The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Recap: Best Friends for Never

Hello, and welcome back to another installment of Rich Women Doing Things, where the women really did things this week. They sprinkled gold dust on top of their fruit plates while their hot assistants looked on and didn’t care even a lick what that gold would do the color of their friends’ poos. They pretended to be Amazon drivers to break into their sisters’ houses bringing pizza even though there was already a perfectly good dinner being prepared. They sat in their personal sauna in their backyards, FaceTiming their friends, not worrying a lick what the heat or the sweat would do to their iPhones because Amazon will deliver a new one in no time. Or is that their friends playing another trick? Oh, the rich women are so confusing.

Speaking of confusing rich women, the episode starts with Kyle Richards and Dorit “The Smoking Bandit” Kemsley continuing their discussion at Sutton’s Surrealist Ball, and they really drill deep into what their fight is about. Since I have a feeling we’re going to be following this skirmish for most of the season, I’d really like to take this argument step by step, see what they’re angry about, and decide who is right, if anyone at all.

Kyle’s first claim is one that we should look into: that Dorit isn’t acting like herself. Kyle says she came into the fight to work out their issues, but Dorit didn’t want that. From the moment she arrived, it looked like Dorit was spoiling for a fight, and she’s gotten one for sure. She definitely seems more confrontational in general and certainly more aggressive with Kyle specifically than she’s been in the past. I would say that it was her clocking in because she needs the paycheck more than ever, but this really started at the last reunion, so it seems like Dorit’s newfound aggression may predate her needing to stay on the show for professional slash financial reasons.

Dorit says that when Kyle diminished their friendship on her Amazon Live — saying that they weren’t really that close — Dorit felt like she took eight years of their friendship and flushed it down the toilet. I totally see Dorit’s point here. Even in the clip they keep showing, Kyle says, “We only went on one trip together as couples.” There are plenty of friends I’m very close with that I haven’t traveled with. Even if they weren’t that close, their husbands were (and still are) so close that it has to count for something. It feels like Kyle is trying to diminish what they had, though I don’t entirely understand why. But that is one point for Dorit (count: 1).

Kyle brings up the incident at BravoCon where Andy asked Dorit to rank the Richards sisters and she demurred and took a shot rather than answering the question. Kyle says that hurt her a lot, but Dorit says it was a joke. Dorit didn’t think it was so funny when Erika Jayne said Dorit and PK, an inside-out watermelon, were headed to splitsville at the BravoCon the year before, so I don’t see why she can’t give Kyle this one, apologize, and move on. So, that is one point for Kyle (count: 1).

Dorit tells Kyle that Kyle isn’t really mad about BravoCon; what she’s really mad about is that Dorit went on Watch What Happens Live and said that as Kyle got close to [we can’t say Morgan Wade’s name for reasons that only make sense to Kyle] that she got further away from Dorit. I don’t think this is such a horrible thing to say. Everyone is busy; everyone has lives. We only have time for so many people, and if a new person comes in, that means time away from the other people — another point for Dorit (count: 2).

However, I don’t think it’s right for Dorit to tell Kyle what Kyle is mad about. Dorit says that if Kyle could just cop to it and they could have an honest conversation, then she would move through it. However, if that isn’t Kyle’s truth, if she really isn’t mad about that, then who is Dorit to dictate the rules of engagement on something that Kyle isn’t even engaged in? Point: Kyle (count: 2).

Dorit says that Kyle tried to ice her out after the reunion, which Kyle doesn’t deny. This seems like a show thing, like Dorit is insecure about her position, and since Kyle seems to have an Andy Cohen’s Golden Ticket and Lifetime Pass, Kyle could cause serious implications for Dorit’s livelihood. As a friend, I might not understand this, but as a co-worker, it is another point for Dorit (count: 3). However, Kyle says that she couldn’t deal with repairing their friendship because she was already struggling with so much in her life. Yeah, she had the separation, the tabloid stuff with [shhh … Morgan], and the continued fallout of her fractured relationship with her sister Kathy. Why bother with Dorit when there are bigger lesbian music videos to star in? That’s another point for Kyle (count: 3).

What is so crazy about this fight is, as you can see on our handy, dandy Jumbotron, it’s a tie game. Both are right, and both are wrong. When they go to Boz’s house and Erika — in a jumpsuit with a print that I pray to the plastic surgery Jesus is the face of Jocelyn Wildenstein — says that she can see both sides of the argument, so can I. This is going to give us a lot to talk about and will have fans pretty evenly divided based on how they viewed the players before this season even started. I think who wins this might come down to temperament, and Dorit wanting to shout over Kyle to get her point across could make for a star turn but also turn fans against her.

