After last week’s episode of Hockey Wives, I got a text from one of my smartest friends. She loves and consumes reality TV like I do, but she doesn’t follow hockey. “Is it bad that I’m kind of hoping Dustin Brown gets injured (nothing career-ending, just season-limiting) or hits a slump?” she wrote. “I feel like they need to be taken down a peg or two.” I replied: “I have excellent news for you! He had a total sh*t season and his team missed the playoffs, which is almost unheard of for a defending Cup champion. Karma: 1, the Hockey Wives Tracy Flick: 0.”
Hockey Wives Tracy Flick builds a house
This week we see more of Nicole Brown’s confidence and comfort juxtaposed with the uncertainty of other hockey families. She and Dustin go to inspect the new house they’re building in the L.A. area — a scene that seems designed exclusively to highlight Nicole’s Type-A domestic management style. She announces that she wants the largest-capacity washer and dryer on the market, and she will have three pairs of them: two in the house and one in the garage for her boys’ disgusting sports gear. This seems like a practical decision and a really nice thing to have if you’ve got endless money to make such things happen — which, weirdly, is why it seems like such an absurd luxury. “I don’t think that’s overly extravagant,” Nicole says.
Dustin, meanwhile, shuffles disinterestedly around the half-finished house, and Nicole says all he cares about is the speaker and TV set-up. “Heaven forbid we get into this new house and his Xbox is not blaring all over the basement,” she eye-rolls. I recall being grossed out by the condescension in her announcing in the first episode that she has five children, not four. I do not feel that way at the present time.
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Obsessing over Obsessions of a Hockey Wife
Much of the episode revolves around a launch party for the website created by Brijet to help hockey wives get set up in a new city; it sounds like an insanely interesting read, but it’s password-protected. Which makes sense, but is still disappointing for the gawking-inclined among us.
Brijet talks about how hard it can be to pick up your family and re-establish yourself at the whims of a general manager, and we see her perusing categories like car care, child care, churches, gym and florist. That last one caused me to question whether I am a deficient adult and homeowner, since I can’t remember the last time I patronized a florist.
Many of the women on the show — Tiffany, Maripier, Emilie, Noureen, Nicole and Martine — converge on L.A. for the website launch party, and it manages to feel like an organic social gathering rather than one of those weird staged reality TV things. It’s obvious that Brijet is a genuinely kind-hearted person and beloved as the den mother of the hockey wives. “If Brijet had a party and four people showed up, I would be one of the four,” Tiffany says. And then my brain exploded and ran out my ears because, holy cow, she kind of recited the lyrics of the Golden Girls theme song in normal conversation and appeared to have no idea she’d done so. I cannot be alone in finding this amazing and a little spooky.
Maripier has no filter, is a good time
We see — again! — Maripier Morin stressing about the fact that she and Brandon Prust are not engaged. She keeps blaming her anxiety on “other people” who supposedly will judge her because she doesn’t have a ring on her finger, but it’s clear she’s projecting (or so decides the journalist with no formal psychology training who has never met this person).
At Brijet’s party, someone asks Maripier if she’s married, obviously just making conversation. “Nope. Not engaged, nothing,” Maripier barks. We don’t see it on camera, but I’m assuming the would-be small talker jumps into the pool fully clothed and swims away. Maripier complains to Tiffany: “I just want to get drunk in a corner, sit down and chain smoke.” Tiffany deadpans: “You’ll be fine.” Later, Tiffany explains to the camera what’s really going on, offering another one of her incredibly insightful assessments: “I think MP is uncomfortable anytime she’s outside Quebec because she knows she loses her status.”
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But beyond the insecurity, we get glimpses of Maripier’s total lack of social filter, which probably makes her the most entertaining person in her social group and the most likely to eat her foot. A bunch of the wives gather in one hotel room to get ready for the party, and Noureen DeWulf shows up wearing panels of lace glued to her legs where pants would normally be found. Maripier has never met her before. “Holy f*ck! That’s what you’re wearing?” she yells. She elaborates to the camera, with both horror and appreciation: “She’s wearing see-through lace pants. I’m like, ‘Dude, who are you?’” Later, at the party, Maripier notices a spine-warping rock on Martine Forget and lunges at it like she’s going to gnaw it off her ring finger. “What the f*ck is THAT?” she yells, then asks in French how much it cost. Someone else comments, “It’s a skating rink.”
Leaving the game behind
This episode pulls back the curtain on how retirement feels from the inside. While Tiffany is in the air flying to L.A., George announces his retirement. “The fact that she came and he announced it that day felt odd to me because I feel like I would want to be with Ray,” Brijet says, not unkindly.
From the outside, retirement announcements often seem anticlimactic because it feels like you can see the train coming so far down the tracks. But Brijet’s comment and Tiffany’s obvious difficulty in processing her husband’s announcement point to how emotionally fraught these decisions are. “As sad as it is, I’ve been getting some nice messages from folks, so it always makes you feel better,” George says on the phone to his wife, as they both flip through the tweets pouring in. “Anytime these guys retire, it’s not easy for them because they always have the Cup in the back of their minds,” Tiffany says. “And when you say you’re retired, there is no more dreaming of that Cup.”
That’s what it means for the players, but it’s clearly a huge shift for their spouses, too, in a world where status and inclusion seems so tied to the husband’s place on the ice. Even Brijet, at the social epicenter of the hockey wife world, talks about her worries that she’ll be left out when her husband walks away. “I’m so lucky, I have some amazing friends. I just can’t imagine being on this hockey journey without them,” she says, tearing up. “It’s like, okay, it’s not gonna be over and I’ll still be a part of it,” Brijet says, sounding like she’s reminding herself that’s true.