Tough love is on the menu in this week’s episode of “Total Divas.” As Eva Marie wisely pointed out last week, sometimes love means you have to slap a bitch. And sometimes you have to force-feed her spinach or drag her to get eye surgery.
Baby Mode
Are you new here? In that case, you might not know that Brie Bella really, really, really, really wants to get pregnant. And she’s not getting pregnant. She can’t pronounce progesterone, but she knows she’s got a problem with it, because it’s been more than a year and she hasn’t been able to conceive.
She and Nikki go to a holistic doctor for some acupuncture, and she suggests that Brie’s recent conversion to total vegetarianism might be leaving her iron-deficient, which could affect her fertility.
That night when dinner arrives, Nikki has ordered herself one steak and Brie 10 spinach salads.
“This is so obnoxious,” Brie says from behind a mountain of salads.
Nikki, as usual, is trying to make a point in the most over-the-top way possible. Brie’s 10 salads, she explains, have as much iron as her one steak.
“Why couldn’t it be plates of, like, dark chocolate?” Brie asks.
“Spinach was cheaper.”
“I’m not gonna eat this much spinach. I guess I’ll have an iron deficiency.”
Brie declares that if getting pregnant means eating meat, then she just won’t be a mom. But then she FaceTimes Rosa Mendes, who was a vegetarian until she got pregnant with her daughter, to get her input.
Rosa tells Brie she needs a lot of extra vitamins if she’s trying to conceive, which is a little confusing, because wasn’t Rosa’s baby a miracle/surprise? Rosa also says she has no regrets about abandoning vegetarianism for her baby, and admits she didn’t completely return to a vegetarian diet after childbirth. (But like really, you don’t have to eat meat when you’re pregnant. Vegetarians have healthy babies every day. Buy an iron supplement, FFS.)
Later, Nikki and Brie go to get full-body cryotherapy, which they are so into because it is so hot right now (and also they both have chronic pain from being wrestlers for a living). In fact, Brie has been going all the time, she tells their physical therapist as they’re discussing her conception problems.
Brake screech! Turns out cryotherapy forces a stress reaction in the body that’s one of the reasons it works… and also one of the reasons it’s not great for someone who’s trying to make their body a happy, healthy temple for a fetus.
“How did you not even look into that?” Nikki asks.
“It’s healthy! It’s natural,” says Brie, a woman who eschews humankind’s historically omnivorous diet but thinks standing in a capsule to subject her body to manufactured temperatures of hundreds of degrees below zero is “natural.”
Flying Blind
Neat story: Maryse needs corrective lenses but refuses to wear them.
“My eyes are not that bad,” she insists. “I can’t drive at night because I can’t see the sign on the highways, but that’s it.” But she can drive during the daytime, apparently, so everything’s fine?
After trying various tricks to prove that Maryse can’t see — including getting Neville to hold up his hand and asking Maryse how many fingers she sees — The Miz attempts to convince her to get Lasik. She refuses.
“It’s pretty scary. I don’t like the idea of having this laser in my eyes.”
Then one day The Miz comes home and Maryse asks him if he liked the photo she texted to him. YOU know what kind of photo (wink, wink). And he did, he says, only…
“You know you put it on a group text, right?”
Maryse has mistakenly sent her naked selfie to a group that is never totally defined but appears to include at least Zack Ryder and Dolph Ziggler (who does not pass on the opportunity to comment on how glad he is to be seeing so much of her).
Guess who schedules her appointment for Lasik?
Maryse undergoes the procedure on camera, while The Miz watches, and then decides it was no big deal after all (and more power to her, honestly; needles in my eye? No thanks):
“That was just really, really fast. It was really easy.”
Third Wheel
When Lana, Renee Young and Trinity/Naomi are selected to go to Anguilla for some WWE-sponsored charity work, Lana decides it would be a great idea for Rusev to come along so they can spend some time together. But she can’t make up her mind whether she wants to have honeymoon time or girl time. First she’s planning romantic dinners and warning Renee that if she wants to hang out with them, Rusev will be walking around naked; after Trinity shows up, Lana decides it’s friend time and appoints herself photographer to the group, whether they want to be photographed or not.
