Summer House
Reunion Part 3
Season 10
Episode 19
Editor’s Rating
Even after a three-part interrogation, we never fully understand what West and Amanda were thinking, let alone the truth of what happened.
Photo: Jocelyn Prescod/Bravo
My favorite moment of the final part of a tumultuous reunion is, unsurprisingly, thanks to Lindsay Dale Hubbard in full Cruella de Vil mode. She returns from a break right before the very end and says, “Andy, I haven’t learned anything. I just feel like there is not a lot of clarity.” Lindsay is eternally clocking in to do her job, to make sure that the sponge of this show has been so thoroughly wrung that there is not even a droplet of drama left inside. Andy Cohen, wearily, responds that they’ll start over, picks up a stack of cards as big as Carl’s new veneers, and facetiously rewelcomes everyone to the reunion.
But she’s right. We get plenty of revelations in this hour, probably more than the previous two parts, but I’m still scratching my head, still wondering what it all adds up to. Maybe that’s because West and Amanda can’t answer the biggest question of all: “Why?” Everyone sort of pokes and prods at it, asks all these questions around it, but I don’t think that West and Amanda even know the answer. So everyone on those couches and at home is going to be more frustrated than trying to put together some Ikea furniture when all the Allen wrenches in the world have disappeared.
The episode starts with Bailey telling Amanda that she worries about her, but that West is going to embarrass her. Amanda says, “Maybe this will be a huge mistake, and one day I will wake up and realize it, but it’s hard to sit on the stage and try to explain myself when no one will listen.” They’re listening, they’re just not buying any of it. It seems like Amanda is partly waking up to the fact that it was a huge mistake on this stage as Andy and the Summer Housers try to get a definitive timeline. West says that he is the one who made the first move, saying that he thought there might be something there, and Amanda says that all of her emotions flooded in during that moment. They say nothing was happening the previous summer, and when Kyle asks, very explicitly, if it goes back to 2025, they both say no, which I believe.
The thing I’m having a hard time with is that West and Amanda say that they started their “connection” in February or March, just shortly before the announcement. They say that nothing was happening at the Super Bowl, which Bailey handily reminds us was February 8, but Dave Portnoy seems to have shot down that timeline, saying he knew they were a thing at the Super Bowl. (Ugh, get your boy sports out of my girl sports!) That is also a week before Valentine’s Day, when West sent his “girlfriend,” Meija, flowers. That means that West was potentially seeing Amanda, having sleepovers with Ciara, and sending flowers to Meija all at the same time, and none of them were aware of it.
West cops to the fact that he has been very unclear with the “jillions” of women he’s dated in the past, including Meija, but as more comes out about their entanglement, the worse it looks for West. Jesse says that he met Meija previously when West flew her out to Montana so that they could go to a football game with his dad. I don’t know, that sounds like boyfriend-girlfriend behavior to me. West says that he wasn’t exclusive with Meija but eventually admits that she thought they were in an exclusive relationship. So West was cheating on her all of last summer, including the “ear stuff” he was doing with Ciara in the summer house. Jesse, getting progressively teary-eyed, says, “What it feels like now is that you probably told her that this was all for a show.” Yup, West was lying to everyone about all of this stuff, including telling Jesse that Meija knew that they weren’t exclusive when that wasn’t true.
When Andy asks if they’ve been monogamous, West says yes, since the announcement, but not since they started exploring their feelings. Wait, so he asked Amanda to put her whole life on the line, and he was still sleeping with other people? Ciara makes the obvious point that if he hadn’t been, the internet would have gone into a frenzy. He and Amanda say that they’re falling in love, that it’s real, that they want to be together, but at this point, does West have any choice? Aren’t the particular circumstances of this very public partnering forcing him into monogamy? Andy asks if that’s the case, and West basically says he doesn’t want the pressure of this public relationship to be why it works, but it seems like that’s working so far.
After West says they’re exclusive despite everything we just learned about how he treats women, Carl, of all people, doesn’t believe it and has some words for Amanda. “And you still want to be with him, after all this shit, Amanda? You see this behavior. He’s hooking up with four different girls and your best friend. That’s fucking crazy.”
Amanda, very quietly says, “I hear you.” But I don’t think she hears him. Amanda constantly apologizes, and so does West. As Jesse is crying about how he feels like he has “lost a brother” in West and that “the sanctity of this friend group feels broken,” West is sitting there stone-faced. Andy finally asks the question we were wondering: If Amanda or West is on anything because they’re placid, resigned. West says he took some beta blockers, but did he take all the beta blockers? He has no beta left, but that has not made him an alpha. It’s made him an omega. It’s made him the last-place finisher.
