Real Housewives of Melbourne Season 2, ep 1 recap: Everyone still hates Gina.

They’re housewives. They’re in Melbourne. They’re real?…Anyway, they’re back.

The Real Housewives of Melbourne are BACK for season two and despite them wanting to “put everything behind them and move on”, episode one opens with a recap of tribal council.

Everyone hates Gina. Gina hates Andrea and Lydia. Chyka – AKA Switzerland – hates no one as she is the only member of the housewives not to possess a resting bitch face. Nor an active one.

Below is the current red-eyed resentment chart so you can follow along with the hate-factions. Don’t worry too much about it though, it will change so much throughout the season that by the end, it will resemble the Game of Thrones Red Wedding.

One of the housewives has been evicted from the house/had her tiki torch extinguished/whatever they do on this franchise and for that, we are sad because it was fun saying “Liberty Belle”. It makes your lips all jiggly. But it looks like Andrea Moss has jettisoned into a career change as a “News personality”.  Or so says her facebook page.

FORGET HER though because OMG THERE ARE TWO NEW HOUSEWIVES that the others can pick the eyes out of befriend. Mrs Moss must be secretly pleased that she’s big enough to be replaced by two women.

OH AND LOOK, there are NEW OPENING CATCHPHRASES.  Watch out TedX, because we’ve got these pearls of wisdom:

COS SHE’S A JUDGE, GEDDIT?

And prepare the Walkley for whichever producer conjured up this one:

The episode opens with a montage of RICH PEOPLE things. Like PRADA. And GUCCI.  And trams. Quite a few trams. Which is no surprise given the cost of a Myki.

And then we see Lydia.  She’s the very sexual one, who is mega rich.  So rich, in fact, that last season instead of driving her car to Woolies for a bit of ‘Ol Bitey on the cheese platter LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE, she flew her private jet to Tasmania’s King Island.

You can get that shiz in the deli section. But that’s hardly the point, is it?

Leggy Lydia manages to get just FIVE WORDS out of her mouth before she says it:

That’s her catchphrase. You may also hear the faint sound of a dead horse being flogged.

Lydia, Switzerland and Jacqui (a psychic, whose catch phrase is “ShineShineShine”) all get together for a ladies lunch at a place called Taxi Kitchen. TAXI KITCHEN? Has the budget hit? Has the share portfolio taken a dive? Was the LIMOUSINE kitchen all booked out?

The topic de-jour is how much weight they’ve all lost.  Particularly Lydia.

Has she stopped flying overseas to collect her 70kgs of ashed goats chevre?

No, she’s just been shagging a lot.

Also, she’s swapped all her meals for coffee. She drinks 8 coffees a day now. Switzerland/Chyka  is shocked but Lydia just laughs throatily. “My heart is used to pounding,” she says saucily before ordering a shot of Wet Pussy in the middle of the day. I’m not even making this up.

Then Janet calls! You remember Janet.

It’s her BIRTHDAY!  No one ask how old she is (we wouldn’t want to ruin the illusion of youth). She is having a party! And she is inviting all the girls along for a bitchy fight in a jelly pit lovely celebration.

Her friend/toyboy/tinder match/notsure/ Carlos is throwing her a party! How EXCITING. Janet’s face LIGHTS UP:

Meanwhile across town, the liquid lunch continues and Lydia subtly tells the girls how rich she is by explaining how she has a Personal Assistant to buy her hair products.

Except the PA stuffed it up. YOU HAD ONE JOB, PA.

So Lydia is in crisis mode on the phone. It’s definitely because the PA went to the local shops and didn’t fly a the jet to Vidal Sassoon headquarters in Paris. Idiot.

Don’t have a hair PA? Five things you’re doing wrong when looking after your hair.

The conversation turns to Gina and the girls decide they still hate her. “I am planning on going forward with Gina” announces Lydia. Quite literally going forward, she means. They are going to carpool to Janet’s birthday party.

Meanwhile IT’S 16 MINUTES INTO THE SHOW AND FINALLY WE SEE GINA!

And the producers are definitely not trying to make a point with their opening shot.

Gina is catching up with her sister, Bettina. YES THAT’S RIGHT. GINA AND BETTINA.  Is there another called Lina? Or Christina Rina? I hope so.  In any case, her sister is BETTINA LIANO so these two are molto molto bene Italian power sisters and everyone else can get fucked.

Gina’s been in LA with her partner. They’re back together now ‘cos he saw how fierce she was on the last season and was like, “damn girl.” Except he’s a lawyer too so he probably summoned her for a cross examination to his heart. Lol! Lawyer jokes!

She’s sporting a tan and this time it’s real, and she tells her sister that’s she’s totes gonna move over to LA to be with her man. Don’t go, Gina. We need you to keep propping up the hairspray industry in Australia.

Bettina is told by the producers casually asks Gina about the other housewives. Gina says she hasn’t given a single fuck about themhasn’t spent any time with them.  She describes her friendship with Janet like a cracked glass. “Once it’s fractured, you can put it back together, but it will always have a crack in it”. And her friendship with Lydia is strained. Like a strainer. These kitchen analogies are fun, Gina. Who is the nutribullet? Is Chyka the fridge? ‘Cos butter wouldn’t melt.

Birthday girl Janet decides she needs a cake. She wants a beautifully extravagant three tiered cake in time for her party, which starts in a couple of hours. Most bakers would break into a sweat, but it’s ok.  Given none of the ladies eat, it probably won’t need to contain any actual cake. Lydia hopes there is a cake that comes as a coffee instead.

