I’m so utterly disappointed in the Summer House kids. It’s the start of a new season; we have new people in the house, the cameras are revved up for the first time in months, and what do they do? They barely order anything from Amazon. Did you see the sad smattering of packages accumulated by the front door this Fourth of July weekend? It was like one trip. Where is the giant village of Amazon orders that we’re used to? Where are the cases and cases of Loverboy spritz? Where is all of Kyle’s DJ equipment so that he can continue to pretend to be Diplo as I continue to pretend he’s my husband? This is a travesty, this, this, this … dusting.
The other absolutely scandalous thing is that their landlord didn’t even bother to fix that sticky front door. If that could be fixed, then summer would be perfect. Well, that and getting Carl and Lindsay to get along. Well, those two and getting Ciara to talk to West. Okay, all of those things, but then also, Jesse Solomon (always both names!) not humiliating himself in front of his new love object. If we can account for all of those things, this will be a delightful summer.
It seems like things are starting swimmingly when Jesse Solomon and West arrive in the house and decide that, instead of having their own rooms on the lower level, they decide to go splitsies in one of the double rooms upstairs. They’re so happy they get to stay up all night giggling, talking about girls, farting into the open air, and then giggling about their farts. “The only issue,” Jesse Solomon says. “No J-ing it.” Then West asks if he has ever J-ed in the house, and Jesse Solomon says no. Then West says he’s always J-ing off in the house. We’re like three minutes in, and hot guys with mustaches are talking about their masturbation habits. This is the best premiere ever, and we haven’t seen Kyle’s milky white ass yet. (Don’t worry, we’ll definitely see it when he climbs into bed at 2 a.m. looking for brownie points that he didn’t stay out until 4 a.m.)
The boys are immediately set upon by new girls, Lexi with an I and Bailee with two Es, the second of which she stole from Salley on Southern Charm. Oh, sorry, guess now it’s Sally from Southern Charm. We don’t see too much of Bailee, who seems like a “friend of” the beach house and is giving me Thora Birch from Ghost World vibes like she has the soul of a Gen Xer in the body of a TikTok influencer. Lexi is possibly the world’s oldest living Canadian child model. I’ve never heard of her. I’ve never even seen her in a Talbot’s campaign, but apparently, she’s been working since she was 10. Once, when she went to Paris, her agent gave her a map of the Metro and told her to go find her casting. Wait, was she a model, or did she just watch a season (sorry, “cycle”) of America’s Next Top Model where Tyra would send the girls on go-sees so that modeling agents could torture them? Probably the latter.
Jesse Solomon and Lexi are immediately smitten with each other. The sad thing is that Jesse Solomon has no game. He has the opposite of game. He has, I don’t know, rain delay. When he finds out Lexi’s last name is Wood, he asks if her middle name is “Gives Me,” and every single one of us watching at home dies for a full three seconds in some mini-rapture of second-hand embarrassment Then, at dinner, he asks her to her face if she thinks she’s ditzy, which she totally is, but you don’t ask a person that, especially someone you just met, especially someone you just met who you are hoping is going to be removing your underwear somewhere in the near future. Jesse Solomon is incapable of flirting, but also all over Ciara. He’s telling her how hot she looks, he’s touching her, he’s telling her that he can’t look up her tiny little skirt. I guess it’s sort of like Kyle and being a DJ; some things people do because they love them, not because they’re good at them.
The two recent additions are the only new news we need to address. The rest is old news, starting with West and Ciara. West is apprehensive about seeing his old flame again after the disaster of the last reunion, but he says they met right after the reunion to talk some things out. He thought he left them fine, but Ciara went off to do (surprisingly well so far on) The Traitors, and when she got out, she saw him on all of these podcasts, doing all of these articles and posting regularly on social media. She decided that he was annoying and she wanted to let everyone know what a loser he was.
I get Ciara’s point, that she didn’t want him out in public saying things to the press that he never said to her. I totally get it. But I think Ciara is missing the point a little bit here. The New York Times article she mentions was a follow-up to an effusive profile they ran earlier in the season when he was the breakout star. The second article was basically saying that everyone had already reevaluated West because of how badly he treated Ciara, and he was actually a fuckboy all along and fooled us all. Yes, he’s up in the press, but he’s up in the press being made to look like a fool, which is exactly what Ciara should want.