I think what everyone in the audience and everyone in that room is having a hard time handling is the friction between what they’re saying and how they’re acting, and I don’t just mean the beta blockers, but how they’re acting in continuing to pursue this. Amanda says to Ciara, “There were times I lost sleep, wouldn’t eat, thinking about what this was going to do to our friendship, even the fact that these feelings existed. I fucked up, and I am deeply sorry for betraying your trust, and it kills me to know that I caused you this pain.”
Ciara’s answer is simple, “No, it doesn’t, Amanda.” She’s right! If even the existence of these feelings felt fucked up, then what about acting on them? Wouldn’t she know that would make her feel even more fucked up? And what about acting on them and lying about them? Would that make it worse? Lindsay asks Amanda, “What did you think was going to happen? Knowing Ciara, how did you not know what this would do to this friendship, and you were willing to say ‘fuck it’?” This is exactly the point. It’s not that Amanda didn’t know what would happen; it’s that West asked her to choose him over Ciara, and she said yes. This is not an accident; this is not a slip-up. This is clearly Amanda and West choosing themselves over the feelings of everyone else around them. Ciara says that West is dating Amanda to get revenge on her. I don’t think his mind is shrewd enough to think that. I don’t think West sat in his apartment rubbing his fingers together thinking, “I know what will screw her — fucking Amanda!” No, but the blatant disregard for her emotions is the same kind of revenge without even thinking about it.
Kyle also makes an excellent point to West about Amanda, saying that he found Amanda at her most vulnerable and asked her to make an impossible choice. He says, “Deciding to pursue these feelings, you have completely isolated her. She is alone on an island.” He’s right. She’s lost her husband, all of her close (show) friends, and now all she has is West, a man who, by his own admission, can’t commit. Kyle completes his thought by asking West what his plan is for Amanda, and right now, it seems like the plan is happily ever after — the fact that they are spitting into each other’s mouths in Italy proves that’s what they’re going for.
But it’s at the exclusion of everything else. Lindsay comes in with a great soliloquy at the end of the episode. “I’m just so confused how such a big decision that is so high-risk, and you’re saying you weighed all these options before making this decision, but you didn’t,” she says, laying in. “All of these guys are a mess, and if you weighted all of these decisions, surely you would have thought about how this will affect more than just the four of you. And I’m looking at you, West, because you’re the manipulator here. You are not thinking through in a bigger-picture way. This affects the future of our friend group. This affects people’s livelihoods, careers, and today is the day that you just thought about that? It’s very shortsighted for a fucking hookup, for a fling … All we want to talk about is to get clarity, and you guys came to the table with, ‘We have a lot to think about after today.’”
Do not, for all that is good and holy, get between Lindsay Hubbard and her paycheck. She has an infant daughter to feed, and she will destroy anyone who messes with that. And she’s right to. I think that Andy does a great job asking questions, facilitating conversations, and letting the cast question each other as they all processed this one big decision. And that’s what it was, despite how West and Amanda want to frame it — a choice, and an exceedingly selfish one, at that. I think Amanda has shouldered a lot of the blame for what she did to Ciara, and that is a blame she should carry. But I think for West, it’s even worse. He is the one who made the move, he is the one who acted on these feelings while already in various romantic entanglements, he is the one who put her in a position to have to betray her best friend, and he is the one who put the timeline of her previous relationship into question. I don’t know that West is a mastermind, but he’s certainly the architect, and this is the Frankenstein creation he will best be remembered for. Next week’s bonus episode that takes place three weeks after the reunion should shed more light on timelines and motivations, but for now, everything is still inconclusive.
While the episode goes out on everyone eating Girl Scout cookies, what I will remember is something that happened just before the final segment, when they go on a break, and Kyle goes to hug a preternaturally calm Amanda and starts to tear up. He hates that their relationship gets talked about like it was 100 percent bad, just as Andy hates that this scandal has overshadowed the most fun season (and the most-watched season, even before the scandal) of the show. We all want clarity. We want this thing put together in a shiny box with a perfect bow on top. But nothing in life is like that. Nothing is 100 percent. We’ll never know everything. Just as we will remember Kyle screaming at Amanda and calling her a “bitch,” or we’ll remember Amanda calling him 80 times in a row when he wouldn’t come home from the club. The difference, dare I say the beauty, is in the things that we will never see, the laughs in the kitchen when Kyle almost tripped on the dishwasher, Amanda’s feet rubbing on Kyle’s for warmth when they were in a ski lodge. Kyle helping Amanda back from the hospital after some terribly mundane ailment, her spending a bit extra time ironing the pants that he loves. A relationship is like the show: It’s all the things that lie just below the surface that get lost in the edit. The meals together, the drunken Ubers home where they sing along to their own music, the sneaky cigs behind the garage where production lives, the sunrises, the cool breezes, the cicadas finally retiring their fiddles after a long night, them with their arms around each other, the only people who will fully understand just what this experience is like, the millisecond where the light streaming through the Sag Harbor trees twists a little bit on its axis and everyone who can see it knows that fall is officially here.
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