Photo: Ralph Bavaro/Bravo
That’s it! I’ve cracked the case! I know who fixed the front door. It was that guy with the Dunkin’. Or maybe it was the guy with the Uber Eats? Are the guys with the Dunkin’ and the Uber Eats the same guy? Is his name Fred and he lives in East Moriches? Probably! But with all of those sweet, sweet product-placement dollars, Fred said to himself, “Now, who can I extort next? Maybe the makers of WD-40. Maybe Kwikset, the lock company. Maybe Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Doors Morgans, who was married to a man so old he invented the door. I think she holds the trademark!” That’s why the door was broken; he was waiting for someone to swoop in to fix it so that Amanda could one day open the door and say, “Thanks, Kwikset!” and we would all rush out to buy one. But it didn’t materialize, and then he was mad that those who did pay had to deal with that broken door, so eventually Fred showed up on a slow Tuesday with some socket wrenches and some elbow grease to set it all straight. That is the simplest possible explanation.
Anyway, this episode was not about the door, but it was about showing someone the door. We dealt with two messy breakups, one that we’ve watched in real time and one that we remember from a year ago whose mess continues to spurt out and stain your favorite shirt, like when you bite into one of those Dunkin’ Boston creams a little too fast.
Let’s start with the slow, excruciating shriveling of the corpse that was once Larl. On the drive out to the beach, we learn that it is the anniversary of Carl breaking up with Lindsay, which she announced in a very long Instagram post. Naturally, everyone saw it. When West tells Lindsay just how long it is, she rebuffs him. Then Amanda, always the most emotionally intelligent, jokes about it being like a novel and about how Lindsay should be done with timelines after the disastrous one she laid out for her ex, Stravy, of not-making-sandwiches fame.
Carl says that he only saw the post because multiple people sent it to him, but he clocks exactly where it’s coming from. “When you put something out in that depth and detail, it’s screaming that something inside of you, deep and dark in your body, is having a hard time with the reality of what really happened. Period,” he says. I say, “Amen,” channeling those feelings into a far-too-long Instagram post designed to piss off your ex whom you still share a summer house with. Passive-aggressive? Sure. But ultimately, they’re her socials, and the post itself doesn’t deal with Carl and their relationship as much as it charts Lindsay’s journey back to a life that she is proud of. I can get behind that.
What I can’t get behind is the big, fat announcement Lindsay makes at the beginning of her Freedom Dinner that she has catered for everyone to celebrate her “freedom” from Carl, who tells her that he doesn’t think they should be “celebrating” this landmark. “Who’s celebrating?” Lindsay asks. Um, she is! She made the post, she ordered the dinner, she gave it a name. That sure sounds like a celebration to me. And while her post is fixated on the recovery, on the positive, this whole stunt was meant to humiliate Carl in the way that she felt humiliated. (And it is a fight that she is still rehashing as recently as last week.)
Lindsay can’t see that these two things are incompatible: She can’t have this amazing life with a new partner and a baby on the way and still be mad at Carl. If all of this “freedom” came from him breaking up with her, take the win, thank Carl for his service, and move on with this perfect life. She says, “Thank you for setting me free so I could go and accomplish my dreams,” but that’s not what it feels like. It feels like she’s still pissed at Carl and wants to settle some scores, which I am totally down for. (I love not only revenge but also ABC’s Revenge, also set in the Hamptons.) But be honest about it, it’s okay to not be over it. It’s okay to still feel the sting of that humiliation. I would much rather Lindsay talk to us about that than this fake bravado about how great her life is.
Lindsay, an omega-level practitioner of the reality-television arts and sciences, is playing this all wrong. She’s the one coming across angry and petty, taking jabs at Carl all season, making jokes at his expense, and disparaging his (admittedly kinda dumb) business plans. Meanwhile, he never brings her up unless asked, tries to answer truthfully but not meanly, and actually seems like he wants to move past this. In response to Lindsay’s above comment about her dreams, Carl says, “I can only dream that you’re happy and I’m happy and we’ve accomplished that.” That is the right attitude. Carl may not believe it. He may go home to his Lindsay Hubbard voodoo doll and stab it full of Soft Bar–branded toothpicks. He might be just as bitter as she is, but it’s not coming across. He’s giving nothing but growth, nothing but recovery. As for who won in the relationship, I’ve always said that they were both terrible for each other, were doomed to fail, and that it was a bullet dodged. It’s no one’s fault, and they’re both winners. But when it comes to the breakup, at least what we’re seeing of it on the show, Carl definitely wins.
