Southern Charm Recap: Bra Code

Of all the bro-downs in all the cabins in all the world, we had to walk right into this one, where a White Clawed Mini-a-Lago is going off on Austen for what seems like somewhat innocuous behavior. I know, I know. Austen is such a cad that if you put him in a coffin, he’d turn into chocolate. (Get it? Cad buried. Cadbury! No? Okay, fine. Not my best work.) Also, the stars of the trip show what a strange season this is turning out to be. We have the holy trinity of boat shoes: Shep, Craig, and Austen, joined by JT, Rod, and Rodrigo, my imaginary throuplemate. They’re being joined the next night by Olivia and Taylor, who are camping at Taylor’s family’s lake house nearby. So, where does this leave Venita, Madison, Whitney, Leva, and the rest of the people stuck at home in their surprisingly large houses? It’s so odd.

Anyway, Austen and Olivia are on the road to healing their friendship after the loss of Olivia’s brother. They meet in the park, and Austen tells her that he learned in therapy that he has to tell people how important they are in his life, so he does that with Olivia. Oh, the poor therapist. She said that to try to make him better, but this will just improve his game. This is just going to get him laid more by disingenuously telling girls how much he likes them. I do think the therapist was right to tell Austen no shagging for two months. I also loved Craig’s rom-com idea about it. The WGA strike is over; let’s get that script written and add executive producer to Craig’s list of jobs, including non-lawyer, owner of an ambulance-chasing law firm, pillow baron, and hair-gel influencer.

The thing that I really loved about this episode is how much Shep hates JT. Actually, I think this is Shep’s most endearing characteristic. When he meets Whitney to grill him about Taylor’s nude, he tells Whitney that JT “is nerdy but thinks he’s cool,” which is simple yet accurate. When they all meet at Shep’s to load into the Sprinter van for a six-hour drive, JT’s Uber tries to pull away before he gets his luggage out of the trunk. Shep says, “I feel like he gets the short end of the stick on a lot of small things.” Again, it is reductive, accurate, and entirely hilarious. When they finally arrive at the cabin, Shep assigns rooms in the most lackadaisical way possible, and he puts JT not upstairs with the rest of the boys but on the dreaded lower level.

We don’t see a ton with Taylor and Olivia yet, though we get a brief introduction to Taylor’s very Southern and very endearing family. Instead, we’re focused on the boys. And we should be because they are talking about things like whether or not panda bears are real. “Do you think panda bears are real? I was really hoping they were real,” Craig says, which sounds like he just got some new info from the CIA that they’re all really Chinese spies or something. Does Craig know about Bird’s Aren’t Real?

At the cabin, Rodrigo finds a picture of 19-year-old Shep that looks like it was taken from a late-’90s A&F Quarterly. He is very square-jawed and handsome and all-American. Rodrigo loves it so much he says he wants to hang it in his bathroom. You might not know this unless you have read the Homosexual’s Handbook Volume 69, but all gays are required to decorate their bathrooms exclusively with erotic art. When Rodrigo says this, he’s basically admitting to having at least a semi right there in Shep’s familial living room.

While Shep and Rodrigo are flirting in the kitchen and making dinner with the groceries Shep’s mom bought for the boys (they are 40 and refuse to grow up), Rod and JT go to their rooms. Rod says he thinks that something happened between Austen and Olivia. He says that his female friend has been casually hooking up with Austen for a while. She went by his house, and in the morning, when she went downstairs, she saw a bra on the ottoman, and she thought it was Olivia’s bra.

When they peel off, Austen and Craig go to their room, leaving Shep and Rodrigo to make out in the kitchen. Wait, that only happened in my fantasies. Nevermind. Austen tells Craig he thinks Rod thinks something because of the bra. He says that Olivia came over to watch a movie, and she wanted to get comfortable, so she took off her bra. I have enough female friends that I have definitely seen a few of them extricate a bra from a shirtsleeve to settle in for a night of Bravo watching and popcorn eating. I don’t think that just because the bra is there that something necessarily happened.

But, and it’s a big but, this is Austen. You would think something would have happened. He says it didn’t, but it’s Austen. He just lied about hooking up with Taylor. Do we think he’s going to be trustworthy about this? When it comes up at the very sophisticated dinner of Kraft Shells and Cheese and hamburgers, Austen and Rod go outside for a chat. I totally understand that Rod is suspicious because he has known Austen for years. It’s like being friends with Anna Delvey; you just kind of know to never let her get the check. But I do think Austen is telling the truth here. He’s pretty honest with Rod when he says he doesn’t want to see him courting Olivia, but he’s not trying to stop it or get in the way. He says he’s just trying to be friends. Rod seems to accept this.

The person who can’t accept it is JT. He’s inside railing on the guys about how they let Austen get away with everything and treat women poorly. I’m with the Trump scion on this one. We’ve watched Austen run roughshod over several women during his time on the show, and his bros never raise nary an objection. JT is right, in essence. However, this is not the fight he thinks it is. He’s talking about how Austen hurts all these people, but if we take his word for it, I don’t think Austen did anything wrong. He had a friend over, she took her bra off to get comfortable, and left it there accidentally. If Austen is to be believed, and that is an if just as big as that but, I think it’s totally above board.

We find out from Austen’s chat with Rod that they did cuddle a little, and she gave him a hug, and he admits that it did stir up some feelings for him. (I’m assuming those feelings are similar to the ones that were stirred up by Rodrigo checking out the pic of Shep.) But he says he’s not acting on it, and he says he is behaving himself. So, yes, I think that JT is waging the right war, but he has chosen the wrong battle to start with. And why does JT really care? I don’t believe he and Rod are really that close, and JT doesn’t seem to be friends with Austen, so why does his opinion even matter? And can we even hear his opinion from all the way down there? No, that wasn’t a short joke; I meant because he’s on the lower level. Okay, it was a short joke, too. I just can’t wait to see what sort of mild behavior JT is going to get worked up about next week.

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