Vanderpump Rules Season-Finale Recap: Fool’s Gold
When this season started, it was a reality show about reality stars making a reality show that just went through the greatest scandal in its history. That’s because it was. The season ends with three excellent monologues — from Lala, Katie, and Ariana — about what it’s like to have your real life be a reality show and what that means: People owe one another and the audience. To me, that end was fascinating, especially with those pictures of them all from their first confessionals. This season was always about the ethics of being a reality star, and each of these different women explained equally valid but very conflicting visions of what it was like.
Instead of the usual recap in which I talk about the boner I got from Brock’s mustache and make fun of them all for grilling Dan at their group lunch (though, according to Lala, that was also about weeding out assholes from the “friend group”), I’d like to just look at those three monologues and talk about what they mean — and what they mean for the future of the show.
These speeches are all kicked off by Ariana leaving Kyle Chan’s “Good As Gold” rerelease party because Sandoval attempted to walk up to her and apologize, and she turned and walked away from him with a coldness that froze over the San Francisco Bay.
The first and longest to speak is Lala. “I love filming this show because it is real. I find it to be tremendously healing, and for Ariana to walk out this way is just such a slap in the face,” Lala says right after her rant about how Ariana got cheated on and now thinks she’s God. “This is what we do. We’ve been doing this for most of our adult lives … And there is a responsibility that comes with living your life on-camera. You have to be truthful even when it’s extremely uncomfortable. I think James has. Tom and Katie. I feel like I have, but there was a time when I was not honest about what was going on in my life, and it was suffocating. I don’t feel like Tom and Ariana were ever honest about their relationship until Tom was caught cheating. And you think you get to be honest for one moment and then get to pack it all away and all is good. Fuck that.”
This is a workplace issue that we’ve seen many times before, like Dorinda bullying Tinsley on RHONY because she didn’t think that Tinsley was being as authentic on-camera as the rest of the women. That’s what Lala is accusing Ariana of. She’s saying everyone else is willing to do things that make them uncomfortable — like Tom and Katie continuing to interact after their divorce — but that Ariana is getting a pass because she has made herself a victim. She resents that Ariana seems to be getting a free pass because of all the shitty things Sandoval did to her.
This sentiment was echoed by Sandoval earlier at the party: “If you don’t want to film with your ex, don’t be on the show. Don’t sit back on your lazy ass and collect a check for doing nothing.” While I don’t necessarily agree with his assessment, I do think that this is a valid way for one of Ariana’s coworkers to feel. Sandoval, correctly or not, thinks that he has shown up, he has dealt with the slings and arrows of the public, he has been willing to talk to his ex, and he has just gotten further vilified for it.
This also can’t entirely be seen as Ariana’s fault. I’m not sure what the producers promised her about her exposure to Tom this season, but they may have promised her that it would be nothing at all, a boundary that doesn’t seem sustainable for the show. For her life, absolutely. But for the show, which is still the basis for her lucrative career, it seems now more than ever it needs to be him or her.
Speaking of boundaries, Katie Maloney Schwartz Maloney sums it up perfectly: “Sometimes you need to stick to your fucking boundaries, and if your peace is more than that, then fucking stand your ground.” The thing that’s hard about all of this is that both Katie and Lala/Sandoval are right. If I were Ariana and I was in this situation in real life (not on a show), then I would form those boundaries about no mutual friends, about not talking to that person ever again, about cutting his balls off so slowly that we’ll have interstellar travel by the time I’m done, and I would never change them.
Katie shows her boundaries with Jo and Schwartz at the final party, telling Schwartz that if he wants to be friends, he should not bring Jo around her anymore. (I think there should be a separate recap about how dirty Schwartz did Jo this season.) While Katie says it’s not an ultimatum, it kind of is, but I think it’s one worth making. And Ariana has been clear about her boundaries as well, which is why Scheana can’t have her goat-cheese balls and eat them too by being friends with both of them. She can try, but it’s going to have consequences both in her relationship with Ariana and with Tom, and if she can’t accept that, then maybe she should drop them both.
Finally, we hear from Ariana. “We live these difficult parts of our lives on-camera, but if it’s something that actually really matters to you regardless, you do it anyway,” she says about Sandoval. “He has never tried to speak to me off-camera. He could have written me a fucking letter and left it on the kitchen counter and I could have read it at my leisure, but if you’ll only do it on-camera, you just showed your true colors.”
The real dialectic here is that Ariana only considers her real life and Sandoval only considers the show. I think that, for these reality-television professionals, the only way forward is somewhere in between all real-life boundaries and all show theatrics. It’s not leaving everything on-camera, like Lala says; it’s not doing everything that’s good for your life, like Katie says. It’s a balance. It’s in between. But that is an ideal world in which everyone thinks these things out in advance and plans them. Reality TV is much messier — it’s people trying to live through the worst moments of their lives in public as we watch and judge them for it. It’s real-time reactions to real-life problems that we then sit around and consider as if they happen in an ideal world cut off from emotion.
Ariana’s stance is still a great one. She wanted Tom to be more real with her and less reality — something he has been incapable of the entire season. We especially see this in the very final seconds when Schwartz says Lala’s rant is a “plot twist,” and Sandoval says, “It’s good for me,” and tacks on a laugh so maniacal that Dr. Evil has been studying it. Even still, he’s only thinking about the show, about his fame, about exoneration. He doesn’t actually care how Ariana feels or about her forgiveness; he cares about selling more tickets for his cover band.
As Ariana says, she is the final boss in his redemption arc, and he’s pissed that she won’t let him win. Because of that withholding, she will always be the victor. She doesn’t owe him a confrontation or even a talk, and she doesn’t owe us that, either, as much as we may want it. We want her to be honest and live her truth; if that means never talking to Sandoval again, then so be it.
Again, though, that’s hard for the show. How can we ever really move on when Ariana and Sandoval can’t move on? How can we find some new story when they’re still stuck in this story, like the mosquito in amber that started off Jurassic Park? That’s why the end of the season is set in a minor key. It seems like Ariana is walking away, like she’s setting off into the night with a whole new crew we don’t really know and a boyfriend who doesn’t know the game and whom Ariana doesn’t want to explain this game to. (When she told him that Jo was a “long story,” I almost died.) She’s off to something brighter, something different, a wonderful Applebee’s where the Shark Bowls are plentiful and she never has to see Tom Sandoval again — well, at least until the reunion.
Do I think she’ll return? I don’t know. But if Tom is still there, then it’s best for her that she doesn’t. She can move on to a new thing (like Chicago in August) and let Tom stay on television, shooting himself in the foot every time he opens his mouth. Or she could stay firm to her boundary and tell the producers that if Sandoval is coming back, then she isn’t. But right now, the in-between seems impossible. These shows are all about conflict and conflict resolution, and if the conflict can’t be resolved, then it has to be removed. I think it’s clear to everyone that Ariana is the one who gets to decide what the future of Vanderpump Rules is really going to look like.