Madix harnesses her righteous anger as she takes Sandoval back to the beginning of their relationship. “Every time I try to apologize to you, it just makes you more angry,” says Sandoval, becoming a front-runner for the gaslighter-of-the-year award. This exchange is just the tip of the iceberg. “Do you want anything?” Sandoval asks halfheartedly. Sandoval is seen in the bathroom, and then he emerges to join Madix in their open-concept kitchen-living room. “He gives me the ick.” It’s soon revealed that the ick is, in fact, in the house with her. “I hate him, but I’m, like, very quickly becoming completely indifferent,” she tells a friend named Meredith. The camera pans to a Lego portrait of the pair that hangs on the wall. Madix sits in the house she shares with Sandoval in Valley Village, decked out in a dark sweatshirt, a sports bra, and black jeans. “Literally, in that moment, I went, I need to look at this.” “Call it a woman’s intuition, call it light bulb, call it whatever,” Madix says. Someone handed it to Madix, unaware that they were giving her the key to Pandora’s box. According to both parties, Sandoval and his cover band-yes, he has a cover band-were performing at TomTom, the bar he co-owns with Schwartz, when Sandoval’s phone fell out of his pocket. Soon enough, though, Madix and Sandoval are chronicling exactly how their relationship ended, their interviews interspersed with footage of the night it all went down. “You ready to talk about this?” a producer asks Sandoval and Madix, seen in split screen in their separate confessionals. That extra hour is a testament to the power of keeping the cameras rolling, capturing the fallout of a truly shocking betrayal.

Luckily for VPR fans, as soon as news broke of Leviss and Sandoval’s affair, Bravo sprang into action, extending the season to capture the drama firsthand. But within 48 hours, TMZ would break the news that Leviss had actually been engaged in a monthslong affair with Sandoval, even though he’d been dating their costar Ariana Madix for nearly a decade.

Leviss’s answer-a coyly quiet “Sandoval?”-seemed innocuous at the time, even like she was choosing the lesser of two evils. The chill of those words hangs in the air as Cohen asks Shay and Leviss which Tom- Tom Schwartz or Tom Sandoval, VPR’s best friend bro-duo-is hotter. He notes that it’s the first day of Women’s History Month. Wednesday’s explosive Vanderpump Rules finale opens in medias res, with a clip of Andy Cohen introducing Scheana Shay and Raquel Leviss on the March 1 episode of Watch What Happens Live.

Hotter than ever elle kennedy