There’s been much talk, and rightfully so, of West’s treatment of women, namely Ciara and Amanda. But this discourse can’t be complete without considering how these women felt about him. That Ciara and Amanda were enchanted by West has baffled viewers at home. I think that’s mostly because how both ladies actively reimagined West to be not just their special someone but a precious treasure has been underrated. This episode puts that all on the table, and then some. Which worked out well since they never got to eat dinner.
SUMMER HOUSE S10 E14
Rated D for Delusion
Genre: Treasure Hunt
Starring: Ciara’s grill, Amanda’s suede jacket, and Levi (relative to her otherwise absence)
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars
Act 1: Camp Rock
This week starts off on an overdue note of wholesome positivity. (If summer is going to be fun, the story does have to, at some point, dip into a different thematic plane than slow-motion betrayal.) Jesse brings the gang to Sunrise, a philanthropic camp for NYC area kids dealing with cancer. The serious nature of the excursion encourages Jesse to exit crooner mode in the corresponding interview bites: he admits his extra behavior is because he’s actually been lonely. He wants to stop playing court jester and focus more on finding real happiness, a pursuit that is strangely the most redemptive male storyline.
The relief of seeing Jesse speak from the heart and without wiggling his eyebrows counterbalances the yuck factor induced by Ciara proclaiming herself “free” to gravitate towards West. I appreciate her calling on the Lord because it’s never too late to encourage His gift of discernment. For the record, even when male figures aren’t darksided agents of clownery like West, there is 9.9 times out of ten, zero reason to be that excited to break bread with a man. I’m dead serious, not when you are an interesting woman surrounded by a city full of others. The only exceptions that come to mind are blood relatives and IDK, Tony Shalhoub.
At Bailey’s It Girl party, Lindsay admits her coldness at Carl’s SoftBar soft opening was not for sport, that seeing Sharon actually rattled her. I’m not saying I’m the Lindsay whisperer, but I am saying I basically explained bar for bar last week why Lindsay felt too slighted by Sharon to exchange niceties: it’s not because she’s no longer with Carl and therefore owes his family no kindness. Her tude was due to the fact that her almost MIL was her biggest opp on national TV, and that’s not a moment from her life Mother Hubbard wants to move past.
Act 2: Zero Dark Flirty
Continuing the youthful vibes, Ciara launches a plan to ambush her housemates with water guns as they cross the broken threshold for one of the last times before the house became spiritually broken, too. The RELIEF I felt when West didn’t pop out in a matching Dr. Suessian costume! Everyone gets in on the juvenile antics, except Amanda, who also didn’t stop by summer camp.
If Lindsay, a single mom who spends her weekdays buried in bodily fluids, can double-fist a water gun and a white wine after getting soaked, herself, then what does it say about Amanda — who was graciously spared from a drop because of wearing suede — that she was grumpy about the floor being wet? This is a woman who is coming from a place of no. Even Bethenny would’ve played along.
If you didn’t see KJ’s text meltdown on WWHL, here’s the TLDR: after admitting to Andy Cohen he had an anxiety-inducing message from West left unread in his phone (relatable AF to a girl who refused to read her SAT results for two weeks), KJ read West’s apology on live television. Instead of clowning West, as many would’ve hoped, remembering the good side of West made KJ want to cry. That’s why seeing KJ express excitement at finally being one of the boys as they chest beat in the foyer is even more sad. Had West not blown things to the high heavens off-season, this group could’ve been Bravo’s new batch of leading men.
On the ride to the beach, the love of Batula’s life was quick to point out that her headspace was very Debbie Downer. Ciara (that’s the best friend she didn’t choose, friendly reminder) took the opportunity to defend Amanda: it’s being around Kyle that pushes Amanda back into anxious mode. Lindsay agrees with Ciara’s assessment that Amanda’s relaysh needs a switch-up; she just seems to believe the separation should be permanent. Mama Bear mode activated.
Act 3: Beaches
Upon arrival at the National Beach Day beach day, Jesse does what he is more prone to than opening up: “playfully” poking at his friends’ sore spots to get a rise out of them. West’s anxiety over the house overhyping his “friendship” with Ciara is actually inoffensive. Everyone is weirdly obsessed with the worst couple that barely happened, rising like an underwhelming phoenix from the fuck boy ashes. But what a more developed male lead might choose to do here, instead of people-pleasing with two hands into the delusion, is tell his friends to stop sabotaging his paltry attempt to be decent instead of on the come-up.
It only took 14 episodes for the producers to give Ben a shred of interiority. Ben reveals to the cameras that he grew up as a born-again Christian, and that has, of course, colored his commitment patterns with women. Jesse is happy for Benbrina, though he wishes he’d had a single partner in crime this summer. Guess West didn’t count because he was too busy being wifed to Ciara and/or Amanda at any given moment.
