There’s a certain beauty to watching a woman unravel. Since the dawn of storytelling, from The Yellow Wallpaper to Carrie, it’s been a tried and true motif, perhaps perfected by the Real Housewives.
Guerdy Abraira was once an event planner who said things like “I’m here to party, honey” and married her hot high school sweetheart. Now, she’s dressed in a swan’s corpse to celebrate beating cancer the only way a Bravolebrity knows how: hosting an event solely to viciously embarrass her co-star with a tactic so crass it kills the little goodwill she has left. In other words, a star has been born.
Everywhere you turn, something depraved this way comes, and The Real Housewives of Miami is fully back in the gutter it once swam in a decade before. Only this time, it’s there to stay.
The episode begins with a heartfelt moment of bliss, as Adriana finally meets Julia’s new sons. However, Alexia interrupts this last moment of sunshine and rainbows to foreshadow friction.
Next, in spite of the upcoming LGBTQ+ Task Force Gala, Stephanie and Larsa go closet-shopping, only for Larsa to miss the event entirely.
But let’s focus on this beautiful, uplifting event hosted by Julia Lemigova, an advocate for any and all LGBTQ+ people, who just so happens to be married to a woman who has been removed from LGBTQ+ orgs for her anti-trans women in sports comments, and has sided with J.K. Rowling on many an occasion.
The gala itself is surprisingly lowkey for a Housewives event, as the women largely lead with love to pace themselves for the headliner of the night: Guerdy’s “I beat cancer, now I’m going to beat Julia with a stick” celebration of life white party.
From the jump, that party’s a hot mess. The venue’s questionable origin as a Baptist church-turned-event space really sums it all up. This is the exact place you’d expect Guerdy to display pages of texts between her and Julia in a deluded effort to win a war that exists only in her mind.
Delusion is the word of the night, evidently, as Julia rolls up to the event to make nice, immediately overextending her reach by trying to make small talk with Guerdy’s husband. It’s a valiant effort, sure, but Russell would rather rip off his skin and throw it in the trash than break bread. He’s kind of the perfect Househusband—and he doesn’t even need John Barlow brand cue-cards.
Next, Stephanie decides to launch her second-ever feud, sitting with Alexia and immediately taunting her about the “not about Todd” narcissist party from last week’s episode. This girl really does love to work. Stephanie shows up to every event and starts a fight in 15 seconds flat, optimizing her slay to turn in those deliverables.
Stephanie’s like a dog with a bone, grabbing onto one thing and absolutely hammering it home, all in the theme of business. Last week, she slammed people who arrive late to work. This week, she’s going after people who bring their relationship drama to the office. She’s corporate girlbossery personified: insensitive and brutally emotionless under the facade of uplifting women.
Alexia is the exact opposite. She’s actually too much of an empath to be a narcissist, unlike her sick succubus castmates who are all evil, awful people.
Stephanie hasn’t learned quite yet that starting a fight with Alexia is a futile task. She doesn’t care about facts or feelings. She glides through life on the unchecked belief that she’s simply perfect, which isn’t narcissistic in any way, shape or form, by the way (according to the receipt in Alexia’s head and heart). This round goes to Alexia, by default, for being so brazen in her delusions she comes out relatively unscathed.
Though, neither Stephanie nor Alexia give the most floptastic performance of the night, as the second Guerdy grabs the mic, the episode slips into a horror show seemingly inspired by the finale of The Substance. It’s impossible to look away.
The speech starts out cringe in the Lizzo 2019 way, as Guerdy drops lines like “I just had a MRI, and the MRI results came back… and I’m 100 percent that b----” while Marysol, a noted empath herself, says “encouragement” monotonously, since clapping’s too gauche.
The event flips from harmlessly tacky to entirely insane when Guerdy sends her family home so she can segue into a moment made possible by having no honest friends. Amid a sea of extras—and New Jersey refugee Jenn Fessler—Guerdy launches into a speech about her continued feud with Julia, complete with pages of texts between the two displayed behind her.
I guess the texts are all about that Captain Sandy cruise debacle, which I’d stop litigating, if I were Guerdy. She already won the battle when Julia lost her mind, throwing a glass of water in the midst of Marysol’s 73rd wedding party. This just awards Guerdy some more court of public opinion brownie points, while absolutely severing her already thin ties with half the group.
That, of course, makes for great TV—but you never want to play yourself off the show. It’s quite funny how disgusted the ladies become while Guerdy giggles with glee, too high on her own supply to hear the Greek chorus.
Larsa isn’t upset at the display of texts, per say. Her issue is it’s simply too much reading, which honestly is fair. Guerdy should’ve annotated those texts and picked a few key excerpts for emphasis. Alexia, on the other hand, decides “I hate texting!”, resigning herself to calling the girls from now on. A wise woman once said: say it, forget it; write it, regret it.
The women storm out as though a nuclear threat’s in the building while Guerdy poses for professional photos with a cotton candy skewer just feet from some interpretative dancers.
“Carrie… remember Carrie? When they dumped the blood on her,” Marysol spews in a confessional. “That’s what I felt like when I was sitting there. She invited Julia to the party, told her to be the prom queen, dress up in white, and then dumps all the blood on her.” Maybe the overabundance of Marysol confessionals have all been worth it for this one—just maybe.
There, the party ends, with everyone in pure misery as a hopped-up Guerdy exclaims “it’s my party and I can do whatever I want!”
Guerdy has come undone in a truly spectacular manner, the loss of Dr. Nicole reverberating through these former voices of reason (Guerdy and Julia) to create accidental icons.
The proverbial tightrope becomes narrower every week. Will either make it to the end, or will the last-standing Season 4 newbies fall victim to their own villainy? For all we know, someone else will top this embarrassment with ease by this time next week. That’s the beauty of Bravo.