West’s biggest concern is when he greets her when she arrives and thinks that if that can go well, they’ll get back on track. He approaches her and goes in for a hug and she moves his hand, pats him on the chest, and keeps it pushing. Damn, that was cold. Ice cold. Colder than Lexi in those Daisy Dukes that are so short they’re no longer legal to wear to the beach on the Gulf of America. Things seem to be hard for Wiara now, but I see a melting on the horizon. It’s clear she has no interest in getting back with him, and it sounds like he is the one who definitively ended their relationship, so I don’t think we’ll have a rekindling, but I bet these two will end up partying together a fair bit.
The other old news is actually the big news, and it’s that Lindsay is pregnant, just like everyone thought she was. She arrives at the house in a baggy shirt with enough fabric to make all the sails on the Parsifal III. This is Lindsay’s diabolical mind in action. You know the day before she was like, “Gabby, I am going to wear a baggy shirt because I am halfway through my pregnancy, but I don’t want anyone to know I’m pregnant for the three hours before I can make my big, contractually-obligated speech so here’s what I need you to do. We’ll get you an even bigger, even baggier, even pinker shirt. Like a shirt so big and pink it looks like the sewage treatment plant in Barbieland. That’s what we’re going to do. Then everyone will just think that we’re all doing big shirts this summer, but ha HA, they will be fooled.”
I’m very happy for Lindsay. Sure, like everyone else in the house, I was doing the Phaedra Parks math on when she broke up with Carl (September), when she got together with the new boyfriend (January), and when she got pregnant (March-ish?). That doesn’t mean I’m not excited for her, but the timeline is kinda tight. When Carl arrives at the end of the episode, he says, “She’s been pregnant for the last six months and hiding it from the world because she knows how crazy it would look if everyone knew she was pregnant.” No, that’s not it, Carl. That’s not it at all. Lindsay didn’t tell anyone publicly because she was waiting for this; she was waiting to do it on camera, she was waiting for the sponsored post by Clear Blue Easy. This wasn’t about Carl, the new partner, Lindsay’s embarrassment, or even the baby. It was about the show.
That’s the bad taste I got in my mouth about this whole thing. Before it happens, Lindsay is upstairs with Gabby talking about her “speech” and how she learned it by heart. Does she need to go over it again? No. She has it down. She even has a plan with Gabby, who will gather everyone for a toast in the living room, and then Lindsay will just take over and start explaining what is going on. The whole thing was so staged, so mediated that it drove me crazy. After Gabby gives a little cheers, Lindsay stands up, and everyone is like, “Are we going around? Should I have prepared remarks?” And Lindsay is like, “I didn’t prepare anything either.” Girl, you sure did. You practiced it 17 different ways in the car ride up here. You had Gabby time the moment when she would hand you the blow-up of the sonogram that you made so that you could make maximum impact when you tell everyone you’re pregnant. Where do you even get a glamor shot of a fetus anyway? Do they offer that at the CVS photo kiosk?
It was all just so fake. I get that it’s a big moment for Lindsay, but this is a reality show. It shouldn’t feel so orchestrated. Why couldn’t Lindsay just gather everyone herself and do a short little thing and get the news out of the way? No, she couldn’t. She had to start, “Eight years ago…” Why eight years ago? That is when the show started, and that is when Lindsay’s public journey started. She needed to survey all of those years — the fights with Garret, the bad boyfriends she fooled around with, not making sandwiches for Stravvy, getting together with Carl, breaking up with Carl — not to remind anyone in that room of what happened, because many of them lived through it. She needed to remind us what happened. She needed to put her story together in a coherent way so that the editors would be able to assemble a Lindsay’s Greatest Hits montage that she could retire to. What annoys me is that the big announcement had nothing to do with the people in that room; it had to do with the audience.
Especially because her speech was more than 20 minutes long. What does her first summer with Everett have to do with this baby? Anyway! Time to move on, Brian! Enough about Lindsay; let’s move on to Carl, who has now seen the news about the baby on social media, has fielded endless texts about it, and is just about to walk into the house and run smack dap into Lindsay’s airing out her baby bump by the pool. Summer has only just started, but, girl, things sure are already heated.
