JoannKB

That giant house for only $3500? I should move to Flagstaff! You could get about 1400 sq ft in LA for that. I certainly hope they paid someone to clean up their Vegas houses for them after they left. A realtor is going to need to show them, and s/he is not going to do that clean up themselves. And... if they can afford paying mortgages on the Vegas houses and the Flagstaff land plus the rentals in Flagstaff - they could afford to hire movers. I'm sure if was TLC production's idea that they do all the moving themselves. Or else - what would they film?

It's so weird that the only thing they were considering when choosing between properties was how it "felt" or what the view was. Are the properties identical prices? Is the cost of building homes on them the same price? Aren't they in different parts of town? Is there one that's farther away from places they might need to go? Do any of them need to find a local job in the area? Is there a difference in the public schools?

Can someone explain the linguistic backbends that the women were going through to try to reassure Kody that the Women's March was not a "political protest" but a "walk of support"? The amount of times they said "it's not a protest" was bizarre. Would Kody not let them go if it was a political protest? If so, is that because: 1. He is morally or religiously against political protest, or 2. Against this cause, protesting this current political climate in particular, or 3. Worried that they would get arrested, or were doing something illegal, or 4. Worried that TLC would not film two political protests in one season, and therefore not cover his polygamy law protest? I couldn't quite figure out what was not being said. They kept repeating themselves and getting so specific about the language that it seemed like there was something unspoken.

It's very distracting, especially in the scenes when she's standing next to her sister. They are completely different colors now. Their skin tone - they don't even look related anymore.

Cutting up your wedding dress and turning it into flowers is not "something borrowed." Borrowing something means that you will return it after you use it. That's why "something borrowed" at a wedding is usually something like a piece of jewelry or maybe a grandparents' handkerchief or something. Then you give it back after the wedding. Mykelti is not going to give the fabric flowers back after the wedding and it will magically become a wedding dress again.

But if Maci's solution to her complaints is to get Ryan to step up and ask to have his time with Bentley be spent with him and Mack only, rather than always at Jenn & Larry's house - which I think is a good solution - then approaching Mack with this suggestion is good. Maci maybe went a little too far with the Jenn & Larry criticism, and Mack was put on the spot with the TV cameras there, but I think the conversation overall was a good idea.

When Jeff told Varner that he'd outed Zeke to millions of people, I wanted someone to say "not if you don't air this." It's not live TV. The choice to make it an outing to millions was the production's choice. What Varner did was awful, but I really hope that Jeff and the producers got Zeke's permission to make this a part of the show. They didn't have to.

I thought the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz was unique! I didn't not realize that they have these all over the country. It made me faint, too. So don't feel bad.

Exactly. I'm a size 8 in regular clothes and had to get a size 12 wedding dress. With Rebecca's beautiful "ample bosom" there is no way she is fitting into a size 6 wedding dress. They missed an opportunity to get a funnier joke about being horrified about what size dress she would have to get. As far as the wedding planning, why did she have to do everything herself? Sure no wedding planners would do it on that timeline, but surely there are bakeries, florists, etc. that she could hire. I know it's funnier if she goes all out over the top, but the fact that they never even addressed her other options (buy some cake pops at the grocery store, for goodness sake) bugged.

This should just become the Lisa Edelstein & Retta show. Their scenes were way better than anything else this show has been doing lately.

After Jack's "we should have another kid," I thought for sure this week's twist was going to be that there was a fourth kid who died, and Kate's guilt over that somehow was going to be the source of her weight issue. Glad I was wrong. My son's school has this policy, but it's only if you are passing out invitations at the school. You can't give invitations to only some of your classmates; you must pass them out to all. (They have the same policy on valentines; you must give valentines to your entire class if you give them out.) However, if you send evites or mail out invitations you can invite whomever you want.

Have Abby & Jake ever tried to get to the bottom of why their son is an asshole and how they might be able to fix that? This show seems to treat his behavior as just normal kids stuff so Abby can roll her eyes and look exasperated at parenthood. But that is not normal kid behavior.

I think a lot of why Meri is unsettled by Mariah's coming out is that is completely exposes how broken their mother-daughter relationship is for everyone to see. It makes Meri realize that she does not know her own daughter. Mariah didn't tell her first, and used a whole crowd of supportive co-parents in order to cushion herself from the cold reaction that she knew she was going to get from Meri. It's all interlinked. Now that her relationship with Kody has fallen apart, and she never pursued a relationship with her sister wives other than Robyn, Mariah was Meri's only chance at having a close family member. And the fact that Meri could be so blind to something fundamental about her daughter makes it clear that the mother-daughter relationship is no longer what she hoped it would be.

Exactly. You only get to say this if you are paying for your own wedding. You can't simultaneously ask for money to pay for your wedding and say that you get the final say about all of the decisions, like when the wedding is. I didn't see either of them say that they would pay for their own wedding in order to be able to have the wedding they want.

This was creepy. Kody kept saying he and Tony were "negotiating the contract" like he was selling off his daughter for two goats and a cow.