As for the dissolution of Jexi, I have to agree with my imaginary husband Kyle Cooke when he says that it was so short but also all over the place, so he never knew where they stood. When Lexi and her sister (a.k.a. the Liner Sisters) showed up at Amanda’s swim launch, Jexi seemed happy as clam pizza slices from Sally’s (IYKYK). Then, two days later, she’s breaking up with him because he’s giving her the ick. Kyle, and most of the boys in the house, have no idea what the ick is. Um, some of you don’t watch Love Island and it’s showing. These two have been like a drunken pendulum: They’re breaking up, they’re back together, they’re having a ball, they’re breaking up again. I’m more confused that Kyle is trying to explain “orbiting.” (So it’s kind of like ghosting but … oh, do we really care?)
Lexi says that she asked Jesse to hang out with her best friends who were visiting (cool) and her family (weird), and he said he couldn’t because he was getting a manicure. She wasn’t upset at the manicure, she was upset because she immediately thought he was lying and she couldn’t be in a relationship with someone she didn’t trust. I think that’s totally valid and I get it. How long can you keep a boyfriend when you question his every action? How long do you want to keep “training” someone to be the kind of partner that you need and deserve? (For the latter, you will probably spend a lifetime doing that, but you shouldn’t be doing it at all in the first six months when you’re wildly in love.)
As soon as they’re in the house, Lexi is asking where she can go that is out of the way to have a breakup talk with Jesse. She goes outside, asks if they can chat, and then asks Kyle if they can use the balcony off his room. I was thinking this was a second-floor situation, but no, the balcony is right there in the yard. The dudes are right there. Kyle even turns his chair around so he can watch!
When Lexi starts the breakup, I’m totally on her side and I get all of her points. She needs someone she can trust, someone who she can feel connected to, someone who is ready and willing to be in a relationship. Then she loses me a little bit when she says she can’t trust people anymore like she did at the beginning of the summer because of Jesse, and then adds, “I feel like the light in me is slowly dying because I am exhausted from teaching you.” What in the TikTok relationship advice? Yeah, I get it, Jesse was a terrible BF. Wait. They were never BF/GF, just “exclusive,” which TikTok told Gabby is different, so he was just a terrible exclusivity partner. Anyway, yeah, Jesse sucked. But this was eight weeks, and she’s irreparably changed? Her light is dying? Come on, sister. That seems a little bit extreme.
Lexi’s other big issue with Jesse is that he ruined her relationship with the girls in the house, because as soon as she arrived, he was clingy and love-bomb-y and they spent all their time with each other. It seems to me, though, that she’s a little more upset about this for show-related reasons than Jesse-related reasons. Her first season hasn’t even aired yet and she’s already worried that she’s not going to get next year’s free Dunkin’ deliveries, not that those would ever pass her lined lips. But at dinner, when this all blows up, she accuses Jesse of “pitting us against each other,” which I don’t think we saw him do. Yes, I can see how he may have leveraged his relationships in the house to make them all think she’s crazy, but I think his worst offense was isolating her.
After the breakup, when Jesse is talking to a group in his room, he mentions that after his convo with Ciara last episode, he was upset with her about how it ended, which he conveyed to Lexi. Then he went and had a nice time with her at the U.S. Open and was happy that they were repairing things. But when he told Lexi that news, she was upset that he was forgiving Ciara so easily considering everything Ciara had done to West and Lexi. This is where the whiplash gets me. Lexi says she was being protective over Jesse because they were in a relationship. That tracks, but what’s crazy is that happened on Tuesday and the breakup is happening on Friday. She was so defensive of him just four days ago and now she’s breaking up with him?
The episode ends on, of course, the women fighting with each other. Lexi, who just told the girls that she wished she was closer with them, says that after everything Jesse told her about Ciara all summer, she didn’t trust her. How about you keep that to yourself, Lexi, and finally take the time to develop your own relationship with Ciara before declaring that at a group dinner? And if she doesn’t believe everything that Jesse is saying and she can’t trust him because of his half-truths, then why is she believing what he said about Ciara? Why not chalk that up to lies as well?
Much like with Larl, I think this is a bullet dodged. Jesse was a terrible almost-BF to Lexi (and not a great friend to Ciara), and he deserves every ounce of heartbreak to come from this. Lexi, for her part, is young. While she knows that she wants a relationship, everything else about her dating style seems mercurial, changing with the tides, the times, the latest episode of Love Island, and the TikTok algo. Neither of them were great (though Jesse was worse), so let’s chalk this up to freedom and move on. However, if we have to sit through an anniversary of this breakup next summer, then I am going to go to the Hamptons, find Fred, and rip that broken-ass door off the motherfucking hinges.