The kindly baker, upon seeing this fragile creature in his shop, is not interested in baking her a cake at all. He sit her down and wants to counsel her. “You’ve been let down enough, I can tell” he says gently. “You’ve got to take one step at at time, you’ve got to soldier on.”

Does he think she’s been in a horrible accident? A big freezer? A cryogenic experiment gone wrong?

Anyway, the party starts and everyone is SO EXCITED TO BE THERE because now we can finally meet the fresh meat. Before they arrive Janet preps the team of vultures ladies.

The first housewife’s name, she says, is Gamble. Everyone is confused. Surely it’s French and pronounced Gam-blay? No no. It’s Gamble, like in the casino. “She is a real person.” Janet tells the others, thinking in her head “unlike me”.

And Gamble seems like a real card.

Gamble confesses: she has a weakness. It’s not the $12.90 casino buffet. It’s MEN.  This will no doubt form a plot point soon. She met her surgeon husband on E-Harmony and tells us it was not love at first sight.  We’re guessing he showed her his yacht and then suddenly she loved him a lot more. She calls him puppy. She admits to stalking him. She gets jealous. She has a bad temper. He says she’s “a bit dippy” and she laughs in a dippy way. She paints crap paintings in her beach house and she doesn’t eat breakfast because calories. She is oddly likeable.

But Gamble, who perhaps in the interests of responsible reporting should be named GambleResponsibly, has a serious health problem she’s been hiding.

Every day, this brave woman faces certain death if she does not have eyelashes.

“Eyelashes are the most important thing in the world to me” she signs plaintively. “I cannot live without them.”

Fuck. This is serious.  Is there an Epipen device for this? Is there a defib box in the living room?

But with her eyelashes on and feeling fine, GambleResponsibly arrives at Janet’s party. She is nervous. She wants to make a good impression. And then she makes the same FATAL MISTAKE that so many have done before her.  She meets Jacqui, who tells her she is a professional psychic. And Gamble replies “Oh, I thought you were just mucking around with that”.

While Jacqui is off fashioning a voodoo doll of Gamble, Gina arrives. GINA!  Cracked-glass-Janet shrieks “THE DRAG QUEEN HAS ENTERED THE BUILDING.” Honey. That joke is so season one.

Gina meets Gamble and the two of them hit it off.  Gamble pats Gina like the magnificent queen she is. Gina likes it. Gina is purring inside. The Gina lovefest does not go down well with cracked-glass-Janet. But before she can shriek about it THE NEXT HOUSEWIFE, PETTIFLEUR arrives.

The producers have this year decided to recruit women whose names belong in 1980’s Mills and Boon novels. Pettifleur means ‘little flower’. But this lady is a boss. And more like a top dog that would cock it’s leg on a little flower.

A property developer, she arrived in Australia as a teen from Sri Lanka and built herself up “from nothing”. (Attention: Scott Morrison). She’s also written a book called “Switch The Bitch” which I cannot find a single record of anywhere. Maybe it’s still coming out. Anyway, Pettifleur loves the word bitch and uses it early and often. #branding

We get to see Petticoat in her normal habitat at home.  It’s a regular Wednesday night so she cracks the Veuve Cliquot, talks casually about life in New York and decides she wants a Bentley for her birthday OH ALRIGHT JUST WIPE YOUR ARSE WITH MONEY WHY DON’T YOU.

Pettiskirt is honest. In her first minutes at Janet’s party she tells GambleResponsibly her earrings are wretched and tells Gina she has a ‘gina of her own ‘cos she’s going commando.

How about no manners?

The night is a great success with Jackie dancing and shining, Janet shrieking and cracking glass all night and Gamble feeling shit about her earrings. Standard.

After they hit it off so well at Janet’s birthday, Gambleresponsibly and Gina go for lunch.  It’s clear that our calorie counting Gamble didn’t pick the restaurant because if the eyelashes don’t kill her, this could.

Poor Gamble is nervous again and despite her best intentions, manages to call Gina ‘Darth Vader’ AND give her a gift of an EVIL EYE. Oh GAMBLE you silly pickle.  What were you thinking? You weren’t, were you?  I think I like you.

The next day,our birthday girl Janet catches up with her current friend/toyboy/tinder match/notsure/ Carlos.  Carlos has a pet pig.  Carlos read somewhere that walking a dog would help him meet ladies so he bought a dog one night when he was drunk and lonely. But when he sobered up he realised it was a pig. Never mind. It’s loyal and smart and sleeps with him in the bed, which are three more things than he could hope for with Janet. Besides, Carlos loves the pig.  REALLY loves it.

Janet loves the pig too. You can tell by the way she looks at it lovingly.

This bizzaro pig park plot is just really a way to get Janet to dig around for some intel about her new friend GambleResponsibly.  Because word on the street is, GambleResponsibly is not ALL SHE SEEMS. THERE ARE RUMOURS ABOUT HER.  Terrible rumors.  Could she be Gambling irresponsibly? Has news of her terrible eyelash burden leaked? Is she in secret partnership with Tom Waterhouse?  Does Carlos know anything ? No, Carlos does not.  Carlos pretends to, though, because he just wants Janet to love him.

But Janet doesn’t realise. She is addicted to Gamble. She will stop at nothing to sniff out the rumours. And she’s put her best nostril on it.

Oh the suspense!