Their conversation was kind of fascinating to me. They kept pretending it was about Mariah, and using Mariah as a stand-in for their own feelings about the situation. ("I think Mariah is upset that you kicked me out of the house..." etc.) If talk ever veered too close to their actual feelings, Kody insisted that they can't have the conversation without their therapist present. What type of person demands a third party present in order to have an honest conversation with your spouse, other than someone in the middle of divorcing? As far as Mykelti, it was frustrating to me that they focused on the proximity of the wedding to Maddie's as being the problem. They kept saying they didn't want Mykelti to upstage her sister, or that they couldn't afford 2 weddings in a year, and that's why they didn't want her to get married so quickly, rather than focusing on the real issue: that Tony is a creeper and Mykelti changes her mind on a whim, so the chances of this marriage lasting are pretty slim. Some of the adults kind of said this to the camera, but no one said it to Mykelti. Kody is such a fan of his therapist, he should have asked Tony and Mykelti to see her for some pre-marriage counseling. It seems like any neutral third party would be able to see that them getting married is a terrible idea.

This is the part that made me laugh: Debra tells Farrah she wants to introduce her to her boyfriend/fiance and Farrah says no, not until you've known him for a year. Because her therapist told her that she shouldn't introduce Sofia to her boyfriends until they are serious / been dating a year. So Farrah is comparing herself to a 7 year-old? She thinks the same advice about introducing potential father figures to a child applies to her, a grown adult woman?

I think that's a big part of it. When they were filming 16 & Pregnant, they thought it was a one-off. They knew that they could not take care of a baby when they were 16 in the current situation they were in - with no money, with their parents on drugs or in and out of jail, with their relationship on and off. But if they had known that MTV would provide them with an income so that they didn't have to worry about finishing school or getting a job, and that April would clean up enough to be able to parent their child for them, then they would have kept Carly. So I think that's where the regret comes from.

Farrah's scenes with Derek's family were obviously fakey fake, but they were interesting to me in that they showed that Farrah does know how to be civil with people when she wants to. It shows she is aware of what polite human interaction looks like, which makes her interactions with her own family / friends / employees even more horrifying. Because it means she's choosing to act like a monster, and she knows she's acting like a monster. Because she has the ability to maintain a polite personality but chooses not to.

True, but the mother didn't know what happened. She wasn't in the car, and she doesn't know what her daughter said to Kate. All she knew was that her daughter was left by the side of the road and found her own way home. And the mother immediately believes and trusts a brand new employee and praises her? The mom may have kicked her own kid out of the car before, but that doesn't mean that she is cool with a stranger doing it. I may punish my child, but I wouldn't want someone else doing it for me when I haven't asked them to. Kate was hired to do a lot of stuff, including driving the daughter around. The first time she did so, she didn't complete the task. She should at least be questioned about that. Why would Kate's first reaction be to kick the kid out of the car rather than call the mom and explain the situation (that she doesn't have Ashley's address and the kid is being a jerk)? It just seemed unrealistic to me that the mom's first instinct would be to reward Kate for not driving her daughter and taking it upon herself to dole out a punishment, when she had asked Kate - a brand new employee - to drop her daughter off, as part of her job.

How long was Kate working for Jami Gertz before she left her daughter on the side of the road? Because that seems crazy that she would not get fired for that. Not only did she not get fired, but the boss instantly took Kate's side, apologized to her, and then gave her almost everything she asked for and begged her not to quit. That's bonkers. Even if Jami Gertz knows her daughter's a jerk, she barely knows Kate. We, as the audience, know that Kate is a good person and we see all of the underlying issues going into it, but there's no way for Jami Gertz to know that Kate is a saint and not a psycho who left a teenage girl by the side of the road with no ride home when one of her job duties was to drive the girl around, as had been explicitly stated during the interview.

I loved the leather apron dress. I thought it was adorable. That and the black "couch" dress were my favorite. Jenni's dress must have walked better in person than on TV because it looked really saggy and shapeless to me. Hated Erin's dress. They kept focusing on the feathers, which were awful, but I also thought the skirt part was way too short and tight, combined with the slit up the side looked cheap.

When Matt exclaims about the clothes costing $900, Amber said, "Really??" like she was taken by surprise. Did she not even look at the price tags the whole time Leah was trying things on, or can she not do simple math to add up the cost of what she is buying?

I think Marcus was exaggerating the wrongness of the branding - surely he understands aspirational branding - but what he was ultimately trying to do made sense. If the product's unique advantage is that it is natural, then the branding should reflect that, and look clean/green/healthy/environmentally friendly. If they are trying to brand it to look expensive, so that they can charge more, then it only makes sense to do that for products that might actually be on display in a home. Hand soap, dish soap, maybe even surface cleaner, I can understand paying more for a pretty bottle that conveys a fancy lifestyle. But floor cleaner, toilet cleaner, leather cleaner, sneaker spray? These things are going to be in a cabinet under a sink. And the type of person who would pay $9 for a cleaning product won't be the person using those products anyway - they have a housekeeper or a cleaning service. So either brand the whole line as natural/green, or keep the aristocratic branding and pare down the line only to those items that would be on display and would be used on a regular basis by the person buying them.

Adding the food trucks wasn't about expanding the visibility of the brand. It was about adding income, pure and simple. Grilled cheese and Hawaiian shaved ice are two of the best candidates for that - very cheap food costs, broad audience, and a good percentage mark-up. These are the two easiest concepts to get off the ground quickly. The Sugar Babies cupcake truck has been parked with a for sale sign on it in a parking lot near my house for months and months last year, in LA. Now I now why it finally went away. Interesting that they chose to buy that one and drive it all the way out to Chicago.