Farrell: ‘Southern Charm’ premiere gets off to surreal and scary start

Four minutes into the season three premiere of “Southern Charm” on Monday night and it wasn’t entirely clear whether this was the Bravo TV reality show or a re-enactment of “The Exterminating Angel,” that 1960s era film of Spanish surrealism in which upper-class dinner guests are psychologically stuck in a room to the point that they begin acting like savages.

The flash-forward takes us three months into a dark future in which the cast sits around the dining room table at Thomas Ravenel’s “new home.”

Right away it is clear that something is terribly wrong.

Shep has a sad, patchy trail beard, Cameran hardly looks like herself because she isn’t at all smiling, and Thomas seems to be giving a toast, but it’s not a toast. He’s roasting his guests, and not in a fun Comedy Central way. This is straight-up bourbon truth.

The dinner devolves into instant chaos. It is suddenly a full-blown reunion episode but without Andy Cohen there to referee the screaming or to tell Kathryn to sit down.

The scene ends with Thomas calling Landon and Cameran “thin-skinned b-whatevers” as he kicks them off his property and makes threats against everyone’s well-being, all as he grabs onto the slats of his wrought-iron gate as if it’s 2008 and he’s just trying to make it through Day 1 of his federal prison-term without getting pet like a goat.

Then boom, we’re back to present-day Charleston where the camera pans over Kathryn’s swollen baby belly as if to shock us. She’s pregnant again, guys! Whose baby could it be? Remember ... she and Thomas were firmly broken up the last time we checked! SORRY, BRAVO EDITORS. EVERYONE KNOWS ALREADY. IT’S A BABY RAVENEL. A “boy child,” worth $10,000 in Ravenel dollars if I remember correctly from Season 1.

The real shock, though, comes from the next shot, which is of Thomas Ravenel’s black eye. We later find out this is the result of some head-butting situation with a stranger in a bar and NOT AT ALL from Kathryn’s ring-less fist.

Of the two scenarios, nobody would’ve bet on the first situation being true over the second. Nobody.

After Kathryn calls herself ghetto for using a window-unit air conditioner and dictates a highly punctuated text to Thomas, the episode becomes familiar again and gets down to business: HashtagNewCraig.

That’s the name of the episode. HashtagNewCraig.

I’m trying to figure out what the cast’s deal with Craig is. I’ve spent the past 10 years of my life considering the subtext in “Real Housewives” disputes. The argument is never about what they say it is. Nope. It’s not “she said this” or “that.” It is almost always about who’s trying to steal air time with their bogus “story lines” and who’s strategizing behind the scenes for a more Hollywood-friendly existence.

Who’s faking their way to the top?

If anyone is guilty of this it would be Craig, at least through the cast’s eyes. In fact, Cameran’s Twitter bio is “I don’t have an agent, but Craig does.”

In Season 2, we left off with Craig being outed as a drunk phony who is living beyond his means and acting like the king of Charleston nightlife. He isn’t studying for the bar. He gets fired from his law firm. And he’s annoying everyone on the show with his scatter-brain and alky-breath.

After a confrontation, he gets all shaky-voiced and tells Whitney and Shep about his sky-high rent and rock-bottom life. They spend the rest of the season mercilessly reminding him of this.

Between seasons, Craig has moved to Fenwick Island, Del., where he is “Silver Linings Playbook”-ing it, running through the streets of his childhood neighborhood, living with Mom and Dad and saving money.

Then it’s time to film again, so of course he returns to Charleston HEALED and falls into the waiting arms of the girlfriend who I knew about only because I Insta-stalked him a few weeks ago (they’re still together, kids)

Naomie, we’re told, is originally from France. Her parents are letting her and Craig live in their vacant West Ashley home that is filled with my dream couches (pristine and white) and that abuts a deep-water marsh.

We only know it’s a deep-water marsh because Naomie points this out to us as if we care.

“Are there alligators?” Craig asks her.

“Oh, shut up,” Naomie says. “Only people from the North ask that.”

Um, HE JUST TOLD US YOU’RE FROM FRANCE. So get out of here with your supériorité.

Anyway, HashtagNewCraig wants to throw a party at his new house to show that he’s changed. He is no longer the drunk loser who can’t afford lovely things. No, he is now channeling Season 1 Kyle Richards from “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” and has oddly hired a chubby event planner, a caterer and a valet for the night so he can fit in with his more rich and established castmates WHO NEVER DO THIS.

Right before the party, Craig gets into a raspberry-colored ensemble that matches Naomie’s dress — and that Cameran later calls “Italian drug dealer” and Shep refers to as “Eurotrash.”

NewCraig, same old insults.

Shep and NewCraig have a moment. NewCraig wants nothing more than to be OldCraig and Shep again. Shep assures him that he’s only mean to him because he likes him. If he didn’t care he’d never have yelled at him for making $5,000 more than he did in the Wounded Warriors charity man-auction last season.

They agree to pursue their old friendship because, as Shep notes to the Craig Gatsby himself, “F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he said there are no second acts in life.”

Then the episode ends with Thomas walking right into the deep marsh where an alligator awaits him. It is a seven-months pregnant Kathryn who has just arrived at the party and is already looking at the door to leave because no one loves her.

Thomas knows he shouldn’t engage the beast, but he can’t help himself.

Lacking for conversation, he tells her he’s changing the color of their daughter’s room from pink to periwinkle.

Kathryn starts to freak out because OH MY GOD LANDON IS WEARING PERIWINKLE RIGHT IN THIS MOMENT. And they’ve clearly done this to signal to each other and hurt Kathryn.

It is the first time in the history of romantic liaisons that a man’s sudden interest in a new color can be construed as evidence that he is sleeping with a particular woman BECAUSE I THOUGHT THE SAME THING. I was like, “Oh my God. Landon is wearing periwinkle tonight! They’re clearly doing it!”

#TeamKathryn

Things calm down considerably, though, when T-Rav touches Kathryn’s bulging belly.

Then the show ends abruptly … or at least it did for me because I got up and gouged out my eyes.

This story was originally published April 4, 2016 at 11:48 PM with the headline "Farrell: ‘Southern Charm’ premiere gets off to surreal and scary start."