Winter House Recap: Ride a Cowboy

There is a strange moment when half of the crew is shopping in a westernwear store that is not Kemo Sabe — therefore, it isn’t even a real westernwear store. Brian is talking to Kyle about how well everyone gets along in the group, and Kyle says, “I’ve been renting houses for ten years. It’s rare to go this long without a blowup.” Yes, we have been watching Kyle in those houses for nearly ten years, and we’re sort of waiting for a blowup, too. How can all of these people be getting along so well? Where is the drama? What is feeding us?

Not that everything needs to be fights and drama all the time, but without a little bit of interpersonal antics, we’re left to watch the parties unfold and observe two of the stupidest couple fights of all time. I mean, why can’t Casey and Amanda just start screaming at each other for no reason? At least that would give us a little something to look at other than Rhylee trying to inhale a Fabio look-alike at the house’s cowboy party.

The first stupid couple fight happens with Alex and Danielle. It kicks off when Alex keeps flirting with Jordan, probably because she keeps flirting back. She says, “Girls need flirting things that don’t go anywhere, too.” She’s right, and I absolutely do not blame her for any of her behavior. She knows it’s not going anywhere past witty banter and a few arm touches; I think she just might need to make Alex a little more aware of her boundaries.

When Danielle tries to lure him away from the party to have sex, he says he just wants to hang out. That leads to a totally wasted Danielle saying, “I’m trying to hang out with you, but you hang out with everyone else.” He’s saying that she told him that he could flirt with Jordan, but her rationale is that it happened after they just made out. Now that they’ve had sex, she doesn’t think he should be hooking up with anyone else.

Alex is saying he doesn’t want a relationship at all, and Danielle admits to feelings she’s pushing down. But this doesn’t seem like some bait-and-switch to me, where Danielle said they could just hook up and now is acting like his girlfriend. She’s not asking for a relationship or a commitment; she’s just asking for basic respect from him in the form of not trying to bone another girl in the house. I don’t think his flirtation is actually a problem because it does seem like he flirts with all the ladies in the house. However, it’s his intentions with Jordan that make it different. If she were like, “Sure, let’s do it,” Alex totally would, which I think would be a slap in the face for Danielle.

Everyone in the house is so wasted that it’s hard to have a constructive discussion. I mean, Katie is so plastered that she takes a big old chug out of a bottle of olive oil. Finally, Danielle tells Alex to come and cuddle with her in bed, but once he gets there, she’s already passed out, and he leaves. The next morning, Danielle needs Amanda to fill in the blanks from their discussion, and she tells Danielle that it was a dumb fight they chalked up to being wasted. The two of them have a sober (well, hung-over) conversation, and the beef seems to be squashed, at least until Alex starts hitting on Jordan again.

Now we have to move on to the name game and Tom Schwartz, who is a loser loser bo boozer, banana fanna fo foozer, me my mo moozer. LOSER! After a make-out with Katie in the back of the van on the way home from the bar, he’s having a major freak-out because he doesn’t want to hook up with her because she has the same first and middle names as his ex-wife, Katie Marie Maloney Schwartz Maloney. He once again says that if he were to hook up with her, it would be disrespectful to his ex-wife. News flash, Tom: You have a divorce so you never have to worry about respecting or disrespecting that person ever again. Also, it’s not like he was respecting her when they were together, so … ZING!

Kyle talks to him and tells him that he’s putting artificial roadblocks in his way because he’s not ready to hook up yet. Yes, my imaginary husband is entirely right, and Tom is the only one who is cockblocking himself. Even when Katie just wants to crawl into bed and cuddle, he seems more paralyzed than Dr. Scott after the Medusa Transducer. (If you got that reference, congrats, you are an old homosexual, and I want to be your friend.)

I think there are a few things going on here. The first is that Tom knows this will be on television, and he doesn’t want things to get worse with Katie MSM when she eventually sees this show. Sure, she’s an ex, but they do have to continue working together. The other is that I think his brain is starting to get clouded by the #Scandoval of it all. He’s about to go back and film the reunion, and, if you can remember, it was a contentious time when he and his friends were being dragged in various and sundry news media daily. (Oh, what a time it is to be alive.)

At the big cowboy party, Schwartz licks some whipped cream off of Alex’s nipple, and, I’m sorry, but does he want me to get out the slash fiction? Because I will. I will live out Tom’s fantasies for both of us right here on Daddy Moneybags Vulture’s internet. But he seems like he’d rather be with Katie. After the party, when they’re all toasty, our delightful Aesha Scott, who dropped by to see her fellow yachties, screams at him, “Why won’t you penetrate Katie?!” It is all going well until she says the name, and his house collapses like Kim Zolciak’s finances. Oh God, this is the all-time silliest reason not to have sex with a woman whom he described, quite accurately, as “capturing the essence of an early-’90s supermodel.”

But this was a very fun episode. I don’t know how, but the Winter House crew somehow managed to have a packed house when they usually can’t even fill up half of the backyard in the Hamptons. We had Aesha stop by, and no one in the Bravo universe brings me more joy. When she said she entered the house and immediately got pregnant and drunk, I wanted to cry laughing. I also loved Brian kissing a girl named Stephanie, who looked shockingly similar to Danielle. There was Kyle walking around shirtless and my girl Casey just flinging a bag of chips all over the kitchen. Even Malia, the Maleficent of the Seven Seas, isn’t getting on my nerves. Maybe what we really need is more fun and less fighting. Is that true? Well, maybe we just need some less stupid fights to go along with all the fun. That would be nice.