While all the above reasons are nits that each other can pick with each other, I think Dorit is right when she says that Kyle keeps changing her reason for why she’s mad. I also think Dorit is correct that there is a different set of rules for Kyle and a different set of rules for everyone else. Just look at how she is handling her possible lesbian relationship with [I won’t say Morgan] and how she dealt with Denise Richard’s possible lesbian relationship with Brandi Glanville. But it’s not like Dorit is an easy friend or an easy adversary. Kyle says in confessional, “She lacks accountability or self-awareness. She seems to be completely oblivious of anyone’s feelings but her own.” This is a statement Garcelle Beauvais would second all the way from Atlanta where she is putting more and more Black girls in fictional peril. Dorit will never admit she’s wrong, never apologize, never try to see anyone else’s perspective. Why would Kyle want to make up with someone like that?

Now we’re at something of a stalemate and while we are tabling further discussions of their disintegrating friendship, they’re both also facing separations. In the line of the night, Erika says, “They are at each other’s throats. PK and Mo are out having the time of their lives and we’re here in Encino fighting. How does that happen?” In an effort to cheer Kyle up, Sutton has an idea that she, Erika, and Kathy should make little pizza kits and go over to Kyle’s to cook in their PJs. They surprise her and pretend to be an Amazon delivery person and Kyle goes into a tizzy because she has to try to get her menagerie of misbehaved dogs in the house before she can open the front gate. I know that most of you have given up on RHONY this season, but let me just tell the women of the Big Apple that this is how you throw a fun, silly, entertaining prank and get away with it. I haven’t laughed this hard at an imaginary pizza delivery since Gizelle, Ashley, and Robyn delivery to Karen’s fake house on RHOP.

At the pizza party, what they’re all saying to Kyle, which she is refusing to hear, is that she needs to file for divorce, that she needs to protect herself and her assets, and that things aren’t going to be as easy as she imagines. Sutton tried this at an earlier lunch date when she told Kyle that discussions about money change people, and she thought she and her husband would always get along until they didn’t. However, Sutton came at it from a perspective of, “Here’s what you should do, Kyle.” I don’t think that’s going to get through to her. However, if she said, “Here is what happened to me in my divorce,” and showed her how things could go more sour than PK’s three-day-old boxers, then maybe Kyle would have listened.

But I am really worried for our girl Kyle, who thinks that everything Mo said about her in his book and in interviews will force him to give her half of The Agency. When Sutton points out that, from the moment she files, anything Kyle gets will be hers, Kyle admits she has no idea what is going on. “That is the stuff I don’t understand. Eventually, we’ll figure it out,” Kyle says, like someone who is more worried about getting her next Kemo Sabe hat than where the money to pay for it is coming from. Kyle, go see a lawyer! Talk to one of your million friends who has been through a divorce. Do something. Instead, she says that she doesn’t think her marriage was the norm, that her divorce will not be the norm, and it will all be amicable. That could turn out to be true, but right now it sounds like the famous last words of someone whose divorce is about to last twice as long as Bethenny Frankel’s.

Kyle needs to face that this is not a separation; it is a D-I-V-O-R-C-E, find out what it means to me, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, take care of TCB (sockittomesockittomesockittomesockittomesockittome). The one thing she and Dorit both have in common right now is that Dorit seems like she’s as firmly in denial as Kyle. (OMG, should we start calling her “De-Kyle”?) At lunch at Boz’s, a regrettably shoe-free household, Dorit says she thinks there is a chance she and PK, a machine gun that fires dried-up lizard testicles, might reconcile. Then, when she meets him for dinner, he asks her what she thinks of his jacket, then stands up to show her the whole outfit and says, “Look. The single PK.” Of all the disgusting Red Bull–and–vodka shit this man has done on this show, how is this somehow the worst? It’s especially true if he is the one who dumped her, then he says, “Look at me, I’m single now.” It makes me wish the Earth really was flat so that he could fuck all the way off the edge of it. Dorit gets her revenge, however, when he says he’s skinner than ever, and she says, “Not if you keep eating like that,” meaning the non-alc beer, bread, and French fries he just ordered because nothing tastes as good with carbs as more and more carbs. (I wish that was an insult, but carb on carb on carb has been my diet since college.)

It seems like Dorit is still holding the door open for healing with her husband, relishing that they still talk multiple times a day and thinking that they’re also going to have this sweet, harmonious divorce that will be nothing but wonderful for the children, who still have no idea that this business trip daddy is on will never end. PK, urethritis of the soul, says, “You came to me a different girl. It was me who was a global entrepreneur. It was me who took you places.” Oh, it sounds like he his jealous of her success, of her being recognized more, of her (I’m assuming) earning way more money than he does. So, instead of trying to fix himself, he’s going to blame her and just throw her to the curb. I always knew this man was gross, but he gets grosser by the minute, just sinking into the ground, seeping into the sewage water, draining himself through the mossy pipes and shit-clogged arteries until he empties out into the sea, his vile molecules dispersing one by one until, like so many microplastics, he is inside all of us, turning our stomachs not through his actions, but by the very moisture that lives inside us.