‘Real World Homecoming: Los Angeles’ Episode 5 Recap: “Moving Forward With A New Story”

Healing and beauty are the name of the game on the latest episode of The Real World Homecoming: Los Angeles. That’s why it’s so appropriate that this recap is brought to you by Castle House Estates, Joshua Tree’s greatest destination for glamping. Need a cathartic spiritual experience in the desert and clean linens? Try Castle House Estates.

Glen gets a real moment in this episode, both to shine and to process some grief. As we rejoin the house-mates, he’s still just beginning to open up about the 2019 death of his girlfriend Kim. He’s got a tattoo of the Roman numeral for 29 on his ring finger, and apparently so did she, their unofficial wedding rings. He’s clearly still shell-shocked and in some deep mourning. “His past has been holding him hostage,” Beth A tells us. Glen is going to need closure, and I hope he gets it, and I hope it’s not through the medium of quick-drag Cancun beauty pageantry, as the gang did in the original season. (I do not want to meet “Bertha” again, and neither do you.) (The original season is on Paramount+ if you want to know what I’m referring to here. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.)

And then there is an INCOMING MESSAGE, one of those little montages from back then that the producers like to throw into the mix to spice things up. This particular one is all about Tami’s abortion, which she got while the show was filming. Tami was very open about it, which was — and remains — pretty unheard of in the world of reality television. What we didn’t know is that her recovery, which we got to see on camera, which is also incredibly rare, was actually much more complicated than we saw, because she was pregnant with twins. Irene reveals that she too had had an abortion a year or so before the show was shot, and then Beth A says the same. (She was pregnant by “a well-known actor,” and I shouldn’t be speculating about which star of School Ties or Where The Day Takes You she’s talking about, but if you’re going to put that blind item out there, that’s where my head is going to go.)

Tami says she felt alone during that whole process back then, and she would have appreciated knowing that two of her castmates had also had an abortion, but maybe they just weren’t ready to say that into a camera just yet. Beth S is absolutely ready to say into a camera that she also had one, but she saves it for a rooftop tête-à-tête with Tami, who sees right through her: “She could have said that downstairs on the couch, because the cameras followed her out here anyway.”

Now as then, Jon is staunchly pro-life, but level-headed about the whole thing, the way a person tends to be when a cultural flashpoint stops being abstract and starts being a real person you know. He’s a good egg, Jon. (Bertha is still a nightmare, though.)

From shots of rallies that cast members have attended, we learn that abortion has been a hot-button issue from the very first season all the way up to 2019’s Real World: Atlanta. We also learn that there was a Real World: Atlanta, and that it took place in 2019.

Another INCOMING MESSAGE replays the cast’s disastrous Outward Bound excursion, in which their leaders got them lost and absolutely nobody learned anything or had any fun at all. The producers offer them a do-over on that trip, in a message that ends with a “#namaste,” to which Tami replies, “Nah, I’m-a stay.” She says the original Joshua Tree trip is a trigger for her now, because she was once homeless, or maybe because it’s where her pregnancy was revealed, and then she says she doesn’t want to go because she needs to process her emotions about her mother’s death, and it’s like: just say you don’t want to sleep on the ground, we get it. Whatever the reason, she’s going to stay in Los Angeles and get some rest in a nice hotel.

But joke’s on her, because the Joshua Re-Treeing is in a nice hotel. It’s at the Castle House Estates, a truly gorgeous plot of land right in the heart of Joshua Tree with a pool and some yurts and a fire pit. There are also a couple of turret-looking structures that turn out to be luxury suites. Did you ever see anything like that? You will at Castle House Estates, Joshua Tree’s leading destination for high-end vision quests.

So this, finally, blessedly, is where Eric Nies comes in. He still looks hot as the desert sun, he’s still on the shaman trip, he still sits cross-legged. He’s going to be taking them through a plant-medicine healing ritual, with his friend Ron Interpreter, that aims to reconnect them with their inner children. I want very badly for this to be ayahuasca. Alas, no: one of the facilitators of the ritual says they’ll be enjoying the healing properties of a plant called “cacao,” which they will dissolve in hot water and drink. I believe this in my very soul: the producers really did pitch a full-cast ayahuasca trip, and what ended up happening was the very most that the legal department at Paramount+ was willing to sign off on, which is the cast sitting in a tent and drinking Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate.

I a little bit expect Jon to go full Marguerite Perrin on this situation…

…but he’s game. David, whose family is from Barbados and dabbled in what he calls “black magic,” retires to his castle. Glen says the word he is focusing on during the ritual is “Kim,” because he wants to mourn her fully. And as he says this, a cute lil mouse enters the circle and comes up to him and gives him a cute lil kiss on his hand. It is very sweet, and that’s before he reveals that Kim used to scoop up cute lil mice in their house to spare them from death at the claws of their house cat. There’s video of it and everything! Glen chooses to believe that that cute lil mouse was a message from Kim herself. “That’s her saying don’t worry about me, I’m in a good place, and you need to get to that place,” he says, and I choose to believe that too, because this is a rough time in history and we need to believe some happy shit once in a while.

It’s a lovely moment, made even more so by having taken place at Castle House Estates, Joshua Tree’s least-stressful place to do mushrooms probably! (No money has changed hands here, reader.) (But Castle House Estates people: I think it’s only fair you hook me up with that turret suite for a night or two. Get at me via Decider.com.)

The next morning, Eric sees the gang off and advises them not to talk about one another, but to support each other on their paths forward. It’s good advice that will fall on about fifty percent deaf ears. But back to Venice they go, where a refreshed Tami awaits them, and Beth A and Glen go get that XXIX tattoo lasered off his ring finger, so that he can finally move forward. It is a nice ending of a largely nice episode that focused on healing and mental health, which is good, because the rest of this show has felt like watching people be tortured.

Next week, I bet Ruthie from Real World Hawaii shows up with a bottle of Southern Comfort and a taser.

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now. He also hosts the Real World podcast Truu Stowray, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch The Real World Homecoming Los Angeles Episode 5 on Paramount+