Jen is en route to Rishi, and she gets into a cab, and eagerly opens up to the trapped stranger.
“Do you think this is crazy?” Jen Pennywises.
“Yes,” the cab driver reads ahead.
Meanwhile, after prayer Rishi sits down to eat a hot bowl of his mom’s exhaustion, and she tells him that he should plan to meet his future wife later that night, and she’s not talking about Jen. Rishi reminds her it’s hair-washing day, so he’s going to be busy into the wee hours, but he’ll keep that in mind when he’s at the gym not buying towels or toilet paper.
“My morning starts on a lie,” Rishi sadly reports. “I prefer to begin with yoga, so that I am limber for my mid-afternoon lie.”
The crew has opinions about production’s decision to Electric Boogaloo Jenny and Summit’s storyline, so they zone in on a massive pile of shit an Indian woman picks up with her bare hands, before slapping it into a pile to serve her wifeless son.
“If you think that’s bad, I almost ate a potato,” Nicole sighs, but slow down sweetie, we’re not there yet.
Jen arrives where Rishi waits, cradling a plant of welcome. They greet each other and kiss like they actually like each other, while the driver detaches the luggage and offers to rig it to a train track or load it into the catapult free of charge. Rishi has arranged a pretty gorgeous apartment in Secret Fiance Manor, and there’s petals on the bed swirled into the shape of a ring with a middle finger going into it.
“That means sex,” Paul is pretty sure.
Jen tells Rishi to go get some adult beverages while she settles in, and perhaps she should’ve taken a longer look around that apartment before sending him scurrying, because in short order she’ll be peeling the label from the body to blot her body dry post-shower.
After he returns Rishi keeps checking his watch because Jen won’t stop talking, and he’s hoping to have the sex before he needs to hustle home to greet his future fiance. She says she’s not ready for him to spend the night yet, and wants to take things slowly and get familiar again.
“I’m sorry, my penis could not hear you from inside my pants,” Rishi offers to remove the sound barrier.
“Good sex clouds your judgement,” Jen laughs.
“Fine. Bad sex it is,” Rishi sees a compromise.
“Can we wait until we’re married?” Jen asks. “My friends back home keep responding to my texts with Jenny reaction gifs, and our names are already so close.”
Rishi says that it’s a little late to wait for marriage, and a little nuts to add more time to two celibate years, but he understands that there are cameras present, and they won’t leave until sex is a lost cause or there’s a body part to blur out. He reminds her that he hopes to delay telling his family about their engagement until after they’ve broken up, and Jen tells him her visa is good for four months.
The next day Jen’s wearing a winter hat and coat, and reports having had a bit of a rough night without towels, toilet paper, heat, or a blanket, and so she’s going to wear this getup to passive-aggressively underscore her welcome-rage. She texts her needs to Rishi, who shows up with a portable heater and a pair of yoga mats she can wipe her ass with.
“These rolls are WAY wider than what I’m used to in America,” Jen has plumbing concerns.
A cup of coffee might improve Jen’s morning disposition, but he’d rather she ask his mom about the blanket and maybe meet him on the roof for yoga. Jen’s thinking emergency shopping as opposed to emergency partner-yoga, but Rishi insists that she’s going to have to plank on his dick if he’s going to make it another few months without some fuck-and-run.
“This is called the hysterectomy pose,” Rishi begins. “It is an excellent form of birth control. Just balance your uterus on my knee until your ovaries start to tingle, and then Superman.”
“Am I supposed to be peeing?” Jen’s warm at last.
Jen pulls it off with her bowels packed like a musket and no warm morning beverage in sight, so he fully deserves a post-yoga interrogation about the ass he might have enjoyed during the two years they were apart.
“I maybe have a friend back home that’s a little upset that you didn’t weigh in on her attractiveness after you accepted her friend request, but I promised make it up to her by being rattled anyway,” Jen plays the part.
“I don’t have time for such things,” Rishi says. “It bothers me that you’d think I’d be unfaithful…”
“Good one!” Coach Summit, reporting for plural marriage.
Jen adds that he’d better be telling the truth, because doing it and lying about it would be worse, and Rishi is getting a little tired of having to lie to both Jen and his mom just to not have sex.
