“The Hills” — Meet the Parents
Goooooose-chill.
Does it strike anyone else as curious that Lauren, star of The Hills, the girl who the entire series was built around, has become essentially irrelevant? In Monday night’s episode her screen time was relegated to being either the shoulder on which Audrina could cry or a girl which random dudes could mildly hit-on. Even her best moment — laughing at the sight of Brody’s thoroughly bandaged arm — was met with a cold stare by the man himself. Apparently breaking your arm isn’t particularly funny when it happens to you (though how could he not know how funny it would be to everyone else?). Yes, Lauren is now officially narrating the Heidi and Spencer show. This makes about as much sense as the idea of Heidi and Spencer themselves. It’d be like Art Garfunkel narrating a show about Paul Simon or Saddam Hussein narrating a show about George H. W. Bush. More after the jump…
The story is set at the jewler, where Heidi and Spencer go to get her ring sized. She casually suggests that maybe the ring not go on the proper “engagement†finger. I love where this is going. I love the slow burn, and mark my words she’ll be torching Spencer by season’s end. He’s a dead man. Still, he’s trying to do the right thing by going to meet Heidi’s parents in Colorado and blowing off his bud’s BBQ down on the beach. Again, I must reiterate that I, unlike most people on this planet, find Heidi to be the hero of this series. Without Heidi all you have is Newport Harbor. Heidi knows what mistakes she’s made. This is significant because Spencer is utterly clueless (and a moron man-child). Just watch her. She’s plotting. It’s going to be great.
Lauren and gang, meanwhile, are invited to the aforementioned BBQ. Audrina plans on taking Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby, so there should be plenty of mystique surrounding all the grilled meats. This is the only taste of the other girls we’re given before rejoining Heidi and Spencer as they arrive in Colorado.
Apparently we’re led to believe that Heidi is from a small town. Of course on The Hills being from a small town isn’t so much about having the town square or a modest house on a cute lot, but about actually living in a gorgeous estate in the mountains. Yes, Heidi is small-town in the same way Ted Turner is a cowboy.
We don’t waste any time in meeting Heidi’s parents, two perfectly normal looking humans who don’t seem to have had any plastic surgery or sprayed-on tans. This visit, at it’s core, is about meeting the parents (hence the clever title for the episode). When Heidi asks her dad what he things of Spencer he does everything he can to not say, “Him?†She then says, “I wanted to end up with a guy like my daddy,†to which you can actually see him throw up in his mouth a little bit.
Eventually he and Spencer go to have ‘the talk.’ They decide to talk by the horses. Horses keep secrets, Spencer. Look out! The dad tells him not to put all of their eggs in one basket. Clearly, the dad is some sort of genius. He says all the right things, and of course Spencer absorbs none of it. Spencer is an idiot, but not in the way that every over-tanned, fake-blonde, twenty-something is an idiot. Spencer goes a step further in actually believing that his cumulative life-experiences are equal to or greater than the sum of human knowledge since the dawn of time.
On the other side of the chomosome, Heidi and her mom have a talk of their own. She keeps trying to tell Heidi that her relationship with Spencer has cost her all of her friends. Heidi clearly knows this to be true, but she’s playing her cards close to her chest [insert surgery joke here]. If anything, she just doesn’t want to admit that mistakes were made, and that the loss of Lauren was a low-point for her (not to mention that it completely upended the entire premise of the show).
Later that night the whole family goes out to dinner. Somewhere around the salad course Spencer starts on this nonsensical rambling about love and future and Heidi. It provided BBC-Office levels of uncomfortability. It hit its climax when Spencer, completely disregarding the warnings issued by Heidi’s very cool and very calm parents when he blurted out, “What an angel!†at a volume level that wasn’t exactly screaming but was certainly louder than the average speaking voice… of a carnival barker. This kid is out of control.
Back on the left coast, Brody broke his finger playing football on the beach. He went to the hospital (which apparenly he was able to squeeze in between commercials), only to come back with his entire arm wrapped — as I mentioned above. None of this really matters as the only moment worthy of note was the heart to heart that was had between Audrina and the completely irrelevant Lauren. Lauren is a little sad about losing Heidi. The two cry. I LOVE YOUs are dished out all around and everyone is again happy as they enjoy their lovely, gated beach community.
That is until Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby leaves Audrina’s motorcycle helmet on the table and left her at the beach. Lauren breaks the news to her. Audrina is sad. This is the second time fashion disaster Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby left her somewhere. One more and its a spree. Lauren offered the best words of consolation, “Dude wore combat boots to the beach.â€
Amen!
This was also the episode’s weirdest moment as Audrina and Lauren seemed to be laughing their way through the scene. They were clearly laughing about the perposterousness of the entire scenario (or maybe just at Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby’s wardrobe which I have to assume he bought off a stand-up comic in 1987). Still, this is hardly reality — shoot another take, this time with feeling!
For next week: Spencer tries to grow a goatee.
August 29th, 2007 at 8:29 am
The biggest problem I had with this episode is they seem to have completely forgotten that Heidi was also on Laguna Beach, so if Colorado is where her parents live now, they certainly didn’t use to live there, so this whole, “I’m from a small town” thing didn’t really work for me.