And now we return to the heavy-handed irony brought to you by Amanda Batula’s subconscious portion of the episode. Before getting into the words Amanda utters that may likely end her Bravo career, it’s worth highlighting Mia’s one sentence of contribution amid Amanda’s diatribe. Mia to Amanda: “Well, first of all, you’re a bitch.” Can’t help but giggle at the fact that most of the Bravo audience watching this at home was probs like, well said queen, no further explanation needed!
Amanda’s Ironic Quotes Supporting Ciara on SUMMER HOUSE
“Even if they got back together, it would make me the happiest person in the whole entire world.”
I mean, even if she didn’t secretly want West this entire summer, which all signs suggest she did, why would her best friend going back to their loser ex be thrilling for Amanda? What a disingenuous amount of joy to express unprovoked.
“I’m skeptical, I’m weary of him.”
Is it normal to spend inordinate amounts of time goofing off with men one is weary of? To be so into West for personal purposes, but disgusted by him on behalf of her best friend, is a concerning level of compartmentalization. It’s not all on Amanda: Ciara herself pingpongs from hating West to diving back into the infantilization and idolization of him, herself. She is the downest, baddest in Bravo history, perhaps. But if I think a man’s a dog to other women (let alone a woman I love so dearly), while I might casually pet him in a forced group setting, I’m certainly not taking that dog home to become my woman’s best friend. Why the hell would I want to subject myself to slobbering and barking?
“Ciara is a very special, incredible person, and you need to treat her differently than any other woman in the world. And like until a man is capable of doing that, I don’t trust anyone with her heart. I would die for that girl. The way I’d cut West off in one fucking second if she looked at me. If she gave me one look, I’d be like I’m gonna attack.”
As someone blessed to be born with ovaries, I instinctively felt these are the words of a woman who wants to see another woman six feet under the sand. Amanda’s weird dehumanizing of Ciara the other direction (she’s not just a lovely woman who deserves respect, she’s a dazzling gift from God that deserves unearthly devotion) was a big sign that Amanda was never thinking of Ciara like a sister. She was looking up at Ciara from the feet of a pedestal Amanda had built in her mind. Naturally, said pedestal became incredibly tempting to tip over by taking Ciara’s self-described most prized possession: West.
If West was good enough to break Ciara’s brain, and Amanda wanted nothing more than to be confident and happy like her superhuman angel of a best friend, it wouldn’t have been hard for a 5’8” (my guess) Minnesotan brick to pathologically become Amanda’s Holy Grail. She already has the Indiana Jones adjacent jacket for it anyway.
Meanwhile, Ciara tries to soft pitch Kyle separation from his wife, and Kyle has so many questions, namely, who is paying two rents. Amanda is a person who has drawn such babying from everyone around her, including Kyle, but this summer, more from Ciara. Kyle being a bad husband doesn’t justify being misled into thinking that his marriage might stand a chance in therapy. How in the world did Amanda not float the issue if their sessions were so genuine?
Act 4: Dinner Party
After several mentions more than necessary of the anal region, the house heads home. Lindsay takes a preemptive wack at Kyle’s DJ career before the table for her Freedom Dinner 2.0 is even set, call it foreplay.
KJ gives Ciara the grill he helped her obtain, and now they have very expensive friendship bracelets. Officially adding KJ to the male adoration exception list. When revealing said grill downstairs, everyone’s intrigued, but only West has to walk over to get an intimate look, closer than the others. This is the priority access that West missed when Ciara announced purchasing her grandparents’ home. Further building the case that his affinity for Ciara is external, territorial, and couched in having a front row seat to her body.
Freedom Dinner goes much better for Carl this time around—instead of a slap in the face, he swaps a little spit with Bailey. I still believe Bailey’s interest is genuine, but there’s something distant about her attraction to Carl (it’s not dizzying the way she first felt for Ben) that indicates this isn’t going anywhere.
Lindsay, innovator that she is, comes up with a new Bravo table game that isn’t blatantly designed to take shots at your fellow castmates (it’s ultimately still designed for that, don’t worry, but much more subtly) called Lost and Found. During West’s turn, against his instinct to not overdo it as expressed in his earlier confessional, he reveals the most important thing he’s found this summer is “a friendship and relationship” with Ciara. Ciara, in turn, struggles to refrain from giving West a Nobel Peace Prize and rights to her firstborn for claiming her importance as a friend-maybe-more, thanks to his renewed voice.