Rishi suggests they go to an amazing Indian dress shop, since it will communicate a lot to his family if Jen shows up to meet them wearing traditional attire. Others might seize this opportunity as a chance to press a relationship reveal, but Jen opts to remind Rishi that he told her she was getting the friend intro, so this seems more like pointless sucking up. She entertains the idea all the same, and a salesperson appears, and in a sea of gorgeous garments he somehow isolates the only pseudo-camouflage option to drape over his assistant.
“I believe I am the Extra! Extra! this episode,” The assistant announces, as he casts off the frump and fashions a natty yellow two-piece Jen is equally eager to reject. With two strangers around them Jen knows when it’s time to ask what would happen if their engagement were revealed. Rishi says they could prevent him from leaving the house, and Jen laughs and calls Rishi an asshole.
“Your eyes must be more softer,” Summit is there for Rishi.
Jen’s not having Wishy-Rishi, so she tells him she doesn’t want to meet his family anymore, and he should let her know when he wants to be honest about their relationship, and until then she’s changing her Netflix password.
“I’m so turned on,” Rishi is a man of many minds.
“Oh yeah?” Jenny throws a chair.
Isabel and her kids Miguel and Sara travel to the airport to pick up Gabe, with Miguel packing serious NERF heat to keep the crew quiet. Gabe comes out and tosses his bag into the waiting arms of airport thieves, and then picks up Isabel in a joyful embrace. Sara and Miguel are just as eager to hug him, and they’re one big happy squish family. He hands Isabel some fluffy landfill fodder, and proudly displays his Isabel tattoo, and the bar-code cover-up concealing his last relationship-curse tattoo.
“Please believe we try to talk people out of this,” The tattoo artist needs us to remember it’s not his fault.
Isabel takes Gabe to eat some intestines to fulfill the scary food requirement, and Gabe pretends to not know the secret of sausage. They reflect on their new shared life, and Isabel recalls the metro bus pass she sacrificed to move her family 90 minutes away to this metropolis where she already knows people. Gabe asks for an update on who in her family is aware he’s trans, and is surprised to learn Sara knew from day one. He says that Sara didn’t treat him differently despite knowing, which I assume means Sara is Gabe’s first zoomer.
“Surely someone in your family will be disappointed?” Gabe glances nervously at the crew to see if anyone is sighing.
“My dad?” Isabel offers, which is enough for Gabe to tilt back towards the tale of a potential threat to their relationship, and their chance for multiple seasons.
Kris and Jeymi wake up from the previous night’s underwear party, and Kris looks younger, which speaks to Jeymi’s secret powers. Kris invades her luggage and reports she paid for Jeymi’s wedding dress and shoes, since Jeymi had to pay moving expenses. Now Kris hopes in the future they can make financial decisions together, since that $500 apartment Jeymi picked it twice as expensive as her Alabama mortgage. Kris says that since she’s older and has been in marriages before, clearly she knows the right thing to do here.
“But those marriages didn’t work out,” Jeymi has the point, and 30 days paid vacation from a job that pays her in money. “Why does she think I am poor?”
Both report that the sex was amazing, but Kris says her toothpaste got seized in the airport and she needs a non-mint variety due to allergies. She also has an unnamed prescription to pick up, because otherwise they wouldn’t have this scene.
Kris marvels at the urban landscape around her, and loves that they can hold hands in public without someone in khaki pants and a buzz cut holding a tiki torch and chanting slurs. At the pharmacy they find the right bubblegum toothpaste, and then Jeymi cryptically points to a medication on her phone. Kris explains that 20 years ago she had a car accident that resulted in a broken neck, and then she got rear-ended on the way home and re-injured.
“I always strike twice!” Chaos stops by to remind everyone how it works.
For those unclear about what’s happening here, Kris has been selected to play this season’s Can’t Win. It doesn’t matter that she has a sleep disorder, and is anxious about being in an unfamiliar place without the things she needs, or that the partner giving her the side-eye of disbelief is the same person who reframed a break-up over a side-piece as a time when Kris “disappeared” without explanation. What matters is that the drug is unnamed, and Kris is nervous…probably because she knows she’ll be cast as a drug addict.
