The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Recap: Fight and Flight

Leave it to Britani to bring up Seth’s alleged infidelity and then act completely shocked when Meredith gets angry about it. Better yet, over yoga (where everybody but her gets a mat), Britani even describes bringing up the accusation as well-intentioned. Meanwhile, Meredith is still fuming in her room, where she’s telling Lisa that Britani “thinks she’s a Disney Princess,” but to be fair, she did play Ariel and Belle at Disney World. Seeking an even better comparison, she then asks Lisa to remind her who from The Wizard of Oz didn’t have a brain. “The Tin Man,” Lisa confidently replies, and Meredith deems Britani “The Tin Woman.” What a missed opportunity for Wicked: For Good cross-promotion!

But luckily for Meredith, Bronwyn arrives at her door with an opportunity to get out some of this anger. She kidnapped Britani’s stuffed unicorn, and goads Meredith into throwing it overboard with her. But we should have known that more than anything, this was really just a ruse for Bronwyn to make use of those dumb inflatable costumes yet again — and she and Meredith don them so they can be “incognito” while tossing the unicorn off the ship. Gone forever is the only surefire way Britani could hear Jared say he loves her.

With the unicorn slowly floating away, Meredith turns her ire toward Whitney at breakfast for seemingly cosigning the TikTok allegation. Meredith tells them all that she’s done with Britani, and she’s done with anyone who supports her. Heather correctly thinks this is absurd, because you can’t operate on a show with that attitude. Bronwyn even tries to bring the temperature down by asking Mary for help: “Mary, can you say something as a mother, as a woman of God here?” But some things are just out of God’s hands.

As they disembark and apologize to the crew for their behavior and volume writ large, one of the crew members rushes out to return to Britani something she thought was forever gone: the unicorn … soaking wet. “Who threw this over?” she asks everybody, as if it’s some big mystery. Meredith eventually cops to it, while also throwing Bronwyn under the bus for good measure, and then hauntingly says, “Uni wanted to swim. You got tanner and makeup all over him. He needed a little dip in the ocean.” Chilling.

What happens next is an all-too-familiar phenomenon that Housewives fans will immediately recognize from the sudden shift in editing. Something happened when cameras were down. It’s a producer’s nightmare, and yet they have to think on their feet to cover whatever incident happened off screen, usually filling in the gaps via confessional retellings and dramatic B-roll. All in all, it’s cobbled together like an episode of Dateline or Celebrity Ghost Stories. We’re told that Meredith’s rage continued at the airport, and then when they boarded, she and Lisa were seated directly behind Britani — and a scene erupted. The way these women tell it, you would have thought Meredith was about to bring the plane down. Apparently, she was calling Britani names, grabbing and shaking her seat, splashing her with wine, pulling her hair, demanding to see the TikTok, and reducing her to tears. For Meredith’s part, she says she was simply venting to Lisa, and adds, “Obviously nothing was that deep, because I would have been arrested by an air marshal.”

While it’s a good point, none of the other women (apart from Lisa) are backing her story up. While very few people were on Britani’s side on the trip (or ever), this mid-air incident seems to have really turned the tide, and now they have no choice but to sympathize with her. When Britani meets up with Heather after the flight, she tells her that what hurt the most was Lisa egging her on the whole time, which she felt was the ultimate betrayal — especially since she had her back so strongly earlier in the season. “I keep saying that I’m the unsinkable rubber ducky, but I feel really broken right now,” Britani says, showcasing her ability to string together a truly insane turn of phrase in even the darkest of times.

Since Bronwyn was on a different flight altogether, Whitney has to fill her in on what went down, and she brings up a good point. Bronwyn questions how this could have happened on a commercial flight without anybody talking cell phone footage of it? Firstly, you would have thought that at least one other passenger would have wanted to record this scene playing out, especially if they recognized the players. But what’s been annoying me even more is that these women should have been trained by producers to start recording on their own cell phones if drama starts to unfold after cameras go down. Then again, secretly recording Meredith last year was what first got Britani in this whole mess, so I’ll cut her some slack there.

But then Bronwyn hits us with an even crazier curveball. “Apparently, Todd and Meredith need a reminder of fight etiquette,” she says to awkward silence. “I don’t know if you’ve seen on Twitter or not that people are accusing Todd of getting caught on a plane cheating on me.” She learned from this trip and is bringing it up herself, not only to get ahead of it, but because she believed it to be true. She says that this person claiming that Todd was getting sent lingerie photos knew too much accurate information about the flight and where Todd was sitting, so she confronted him about it and temporarily kicked him out. This leads to a fascinating conversation between her and Whitney about being open to the idea of being open, and that this wouldn’t be as much of an issue to her if it were something they had discussed or agreed upon. This conversation cements Bronwyn’s place as a phenomenal Real Housewife.

We then see Heather arrive at a coffee shop, and a chyron appears that reads “11:10 a.m.” — we all know what that means. Someone is about to be late. Sure enough, we watch a montage of Heather sitting there for over an hour until Lisa finally arrives at 12:26 p.m. without apology. Most interestingly, though, is that Heather doesn’t make a single mention of her tardiness, which is either incredibly mature, a power move, or is focused on the more pressing matter at hand.

Lisa is shocked when Heather tells her how upset Britani is with her, because, as you might have guessed, Lisa maintains that she did nothing wrong. All she did, according to her, was tell Britani to show Meredith the TikTok in question, and she denies that a big scene erupted. She explains away the jostled chair as Meredith using it as leverage to stand up, and says the the spilled wine really landed on her, not Britani. But all of these explanations do sound a lot more like confirmations. Nonetheless, Lisa says she was trying to diffuse Meredith, not egg her on, and is annoyed to once again be getting the blame for something she maintains she’s innocent of.

Meanwhile, Mary gets the unenviable job of sitting down with Meredith, who continues to deny. “What is it that you think happened?” she asks Mary, who quickly responds with, “I don’t think anything happened; I was there.” Meredith maintains that she was simply venting to Lisa, for maybe 15 minutes. Mary says it was much longer than that, and then they start doing math. Meredith says she was asleep for over an hour on the flight and watched two movies, and there’s only so much time on the flight, so how much longer could this incident really have been? I, for one, would like to know what movies Meredith was watching. Fight Club? Snakes on a Plane? She thinks that this exaggerated story started getting spread to women who didn’t actually see it for themselves (because they were either on the other side of the plane or sleeping). In any case, if Meredith really did wait to pop off until they were airborne with no cameras rolling, it makes for the perfect crime.