Summer House Season-Finale Recap: Breaking Up Baby
Two moments in this episode really warmed even my Igloo cooler of a heart. The first came at the end of the big finale party when Amanda, Ciara, and Paige, a.k.a. the Bed-Sore Sisters, gather not in a bed but around all of our ultimate beds: a coffin. They profess their love for one another and how much they will miss their sisters now that summer is over. Amanda even says she may not have seasonal depression after all; it’s just that she doesn’t have her girls around as much for the rest of the year, and that makes her sad. It’s the best part of a really mediocre party.
Sorry to West and Jesse (Jest? Wesse?), but the shindig they organized is subpar, at least what we see of it. The theme is ill defined, and I’m not quite sure why they want to do a “scary” party at the end of summer because it just ends up looking like a too-early Halloween party. Also, the costumes? They could all do better except for Lindsay’s very witty Handmaid’s Tale getup, which incorporates her pregnancy. I also loved wacky Auntie Danielle’s Patricia Bateman, a fun play on a classic. (This is the exact right amount of Danielle I need to make me not wish she would go back and be the founder and CEO of her own obscurity.) Compared with Danielle, Jesse’s Patrick Bateman looks hack, especially because it’s the ultimate fallback costume for every handsome fuckboy in existence. Poor Jesse, can’t even beat the allegations when he’s in costume.
The other moment I loved came at the very end of the episode when we get a barrage of dates flashing on our screen. On December 4, Lindsay went into the hospital alone. (Was she really alone when there were cameras with her in the elevator?) On December 5, she had her baby, Gemma, who looks absolutely adorable. Then, on December 30, Paige announced her split from Craig on her podcast and then, finally, on January 21, Paige and Amanda go over to Lindsay’s for a visit. Paige arrives first, and this is exactly what I want for our Summer House crew. Lindsay looks happier than ever but is also being realistic about the harried tedium of tending to an infant. Paige looks more successful and gorgeous than ever in black leather pants that even Sutton Stracke couldn’t call ugly. But they’re friends. After all these years of Lindsay hazing Paige and Paige resisting the hurricane Lindsay brings to the house, they have finally come to a respect and understanding, and I couldn’t be happier.
When Amanda arrives, Lindsay takes her to see the napping baby, and Amanda wells up just looking at her. It meant so much more considering Lindsay and Amanda’s long journey from Kyle having to send a 17-page email about Lindsay and the women in the cast being nice to Amanda to now. And that doesn’t even include Amanda’s recent ambivalence toward motherhood; for her to be able to share Lindsay’s joy means the world. No, I’m not crying, you’re crying!
The information we get from the scene isn’t anything too groundbreaking, especially for fans who have followed the ins and outs of Paige and Craig’s breakup in real time. Paige says Craig said he bought a ring, but she’s not sure if the ring ever existed because, well, we all know Craig has an interesting relationship with the truth. She also says that when everyone online was coming for her and alleging she had cheated, which led to the breakup, she asked him to put out a statement saying it wasn’t true and he refused. She says that was the last time they spoke.
Lindsay shares that she and Turner would have broken up if not for the baby because she’s a public figure and he’s very private and she didn’t want to compromise in that way. But then Lindsay gets much more intimate, not just pumping in front of the girls but pouring them breast-milk shots that they take on the couch. These are not the kinds of shots we usually tune in to Summer House to witness, but I’ll allow it. The whole scene, even the mildly gross milk drinking, made me so happy. It was so great to see them all together, to see everyone laughing and getting along. This season ends much like the previous one, with the women gathering around Lindz, but this time it is to support her triumph, rather than to help her through her devastating breakup with Carl.
As Rebecca Jennings wrote in her excellent Vulture story about the show, Summer House really has become about the women of the cast coming together to support one another. When female friendship looks like this, or like the girls giggling by a coffin, it seems absolutely entrancing, an enriching life force that women can’t do without. The problem is the show is still full of boys, and boy oh boy oh boy oh boy are the boys boying. They are boying so hard I find it hard to be buoyed by their boy bodies, which is a constant source of buoyancy for my boy yancy. (Sorry, I took this linguistic experiment way too far.)
The boys behaving badly is illustrated in this episode entirely by Jesse Solomon (always both names!) in the continued disintegration of Jexi. The conversation at Lindsay’s Freedom Dinner that continues from last episode is also, interestingly, a conversation about the women and their friendships. Lexi complains that Jesse pitted the girls against one another and kept her from having other relationships in the house. I appreciated that Paige speaks up that she doesn’t think Jesse did this intentionally but that, yes, it did happen anyway. Ciara makes a good point that the previous summer, though she and West were linked, West still took time to forge relationships with everyone else in the house, which Lexi didn’t do. (It was also a little shocking to see Ciara give West something verging on a compliment.) Lexi acknowledges that, yes, she could have told Jesse to go screw and spent more time with the girls but she didn’t do that.
