‘The Real Housewives of Miami’ Recap, Season 6, Episode 8

As longtime members of the Real Housewives Institute, we have seen plenty of dinners where the women all dog pile on one castmate to teach her some lesson. Just look at what happened to Jenna Lyons on this season of The Real Housewives of New York City when they decided that she had nefarious reasons for wanting to go on vacation early and that nefarious reason was hating to fly coach. But this episode of RHOM is different because we finally see a dog pile where the women are trying to use their powers for good, not evil.

I’m not saying it never happened before — the “And now we said it” tea party where the women rallied around Taylor Armstrong comes immediately to mind — but we certainly see it with less frequency than we see, say, Roaring ’20s parties or Ramona Singer pooping on the floor. But it was so nice to see the ladies, albeit misguidedly, trying to get Lisa Hochstein out of a prison of her own making.

It all starts when the women are having lunch at the National Croquet Center, and they’re talking about Lisa’s struggles in her divorce from Lenny, a cloud of noxious smog infested with seagulls and hair plugs. They think that she shouldn’t be relying so much on Jody, her new boyfriend. They think that she should not be driving Lenny’s car since he accused her of putting a tracking device in it. They think that maybe she shouldn’t be going out on the town after the cops just left her house. They have a lot of conflicting opinions, but they’re all of the opinion that Julia has to be the one who brings it up because she’s the only one who hasn’t tried so far.

Luckily, after that heavy conversation, we’re treated to a wonderful interval where the women of Miami try to learn how to play croquet and mostly just confound and insult a group of 70-year-old white dudes who are wondering just how much one of Larsa’s feet pics cost. (FYI: About $12.) But the scene was great. We have Larsa cursing on the course, one of the members saying that they don’t really do that, and her promising to tone it down even though no one believes her. When Kiki gets a ball through a wicket, she takes a very bawdy victory lap. I’m sure Kiki is not the first person of color on this croquet court, but I can almost guarantee that hers was the first boob of color to slip out and make an appearance.

At dinner that night, Julia — who looks ravishing in an editor’s cape and the Kim Kardashian wet-look hair — has her work cut out for her. The first order of business is to try to survive an alligator attack that Adriana completely made up because she’s been overdoing the ketamine therapy. Second, she has to confront Alexia about why she had to ask Todd for permission to share a bed with her. That was an awkward conversation because we could all see that Alexia was uncomfortable, but she played it off as a joke. She admitted it was a bad joke, but she says, “Oh, I don’t see you like that, don’t worry.”

Know what? I’m fine with Alexia being a little uncomfortable about it, even if we’re never quite sure why. It could have been because she didn’t want to piss off Marysol, who was already coming for Alexia to support Julia’s friendship with her ex. It could have been because she just doesn’t like sharing. It could be because she’s a little bit more bi than we think and maybe she is attracted to Julia. I don’t know. What I do know is she didn’t want to pawn her unease off on Julia and tried to make her feel welcome and loved while still keeping her at arm’s length. As long as she’s being magnanimous about it and not saying out loud, “It’s cause you’re a lesbian, and that’s weird,” I think we have a bit of a victory on our hands.

Finally, it’s time for Julia’s big job and that is introducing the topic of Lisa’s divorce in a sweet, calm way so that they can all express their concern for their friend without her freaking out about it and taking her multiple butterfly rings back up to her room in the Aroma360 house. Julia’s conversation-starting skills are about as good as her opera singing skills. I don’t know if it’s a language barrier, if Julia is awkward with these kinds of conversations, or if her hair is so slick that the thoughts are just rolling down her noggin like beads of rain on a windshield. She tells Lisa that the night of the opera party, she came out when her kids just had to deal with the police and that they should all agree that kids go first.

Oh no, whatever you do, do not make it about the kids. Keep the kids out of this, all of them. As Dr. Nicole says, Alexia doesn’t like it when people talk about her children, who are probably an entire Taylor Swift old at this point, and she’s going to talk about Lisa’s babies? Then they tell her she should get her own house and not move in with Jody. She tells them that she intends to. Then they start asking about Lenny’s car and if he owns it and why she’s driving it, and by this point Lisa is a little pissed. She’s fighting back and asks Alexia who owns her car. She says Todd does and points out that it’s different because she and Todd are good and Lisa and Lenny are like Itchy and Scratchy after a week of fighting at the Restylane factory.

Lisa says she feels like she’s being interrogated, and the day before, they were like, “You need to talk about Lenny less,” and today, she feels like all they want is information. I get what she’s saying, but the ultimate problem is that Lisa can’t hear any criticism of herself or what is going on with Lenny. To even mention it, in her mind, is to deny the daily mental torture she is suffering.