It’s palpable how much she wanted to mean to West, someone she calls “just a baby” — there’s that infantilization, for the record. In case Ciara’s deep devotion to the 30-year-old man (not baby) went unsaid, Ciara states it plainly: West is “the person the [she] love[s] the most.” There’s that idolization. Maybe that’s why Amanda wrongly felt she had no choice but to take her intimacy with West to a romantic place. Because her main point of reference to West (Ciara) never hesitated to recontextualize their dynamic as singular, superior, borderline divine. Amanda wanted the glow Ciara has as she leaps across the table into West’s arms for managing to get through a few sentences with minimal umms.
While Lindsay gets properly into her 1-2 punch routine on Kyle, Amanda visibly relishes the negative attention toward her husband. She quite literally has her fist in her mouth as Lindsay brings up Kyle’s upcoming Vegas trip and works to hold back a smile when Lindsay fully lays Kyle’s lack of consideration on the line: he’s taken on a manager and booked a gig in Vegas, despite the fact that his wife hates how DJing has become more than a side hustle.
While DJing is the most cringe mid-life crisis, and frankly, the good punchline to many jokes because of it, it is odd that no one acknowledges that Kyle’s DJing not only makes him happy by feeding his ego (something his marriage is far from doing), but also helps him cover Loverboy’s financial losses. This raises the question, what is Amanda doing to fund their lifestyle? It’s hard to imagine the commission from South Moon Under’s Batula Swim sales covers rent.
The conversation quickly moves on to how Kyle’s new career is counterintuitive to starting a family, which is true. But Kyle is also absolutely correct in that Amanda doesn’t want to have kids right now, with him, or anyone—proven by her hanging out in NYU dive bars all winter with a man whose only proximity to diapers is constant fart jokes. Amanda pushes back to remove kids from the conversation, but it does stand to reason that if Kyle had a family unit to plan for, he might have channeled his type-A attention into that instead of DJing. That conversation may have had a chance at producing results, but Kyle’s temper, Lindsay’s bullishness, and Amanda’s baiting got the best of him first.
Instead, Kyle drops his spicy go-to (a “fuck you” to Amanda), which is his infantile way of expressing the betrayal any partner would feel for being laid to the slaughter instead of whatever main the chef won’t get to serve. You’d think Amanda would eventually become less glib and more upset, but the editors dropped in clip after clip of her reacting the opposite.
Her licking her chops at the delight before her was especially eye-catching. Her gleeful demeanor doesn’t stop Ciara’s favorite male on earth from jumping across the table to buck up his chest like he’s GoNnA dO sOmEtHiNg, a la Peter on Pillow Talk night, to defend someone who doesn’t need any further defending. Ultimately, though, West’s bravado amounts to a red-faced whisper that Kyle needs to talk to Lindsay, or else, ummm, nothing.
So Kyle keeps looking and talking. He’d have taken the words out of my mouth if I hadn’t involuntarily shouted them at the screen: Lindsay is coaching Kyle on a partnership that simply does not exist. Lindsay’s surely coming from the place of someone whose former fiancé never fought for her, except she doesn’t realize the difference is that she was really giving Carl something to fight for.
Amanda’s more likely to physically and mentally go anywhere Kyle is not. Kyle is not considering Amanda’s feelings, and equally, Amanda does not have feelings for Kyle. A more tirelessly dedicated (and less ambitious) husband might’ve tabled his one-track mind for the optimal life to rebuild one essential element of it (his romantic relationship) from scratch. Instead, Kyle saw his marriage falling apart and chose not to let his livelihood crumble, too.
Call it selfish or maybe call it self-preservation, but Amanda being absent from their relationship and then complaining that Kyle goes out to make money (yes, in the corniest way possible) instead of staying home to be in their relationship alone isn’t fair either. That Kyle’s lifeline is dripping in age-inappropriate vanity doesn’t help his case, but if the man had gotten hooked on a less glamorous avenue to self-assurance like, IDK, making sourdough, or something, I sense his passion would remain the same, as would Amanda’s disdain for it. On the plus, at least he’s not finding validation in someone else, something both parties probably can’t claim anymore.
Kyle has a big reaction to being big-time ganged up on, and for whatever reason, everyone’s surprised, telling him to stay calm, as if they didn’t wind up a drunk jack-in-the-box who has been the #1 guy in this group for a decade due to his penchant for losing his top.
And finally, we arrive at the moment teased in the trailer. Kyle and Carl’s full circle arrival at fistacuffs. I never expected to be on Kyle’s side in this moment, but here we are. A grown man can’t quite literally chase after another grown man he’s not so secretly really mad at when that man is seeing red, call them a loser, and expect any other outcome than a testosterone-filled confrontation that should’ve been a hard conversation a few weeks prior.
Best SUMMER HOUSE Performance Of The Week:
Kyle ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5/5
You know what, talk your shit, king.
Outstanding SUMMER HOUSE Flop Of The Week:
West ⭐/5
And the results are in — you are NOT the man ready to take on Kyle Cooke. Apparently, that was Carl.