“The Hills” — What Goes Around
Let’s drink to the telephone game!
Here’s what I love about The Hills: I love that the show is built around these “moments of conflict” that are rarely all that conflicting and tend to last about fifteen seconds, only to be followed by scenes where the characters are back with their friends and talking about the aforementioned conflicts for what seems like the rest of eternity. I love this, because it’s just like real life — this is, after all, reality television. As we all have learned by now, real life is for the most part pretty boring, so it makes sense to draw out fleeting moments of emotion for as long as we possibly can in some futile attempt to ascribe meaning to something otherwise meaningless. Wow, that was depressing. How about some more after the jump?…
Things kicked off this week with Lauren baring her soul a little to Audrina, who she had gotten into a fight with in Vegas. Audrina accepted her apology (which wasn’t technically an apology as nothing was apologized for, but that’s not really the point, I guess) and the two went back to being bestest buds.
Though the real action started when Lauren met up with Jenn Bunney for lunch. After a few minutes of stone-cold awkwardness Jenn (whose name is sometimes spelled with one N and sometimes with two) drops the Brody bomb, telling Lauren that her good friend and possible gentleman caller was the one who started all of these sex-tape rumors. Of course this is coming via Heidi, who we’ll get to in a minute. Lauren then tells Jenn that she doesn’t believe her and that it was actually Heidi and Spencer who started the rumors. This then led to Lauren having dinner with Brody telling him that Jenn told her that Heidi told her that he started the rumors. He said he didn’t, and finally looked her in the eye and said that it was Heidi and Spencer. Jenn then had lunch with Heidi and told her that Lauren told her that Brody told her that she and Spencer had started the rumors. Heidi said this was not true and then got the check. THIS then led to Heidi going home and telling Spencer that Jenn told her that Lauren told her that Brody told her that he suspected the two of them had started the sex tape rumors. Spencer calls Brody a little bitch and then the two exchange curious looks of non-trust suggesting that Spencer is the guy responsible for all of this, but of course we’ll never know until he tells someone to tell someone else who then has lunch with Jenn who tells Lauren to tell Brody… or something.
The moral of the story? The best way to dispel vicious rumors is by communicating via surrogates and never, NEVER asking the blamed parties directly.
In non-telephone-game threads, there were two other scenes that played out kind of interestingly. The first of them involved Heidi getting asked into the office of her boss (Mr. Bolthouse) after the Elodie-fiasco from the previous episode. Here, he gave her a very basic “you wanted this job so step things up a bit, dear” speech, which she took in stride and then went back to sitting in her office ordering lunch and pretending like she’s working. I found this quite frustrating as she should have really been raked through the coals a bit more. I mean, what kind of person in a supervisory position doesn’t know when someone below them gets fired (granted, this whole show is staged, but let’s just pretend its real for a few more minutes)? If anything Mr. Bolthouse needs to take a course in tough-love from Ms. Lisa Love, who would have ripped her a new one had she worked over at Teen Vogue.
More hilarious was Spencer’s classic reaction to this news. Yes Spencer, how dare the owner of this company complain that one of his underlings was underperforming. The nerve of that guy.
Finally, I kind of liked the Audrina/Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby pool game as it was the first time this season the man found a way to string more than four words together to make a complete thought, even if said words were, “I think things should be happy and blissful, and just… mellow.” Someone must be on Teamocil. I guess if anything what we learned from this exchange is that while Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby may still be a tool he might not be a robot.
