House of Villains Recap: The One Where the Villains Wake Up

You all have to promise me that if I offer a controversial opinion up top you won’t cancel me: Maybe taking New York out was the right move for House of Villains. At long last, our remaining villains are finally practicing real gameplay instead of attempting to just pick off big targets for the sake of peace and quiet. With both Jax and New York out of the house, under-the-radar players like Shake and Tanisha snap to life this week, offsetting the standard bumbling (Corinne) and floating (Anfisa) of some of the show’s less-versed players. House of Villains is starting to feel more like an off-the-rails Survivor in a mansion with each passing week, and that’s exactly the sweet spot E! should be firing at with future (god-willing) iterations of the series. Jax was never going to latch onto strategy, and New York was too focused on delivering pitch-perfect memes to give us proper alliance work, so it pains me to say that both villains being gone is perhaps the best thing to happen to House of Villains other than Danielle Staub’s lingering guest appearance two weeks ago.

An activated, fighting-for-his-life Shake is at the center of much of this episode, having been quickly identified as one of two votes against Anfisa (the other being Bobby) in last week’s elimination. Though Shake tries to throw Anfisa off his scent by attempting to confirm her suspicion that Corinne was the other vote against her, he immediately stabs a knife into his own back by confiding in Bobby that he’d voted for Anfisa, as he thought New York could further his game. “Villain rule No. 88: Don’t trust me,” says Bobby in a confessional. I’d like to know rules 1 through 87 if “don’t trust me” is not important enough to even crack the top 80.

From a thankful viewer’s perspective, alliances seem totally fractured and fluctuating this week, making it impossible to tell who’s at the biggest risk for the Hit List, making for a taut, tense episode of hushed one-on-ones and backstabbing. Bobby tells us his alliance with Corinne broke the moment she turned on New York in the last vote, which is the shuffle the decks so sorely needed. Bobby also immediately blows up Shake’s confession that he voted for Anfisa, right to Anfisa and Corinne’s faces, making Shake “a meat shield,” in the words of Banana, who’s once again showing off his prowess in shifting the spotlight off him to lesser players. At the end of the world, it’ll be cockroaches and Johnny Bananas roaming the land.

Our Battle Royale is called Cold and Calculated, and it’s the funniest challenge yet. Each villain is given a chest, held shut by three locks. To complete the challenge, the villains must hammer their way through ice blocks, which contain locks and keys. The locks can be added to their competitors’ chests to slow them down; the keys can only be used once. The villain who unlocks all their locks first wins the challenge. The twist? Their hammers are also encased in ice blocks; the only way to get to them is through body heat.

A producer intervenes before the challenge begins to let contestants know they cannot pee on their ice cubes to melt them, which Bobby and Fairplay immediately concede they’d been planning to do. God works hard, but the devils of reality TV work harder.

The challenge quickly — and I mean in seconds at most — becomes as pornographic as cable TV will allow, with Fairplay in a banana hammock riding his ice block, Bananas taking a slip-n-slide approach to his like a cat in heat, Bobby going for a tongue-first approach. Joel McHale stares wordlessly with a twinkle in his eye, watching small-screen gold being made.

Bananas gets his hammer out first, followed by Shake, both of whom break locks out of ice and attach them to Bobby’s chest. Soon, everyone’s in on the action, with all the locks going on Shake and Bobby’s chests, and Omarosa evading everyone’s attention, coming down to her last lock at the same moment Shake does. Shake beats her and unlocks his lock, and starts running around the room, boasting to Corinne and Bobby that they were both “fucking toast,” but Joel — again, excellent, droll hosting on full display — asks loudly and clearly if Shake has opened his box, which, readers, he sure hasn’t. Omarosa sees an opening, unlocks her final lock, opens her trunk, and declares victory over Shake, who moves from dumbfounded to furious. Joel confirms it: Omarosa is our Villain of the Week.

Back at the house, Shake goes onto “cleanup duty” with everyone he’s infuriated, starting with Corinne, but it ends with Shake calling Corinne “such a good pawn! A brainless little pawn that sucks onto …” before getting cut off by Corinne’s barrage of swears and middle fingers. If that’s Shake’s definition of cleanup duty, I fear to imagine what his home looks like.

We cut to Omarosa in the kitchen with Corinne, Anfisa, and Tanisha. She’s using oranges to strategize who she’ll put on the Hit List; Tanisha’s eyes glaze over while mathematical equations flash across the screen. “Baby, the last time I was this confused, I stepped on a scale,” Tanisha says. I love her so much. Maybe I want her to win? She doesn’t deserve it from a gameplay POV, but let’s give this woman the check!

Later, Omarosa invites allies Anfisa and Fairplay to the reward. “Because he’s so good, you have to work with him, or he’ll come for you,” she says of Fairplay before telling him she’s considering putting him on the Hit List. Her “reasoning,” she says, is that Fairplay could win the redemption challenge against Shake and Bananas — supposedly her other targets — but really, it’s just her soft-checking to see if she could get him to put himself in the line of fire as a way of getting him out of the competition without getting her hands dirty. It’s the old “I never meant for him to go home!” trick and Fairplay is not here for it because it’s just that: a trick, one he’s seen one million times before, and he’s too smart and well-versed in the genre to fall for it.

Omarosa, a queen at reading the room, senses Fairplay’s dissent and pivots. At the Hit List ceremony, it’s Shake, Corinne, and Tanisha on the chopping block. “This shit got more twists and turns than a wet synthetic weave,” says Tanisha of Corinne’s inclusion before her name gets called. When asked why Tanisha made the List, Omarosa has a simple answer: “The one thing I disdain the most in reality TV are floaters … they just float through the game and under the radar. Not on my watch.”

Tanisha, gorgeously, is activated, pointing out all the ways she’s been showing up to play, quietly or otherwise. “Child, I’ve been interviewing people like I’m Barbara Walters in this bitch,” she spits. “Do you understand me? Getting all the tea and the Henny.” Long live Tanisha!

The Villains’ Attic

• “Girl, you loud this morning, it’s too early for all that,” Omarosa says to the house’s omnipresent narrator. It pains me how good at making TV this woman is.

• Omarosa tells the housemates that Mark Burnett used to try to make the season one contestants of The Apprentice try to make their beds on the show. More, more, more curtain-lifting!

• Joel McHale is proving to be not only an excellent master of ceremonies but also a top-notch competition show host, as genuinely invested in the game as he is in the foolishness of the construct of it all.

• I guess we have to mention Corinne and Tanisha holding a funeral for the New York doll? There, that’s our mention. I’d rather focus on the gauzy music video sequence by the “band” Corinne’s Fantasy, which is just an excuse for a sultry, shirtless Bananas montage called “Heaven’s Gonna Have to Wait.” Corinne is on House of Bachelors, and I have not grown tired of her competing on an entirely separate show for one second.

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