Oh boy. I fear things are going off the rails. I stop paying attention for five minutes to daydream about each MomTok member’s Erewhon order and the next thing I know, every single plot line is about abuse, assault, or both. It’s making me question whether it’s always been this way (thinking back to the season-two reunion, the answer is “possibly”) or if this season is just particularly grim. It’s too much! Where have all the hijinks gone? We desperately need an infusion of drama about something stupid. The things I would do right now to write about, I don’t know, someone getting a little tipsy and admitting she thinks one of the other mom’s dogs is ugly.
But no. We are off to Palm Springs for Stagecoach, where MomTok does onscreen sponcon for a real cartoon villain of a brand and discusses DadTok’s imminent arrival. Before anyone can dig too deeply into Dakota’s intentions to claw his way into Taylor’s heart again, Demi is back on her bullshit. She posts a story that says:
“It seems pretty clear but I guess some people are still confused — unwanted physical touch = assault. PERIOD the end. To the people that were made aware of these events and watched me cry and then proceed to use their platform to victim shame publicly call me a liar and judge the way I handled it, from the bottom of my heart, shame on every last one of you.”
The other women are frustrated because: (1) they insist Demi never cried in front of them, (2) they don’t want to be lumped into a single “victim-shaming” group, or (3) both. Either way, no one seems to understand what Demi’s endgame is in all of this, especially now that lie detector tests seem to be standard operating procedure on this television program.
As a brief and beautiful respite, Lana Del Rey messages Mikayla with an invitation for a pre-set meet and greet. I wish the rest of this episode were exclusively the subsequent interaction. Watching even a minute of a non-reality TV celebrity interacting with their reality faves is often more revealing than a 5,000-word profile. Lana asks the women if they’re all mic’d up. She wonders if Whitney is really a problem. She probes, “If it’s actually real?!” Celebrities! They’re just like us! Alas, the moms are all, “wait until you see season two!” instead of digging into the layers of reality and persona-making that are inherent to reality television. Perhaps in season four, the moms could take that advanced therapy talk foundation and add in some dabblings in postmodernist theory. That Kardashian analysis book is out soon — hop to it, ladies!
Later on, Taylor lusts after Dakota. Some random girl talks to him while he’s eating dinner on the grass, and Taylor gets disgruntled. Her previous goal was to focus on a healthy coparenting relationship, but she found out a family member has leukemia, and now she’s all “part of me loves him, it’s confusing.” Mayci alluded to it before, and here we have definitive proof: Lana Del Rey really does horn ya up. The next morning, Dakota is missing from the dude’s pool house because — shocking — he was in Taylor’s room.
This is where I really appreciate Taylor because she outright says, “Yes, we had sex. Obviously.” On one hand, it got me very excited to imagine this level of candor in a Bachelorette lead. On the other hand, I fear Taylor and Dakota are fated mates and that man is going to show up halfway through the season so they can continue on with their toxic cycle until their dying breaths, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, disaster to disaster.
No time to ruminate on that, though, because Whitney’s arrival is imminent. She has reposted Demi’s Instagram story-essay with an “I love you,” and the rest of MomTok is displeased. Everyone else continues putting on their cowboy costumes for day two of the festival while Taylor preps for another round of bulldoggery. The optics are hilarious. Whitney is serving sexed-up Angelica from Rugrats. Conner is wearing her purse on his shoulder. Together, they’re a couple from a Christopher Guest film. They say “five, six, seven, eight.” Out loud! Sans irony!
And yet Taylor attempts a serious discussion. She summarizes the other MomTok members’ gripes about Whitney’s repost of Demi’s story. In Whitney’s mind, Jen, Layla, and Jessi have participated in stirring the victim-shame-y pot, and if Mayci and Mikayla don’t want to be included in that, they should say something themselves. Taylor and Whitney go back and forth about Demi’s feelings. Whitney then tries to rehash the swinging scandal before giving up and asking why Taylor’s making her uncomfortable when she’s just trying to make her brand content and hit the bricks. Whitney, babes. If you want to be back filming this show for DWTS casting purposes, I am afraid to report this is unfortunately how it works.
Once Whitney leaves, everyone else pledges to carry on. Jace rips shots with Jessi. Jacob holds a bottle of Tito’s and even takes a small sniff. Taylor and Dakota bump and grind on the party bus like they’re en route to the homecoming dance. Once on the festival grounds, things escalate with Mikayla and Jace. The night prior, they’d attempted to emotionally/romantically connect in their giant bedroom and in-room jacuzzi, only for it to fizzle. And now, Mikayla is grumpy, and Jace pouts on a hay bale. Listen. I’ve been to those festival grounds (for Coachella, but close enough). I cannot think of a place that’s less romantic if you are sober and pregnant. It’s very hot and very crowded and overall an experience built in a lab to induce an existential crisis.
Especially if you’re already on the verge, which Jace and Mikayla clearly were. Back at the house, they have an unintelligible argument in the shower. Mayci and Taylor check in on Mikayla after. They sit by the firepit, and Mikayla talks about how hard it’s been the last couple of years and how much pressure and guilt she feels knowing these problems came from her abuse. She also details how there’s an additional layer that comes from the Mormon conditioning to be a perfect wife. The LDS church never ceases to amaze me in its ability to fester into every crevice of these women’s psyches. Anyway, Taylor and Mayci gently nudge Mikayla back toward couples therapy.
The next morning, Jace sits by the pond and looks at the ducks. Taylor wanders over and encourages him to be patient, especially since, other than this intimacy thing, he and Mikayla have the kind of relationship she longs for. In fact, she believes that if she and Dakota got past their own shit, they could thrive as a couple. She really is a hopeless romantic.
And here comes Jordan to usher in the large-scale crushing of that hope! We’ve gotta pave that road to Taylor’s Bachelorette era somehow. Jordan and Jessi are driving around Provo. Jordan knows one of the oldest tricks in the dysfunctional couple book — how gossiping about others can be a pretty strong glue if no other glue is attainable. It’s a short-term solution, but given the edit we’re getting, it appears to be working. Jordan dishes that when Taylor and Dakota were broken up, one of Liann’s friends reached out to Dakota and started hitting on him and it turned sexual. It’s apparently someone who is “like family” to Taylor, so Jessi is full-on losing her mind over this gossip nugget. In the fully out-of-context words of Whitney, “A storm is coming.”
