup conversation. Lindsay says Carl told her he didn’t think he should have asked her to get married, and when he did that, she started filming him because he was saying cruel things to her. That alone is really dark behavior. Even darker is Lindsay says Carl then started filming her and was saying, “Lindsay, stop yelling at me,” as a way to make her look bad. This makes me realize that we don’t know the half of it. These two were fighting so much and so viciously that the landlord emailed them about noise complaints. We’ve seen Larl get into some humdingers on camera, but I have a feeling that the on-camera fights is them on their best behavior. What are they like alone? What terrible things are they saying to each other when no one is watching? I don’t think any of us want to know.
When Carl is talking to Kyle, he says that the “realization I may have been running from since the start of our relationship” is that Lindsay isn’t going to change. Nor should she! Nor should anyone in a relationship. I think Lindsay wanted to change some things about Carl (I suspect mostly his earning potential) too. That’s never going to work. You can’t get into a relationship expecting the person to change. Yes, your communication and the way you get along can improve, but you can’t fundamentally change a person, and that is why it is best that they call this whole thing off. Kyle says it perfectly from his own experience: “If you think there are things that aren’t going to change and she’s not going to meet you halfway, let me tell you one thing, marriage doesn’t solve any of that.”
Carl leaves that conversation to go break up with Lindsay and, boy oh boy, was it a scene for the ages. It starts with Lindsay saying that things with Carl have changed in the last two weeks, and he’s now expecting her to behave differently from what he wanted in the past, and she needs a little bit of “grace” (which is the positive younger sister of “gaslighting”) to catch up to what he wants. They both go over some of the other’s worst behavior, calling names, yelling, fighting, and screaming. Carl says the way that they fight is not normal, but he is right. It’s not. You can have knock down, drag outs every so often, but if you’re as combative as these two are there is something wrong.
Carl says that he is not ready to get married and Lindsay tells him that he’s giving up, that relationships take work and she doesn’t want to quit on them. Lindsay, I have something to tell you: it’s time to quit. They’ve been in couple’s therapy since November. This is August. It’s been almost a year, and things have not improved. They’ve talked, they’ve changed, they’ve gone to therapy. There is nothing left for them to do. But I will give Lindsay tons of credit. When talking to Danielle back at the house, she says, “I’ve been really working hard on my tone and delivery and not getting activated.” And she has. The Lindsay we saw this summer is not the Lindsay who shouts about sandwiches. She has tried. Carl has tried. They have failed, and what he did was the best thing he could have done.
There is a litany of things Carl says about what he thinks Lindsay thinks about him: that he’ll relapse, that he’s not a man, that he is not capable of making money, that he lacks confidence, that he has an anger problem. I think Lindsay does think those things (and I think some of them are true, but not all of them), and that is why they should break up. I would love to hear the negative things that Lindsay thinks Carl thinks about her because I believe there are just as many, and if she had time to prepare for this conversation, she would have them outlined as well. (Wait for the reunion.)
The biggest problem these two have is that they both think each other is the bad guy and are doing nothing wrong. They’re demonizing the other, and I think they’re both internalizing the hurt from the other person and then using that hurt to lash back out. They’re both at fault, this is both of their problems, they were both wrong and, as Paige said, Carl did them both a favor.
Lindsay meets the girls, and I think everyone on Danielle’s velvet sofa is correct. Gabby says Carl was right to break up but didn’t like how he did it. Danielle says that she doesn’t want to say, “I told you so,” but this is just what she was worried about. Paige says it’s for the best. But I think what Amanda — again the show’s emotional heart — says is how we should all feel about this breakup and applies to the viewers and this circle of friends. “They both say fucked up things about each other,” she says. “And I hear it from both sides. I don’t think we can point fingers … Because we all witnessed everything that went down this summer. You have to look at their whole relationship.”
Lindsay tells the women that she’s blindsided and humiliated. I disagree with Carl, who believes that she should have seen it coming; how could she have seen the end when she was this clued in? I see how she was blindsided and humiliated, but I don’t think she’s as humiliated as she thinks. We’re all rallying around her; we all think this is the best thing, and we all think that this is a bullet successfully dodged. I think we all agree with Paige that Lindsay was letting herself settle for a level of happiness lower than she deserved. She’ll come back from this, so will Carl, and so will all of us. This summer is only going to cement the group and the fanbase even closer together, not because of the humiliation and the drama, not because of the fights and the spectacularly savage implosion of these two, but because, like that group hug at the end, we all got through it together.