“These are great pictures except for your face,” Lana complains to Renee, who is refusing to smile.
Later, Renee and Trinity go out and get drunk while Lana and Rusev go out to dinner. When Lana calls them up and suggests that she might join, Renee tells her they’re “at a place called Deez … DEEZ NUTS!” and then basically tells Lana she’s not invited.
“Yaaaaaay, conversation over,” Rusev monotones as Lana hangs up the phone and storms away.
Renee and Trinity get wasted and then come back to the house, where they sneak into Rusev and Lana’s room as a prank and then go for a very loud swim. Lana finally storms out to tell them she’s going to call the cops if they don’t quiet down, because they’re making her heart race when they wake her up.
“What are you, 65?” Renee asks. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over our fun.”
Then things get ugly, with Lana telling Renee she’s “so needy for attention” and Renee calling Lana something in the neighborhood of “Captain 45,000 Photos” and Lana calling Renee a “needy motherf–king b—h” and Renee shouting after her to “go to bed, b—h” as Trinity physically hustles Lana back to her room.
But, as with all fights in Girl World, there’s heartache at the root of the catfight. After apologizing to Renee and Trinity, Lana admits that she’s jealous that she’s not on SmackDown with all her friends. She moved around a lot as a kid and that makes it hard for her to forge connections with people. Hugs all around.
…And Then There’s Eva Marie.
All Red Everything has worked her way back to the main roster and even gotten herself a bit of a storyline… wherein she comes up with elaborate excuses to get out of matches. It’s more than a little frustrating for Eva, who has just come back from a voluntary demotion so she could actually learn how to be a wrestler.
“I could have had this storyline three years ago when I walked in to WWE,” she complains as we watch footage of her no-showing a Naomi match and limping away from a scheduled face-off with Becky Lynch.
Nattie, as usual, is the queen not only of Harts but of the unvarnished motivational talk, telling Eva she needs to stop freaking out, go with the flow, and hope there’s a big payoff at the end.
“I had a storyline once where I farted,” Nattie says, by way of perspective.
After Nattie gushes at a meet-and-greet about how wrestlers are fans first, Eva decides it’s worth the humiliating storyline to get to do what she loves.
“I’m just realizing it’s such an honor to even be here,” she says. And at the very least, “I’m not going out there and passing gas like Nattie had to do.”
Then she goes to the ring and pretends to lose her top to get out of wrestling Becky again.
“So, when it comes down to it, we’re entertainers,” Eva explains over footage of her clutching a towel to her chest, “and I just need to embrace the moment and enjoy it and do the best that I can with what I’m given.”
And they said there were no casualties in the Divas Revolution.
What About Paige?
Finally: If you’re anything like me, you’ve been deeply curious about whether Total Divas will address Paige’s 30-day Wellness Policy suspension. And it does! In the just about three minutes of screen time Paige is given in this episode, she talks about how depressing it is to be sidelined with her neck injury, and then Corporate Bearer of Bad News Mark Carrano kicks Jerry Lawler out of his office so he and Paige can have a Serious Conversation.
Cut to Paige (in a completely different outfit with different hair, so probably a totally different day in real life) pacing the parking lot in hysterics, on the phone with Alberto Del Rio, shrieking things like “This is my life” and “It’s not fair.”
In a talking head, Paige emphatically declares that she doesn’t do drugs, that she did pass her drug test, and that her only crime was not doing it within the window of time required by WWE, which she clearly thinks is no big deal, although she’s also emotional as she describes her situation.
“I’m a strong girl. I’ll get over it at some point,” she says, wiping away tears.
Did Paige’s wrestling suspension include a Total Divas suspension? I suppose we’ll find out next week. Then again, Divas has played fast and loose with the timeline in the past, so who knows?
