The Real World Recap: Episode Eight

Episode Eight of The Real World: Austin, is all about the sobbing. There is so much sobbing in this episode that it makes us sob to just think about it. OH! OH, THE HUMANITY! Danny's mom died! Nobody should ever have to deal with the death of a parent, let alone someone being filmed for MTV. It's so cruel, on a really cosmic scale.

Whatever.

Melinda is worried that Danny is not going to come back from Boston after the funeral. "I wish, I hope, I pray that he will come back here," she says. Danny, however, isn't sure. He's back in Boston, hugging his dad and his sisters, and blowing his nose into lots of tissues. He says that he feels that it is his responsibility to hold everything together, and be there for his sisters. We're wondering where that responsibility lay before his mom died. Who was taking care of your fully grown, adult sisters, Danny? Had they descended into madness while you were away in Austin? Did you return to find them living in piles of their own fecal matter, eating cat food?

We imagine so!

Back in Austin, where birds chirp in the trees and it is never below 95 degrees, Wes and Nehemiah ponder the deep issues of keeping your parents constantly aware that you love them. Nehemiah explains to Wes that he is a stereotypical inner city black male - he never met his father, and his mother is a drug addict in rehab. Wes has nothing much to add, except that he has been thinking about the last time he talked to his mom, and wants to make sure he said the right thing so that if she gets hit by a bus, nobody will find out that he doesn't love her.

Nehemiah tries to call his mom, but can't get through to her. Probably because she is in rehab, where they don't let people just call you up to chat and deal drugs. He says that he just wants to call her to say he loves her, and to make sure that the last words he says to her are specifically the three magic words (1).

In Boston, Danny mopes around all tear stained and melancholy. He tells his sister that he wants to take a photo of his mother. Then, he begins sobbing again about how he should have called her sooner / more often / with more vigor.

"I should have called her on Valentine's Day" he sobs.

"She was dead at 10 AM!" says his sister.

It's nice to see that someone has a level head about the situation. Danny's sister realizes that their mom was a drunk who drank herself to death, and doesn't want Danny to turn it into a "I killed my mom, so I'm going to drink myself to death" thing. It's always about Danny, isn't it? Your mother was lying on the floor of the bathroom, crying out for your love as she violently choked on her last few breathes, and the real tragedy here is that you feel like you should have called her right then, as her soul shuffled off this mortal coil, to say hi. Yeah, that would make everything all better. ALWAYS ABOUT DANNY!

Except when it's about Melinda, who is totally not OK with all of the pain that Danny is going through, and the sort of semi-vicarious feelings of guilt and loss that she is feeling due to her proximity to all the sobbing. Lacey says that Melinda feels inadequate because she can't be there for Danny, which confuses us because she totally can be there for him. Like, we're there for Danny. We support him in his time of need! If he needs to come over and sit on the couch and stare at the wall, he totally can. So what's the big deal, Melinda? Jeez.

Melinda worries to the girls about her fears that Danny will violate his contract with MTV and not return to Austin. "The only thing I want to do is spend time with Danny," she says. And get drunk. Naked drunk!

The girls reassure her that he'll come back, because they read their contracts in more detail than she did. Melinda isn't so sure, because she understands that Danny can be a "big support system" for his family. Ahem.

A "support system" is what people become, in Melinda's imagination, when something bad happens. Like, say we stubbed our toe. And we were all like, boo hoo, our toe is bleeding, and now there is pus coming out of it everywhere. And then you came over and were like, here, let me rub my breasts in your face. That would be "being a support system." Your breasts would be supporting our face, systematically, thus creating a support system.

This is the only rationalization we can give for Melinda's repeated use of this utterly meaningless phrase.

