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Like All Terrible Things, This Season Of Basketball Wives Must Come To An End

Every week, our patently undramatic friend Sarah has bravely agreed to recap Basketball Wives, quite possibly the most dramatic human drama of our time. Her previous recaps can be found here.

This episode was the season finale, and also the moment when most viewers (if not the Basketball Wives themselves) realized that the cast has been fighting about the same two or three things for the entire season. Most of those fights, with the exception of the Bottle Throwing and Slap Fight incidents, were about things that the various Basketball Wives have tweeted at one another. I say this in order to make the scale of the drama very clear before we dive back in.

Fight #1: Smack A Ho Productions

We begin where last week’s episode left off, with Shaunie O’Neal valiantly trying to keep the cast of her show under control comfort Jennifer Williams. She follows her to her room and asks her to stop tweeting rude things about Evelyn Lozada. Jennifer replies that she never wrote anything insulting or offensive to Evelyn on Twitter, and Evelyn is in fact the one who is cyberbullying her, referencing a tweet that made a mention of “Smack A Ho Productions.”
Outside, Evelyn is in tears, with Kenya Bell nicely mediating despite Evelyn’s burning hatred of her. Ev is upset because all she wanted to do was have a civil conversation about how Jennifer is at fault for everything, including the invention of Twitter, and now Jennifer has ruined that for her too. Suzie Ketcham is absent, because wasn’t feeling well. Apparently she had a small bout of malaria or something from an “ant or mosquito” bite on her eyelid.

Later, the Basketball Wives (minus Kenya and Jennifer) have dinner. They wonder why Kenya still has not noticed the stench of all the rotting fish they put in her room. “Oh god,” Tami Roman says, “If she turns the fan on the fish are going to smack her in the fucking face.” Most of these women are parents.

Fight #2: Who’s Worried About Evelyn’s Vagina

It’s the day before the Basketball Wives leave Tahiti, and they are sitting on reclining chairs on the beach, hopefully thinking about how they have wasted this trip to PARADISE by getting drunk and screaming at one another. Jennifer emerges from her room in an evil-looking caftan, straw fedora and enormous sunglasses. She sits down beside Evelyn and asks to talk, but Evelyn rebuffs her, claiming that if she doesn’t stop giving interviews in which she vaguely insults Evelyn and/or her fiancé, Evelyn will respond in kind.

Jennifer protests that she hasn’t had sex with her ex-husband Eric Williams in three years (whaaaaat) and that she doesn’t care to keep tabs on Evelyn’s personal life. “I’m not worried about your vagina,” she scoffs. Evelyn’s counterpoint is that Jennifer slept with someone in Las Vegas and didn’t use a condom, which is at once a very specific and very vague accusation. Tami adds to the pile-on, claiming that she is personally offended that Jen spent so much time in her room during this trip, and that Jen never takes responsibility for the shady things she does. Jennifer leaves. “I’m a ride or die chick,” Evelyn says in an interview, “and Jen ain’t that bitch.” Their friendship is officially pronounced dead.

Jennifer decides to leave a day early, and Kenya goes with her. Suzie spies them leaving and then tells the other ladies at dinner that they took off together. “Shots to that!” someone yells, which is sort of the root of the problem right there. Evelyn surprises Shaunie, Tami and Suzie with gifts — makeup palettes from her new line, which Tami points out is done by the same people who produce the MAC lines, before taking the opportunity to make several digs at Jennifer’s “lipgloss line.”

Fight #3: Ghetto Hot Messes

Royce meets Tami for lunch in Miami, and calls her on her treatment of Kesha at the beginning of their vacation. Tami, after pledging to work on her anger and talk to Kesha like a normal human being, gets mad all over again,telling Royce that Kesha shouldn’t be talking about their fight, but Royce rightly points out that Tami’s talking about it now, because that’s a normal thing that people sometimes do. Tami vows to let it go because Kesha is “so pitiful.”

Tami, Shaunie, Evelyn and Suzie meet for dinner. Evelyn reminds us that she’s getting married. Tami announces her intention to move her daughters to Los Angeles to continue working on turning them into tiny pop stars. She also announces her intention to stop being friends with Royce, as a consequence of her decision to defend Kesha from Tami’s abuse.

In what is almost definitely a meta-comment on the maturity of all of this, Shaunie pays a visit to her pastor, as she’s feeling conflicted about how Basketball Wives reflects on her professionally. Do people think she’s a “ghetto hot mess” because she’s associated with the show? Her pastor tells her that it sounds like she’s in a valley, and that she’s going to have to go up the mountain and leave some people in the valley. Have I been watching too much Game of Thrones or is he suggesting that she kill the Basketball Wives?

Thus ends the season finale. You can dissect Shaunie’s pastor’s oblique metaphors in this clip, via VH1: