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Courtney Loves Dallas Episode 6 Recap

I'm going to need hazard pay if you want me to watch Episode 7.
By Tim Rogers |
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Courtney_Kerr

Last night’s episode was titled “Courtney Loves Besties,” and it featured twerking in Marfa, Texas. And crying. And manipulation of the space-time continuum. And a lady named Shoshanna Fishhoff. Read on, if you dare.

We open where Episode 5 left us, outside the restaurant where Courtney and Matt Nordgren had a deep disagreement about whether they ever, in fact, actually dated one another. Courtney is distressed and on foot, telling Matt Nordgren not to follow her. Matt Nordgren ignores her instructions and does follow her, though he doesn’t exactly give chase. My point: if Matt Nordgren didn’t want to catch Courtney, then he should not have followed her. The fact that he did follow her suggests that he wanted to catch her. Why, then, did he not put the slightest pep in his step? He is either really lazy or only pretending to be interested. I’ll let America decide.

Courtney goes up to her apartment, throws herself on her bed, and sobs some more. Then she goes to the kitchen and sobs. Matt Nordgren calls. Despite having just walked out on the guy at dinner because she didn’t want to talk to him anymore, Courtney answers the phone. Such is the power of the slow-footed Matt Nordgren. Courtney takes her cellphone into the living room, swoons onto the couch, and talks to Matt Nordgren on speaker, thankfully, so that we can hear.

Then something mysterious happens. Courtney’s eye makeup vanishes at some point during this conversation, in the space of an edit. At first, this confuses me. But then the Bravo cameras show the screen of Courtney’s iPhone. Two things catch my eye. First, she needs to update to iOS 7. Second, the time on her phone reads 10:54. Take a second to let that sink in. Has it sunk in? As I astutely pointed out in my Episode 5 recap, when Courtney was girding her loins in preparation for the dinner with Matt Nordgren, a clock on her kitchen wall read 10:30. You understand what this means, don’t you? Courtney has the power to bend the space-time continuum.

Now it all makes sense. Matt Nordgren only looked like he was moving slowly in comparison to Courtney, who was traveling at near the speed of light. The eye makeup didn’t magically vanish. Courtney tesseracted into her bathroom and removed it while the cameras were rolling. We just couldn’t see it happen. And that’s how Courtney was able to leave her apartment, travel to a restaurant, knock around some eating utensils, have a heartbreaking conversation with the love of her life, erupt in tears, return to her apartment, and flop around on the furniture — all in 24 minutes!

Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson are two physicists at Michigan Technological University. They recently published a paper outlining the results of a study they did using Twitter to search for evidence of time travelers. Nemiroff and Wilson are idiots, which is what I will report in my forthcoming academic paper. There is no evidence of time travel on Twitter. It’s all right here, on Courtney Loves Dallas.

The next morning, Courtney declares that she is emotionally exhausted. This is a cover story. As I will also report in my paper, time travel comes at a price. Depending on the length and duration of the journey, travelers use up what I call “hit points.” Courtney’s journey last night cost her dearly. She is down to seven hit points. Thankfully, intern Shannon shows up for her first day of work to lighten the load. Courtney tasks her with steaming her drapes and leaves to run an errand. While Courtney is out, Tori shows up. Then Courtney returns, and we learn what sort of errand she was on because she’s carrying a bottle of champagne. Or Champagne. But I doubt it. The bubbly is to celebrate. Courtney says, “I’ve officially cut Matt Nordgren out of my life.” I shout at my TV, “The Bravo producers and I will both take that bet!” Tori repeatedly calls Matt Nordgren a “little bitch.” She also delivers a medical opinion that I find highly suspect. Tori says Matt Nordgren has a vagina.

Listen, I am not Matt Nordgren. But if I were Matt Nordgren, and if I possessed a vagina, I wouldn’t bother with taking Courtney to dinner and trying to convince her that we never dated in an effort to get her to date me (?), because I’d be too busy back at my pad having sex with my vagina. In any case, Tori and Courtney decide they need a girls’ trip to Marfa, as they drink champagne out of old fashioned glasses, which I find tacky.

Side note: do you realize that at this point I have written 757 words about hermaphroditic sex, time travel, and barware etiquette in Courtney Loves Dallas? Shoot me. Back of the head. Double tap, please.

Fortified with champagne, Courtney takes Shannon to the venerable Asel art supply store to buy materials they will need to create a “mood board” for the jewelry collection she is putting together for Bauble Bar. Courtney asks Shannon whether she has ever before made a mood board, and when Shannon confesses that she has not, Courtney says, “Why did I hire you?” I want you to remember that. Back at the apartment with the supplies, Shannon leaves before anything gets accomplished. There follows a montage of Courtney painting and gluing glittery stuff on foam core boards, essentially what my 8-year-old daughter does after I’ve picked her up from school but still need to get some work done and force her to entertain herself. Hey, Courtney, according to my algorithm, girls who like to paint pretty pictures on foam core also like this.