Later, at Jesse’s weirdo party, the pair have another altercation in the kitchen where they once again get on the merry-go-round of recriminations we’ve been watching for weeks now. They each accuse the other of attacking their character, and both are totally correct. It seems each of them says the other is distorting the truth to make themselves look better, and, again, they’re both right. Do we have to relitigate this? Must we get into who is right and who is wrong, who did what to whom?
There are a million ways to look at this. Maybe Jesse is some master manipulator who found the kind of girl he always wanted but never had and then was way too insecure so he smothered her and lied to her just to keep her in his bed. Maybe it’s all Jesse’s fault. Or maybe it’s all Lexi’s fault for sending him mixed messages like saying all he wanted to do was hang out with her and it was smothering but then getting mad when he invited Ciara to the U.S. Open even though he knew Lexi didn’t have plans. Maybe it’s all about the show and Jesse thought he would get even more screen time and fame if he had a girlfriend. Maybe Lexi thought the way to cement her burgeoning reality career was to lock down one of the guys but then she and Jesse weren’t a fit and now she’s mad she didn’t make relationships with the other women and might be off the show. Maybe it’s all of this. It probably is all of this and all sorts of things we didn’t see that both exonerate and incriminate both of them.
But I think the real takeaway from all this is something much simpler. As Paige says, lovingly, to Jesse after the Freedom Dinner, they just went too hard and too fast and it blew up in their faces in a very public way. When Jesse and Lexi fight in the kitchen, Jesse says he didn’t think he was talking shit about Lexi to the rest of the house, saying, “I’m on a fucking reality show. I’m talking to my fucking friends about my relationship.” This seems tantamount to carelessness, a crime more often born out of immaturity than nefariousness. Does that mean what he did to Lexi was right? No. But here are two people baring their most intimate moments for our entertainment. Can’t we let them both off the hook? Can’t we refrain from calling them names, pathologizing them, and trying to dig through the slim moments of their relationship we saw on a heavily edited and somewhat manipulative reality show trying to figure out which psychological disorder they have? Can’t we just let them be young people making stupid mistakes in the way all young people make stupid mistakes every day? Can’t we admit that if we were put in the same situation, with the same intoxicating blend of fame, hormones, money, and attention, that we might not fare very well either? That we might make errors we wish people would forgive us for? If we can’t, then why would anyone even go on one of these shows in the first place? Just as these shows are all about conflict and conflict resolution, so too should our relationship be to the people on them. Can’t we all just move on and forgive them as so many people have forgiven us for our youthful indiscretions?
Jesse and Lexi’s conversation broke the fourth wall, and so did the best conversation of the whole evening, between OGs Kyle, Lindsay, and Auntie Danielle in the backyard at the party. Kyle says, “Personally, I could keep doing this,” meaning not just living it up in the Hamptons but also doing so on a reality show. Then Kyle asks Lindsay if she can continue given that she’s about to have a baby. Danielle joins in, asking if this is the end of the summer house and Summer House, to which Lindsay replies it doesn’t have to be. They’re surprised, and it seems to be an answer born out of fear more than anything else. As she says, what does that mean for her identity? How will she make her money? How will she provide for the daughter she’s about to have without reality television? Danielle, forever the ultimate Lindsay whisperer (sorry, Gaby), says, “You’re delulu if you don’t think this isn’t an ending.”
Our minds have a way of changing, though, as do our circumstances. Lindsay jokes that every parent says they never knew a love like their child and she always thought it was bullshit until she had her own, and now she totally agrees. As she, Paige, and Amanda finish drinking Champagne in the middle of the day, Lindsay hears the baby stirring in the next room and knows the silence of nap time is about to be over. Soon, there will be crying; there will be nursing and burping and spitting up and fussing and playing and giggles and bath time and trying to get this damn baby to sleep through the night. She tells the girls it’s time to go and holds the door as they exit so it makes only a soft click, nothing that might rouse a newborn. She walks to the door of the nursery and just stares at her baby lying there behind the Lucite bars of her crib. Her perfect baby, the thing she was always looking for without knowing. She can’t imagine being apart from her, not even for a weekend, not even for all of the rosé, sandwiches, and activations the Hamptons has to offer. Maybe Danielle was right, she thinks to herself. Maybe she was delulu for thinking this wasn’t an ending. But Lindsay knows something Danielle doesn’t, something she may not ever learn: She was delulu for not thinking this was also a beginning.