Day Two in the new season of WEtv’s “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars,” and I’m starting to wonder if this season will be “The Tara Reid Show.”
Getting to know the other boot campers (since she missed Day One entirely), Tara explains the problem in her relationship with Dean. It’s their schedules. Pretty weak.
And apparently Dean has a lot of “friends” who visit and stay with him so she’s not sure there’s room for her in his house. Sounds like a complicated relationship to me. But I stand by last week’s assessment that they totally do not belong in Marriage Boot Camp. They’re not really a couple.
There are, however, four other couples who desperately need the help of Marriage Boot Camp Directors Jim and Elizabeth Carroll.
“Look at in the bright side, you had a hall pass, you used it,” Toya tells Memphitz. Then she revokes it, and he’s not too happy about that. He had to know that was coming. He got the pass, but he wasn’t supposed to use it.
Now she knows he cheated, but she’s not supposed to be mad because she gave him the pass. Her reverse psychology she explained to Montel Williams failed miserably.
For the first drill of the second day, Jim and Elizabeth split the couples up by gender.
“Imagine that you are now single,” Elizabeth begins. They have both groups fill out online dating questionnaires about their partners.
“What do you wish your partner’s exes had told you before you got in too deep?” Elizabeth asks. And they take the bait.
Everybody gets pretty nasty.
“My daughter comes first, I come second…” Cody lists a whole bunch of things that Michelle puts before her partner, as a warning to the next guy.
Almost everybody seems to think their partner is selfish. That makes me sad. I mean the stuff they wrote was funny, but these are their partners they’re talking about.
Over lunch, the group dissects Memphitz and Toya’s relationship. He’s not willing to give up his “man cave” crib he’s keeping on the other side of town. I figure now that he’s lost his hall pass, he doesn’t need it anymore. I think Jim and Elizabeth will tell him the same thing.
After lunch, they split up for the famous somebody’s dead drill – where one half of the couple has to play dead while the other one deals with the loss. It’s a little bit different every season.
This time, the live half of the couple has to read what they put in the dating profile about their now-deceased mate. Brutal!
Lorenzo and British are first up in the exercise. British is in a morgue drawer (mad creepy) because they had a fight and she drove off angry and had a car accident. Lorenzo falls apart as he reads the mean things he said about the woman he loves.
Lorenzo seems so genuine, and British says all the right things at the end.
For the record, I hate this exercise. It’s hard to watch every season.
Then Adam has to view Lisa in the drawer.
“I can’t even think about this. This isn’t going to happen,” Adam says. For a prepper, he’s a little unprepared for the realities of life outside his happy little bomb shelter.
“These last words are not the last words you want her to hear,” Elizabeth says when he reads from the dating profile he wrote about his wife.
Michelle and Cody’s exchange seems a little bit fake. I haven’t figured them out. Do they love each other, or are they together for TV?
Meanwhile, in another room, the half of the couple who isn’t in the drawer is talking about life maps with co-directors Ilsa and David.
When they get to Tara, she talks about being left alone in the cold when she was five, and jumps to holding her new nephew a couple weeks ago, basically making no sense at all.
They prompt her for more information about her life’s timeline, and she flips.
“If you’re not looking for interesting… you guys want to talk about tabloids,” Tara accuses them. She really seems like she’s on something.
They try to explain that they’re getting to know her, and she makes a run for it.
“I don’t need to keep focusing on something that everybody in this room knows the story to,” Tara says, and walks out of the room. No, seriously. What’s she on?
And what tabloid story is she referring to? She’s done about a zillion outrageous things that would certainly be embarrassing to discuss. Nobody has mentioned any of them. So what is she freaking out about?
“We want to know what makes you you,” Ilsa tries to talk Tara off the ledge.
“I’m just saying that’s enough,” Tara argues. She’s making up her own rules for participating in this show.
She stumbles off – and really, she looks out of it as she’s heading out to grab a smoke. This chick is a hot mess. And she’s got to be totally distracting to the rest of the boot campers.
When it’s her turn in the morgue, predictably, she freaks out again.
“Oh come on you guys, this is like… what do you want me to do?” Tara asks.
“You’ve been asked to identify the body,” Elizabeth says.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Tara says, and Jim rolls Dean’s body out of the cabinet.