The next day, Courtney makes her mood board presentation via Skype to two Bauble Bar executives in New York City. The executives exude New Yorkness in every possible way. One is named Shoshanna Fischhoff. The other is named Daniella Yacobovsky. They are both dressed in black and wearing expressions like they are trying hard to visualize on a map in their heads where again, exactly, Dallas is. You can tell that there is a least one Harvard degree between the two of them and that they associate with the right people and that they vacation in the Hamptons. Sure, they traffic in cheap, Chinese-made jewelry that they themselves would never wear if they didn’t work there, but they do it ironically. As Courtney shows them mood boards splashed with floral prints and pictures of unicorns farting rainbows, one of the New York ladies unsmilingly says, “Jewelry on top of prints sometimes gets lost.” Uh-oh! We’re going to need a commercial break to recover from that harsh critique.

And we’re back. Turns out Shoshanna and Daniella were just kidding! One of them declares that Courtney’s work will be a “super strong collection.” Smiles all around! And then Courtney tells the camera something interesting. Remember what I told you not to forget back at Asel? Courtney tells the camera after her good Skype meeting, “Going into this call, I had no idea what a mood board was. I was in an emotional distraught place [read: “I had just time traveled.”], and I had to pull it together. And I think that is the sign of a professional that wants to be successful and wants to make a name for herself. And you know what? Like, I feel like that’s what I’m doing.” She is also abusing an intern, making her feel stupid for not knowing something that she herself didn’t know. I would like to point Shannon to Unpaidinternlawsuit.com.

Cut to highway montage. Courtney, Thais, Tori, and Katie are on the road to Marfa, which Courtney declares “the coolest city ever.” It’s a long drive. They pull over so that Tori can urinate by the side of the road. If Courtney were traveling solo, she could create a singularity in her well-stocked closet and then appear in Marfa almost instantaneously, but neither Tori, Thais, nor Katie knows how to tesseract. This is the downside for time travelers who take along besties. Upside, though: no loss of hit points.

When they arrive in Marfa, Courtney says, “Oh, my God. This place is so cool, y’all.” Tori says, “Uh, gross. This town is done.” The ladies check into a motel and rent bicycles. Actually, while her three friends rent bikes, Courtney rents an adult-size tricycle. It is only after we are forced to watch the besties ride around aimlessly, doing nothing, that we learn the reason Courtney went with three wheels. It’s because she can’t ride a bicycle. As my paper will reveal, just as vampires do not cast reflections in mirrors, so time travelers cannot ride bicycles. That a grown woman doesn’t know how to ride a bike is glossed over by the producers, presumably to conceal Courtney’s special powers. But she does get pulled over by a sheriff who tells her in a calm voice that she needs to obey traffic laws or else he will arrest her. Courtney complains that he yelled at her, and she cries.

After a hard day of doing absolutely nothing interesting in the coolest city ever, the girls sit around a table someplace, drinking Dos Equis. Courtney blathers on about Matt Nordgren, and the Bravo editors do their best to make her seem unlikeable, editing together footage of besties yawning and checking their phones as Courtney bares her soul. Either Katie or Thais says to the camera, “We love Courtney, but she’s so consumed in herself and so consumed in what’s going on in her life. That’s all she really wants to talk about. She has a hard time really engaging with us on what’s happening in our lives.” I think either Katie or Thais misspoke. I think what either Katie or Thais meant to say was “We love being on camera and getting minor roles in this reality show, but hanging out with this time traveler is painful because she’s so consumed with herself and so consumed with what’s going on in her life. That’s all she really wants to talk about. It’s almost like she’s 8 years old and we should just put her at a different table with her Lego Friends so that the adults can have a grown-up conversation.”

The next morning, the besties check out of their motel and visit Prada Marfa, which is a permanent sculpture installed by the side of a highway and which Courtney insists on repeatedly calling a museum for reasons that are as hard to understand as the motivation that compels Courtney to twerk in the highway and then bend over and grab her ankles. Yes, she declares that she is “single and ready to mingle.” But is this display of art ignorance and bobbing hindquarters a mating call? Because all we have here are besties. Not a man in sight.

Except hang on just a second. Out of nowhere materializes a handsome young man wandering the desert with a camera. We do not meet him. He is never given a name. He just — appears. I guarantee you that this dude can’t ride a bike. Courtney asks him to take a picture of her with her besties in front of the museum that is not a museum.

As the show ends, Courtney gives us these concluding words: “This is what’s great about my girlfriends. I can be self-centered. I can be vain. I can be bitchy. I can be, like, obsessed with my work, obsessed with myself, obsessed with Matt, obsessed with Marfa. And then we can all just, like, come together, go see Prada museum, and then, like, we’re fine.” Again, I think she misspoke. What she meant to say was “This is what’s great about my girlfriends. When I agreed to let Bravo make me look like a shallow, unlikeable time-traveling tart so that I could get more people look at the free pants I’m wearing on my blog, my friends said they’d help. They didn’t say, ‘I don’t know, Courtney. Maybe you should think this through. Let’s imagine the worst-case scenario [read: episodes 1 through 6].’ Nope, they hiked up their skirts and took a wiz by the side of the road.”

And that takes us over the 2,000-word mark. Yet there you are, with no pistol in sight. Some friend.

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