Back in Boston, my God, can they just stay in one city for a second? Back in Boston, Danny talks to his sister about how it is really difficult to maintain proper, adult relationships with people -- that it takes work, and that things don't always go the way they should. He says that if he could go back, he would do everything differently. Look at how much Danny is learning from this painful experience! Wait, no, he hasn't learned anything. There's pretty much no way someone could take an experience like this and say anything less insightful, unless he talked about nothing but hamburgers.

"Son, your mother is dead. I'm sorry."

"What? Oh, suck. At least I am totally ruling at Halo 2 Team Preview right now. This new map is so realistic."

But it's only a matter of a few seconds and a long, sad music cue before Danny is back into self-loathing mode, which features heavy sobbing, lots of touching of the forehead, exposed teeth, and many, many man on man hugs. Remember, we are basing this on nothing but fifteen years of research, the tricks eyes play when you're doing bong hits and staring at static, and our vivid, vivid imagination. Write in if we're off base on this, but we think we've got a pretty accurate picture of pretty much anything Bunim & Murray can throw at us, at this point.

Uh, yeah.

"I will never forgive myself!" Sob. Sob. Sob sob. "I should have been there!" Sob. Sob sob. Sob sob sob.

Seriously.

Meanwhile, and so as to not push the show past the crucial turning point of suicide-inducing unbroadcastability, Lacey gets a call from her boyfriend Ryan, who is coming down to visit her as a Valentine's Day gift. Aw! Because they had left over footage from last week, and Lacey hasn't really paid off in any major story way yet. That's so cute of him!

Nehemiah, MTV's Embedded Reality Host, interviews Lacey about how she and Ryan met. She explains that they met when he came in to get his hair cut at her salon. Then she drops the bomb that his legs are paralyzed and that he is in a wheelchair.

"My friends are like, HAHAHA, you are a virgin and your boyfriend has no legs! You can not have sex for like your whole life!"

Wait! No! Stop thinking about Lacey being deflowered by a punk rock paraplegic. This is not a show for us, the mainstream, who like to think about that sort of thing. This is a show for teenaged girls who love Danny and Mel!

Melinda gets an email from Danny, who is still sobbing in Boston. "He is trying to be really strong," she says, summarizing the email. "And that's it's really hard for him. And that. And. Hold on, I'm reading. Buh-buh-buh, guilty. Something about being hungover. Ok, ok, oh god! He doesn't think he is going to come back!"

Melinda begins crying. "I'm trying not to be selfish, but I like him so much!"

"Why," she screams, as the camera pans up as she cranes her neck, opens her arms wide, and curses God and all that he created for the misery of her life.

commercials.

Lacey, she's the virgin that tells everyone's secrets, then denies it, she goes to meet her boyfriend at the airport. He is in a wheel chair, but his hair looks awesome. So awesome, that Lacey comments jealously, imagining that some other woman is cutting his hair now.

"My boyfriend has the most amazing insight into things," says Lacey. "So I can't run a marathon. My life is just capable of having amazing things in it. Who cares, I'm alive!"

Lacey doesn't seem to realize that this attitude has nothing to do with his status as a person who cannot use his legs, but rather stems from his desire to lead the ultimate slacker lifestyle. "Who Cares, I'm Alive" is the new official motto of our life.

Ryan meets all the housemates, and there is much joy, except for Melinda whose life is cursed. They do shots. Someone says, "He's the kind of guy who you don't notice he's handicapped," which isn't a properly formed sentence of any kind. Rachel says Lacey "has this little giddy girl face."

Wait! No! Stop, sorry, again, normal people in love are boring.

"I feel bad that we can't be there, but I know Danny knows we're all thinking about him," says Melinda. We know that, were our mother to die halfway through a reality television show we were shooting, we would want our cast mates to stay as far away as possible. But hey, that's us.

Back in Boston, which is cold in reality as well as in the metaphorical motherless sense, Danny is moping silently, and hugging people, and looking sad. The harest thing he had to do, he says, was knocking on the door of his mother's house, and realizing that she wasn't answering because she was really, actually dead. This is an age old tradition in New England, where due to the extreme cold, and the fact that everyone is kind of tired all of the time because they work too hard, you knock before looting to make sure the person is really dead and frozen like a popsicle, and not just having a really good nap. So it's not weird that he would do that. We just wanted to make that clear.