“Definitely a drug addict,” Dr. Reddit, reporting for armchair. “According to my master’s degree in assumptions, there’s one type of drug addict, and she’s skinny and southern. Pain isn’t real.”
Kris says she’ll eventually need surgery, but the $100K price-tag paired with a year trapped in headgear inspired her to delay, and she’s confident there’s been no scientific advancements since she received this insight 20 years ago. Jeymi helpfully points out that Colombia also has surgeons, and they don’t just correct back-alley butt injections, and Kris hears this as clearly as she hears Jeymi’s reports about employment.
Nicole greets Mahmoud’s family, and they’re happy to see her and say they’ve missed her, and are hopeful this time she won’t escape.
“You light up all of Cairo,” mom brings the poetry.
The BART car of children and adults fraying the seams of the house push Nicole to her introvert edge, so mom brings out a plate of fried potatoes that threaten the integrity of Nicole’s hardware.
“Two quick circuit connections from my main frame to potatoes, and just like that I’m a radio,” Nicole wishes she didn’t have to explain this.
Sis-in-law Fatima is from China, and Nicole suspects she’s had an easier time integrating into Egyptian life, so Fatima suggests learning Arabic could be easier than waiting for millions of people to learn English. Nicole asks if Fatima has friends, and she says she doesn’t, but it’s fine since she can’t leave the house anyway.
“Please go shopping with me,” Fatima pleads.
Nicole retreats to their room in hopes of finding no one else, but Mahmoud follows her so she tries to figure out what that’s about. She’s eager for them to get their own apartment (again) because she managed to stay a whole two months after he arranged one last time.
“I just need some space where I can pretend I’m not in Egypt, while also pretending I’m going to remain in Egypt,” Nicole explains.
“But my love, okay, it is like, yes my love,” Mahmoud talks while we anticipate Debbie.
Debbie leaves her house of treasures with a peacock-shaped bag on her arm, which she’ll use to collect the haterade flowing freely from son Julian’s geyser of doubt.
“This is what happens when eccentrics have children,” Debbie defends spinster aunts everywhere. “They become cops, preachers, accountants, insurance executives. It’s all ‘fuck art, let’s kill.’”
“Exactly,” Julian agrees with her hypothesis. “I’m going to drop you off at the rest home over there.”
“Over my dead body!” Debbie objects.
“Not dead, decaying,” Julian clarifies.
My favorite 90DF mother-son team are on a quest to meet Debbie’s lawyer Gina, who has arranged a prenup for Debbie to ignore while Julian’s blood pressure rises. Gina assures Julian that what Debbie has will remain hers, so long as her assets are anchored in Georgia. Julian thinks Morocco might have a different interpretation, and Debbie notes that she’d love to bring Osama state-side, but their age difference inspired immigration to send her a certified stop-it-already order, with files she couldn’t open containing curated episodes from 90DF’s previous 300 seasons.
Gina is surprised by the 43-year age difference, and offers to help Debbie pull up a few choice scenes from YouTube. That sounds distracting to Deb, who wants to know if she can drop some coin on the kid if she time-travels fifteen years into the future and is still alive.
“And, like, you’re still married? To each other?” Gina tries to recall if this has happened in the history of multiple-decade age differences.
“I anticipate happily ever after,” Debbie insists.
“You anticipated that with two other husbands.” Julian retorts. He takes her reference to showering Osama with material affection in the future as evidence she’s already done exactly that, and worries that it won’t take much convincing for her to route money out of her account and into Osama’s.
“Since we’re already here, can we talk power of attorney?” he asks. “Or can you recommend a bank account with a kickstand?”
NEXT TIME: Kris adjusts to a gunless country with a little help from a side- stabby that makes Jeymi squeak; Debbie heads for Morocco to interrupt skateboarding with a six-pack of juice boxes and a promise to fall off a camel; Jen re-meets Rishi’s family and they worry he won’t find a wife with this weird white lady hanging around; Daniele diagnoses Yohan as toxic, because she’s already tried emasculation and financial shaming, and she’s almost out of tools in her manifestation kit; and Nicole malfunctions from the pressures of playing Muslim on TV, in a country she hates with some dude she can’t stand, who keeps knocking on the door like a toddler asking for a snack, while surrounded by toddlers asking for snacks.
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