Jessica Besser-Rosenberg
In the words of Jen Shah’s nephew, “This don’t make no damn sense.” Jen’s apology tour, Seth’s disgusting soul patch, Whitney’s robot sex, and Lisa’s plan to sew her own pants. NONE of it makes any sense. Or makes for a very compelling episode. But there were a few precious diamonds in the snow.
Mary is redecorating her home and has coerced another cousin – this time Big Joe, the contractor – into toiling away for her while she insults his faculties. Everyone in Mary’s orbit, notwithstanding her son, regards her with a mix of terror and reverence. It’s like she called all her friends and family over for a seemingly innocuous Sunday dinner and then beheaded one of them to prove her might…which likely explains the absence of Robert Sr. this season.
Mary tells Big Joe that she’s frustrated that her son is acting like a teenager. He’s 18. He IS a teenager. But he didn’t get the memo that he’s supposed to act like a fawning sycophant. Mary is then like “you like non sequiturs?” (no) “Here’s one: I told my son that if any woman he’s with smells like fish, he needs to run the other direction.” WHAT? WHAT? WHAT TYPE OF WOMAN OF THE CLOTH SAYS THIS SHIT. It’s almost like Mary is not as pious as she professes to be and probably runs a cult/money laundering scheme?
Meanwhile Jen Shah is doing what Jen Shah does best: Buying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of designer goods with money she earned from defrauding senior citizens and retweeting and liking offensive comments about Meredith’s son, Brooks. Meredith is MAD. So mad she’s not even disengaging. She’s engaged. And out for blood. Lisa, lover of all humans, especially herself, wants to smooth things over between Meredith and Jen, so she grabs the new girl Jennie and heads over to Jen Shah’s house to eat charcuterie and make matching pants. I have no idea what this “making pants” storyline is about but next season I expect to see Lisa Barlow’s pants in a Brooks Marks fashion show, all proceeds of which will go to the little old ladies Jen Shah has defrauded.
Lisa tries to convince Jen to apologize to Meredith and Jen is all, “FOR WHAT? ALL I DO IS APOLOGIZE? WHAT AM I EVEN APOLOGIZING FOR?” For making fun of Brooks’ sexuality, Jennifer. If you can figure out how to manage a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, surely you can see why Brooks and Meredith are upset.
Meanwhile, Jen is also trying to reconcile with Heather, who she has also cyberbullied over the past year. Heather agrees to meet up to talk with Jen but when she tells Whitney about this, Whitney is convinced Heather’s going to get hurt again. You never know what Jen you’re going to get: fun-mean Jen, drunk-mean Jen, or just mean-mean Jen. She’s a complex person. In other news, Whitney has grown her skin care business, which has duly reduced the time she can spend boinking her husband. Then she reenacts robotic sex in her interview for about eight minutes and my corneas fell out of my eyeballs and my organs are now on the outside of my body.
Jen and Heather meet up at some remote ice castle to hash out their issues. Jen has called Heather a manatee, Shrek, and a racist on social media, and Heather’s pretty hurt. Jen denies ever writing anything insulting and has the balls to insist that the verified Jen Shah account was someone else and not her. Then like a thief in the night, who defrauds old people of their life savings, she quickly turns the conversation around to how misunderstood she is and how she has so much love to give and WHY SHE IS ALWAYS APOLOGIZING. Somehow this pulls at Heather’s heartstrings and they kind of makeup up and eat churros. It’s surprising how quickly Heather caved but it’s not surprising how a good churro can make you forget that you’re sitting next to a soulless felon.
