‘Real World Homecoming New Orleans’ Episode 7 Recap: “It’s Not Regret, It’s Reset”

I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the old ABC sitcom Soap, but you should be. It was created by Susan Harris, who went on to create The Golden Girls, and it introduced the world to Billy Crystal, and it was rerun on Comedy Central in the ‘90s and ‘00s, so I don’t want to hear any of your shit about how you’re too young. Learn your history. Anyway, Soap is an important show for a million reasons, not least because each episode started with a recap, and because Soap was a parody of soaps, the recaps were purposefully twisty and Byzantine, and each one ended with the announcer (The Price Is Right’s Rod Roddy!) saying “Confused? You won’t be after this episode of Soap,” and the joke was that you absolutely still would be.

Soap is at the top of my mind right now because at the top of a new episode of The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans, there is a recap about Tokyo knowing who he is now, and Julie trying to make good television by getting drunk and getting aggressively sexual about Jamie (but weirdly not at the same time), and Kelley kind of wanting to bail on the season, and then the whole situation with the “roping” playlist, and I am confused, and I will continue to be after a new episode of The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans. Help me, Rod Roddy.

And it doesn’t really matter where we left off anyway, because we start this episode where we left off two episodes ago, right after the weird game with the paddles and the quotes from the quickie Real World book. Julie goes to explain to Danny all that has happened with the roping playlist and the frantic phone call from Spencer, which we were led to believe happened after Spencer’s visit, which we were led to believe happened right after the paddle game, so you are correct to be a little disoriented, but as with Soap, the move is just to go with it. Anyway, she gets through the whole thing, and she adds that Spencer has offered her a “hall pass” to hook up with whoever she likes in the house, and that they don’t have an open marriage per se, but they both think monogamy is worth examining, and you and I think it is unwise to wade into these waters on camera, but it doesn’t matter what you and I think about it, because whatever order all of these things happened in, they definitely already happened and it is too late for us to reason with Julie now. Danny says Spencer probably had his antennae up for a connection between Julie and Jamie, and the reaction to the roping playlist was “confirmation bias,” and overall Danny is much more patient about the whole thing than I am.

So let me share a theory I have here. The pre-episode recap does contain a clue about one aspect of this season, why it might be so low-key surreal, and why Danny and Julie seem to be kind of chill with one another despite everything. In that recap, Julie wears a t-shirt that says “Brain Food,” and has a whole bunch of mushrooms on it. Danny has been extremely open on this show (and on mine, and in our conversation on esquire.com) about microdosing psilocybin (street name: mushrooms!) as a treatment for complex PTSD. And— I went back and checked this— upon Julie’s nervously merry arrival at the house in episode one, Danny said to her “Girl, you have to put that psilocybin down.” Here is my question: is Julie also taking part in our culture’s current shroom boom? Is this a thing she and Danny have talked about before? Does her behavior so far help or hurt psilocybin’s chances of being decriminalized, and will the eventual Congressional hearings attempt to define “roping,” as they once did “the Devil’s Triangle?”

But whatever the deal is there, Kelley is doing the other kind of tripping. In the last couple of episodes, it has seemed like Kelley is very eager to get the hell out of the house, and because she’s close with Danny and has grown close with Melissa, they’re both trying to get her to stay. I cannot say that I blame her for wanting to bounce, because here’s my theory about Kelley: her mindset is the exact opposite of Julie’s. We know that Julie is thinking about the storylines that she’s creating; whether this whole playlist/hall pass story arc is real or not, she’s happy to put it out there, leave it in the hands of the editors, and hope for the best. This is because Julie is not great at thinking. Kelley, on the other hand, seems to have an understanding of what can go wrong. One can see her being extra-careful with her words and actions, because she knows the producers have a job to do and conflict to create. So she’s doing her thing and then largely peacing out, out of an abundance of caution that you absolutely understand. Julie’s out here getting herself excommunicated, like what have I got to lose, whereas Kelley’s like: cool, let me do some reading in bed because I like my family.

Also I would imagine Kelley wants to go home because home is where Scott Wolf lives.