She refuses to read the last things she supposedly said to Dean.
“If you want, I can act it out,” Tara tells her housemates.
I was disappointed that Jim and Elizabeth let her off the hook, and she and Dean didn’t finish the exercise, if only because I thought maybe we’d get an idea of whether there really is a relationship there, or if it’s all acting. Watching a TV star who is clearly on something melt down on camera is only entertaining so many times, and there’s a lot left to this season.
“With every passing moment, Tara was shutting down to the point of non-verbal,” Elizabeth says.
“She’s obviously struggling with the process… she’s afraid to open up and get real,” Jim agrees.
“I’m not sure I can f**king deal with this,” Dean whispers to Tara when they take their seats. I’m not sure why this couple is getting so many free passes, but it’s annoying the other couples in boot camp.
Memphitz and Toya go last in the morgue, and it’s a strange one.
“You’ve been killing her every day with words like this,” Jim hands Memphitz the envelope so he can read the letter.
“I’m sorry for blaming you for things,” Memphitz says. He’s raw and very real.
Toya sits up bitching about how much she doesn’t like the exercise, but then she doesn’t tell Memphitz that she loves him, even with Jim’s prompting. She won’t do it. It’s bizarre.
“You have got to take those walls down,” Elizabeth says.
“The way you care for me, I’ve never received that in my life,” Toya says “But the things that you say to me, it really hurts me.”
Afterwards, the couples get a pep talk from Jim and Elizabeth before heading out to face evaluations.
“You get an opportunity to cherish each other for the rest of your lives,” Jim says.
“The worst thing you could do is to leave this planet with those heartfelt feelings left unsaid,” Elizabeth warns them.
Cody finds Michelle outside crying after the morgue exercise. He asks what’s wrong, and she’s mad that he doesn’t remember exactly what she said. And she won’t tell him. I hate it when people do that.
“It’s always me, it’s always me, it’s always me,” Cody bitches as he walks away.
British tries to find out what’s going on from Cody but he doesn’t want to share their laundry. It’s a “trust” issue, we know that much.
Nobody looks forward to evaluations with Divorce Court’s Judge Lynn Toler. I wasn’t excited to see her back this season. I much preferred it when the Marriage Boot Camp directors did the evaluations because the feedback was much more therapeutic and a lot less showy.
Lisa says being graded with Adam is going to hurt her grade. That’s funny. But really insulting to her husband.
The judge grills Lorenzo first.
“Is she important enough to you for you to make the effort to be a better man for her?” Toler asks.
She’s direct with the house’s only prepper.
“Adam, you will die. The question is will you live first.” Toler says.
Toler lets loose on Tara for not opening up about her own life. Tara plays dumb. Or she’s being herself. Hard to tell.
“If you don’t want to ‘get it’, you won’t ‘get it’,” Toler says.
“Tara is avoiding issues and hiding stuff, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” British says. Good luck with that!
Then Judge Toler busts Michelle and Cody wide open.
“Michelle, are you here to be with this guy, or are you here because you don’t know if he’s the guy for you?” Toler asks.
“I don’t know” Michelle says. Ouch!
Cody tells a story about how Michelle dumped him while they were on a trip with her family for Thanksgiving.
“It’s bad, they’re not going to make it,” Tara predicts from her seat. She’s got some nerve having opinions on anybody else’s relationship.
Cody and Michelle go into another room with Elizabeth and Jim for a one on one before things explode in evaluations. They start arguing, and Cody loses his temper.
“You cannot trust a man who is easily triggered,” Elizabeth says.
Cody doesn’t want to explain why he doesn’t trust Michelle. They make zero progress, and Jim and Elizabeth tell them to give the selfies a rest for the night.
After the evaluations, Tara has a meltdown.
“I can’t do it. I won’t do it,” Tara tells Dean, back in their room.
She has a temper tantrum, and boot camp has hardly gotten started. I don’t think this couple is going to make it through the whole program. I sort of hope they don’t because I’d rather watch the other REAL couples working on their relationships.
Next week, it’s wife swap! And it looks like it’s going to get dramatic. I’ve decided watching Tara Reid reminds me of watching Anna Nicole Smith. She’s a train wreck, but you don’t want to look away. Here’s hoping she gets her s**t together better than Anna Nicole did.