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It’s end-of-year wrap-up time, and as ever, I’m looking for one intertwining theme to run through the entire year. One piece of cultural ephemera that kept recurring throughout the film and TV year that was. In 2016, I latched onto the theme of smoking on screen, it’s tempting visuals and poisoned practitioners. 2017 was the year of the mother, in all sorts of nurturing and terrifying ways. For 2018, a year where film and TV did the job of nourishing me in ways that politics, sports, music, and poor neglected books couldn’t, I tried to triangulate around a theme of food.

There was the Pizza of 2018, which played such a prominent part in films as disparate as the Best Picture contender Green Book — where Viggo Mortensen folds up an entire pizza and eats it — and Netflix’s rom-com success story Set It Up.

And then I considered expanding the category to “stuff you could order at a pizza place” because then I could include the can of soda that clocks Cassius (LaKeith Stanfield) in the head in Sorry to Bother You, one of the funniest moments in a movie that tends to blow past comedy to get to some true and horrifying stuff.

Ultimately, though, 2018 wasn’t about the pizza. It wasn’t about a rogue can of soda. It wasn’t about the dish of ice cream that Villanelle eagerly dumps into some young brat’s lap on her way to one assassination or another in Killing Eve. It wasn’t about the buffalo wings at the sports bar in Support the Girls, the pancakes that mother Blanca helped Damon make so lovingly on Pose, or that alluringly crafted martini with a twist Blake Lively whipped up in A Simple Favor. No, in 2018, it was all about the pasta.

It was honestly hard to believe it as we were watching the scene play out on Vanderpump Rules back in January. Were James and Lala really having a 0-to-60 ramp-up argument over who ate who’s pasta without permission? Surely this was about something so much deeper than the pasta. This was about James dating simpering Raquel even though he really is deeply in love with Lala, who in turn thinks James is good for a shag but she had her sights set on Mr. Moneybags Private Jet Anonymous (Whose Real Name Is Boringly ‘Randall’), and it drives James crazy.

And yet, as the argument spilled out onto the sidewalk — at the behest of James’s gay roommate who spent half of last season trying to get James into bed, a task at which we’re like 40% sure he was successful — and James kept saying that the argument wasn’t about the pasta, something strange happened. The more he claimed it wasn’t about the pasta, the more viewers got suspicious. Maybe it … was about the pasta? Surely that couldn’t be it. But why keep bringing up the pasta? Why so defensive about the pasta? “It’s not about the pasta?” Bro, we’d forgotten about the pasta! And while James was busy putting his own DJ James “White Kanye” Kennedy spin on the “don’t say ‘mole’ / he said ‘mole'” scene from Austin Powers, the viewers got suspicious enough that a conspiracy theory started that posited that “pasta” was the Vanderpump cast’s code word for cocaine or whatever, and that the argument was really about Lala hoovering up all of Raquel’s nose-drugs. (In which case, the argument would still have been about how James is in love with Lala, but whatever, at this point we were having fun.) It was a theory that was honestly too delicious to not believe, and ultimately it made its way all the way up to the highest echelons of power, i.e. Andy Cohen and Watch What Happens Live.

Our verdict: it was probably about the pasta, inasmuch as pasta was pasta, serving as a stand-in for James’s obsessive feelings about Lala. Also, if it was Sur pasta, it was almost certainly not good pasta.

No sooner were our minds able to disentangle the knotted angel hair at the center of Vanderpump Rules‘ starchiest controversy then there was another trashy reality show whose fate hinged on a serving of noodles and sauce. This past season of The Challenge was dubbed Final Reckoning, perhaps in an attempt to goose fans into watching by tricking them into thinking this would be the show’s swan song. (It’s not.) But that sense of urgency in the theme — and the $1 million prize offered to the winner — sure seemed to get contestants’ tempers pitched to their breaking point. There were fights galore, plus lots of chest-puffing and name calling. But the season’s biggest physical altercation had a familiar culprit at the center: a to-go carton full of pasta.

The story goes like this: Cory and Devin — who’d only recently been inserted into the game midway through, at the whims of MTV’s producers, who have proved over the years to be capricious madmen — were among around a dozen Challengers on the way home from a night out. As is always the case, the cast was coming home drunk as hell, and with this bunch, that also meant at least four or five of them were spoiling for a fight. Cory had taken his plate of pasta to-go, and, according to secondhand reports (since there were no cameras in the van, like, great job, show), Cory showed Tony the pasta (because it had been sat on?), and drunk Tony snatched the pasta and threw it out the van window. As you do when you’re a drunken moron. Cory’s reaction, upon the van returning home, was ill-advised:

Cory, having taken Tony’s antics for disrespect, executed a note-perfect Russian leg-sweep and took Tony to the ground, all the while maintaining it was an accident. With MTV’s zero-tolerance policy for physical violence (lol, but I guess in this case they stuck to it), that meant that Cory was getting booted from the show. And since Devin was Cory’s partner, that meant he was gone too. “I can’t believe my shot at a million dollars could be gone … over pasta,” Devin lamented more than once. Maybe not in another year, buddy; but in 2018, that pasta will take you OUT.

Some other Great Moments in Pasta from 2018:

Big Mouth let its Hormone Monsters get nasty with some spaghetti.
The big scene in Homecoming near the end of season 1 where Julia Roberts’ character defiantly broke the rules of the Homecoming protocol by dining with one of the subjects (Stephan James) and intentionally loading up on the drugged-up gnocchi.
This sad bit of business from Kitchen Nightmares where Gordon Ramsay sits in dismay as the four types of cheese in his four-cheese fried ravioli are revealed.
The nightmarish “Cheddar Goblin” mac and cheese commercial that shows up at the worst possible time in the terrifying Nicolas Cage nightmare Mandy.

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