Okay, so Tokyo spent a couple of years as a bat mitzvah dancer, and my notes on that read, in full: “Tokyo was an exotic dancer for children.” Melissa tries to goad Jamie into saying that “Come On Be My Baby Tonight” is the best thing that’s ever come out of the Real World franchise, but he’s sweaty and dazed from roping, so he doesn’t quite get there, plus everyone knows David screaming “IT KILLS ME, KIRA” in the Seattle season is the best thing that’s ever come out of the Real World franchise. “IT’LL MAKE IT REALAH THAN ANYTHING YOU FUCKIN’ HAVE!”

But “COBMBT” is up there among the best RW moments, and it is the thing that you think about when you think about this season, so we have to address it. I’d forgotten that it was his intro piece for that cable-access show they had to do, and that everyone else had some boilerplate Q&A stuff prepared, and that he just decided: no, what I am going to do instead of reveal my favorite book is scat and make very big singing faces. “At that point in time, I wasn’t connecting with my cast-mates,” he said, “so doing a song was my way of inviting them into my world.”

It…did not go that way. More on that later.

Julie and Spencer talk it all out over the phone — or do the lines they’ve been rehearsing for months now — and Spencer says he’s jealous of Jamie but only because Jamie gets to hang out with her in New Orleans, but he’s not worried. Whether Jamie actually does need to go get his headphones from right where Julie is, right in this moment, is not important: he does, and it’s perfectly awkward. Julie concludes that she can’t be friends with Jamie if it’s going to make Spencer uncomfortable at all, and that shouldn’t be too hard an adjustment because it doesn’t seem like they’ve been keeping in touch, and if Julie is in Jamie’s phone at all, she’s in there as like “Orgasm Person?”

So it’s time for an Incoming Message, and this one is all about Kelley and how she also didn’t hang out in the mansion all that much in 2000. She’d blown off a lot of the original season in favor of a boyfriend, and in retrospect she wishes she’d made more of an effort. (She also watches confessional footage of herself from back then, points at it, and says “She’s buzzed,” which is very sweet.) She felt a little left out of the Melissa and Julie friendship, and then reveals that before her stay in the house, she’d been ostracized by a group of girls who vandalized her house and spat on her and I am just going to say should all be in federal prison. So she closed down. “Poised is protection, for sure,” she says, “and that I have down.” So Kelley has a long history of protecting herself from dangerous situations, which is very healthy and also probably why it is correct for her to get the hell out of there.

What a perfect time for the whole group to get into the studio and record a new version of “Come On Be My Baby Tonight.” Tokyo had performed it on Chappelle’s Show, and he says “Dave Chappelle made that song a problem,” which is about as deep has he gets about the whole thing. Danny says Tokyo got the feeling he was being laughed AT instead of laughed WITH, and that he suspects that moment is when David died and Tokyo was born. There is a lot to get into here— even more when you consider that Dave Chappelle himself would go on to walk away from his own show because he wasn’t sure about the tone of the laughs he was getting, and even more than that when you consider how he’s currently mostly famous for getting laughs at the expense of vulnerable people— but what happens instead is that everyone sings along and is still kind of goofing on it and that’s that, and it’s cathartic because everyone says it is.

Jamie goes into the Oculus meditation app, which makes me wonder whether it was Oculus porn he was sharing with Julie. Julie has a very forced sexy conversation with Spencer, who has apparently sent her sexy pictures. Julie runs right up on Kelley to show her one of them, and Kelley recoils. She decides to talk to Julie about all of it, and basically puts it all on the line: Kelley feels like she’s being baited into sexy conversations that she doesn’t want to have on camera. Julie says Kelley is “acting like my old grandma,” which suggests the existence of a much younger grandma, and I just don’t have the time to think that hard about Julie’s extended family.

With this, whether Kelley has made the decision to physically remove herself from the house, she has for sure mentally checked all the way out. The gang goes to a fancy brunch, and it looks like the producers just want them out of the house so they can set up some massive New Orleans surprise party situation for them to return to, and for some reason the idea of a looming massive New Orleans surprise party situation does not ease Kelley’s nerves. “This day was the Done Day for me,” she says. I hate to see it, but the author of FLOW is about to FLEE.

Next week: tears from Danny, a deeper look into Tokyo’s soul, a final night in the mansion, and probably three more uncomfortable swinger-type conversations. I’m going to go macrodose some psilocybin.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now. He also hosts the Real World podcast Truu Stowray, available wherever you get your podcasts.