Treatment To The Gallery Girls Episode You Wish Existed
By Dara Katz
The episode begins with a cold open set in a cave in Williamsburg as CHANTAL exerts all the skeletal muscle in her wilting little anime frame to lift a shovel. She’s burying the lifeless body of her most recent homicide victim, Spencer, that Asian fetish-consumed boyfriend of hers. As the camera pans out to reveal other unburied remains, to not much surprise, we discover she is a serial killer. The murder happens off screen, but we do catch a glimpse of vampire-esque bite marks in Spencer’s neck. She ultimately cannot lift the shovel, so instead she lights a cigarette and heads out of her murder cave to that other hollow of death, End of Century.
Credits roll, and now we’re in AMY’s Upper East Side apartment where she’s living a Grey Gardens tale minus the mother plus a life-size blow up sex doll to which she’s taped a picture of LIZ’s face. She makes sure the water’s just right and steps into the shower with LIZDOLL tucked under her arm while singing “Put on a Happy Face” and proceeds to wash LIZDOLL’s butt crack. She says in her interview, “Like I said, I’ve known Liz a long time. We both come from wealthy families where showering together is what we do because the showers are so big!”
In Murray Hill, we see JERSEYBRO sleeping face down in bed. With the help of the production crew, the bro is flipped onto the other side of the bed revealing MAGGIE gasping for air. Under JERSEYBRO’s weight, she’d sunk into an indentation in the mattress dark and deep enough to keep Bill Compton safe from the sun. She leaves for the other suffocating heft in her life, Eli Klein’s Wondrous Gallery of the Only Chinese Art in New York City. Her GAY BEST FRIEND waves goodbye from the window while sipping pink champagne. He then proceeds to give a blowjob to a sleeping (or is he?) JERSEYBRO.
At Eli Klein’s Wondrous Gallery, ELI KLEIN is sporting an all out Jew-fro but acts as if his morning wasn’t completely ruined when he realized he forgot to not pay one of his hookers interns to run to the Duane Reade and grab him some mousse on their own trust funded dime. He’s giving, who he believes to be LIZ, a massage but is actually the LIZDOLL that AMY clandestinely placed at the gallery earlier that morning before her early bird full body waxing appointment. MAGGIE walks in, head down, not noticing any weirdness, and for the next ten hours attempts to trap and kill the fly ELI told her to kill but does not actually exist.
An alarm clock goes off in Gramercy where real LIZ awakes, looks at the clock, and then says, “Fuck it who cares?”
We return after commercial break to End of Century where CLAUDIA is hiding behind a rack of sheep skin thongs. She’s anticipating her family barging through the EOC door demanding the $15,000 plus interest or her head so she screams out of shear fear of possible confrontation when CHANTAL walks through the doors. LARA, who’s doing nothing, makes eye contact with CHANTAL and they both roll their eyes so much that LARA goes into seizure, which makes CHANTAL roll her eyes even more. In an interview CHANTAL says “I’m bored. So I’m throwing a ‘trunk show’ at my secret cave tonight. It should be spooky.” Her shoulders bounce and she giggles toward the camera. The production crew is forced to sign waivers.
Across the bridge in Williamsburg, ANGELA is going up to handicapped strangers and forcing them to take pictures of her walking down the street in what appears to be a codpiece over each boob and a sheep skin thong she stole from EOC. She says something like “I’m just surprised all these Lane Bryant-wearing laypeople don’t get the ISO.” She’s trying to get her mind off the fact that she’s murdered her best friend ALEX for not spending enough time making her famous for free. She needs a place to bury the body, and is excited she’s shooting CHANTAL’s trunk show because it’s the perfect place to get rid of the body. In an interview she says, “But wait. Who’s gonna carry Alex’s body if he’s dead? He’s still causing me so much fucking grief!”
We return from commercial to the cave with an eerily calm CHANTAL. There are neither trunks nor shows, except the skeletons she’s hung amongst the stalactites. CLAUDIA shows up first. She sees the skeletons and then admits in her interview, “The installation is amazing. Cave man minimalism is so in…Once again, Chantal has one-upped me as gallery curator…” CHANTAL resists her impulse to murder CLAUDIA immediately.
On an ambiguous Brooklyn sidewalk MAGGIE, LIZ, and, oh yeah, KERRI, walk to the cave. MAGGIE says to the camera, “I hate going to Brooklyn. It’s like where Manhattanites go to get murdered.” And LIZ bluntly breaks the fourth wall saying, “I’m going to this fucked up retarded cave thing because I’m on your fucking show now tickle my butt hole.”
The girls enter the cave to see CHANTAL, CLAUDIA, and ANGELA, who’s just discovered the automatic setting on her camera and has positioned it on the tripod that is ALEX’s stiff dead body in a duffle bag (Louis Vuitton) so she can take as many event photos of herself as she desires (that will show ALEX!). CHANTAL greets everyone, and, resisting every devil-cell in her body, tells them that they look beautiful. She also asks them to get naked, which is right when AMY enters with LIZDOLL and exclaims with absolute perfect timing and total relief that she got that full body wax earlier, “We’re already naked!” Cut to an interview of CHANTAL giggling until she coughs up blood, which she then lets drip into a jar and uses as rouge for her lips (the secret’s revealed!).
After they all strip their clothes off without question due to the combination of some strange ass group think and the presence of a camera crew, LIZ takes one look at LIZDOLL and says “What the fuck? That doll’s not even gluten-free. A real friend would know never to bring a blow up sex doll of me to a cave who’s not gluten-free. Like what the fuck?” Thus ensues a fight between LIZ and AMY, but it’s really just LIZ yelling and AMY trying to kiss her. The other girls, except for ANGELA who is too self-consumed (and who also came to the event naked), get involved in the fight and fail to notice CHANTAL collecting their strewn clothes and exiting the cave with the accidental stride and posture of Fosse dancer.
As yelling and hair pulling commence in the background, outside the cave, CHANTAL puts the end of her cigarette to the dynamite fuse and says “Oops.” Within seconds the mouth of the cave is blocked with rock and pieces of Williamsburg. CHANTAL looks at the camera and says, “I don’t have enough ATP to murder them all in one sitting. So I figured they could just kill each other. I wonder who’ll they eat first?” Our antihero grins, opens her mouth, sticks her cigarette in it, swallows, and walks into the Brooklyn night…probably to Union Pool…
The camera cuts to a street view of pedestrians walking past what was once the mouth of the cave. Flashes of light from Angela’s camera shine through the rocks every three seconds, but this is Brooklyn, and a weird site on the street doesn’t implore its inhabitants to stop and see if a group of millennials are stuck inside a cave. And this is also Gallery Girls, so being stuck inside a cave does not alter their delusions of self importance. Next season on Cave Girls, not much will change. It will just be a little harder for some of them to access their trust funds.