First things first. Here are the important things we learn on “Total Divas” this week:
- Nikki Bella doesn’t wear underwear.
- Nattie doesn’t like bugs.
- Rosa Mendes does, in fact, Botox those lips. At one point in the episode, she also ponders butt injections.
- Alicia Fox has a closet room in her house. Within that closet room is a giant, wall-sized closet. It’s super-closet porn.
- Asked where he believes he fits on a hotness scale of 1 to 10, Titus O’Neil, in yet another standout cameo, proclaims himself without hesitation to be a 10.
- Brie Bella, Nattie and Cameron/Ariane work out with Vince McMahon’s trainer. He makes them do a lot of old-school exercises you’d recognize from your elementary school gym class.
- Paige fears the sun. Probably because she is a vampire or ghost.
In Phoenix, Brie is still reeling from the burglary famously thwarted by her husband, Bryan “Daniel Bryan” Danielson.
“I honestly might think about getting a gun,” Brie tells Bryan D. Bryan.
“Having a gun is not going to stop people from approaching the house,” Daniel B. Danielson points out.
Brie mentions that Vince McMahon’s trainer, who used to work in corrections, recommends dogs and barbed wire. (He also recommends jumping jacks.) Daniel Braniel makes ruthless fun of his wife when he finds out she thinks barbed wire is called “bob wire.” And then he proposes resolving their home security vacuum by setting up a crossbow that fires automatically unless a would-be burglar enters the correct code.
“Actually, a bow and arrow sounds f–king amazing,” Brie says.
Later, Bryan D. comes home to find Brie having some “bob wire” installed along their fence.
“To make our house look like a prison?” he asks. “Should we ask the neighbors to see if we can put this — what is this, razor wire? — if we can put this razor wire across their fence, too? We should probably do it without asking any of them.”
Brie shrugs off his complaints and then asks Bryan to move so she can hang her signs.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he says. “‘Beware of dog’? Look at Josie.” (Josie, the dog, is roughly cat-sized.) But Brie says Bryan will feel safer when she’s done.
“Will I? Or will I feel like an asshole for having this razor wire at my house?” Bryan D. B. Danielson asks. “I’m gonna go build a bomb shelter because I think we need that just in case there’s a nuclear war… This is legitimately crazy.”
After a lot of back-and-forth about who is being more unreasonable and whether they should move, the Braniels compromise with the decision that Bryan will start a neighborhood watch.
Imagine for a minute that Daniel Bryan is the president of your neighborhood watch. When can I move in?
Meanwhile, during a visit to Alicia Fox’s ubercloset, Paige mentions she thinks it’s cool for ladies to get with ladies since “it’s the 21st century,” which Rosa (noted reader-into-things-er) decides this is the green light to go for Paige. At a “three amigas” dinner with Paige and Rosa, Foxy starts to feel like a third wheel, and after she leaves, Rosa kisses Paige goodnight. Turns out Paige likes to flirt with girls but not make out with them. And those “signals” she was sending Rosa? Those were things friends do, she says, like be there for one another.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever had, like, a proper friendship before,” Paige says.
Then, like a proper friend, Paige goes to work and tells Foxy about what happened. They talk about how Paige is maybe sending mixed signals. Which Paige does not think she is doing.
Rosa gets weird and ignores Paige’s calls, so Paige goes to confront Rosa at a sidewalk cafe and accuses recovering Rosa of drinking alcohol (she’s not), and then they fight about who “made it weird,” and then Foxy steps in to play referee.
That’s right. Alicia Fox is the reasonable adult in this situation.
Later, Nattie and Alicia watch as Rosa snubs Paige, and then they advise Paige that she is kind of flirty and ought to be more sensitive to their friend who is still in the early stages of recovery from alcoholism. So later, at work, Paige apologizes to Rosa and explains that she only wants to be good friends, and Rosa apologizes to Paige and explains that she’s very fragile right now, and everyone is sorry and everyone feels better, and they agree that it’s OK for Paige to grab Rosa’s breasts as long as Rosa understands it’s just as friends.
Much of the rest of the episode focuses on Eva trying to get back in shape for a magazine shoot after her breast implant redo surgery. She overdoes it in a plotline that’s straight out of that episode of “Full House” when DJ freaks out about going to a pool party and faints on a stationary bike. Eva refuses to eat a banana, talks about how fat she looks in a photo on a trailer, and has a fainting spell in a boutique dressing room.
This inspires Ariane and Eva’s husband Jonathan to take Eva to a surprise intervention.
“It’s gonna be very beneficial,” Ariane says.
“Ew,” Eva responds.
Ew, indeed. They go to an artist’s loft, where Eva does an exercise THAT ARIANE FOUND ON THE INTERNET (RED FLAG) during which she describes herself to an artist who draws her based on her description. The words “saddlebags” and “love handles” and “back fat” are used. Then another artist describes her while the same artist draws another picture based on the second description.
Oh, hey, guess what? The pictures are totes different and Eva has a total, like, realization that she has an unrealistic image of herself! And now, thanks to this realization, she can start working on her own insecurities!
(I have exactly zero patience with eating disorder storylines on TV shows. Either it’s a real problem, in which case it can’t be solved in a single episode, or it’s not a real problem, in which case screw you, E! Network, for pretending it is. At least “Full House” admitted to being fiction.)
Oh, and then Eva goes to her photo shoot or whatever and feels great about herself. Because that’s how real eating disorders work.
Next week: S–t gets real when Ariane accuses Foxy of being “as fake as a press-on nail” and Nikki goes on an explosive fishing expedition with Mark Carrano to see what would happen to her career if another Bella twin (no one in particular, mind you!) happened to get knocked up.
