‘The Real Housewives of Dallas’ episode 2 recap: The scat in the hat

The second episode of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Dallas is even more poop-centric than the first, as if anyone thought that could even be possible.

But, yes, everyone’s favorite former Cowboys Cheerleader Brandi Redmond’s fandom for waste really is like Beatlemania — but with fecal matter instead of cute English accents. While baking a chocolate cake with her kids, she says, “It looks like poop pie” to which one of her young daughters wisely replies, “That’s not funny, mommy.”

Out of the mouth of babes.

But it doesn’t end there. Partly because of her obsession with feces, partly because of her desire to enrage frenemy and queen bee Lee Anne Locken, and partly because Bravo thrives on contrived drama, Brandi decides to wear a hat decorated with fake dog turds to the Mad Hatters charity event at the Dallas Arboretum — “the event of the season!,” according to Lee Anne.

Of course, all of the Arboretum is abuzz and Lee Anne is expectedly outraged: “She might as well just walked up to every woman there and went [sic] bitch slap, I’m here.”

Brandi’s hat even riles up a nameless guy friend of Lee Anne’s who would be clutching pearls, if he were wearing any. “I really can’t believe her husband is letting her do all this,” he says with exasperation.

Hey, random reality-show dude, Mad Men called. They want their controlling paternalism back.

And, judging from the next week’s scenes, turdgate is going to continue because Lee Anne is not going to let it go — apparently to Tiffany’s dismay. It all leads to several questions:

▪ As symbolically appropriate as it may be, is this season really going to be all about defecation?

▪ Did former FCC chairman Newton Minow have troubling psychic visions of this show when, way back in 1961, he famously called television a “vast wasteland”?

▪ How soon is this season going to end?

Shake it off

When she’s not making hats out of excrement, Brandi is also teaching the young daughter of Housewife friend Marie some of her Cowboys Cheerleader moves.

Now, the daughter is not a teenager and looks about 9 or 10, so the whole thing is just a little bit inappropriate, maybe not full-on sketchy but sketch-adjacent. Marie wants her “to learn some basic choreography that hopefully she can use.”

Use where exactly?

“Is that too naughty for her?,” Brandi says after a particular move, proving she can occasionally be the adult in the room. A small room, granted, but still.

She then goes on to apologize for the scene she made at Marie’s house the prior week when she tangled with Lee Anne.

Stephanie chimes in and says she thinks Brandi and Lee Anne will bond over similar senses of humor.

Like Steve Harvey hosting a beauty pageant, she is wrong.

A tale of two cities

At various points, producers throw in interstitial shots of the Fort Worth Herd and Cattlemen’s Steakhouse mixed in with the Katy Trail, Reunion Tower, and the Uptown Trolley — like if the images zoom by quickly enough, no one’s going to know. If you had cracked a window during the broadcast, you could have heard everyone in Fort Worth simultaneously slapping their foreheads.

Hot ovens and hot doctors

While cooking with her plastic-surgeon husband, Mark, in their kitchen, nurse Cary Deuber admits she didn’t know that she shouldn’t touch the inside of a toaster oven when it’s on. D’oh!

She also engages in some recreational fat shaming of hubbie. “When I first met Mark, he was a total fixer upper. He was a chubby, married plastic surgeon with a really bad haircut and man boobs. Luckily, I didn’t have to see his man boobs though, just through his scrubs. It’s not like we were doing it when he was fat.”

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse.

“I don’t know what inspired him to lose 80 pounds. Maybe my magical junk.”

Truer words were never spoken

Stephanie on the juvenile poop jokes in which she and her best bud Brandi like to indulge: “Most people don’t think our stupidity is funny.”

That belongs on the dollar bill or in the Constitution or something.

You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do

Lee Anne and live-in boyfriend Rich have a barbecue at their place with Tiffany Hendra and her hubbie, Aaron. They’re kind of like the Lucy, Ricky, Ethel and Fred of DFW, if Lucy, Ricky, Ethel and Fred made allusions to their sexual positions (“What you did the other day? That’s nothing.”) And if Ricky won a Best Legs contest in college like Rich and Fred were from Australia like Aaron.

Aaron 1, Dallas 0

Aaron throws shade worthy of the Amazon jungle on Dallas this episode. When Tiffany proposes buying a home and settling down because she wants to grow old with him in Texas, he responds, “I wanna grow old with you. I know that,” omitting that whole, pesky living in Dallas thing.

Later, while house-hunting, he drops the bomb that he doesn’t “even know if I like Dallas that much” and “I’m trying to like Dallas. I’m trying really hard.”

You would think he was from Fort Worth or something.

Buzzkill

Here’s the moment when you not only want to pull the plug and set your TV on fire but regret that electricity was ever discovered. It’s when Stephanie and Brandi put on fur coats to go out and knock down a wasp’s nest, one of the many chores on the to-do list that Stephanie’s husband, Travis, gives her.

But wait, there’s more.

When some of the pesticide rains down on Brandi, she says, “that was like jizz.”

Damn you, Ben Franklin.

This story was originally published April 18, 2016 at 5:00 PM with the headline "‘The Real Housewives of Dallas’ episode 2 recap: The scat in the hat."