Winter House Recap: Sam I Am

Finally, I thought. Sam is showing up and Schwartz is returning. We won’t spend a whole hour dissecting the cratering relationship between Danielle and Alex. Well, little brain, I hate to tell you. You’re still going to have to spend an entire 43 minutes without commercials watching Bravo’s most cursed couple. I never thought I would say this about a program featuring my imaginary husband Kyle Cooke, but I can’t wait for this season to be over after next week’s episode.

The episode begins in the eighth-grade fight we left in the last episode, with Brian shouting, “Hey, my mom just got me those!” and Danielle asking, “Does Alex like me?” I mean, these two better get their assignments done because I think they’re already late for homeroom. When Brian insinuates that she might be raging at him because she’s insecure about how Alex feels about her, Danielle is like, “Pfft. What? No. It’s not that.” She is lying. After complaining about how everyone is doling out that night’s dinner of Chinese takeout (can’t Bravo hire these kids a chef?), Danielle retires to bed while everyone else is partying in the dining room that they turned into a fake club.

While Danielle is napping, Jordan is complaining about Danielle’s comment about how she is low energy now that there isn’t a guy in the house who is interested in her. Jordan, in confessional, comes back with, “That’s because I rejected half of them, including your man.” I feel like Jordan was this season’s secret weapon and she should not be secret. She should just be a weapon. You mean she could have been this bitch all season? Look at what she says when Sam arrives: “I was definitely gunning for your man at one point. I didn’t know he was your man, but I don’t think he knew he was your man, either.” Give Jordan a Peabody and more prominence next year, please.

They all go to bed at 4:30 a.m. after raging in the living room and playing intergalactic beer pong. It’s just like regular beer pong except there are blinking lights in the cups and everyone has to dress like Angie K. from RHOSLC. The next morning, Danielle gets up early because she’s the only one who went to bed at a reasonable hour. She cleans up all the mess because she needs to do something nice for the house so that everyone doesn’t hate her. It may be too late, Danielle.

In the morning, Alex is missing his partner. No, not Danielle. His real love, Tom Schwartz. He says he needed a pillow-talk session with his roommate that morning to go over the Danielle situation, but, alas, Tom was taking care of his other platonic, same-sex life partner back in Los Angeles. Alex prepares for his lover’s return by not only making his bed but also washing his sheets. When Tom does show up, with the dust from James Kennedy’s insults still shaking out of his hair, Alex gives him a big hug and tells us that he immediately got a chubby. Now this is the kind of romance I’m here for, people. Alex was with the wrong person the whole time. Seriously, Alex seems way more into seeing Tom than Katie does and she gave Tom some under-the-bra action in the bathroom.

Sam also turns up to the house in a yellow parka and matching yellow earmuffs. Kyle says she looks like a bumblebee. I think she looks like Bumblebee the Transformer. Sam and Kory waste no time getting horizontal, and at one point it seems like she only has on a parka and panties as she’s grinding all up on him. She wastes no time, especially because her man is talking about how all the women in the house wanted to get it on with him. I appreciate his honesty, but considering Sam knows the women in the house like she knows being silent, maybe the best way to introduce her to them isn’t by saying how bad they are all sweating his jock.

This really plays out when the group goes “moon biking,” which is kind of like a snowmobile but if it was just one of those electric bikes that Seamless drivers whiz around New York. Malia and Kory keep roughhousing, pushing each other into snowbanks, wrestling, and throwing snowballs. You know, usual boy-girl behavior. I get Malia’s point; she has older brothers, and this is how she bonds, but this is also the way a girl bonds when she’s flirting.

But Sam seems hyperaware of it because Deux Moi, the scourge of thinking reality-TV fans everywhere, has burrowed into her brain and taken over. Someone posted a sighting of Kory and Malia, and it said they were “vibing hard-core.” Yeah, we can see that, based just on their roughhousing, but since when have we ever believed Deux Moi? The internet is, in fact, built on lies. Half of the things in this recap, including my last name, aren’t even real. How do you believe any of it?

I guess it’s the combination of the two, though. She probably thought nothing of Deux Moi until she saw all of the tackling and rolling around in the snow, and then she thought, Hmmm. Is this possible the first time that Deux Moi has ever been right? I mean, for real, though. Deux Moi is like Nostradamus if he followed the Shade Room. It keeps making predictions, it keeps saying things are going to happen, but it’s never right and they never do. I wouldn’t be surprised if I went on there now and they said that Elvis is still alive and he really loved Jacob Elordi in Priscilla.

Of course, Danielle has to get all up in this business too, and she tells Malia that Sam is a little agitated about all of the tackling. Well, Sam did say that it looked desperate, which isn’t really shrugging it off. But was that Danielle trying to do a friend a solid or Danielle trying to make a mess? If this had happened before this season, I would have talked about how reasonable Danielle is, how she’s the businesswoman emoji (👩🏻‍💼) that you have never once used. But now it’s gotta be mess, right? We know Danielle’s secrets inside are just squabbles, beefs, and misunderstandings, and we can never unsee them.

Speaking of which, Alex pulls Danielle for a chat and asks where she’s at. She basically says that she’s having a good time, that they’re friends with “lots of amazing benefits,” and she wants to keep it that way. He tells her that he didn’t think there would be so much emotion. Dude, I have only slept with one woman in my life, but I can tell you there is no way that was going to happen. Has he talked to a human woman in his entire life? I mean, he did a whole season with Gary on Below Deck Sailing Yacht. Did you not see all the emotions he has to deal with only having one-night stands? Seriously.

Danielle says that she thinks Alex is trying to have a teachable moment with her, which I think she’s right about. He’s trying to school her on what it’s like to bone and not care about people. He says it’s not and adds, “You’re almost ten years older than me. I can’t teach you anything.” Exqueeze me? Exqueeze me? He’s trying to let Danielle down softly and calls her old right to her face? The next thing he says is that they should focus on their friendship, not on their benefits, and she storms off because she is ten years older and everyone in this conversation is incredibly mature.

At Amanda’s insistence, Kyle pulls Danielle aside to ask her how she’s doing. She says that Alex is hot and she still wants to jump his bones, but only if he won’t talk when they do it. Finally, I think they are both on the same page and that page is, “We are attracted to each other, but there is no way this would ever work.” Happy to finally get there, crew.

At dinner, everyone is having roast beef, but they’re also roasting everyone else in the house. The jokes are terrible. Not even the unfunniest queen on a season of RuPaul’s Drag Race is as unfunny as the crew reading their insults off of their phones with no comedic timing or even a good cadence. Malia’s is the only decent one when she welcomes Sam to the house and says, “I know it was a lot to tackle.” But Sam’s knives are already sharpened and it doesn’t land with the intended impact that it seems Malia was hoping for.

The two try to talk after dinner, but the damage is done. Malia says that Sam came in way too hot for someone who didn’t know her. Sam says that her head was filled with Deux Moi insanity, which I believe is an acceptable plea in most courts of law. Malia also shares that the girls thought he was fair game because he was downplaying his relationship. Sam tries to make a point that if someone is in a “situationship” for eight months then Malia should know to back off. “I probably wouldn’t be,” Malia says. “That’s just not my style. But I respect you guys.” But does she? Does she really? No, she sure doesn’t. I think this fight is going to peter out quickly when we rejoin it in progress next week, but hey, at least we didn’t have to end this by talking about Danielle.

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