But I do think her friends have some justified concerns. Her leaping for Lenny taking care of everything to Jody taking care of everything is as dangerous as they make it out to be. What happens if Jody packs it in? Lisa didn’t learn her lesson from Lenny that she needs to make her own money, have her own life, and drive her own damn car where she can install as many tracking devices as she wants. She only learned that she needed a nicer (and hotter) man to do the same thing for her all over again.

The problem is, no one can seem to tell Lisa that she’s going to have to have less, live cheaper, and drive a Corolla. Can you imagine? Lisa in a Corolla! A Kia, maybe. But how about a leased BMW? A pre-owned Audi? I don’t know. Something. I really want Lisa to have a Gina Casita moment and be like “Oh, I’m poor now. I bought a condo; it was all I could afford, but it’s mine.” I want Lisa to see that what makes her life wonderful is not all the parties and trips and enormous houses on Star Island. What makes life wonderful are her kids, her friends, her boyfriends, and, most of all, her freedom.

Alexia is the only one who gives her some good advice. She talks about when she was fighting her ex-husband’s estate while she was dating Todd. She lost her case and thought about appealing, and Todd said she had to choose between the past and the future. I’m not saying Lisa should give up on fighting Lenny. Fuck that asshole. Take him for everything he’s worth. But she’s letting the poison inside. She’s staying around that nuclear waste golem too much and she’s going to end up with radiation poisoning. She’ll spoil herself forever trying to be right. Maybe instead she should just try to get out.

That’s easier said than done, I feel. A few days later, Lisa finds out that Lenny has put in a motion for full custody, saying that Lisa is an unfit mother who abuses prescription drugs. Her “I have prescriptions for those!” defense is sadly not the magic bullet she might think it is. But she’s right. Lenny is trying to wait her out, out-sue her, and waste her money so that she gets tired of fighting and gives up. There has to be a middle ground between giving up entirely and only playing so many of Lenny’s Slutty Reindeer Games, which is also the name of his models-in-lingerie-only holiday party.

But as hard as those scenes were to watch, it was a lot harder watching Dr. Nicole’s dinner with her semi-estranged father. I had seen the news in late November that Nicole’s father, 69, passed away. The episode ended with a dedication to him, but I wonder if it should have come at the beginning of the episode or right before Nicole meets up with her dad because knowing that this might have been one of the last times they saw each other really changes the whole dynamic of what was still an extraordinary scene. Here at the Institute, we have a speak no ill of the dead policy (well, at least until we have to write Aviva Drescher’s obit), so I don’t think I want to address Mike or his behavior but rather how it played out for Nicole.

She arrives thinking that she’s finally going to meet Mike’s much younger girlfriend, Isis. However, her father arrives alone, giving Nicole a weak excuse about how his 20-year-old girlfriend is struggling with sciatica. Um, this lady has been to medical school. If you’re going to use a medical excuse, then at least find a better one. Still, Nicole was willing to meet her and was excited to meet her, which says something about how far she’s come with her father, whom it seems like she never fully forgave for going to prison when she was a child.

When Mike keeps going to the bathroom, she asks about the state of his prostate, and he says that it’s good, actually, and he’s about to have a kid or two. The way this was shown in previews and the trailer made it seem like Mike had already knocked someone up, and I wondered if the reason Isis wasn’t there was because she’d waddle into dinner, and Nicole would immediately be pissed off that this was how she found out.

Instead, Mike explains that they’re planning to have children, and Nicole starts to get snippy with him. “So, if you have a kid, that will make them my sister, and she would be Greyson’s aunt,” she says with so much spice on it that even the Hot Wings guy would be like, “Um, you crazy. I’m not eatin’ that.” But she holds it together nicely. She says she’s processing and tries to keep a smile on her face, tries to keep an open mind, and tries to keep the communication with her father flowing like he just took his prostate medication.

Then Nicole makes a fatal error and asks Mike if he had two more kids what his grand total would be. He says eight. You can see Nicole mathing in her head. There’s her. There’s her brother, who is never on the show for some reason I wish someone could explain. Then there are two others she knows about. Who are the other two? We get a symphony of beeps to protect the innocent and then find out the kids are only 7 and 8 years old. Should Nicole meet them? Should they have play dates with her kid?

You can tell Nicole is upset. It seems like this is yet another time where she thought she was showing up for one thing — a girlfriend reveal — but was really there for something entirely different — two pre-teen reveals. You can see her disappointment and her father’s annoyance, and you can see both of them searching for the other’s approval even though you can tell it’s never going to happen.

But you can also see them working, you can see them building, you can see them trying. This is important for them, working it out, thinking that one day they will be in a place where they can have blended family Christmases and they’ll all drive each other crazy but an acceptable, loving amount, not the please-don’t-call-me-again amount. You can see, above anything, the hope that, given enough time and patience, everything will mend itself. But that time is up. This is it. This is the best that they’re ever going to get, and maybe, one day, Nicole will realize that even “almost there” was a bounty she could have cherished when she had the chance.