The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Recap: One Tough Mother
“If I don’t feel it, I’m not showing up.” Those words to live by are spoken by Mary Cosby over FaceTime when Whitney invites her to dinner to hash things out. They follow in the footsteps of other great quotes, like Kim Cattrall’s, “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself,” and Whoopi Goldberg’s, “I don’t want somebody in my house.” And now, Mary’s wise words will always come to my mind when debating an RSVP.
Whitney herself doesn’t quite understand why she wants to meet up with Mary in the first place, considering that she’s famously not that nice to her, but nonetheless, the conflict keeps coming up with her “energy hiller,” so she wants some kind of resolution.
But before that, we catch up on the state of her and Justin’s union. They realize that Whitney scheduled their daughter’s birthday party for when Justin is working, and she agrees to change it to a weekend less convenient for her if Justin agrees to pick up the slack. This exchange feels like a highly calculated game of 3-D chess. Was this scheduling snafu just a long con to make Justin promise to carry his weight? We may never know, but if it was, Whitney is a mastermind.
Over at the Barlow residence, John is going through his old missionary stuff with Jack and tears up in his confessional talking about how proud he is. He also tells us that Jack actually told him two weeks before he told Lisa, and given the way Lisa drags Jack’s frosted tips, I can understand why. Nonetheless, his parents both reiterate how supportive they are of his decision while assuring him that he’s welcome back home at any point. Lisa warns him that he might not like the companions he’s stuck with and tells an incredible story about her college roommate as an example. “I came home, and she was in my room wearing all my clothes and sitting on my bed, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, I just wanted to see what it would be like to be you for a day’ and it was really creepy.” I think the same thing might have happened between Monica and Jen Shah.
And in true Jen fashion, Monica is now buddying up to Heather, who takes her snowmobiling. After seeing the interaction between Monica and her mother at Angie’s Greek Easter, Heather reached out because it reminded her of how she feels about her own mother. Though Heather says she was always a great mom, they grew apart after Heather’s divorce, which was hard for her family to accept. For Monica’s part, she explains that when she was 12, her mother left her to pursue her dreams in New York, giving her lifelong abandonment issues.
But one winter sport isn’t enough to hash out all of their mommy issues, so later in the episode, the pair go cross-country skiing with Whitney and Meredith, continuing this show’s mission to be mistaken for the Winter Olympics. After hitting the snow, they have a little tailgate where the ladies ask Monica about her new car, which she tells them is a rental. She explains that her actual car is in her mom’s name, and whenever she gets mad, she comes and takes it — despite Monica being the one who makes the payments.
Whitney commiserates with Heather and Monica’s mother problems, saying that she didn’t talk to her mom for 13 years because she left the church. But since they all have daughters of their own, Monica says they have to break that generational pattern.
Speaking of which, Whitney invites them all to Bobbi’s 13th birthday party, including Meredith, whom she has to have an awkward conversation with. Since Angie will be there, Whitney feels uncomfortable with how Meredith has been talking about the rumors and points out that this is just the latest in Meredith’s pattern. “It was the same thing with Jen, with Lisa, with Mary, and now it’s Angie.”
But Meredith doesn’t want to talk about that. What she does want to talk about is how Whitney didn’t reach out to her quickly enough when she heard about her car accident. In her confessional, Whitney says this is another one of Meredith’s impenetrable shields that she throws up to shut people down, knowing that nobody can challenge it. But at the end of the day, Meredith says she’s not inflicting harm or wishing ill on anybody, including Angie.
I don’t wish ill on Angie either, but I am skipping the scene of her cooking Greek food with her Greek father because it was boring. So onward to the long-awaited sitdown between Mary and Whitney!
I need to know everything about how they managed to convince Mary to get dinner with a woman she clearly hates. Especially considering they couldn’t even convince her to go to a park for Meredith’s trust-building exercises. Did production promise her use of the sprinter van as her own personal valet? A vat of 2003 Dom Pérignon? Maybe she was just there for the free meal. That meal, in an act of karma for how Mary treated the servers at Lisa’s party, gets accidentally spilled all over her lap as it’s put on the table. It’s hauntingly clear that the only thing stopping Mary from unleashing the rage behind her eyes is the presence of the cameras. Instead, she simply wishes it had been spilled on Whitney instead.
Whitney uses the meeting to apologize to Mary for talking so much shit about her, which Mary says severed any future the pair had. With that out of the way, Whitney’s ready for her apology. But Mary has zero interest in apologizing to Whitney for the diatribe of a text she sent her and takes that as her queue to leave. What follows is what must be the longest “storming out” in Bravo history. As she puts on her coat and gathers herself to leave, she tells Whitney that it’s a false equivalency to compare her texts to Whitney calling her a predator, saying, “Wake up, bobblehead.” But she’s not leaving without her food, which she waits for the server to put in a to-go box, which makes her “storm-out” clock in at a full two minutes of screentime.
It’s Jack’s Mission Location Reveal Party, but no reveal could be bigger than finding out that John Barlow’s sister is named Cher. The party kicks off with Lisa playing her favorite game: “Who Knew About Jack’s Mission Before I Did?” And naturally, when she asks the room of blonde teens, practically the entire party raises their hands. Jack stands up and thanks his family for being supportive both pre and “post-mish,” before unveiling that he’ll be going to Bogota, Colombia, for said “mish.”
Monica goes to get dinner with her mother, who immediately starts crying as an unbothered Monica sits down. “Excuse me, can I get a straw?” she asks the waiter as her mother weeps, with impeccable comedic timing. In fact, this entire conversation is a comedic masterclass, whether our two performers know it or not. Wiping away her tears, Monica’s mom starts the conversation by saying, “I watched a movie about an older lady in Croatia who had issues with her mom. The mom died, and they hadn’t resolved their issues. I don’t want that to happen with us.” I simply had to know what this movie was, so I poked around, and my guess is Netflix’s Faraway. Either way, Linda should make a Letterboxd.
But Monica isn’t buying what Linda is selling, and she doesn’t like that she’s positioning herself as the victim after what she did at Angie’s party. When this comes up, an angry Linda yells that she’s not going to talk to her like “a weak-ass bitch.” Just then, their waiter appears to take their order and thus diffuse the situation. But not for long! Soon enough, Linda is screaming again. “Did you just call me a fucker?” Monica asks, to which her mom clarifies, “Motherfucker. I called you a motherfucker.” Ah, alright.
Linda then helps herself to Monica’s guacamole, which she calls a “pretty dessert.” After being corrected on what guacamole is, Linda says that they have to be able to be vulnerable with each other to get to the root of their issue. But Monica already knows what the root of the issue is: being abandoned as a child. As her mom frantically searches for aspirin, Monica tells her that Easter at Angie’s made her relive being abandoned as a child, something that Linda denies doing.
Monica then brings up Linda’s own mother, pointing out a pattern of generational trauma and the trickle-down effect it’s had. Her grandmother’s relationship with Linda has been damaged from the beginning, and that same damage carries over to Linda’s relationship with Monica. Linda then calls her “Monica Darnell,” which annoys Monica because that’s not her name anymore. “That’s the name I gave you,” she says. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what the fuck your name is; you change it every fucking week.” It’s giving Lady Bird. That should be the next movie Linda watches.
When Monica mentions her mother leaving her in the trunk of a car while she was making out with a man, Linda says, “That happened one time.” Once again, it’s just incredible (albeit unintentional) comic timing. Ultimately, they fail to find any resolution, and Linda says that the only way for them to get through this is therapy, which Monica agrees to. And just like that, Linda has masterfully secured a continuation of her multi-episode arc.