Commercials. With a teaser for the next Real World, wher Wes will finally have sex. Also, something that stops blackheads from even forming. And Trident now comes in brain exploding new flavors. Our TiVo is broken. This is so upsetting. TiVo should give me a free one, just for mentioning them in this extremely popular internet column.

Lacey, who is good for coming back from commercial, but not much else, takes her boyfriend out drinking.

"He makes you feel like you've been friends forever!" says Johanna, as she does a shot and dances on top of the bar.

"He wishes he could surf, but he doesn't live to walk again," says Lacey. "Life goes on!"

"It's sort of weird that you say that all the time," says Ryan. "Cause like, I really, really would like to walk again. I mean, I'm not focusing on it all the time, but shit girl, I've got rubber bands for legs here, and all of your friends think I can't have sex. I can have sex, Lacey. You just watch me."

Ryan pushes himself up onto his legs and takes a few wobbling steps forward. Lacey looks on in stunned awe. He looks at her with a glint of pure happyness in his eye, falters, catches himself, throws her a jaunty thumbs-up, and stumbles directly into Melinda's vagina.

In Boston, Danny sobs and talks about how he has to be the woman of the house now that his mother is dead. His sisters scoff at him, and he cries more. To make himself feel better, he calls Melinda.

After Danny talks briefly about the darkness inside his soul, Melinda tells him that she is not ok and that it hurts her to know that he is hurting. Also, that he should feel guilty for making her hurt, and that making him feel guilty makes her feel really, really guilty, and that he should know that is why she's mad at him. What? Why are you mad at me? I didn't even do anything! You can't really be blaming me for my mother dying, and thus inconveniencing your delicate emotional balance, can you?

Whoa, whoa, we just got way too into that.

Silence. Weeping. Long distance bills sky rocketing.

Nehemiah feels left out of the self-pitying party, and babbles to someone about how he has let his mom down. "I don't know what it's like to have a good mother," he says. "I've never seen my mother sober. Never!." But he's willing to forgive and forget so that he won't have the exact same scenario that Danny has just undergone play out for him. Because, when the relative of someone we know dies in a weird, tragic way, we think that our relative will also die in this same way, pretty much immediately. That's called "irony." Like boys with funny mustaches. Irony.

Sadly, Ryan's visit has already come to an end, and we didn't even get anything good out of it. Lacey takes him to the airport, and they cry a little bit, and Lacey talks about how she always cries at goodbyes. We agree. We used to be a terrible airport cryer, which is why we like the fact that you can't go past the security gates without a boarding pass. Leave your emotions at the passenger pick-up/drop-off! This is travel by air, by God!

On the way out of the airport, someone gives Lacey a gift because she looks so durn sad, and also because she is clearly someone who can get you on tv if you do something really weird and uncharacteristic of the ways people normally interact. What was it that she was given? We don't know, because of the static thing. A bible? We think it might have been a bible.

Nehemiah finally gets through to his mom, who sounds glad to hear from him. "You been praying?," she asks. "Every night?"

They chat about Nehemiah's ability to not get wildly inebriated every night, and she compliments him on his ability to think things through, and that things seemed to work out for him well. "I love you," she says. "Make all your dreams come true!"

"Mom," he stops her from hanging up. "I love you too," he says.

Beat.

Beat.

"Aw, ok, bye," she says.

Beat.

Beat.

Danny sobs.

Beat.

Melinda sobs.

Beat.

Lacey sobs.

Roll credits.

(1) "I blame you!"

Read Austinist's recaps of previous episodes of The Real World :Austin!

The Real World: Austin is fresh every Tuesday at 9pm CST. We'll recap each episode the very next morning.