‘Southern Charm’ Episode 3 Recap: Taylor Emerges as This Season’s Villain

During her brief time on Southern Charm, Taylor has been a mostly sympathetic figure. You can call the girl foolish for taking on famous playboy Shep as a serious mate and, later, quitting her job for him. But the portrayal of their relationship—including when Shep called her an “idiot” in front of everyone, and she downplayed it—revealed a severe lack of self-esteem. That’s not to mention her deeply ingrained set of religious beliefs that included letting a man walk all over you. At the reunion, we also found out that her twisted family still loves Shep, despite his publicized mistreatment of her.

In tonight’s episode, though, Taylor emerges as the ostensible villain (as in the person fans will probably be the most angry with) in this scandal involving her and Austen. On the one hand, it sucks to see a woman, on this patriarchal nightmare of a program, be nailed to the cross—like when Madison was attacked for cheating on Austen after he had a whole threesome while they were dating. But as Raquel showed us throughout the Scandoval, low self-esteem is not an excuse to betray your friends. And this episode is arguably not a great look for this Jesus-loving woman.

This episode begins with everyone waking up from their hangovers from last episode’s bar crawl. Taylor goes over to Austen’s to get a liquid IV after her own wild night out with Olivia. She talks about meeting a guy at a warehouse party, seemingly to underscore her and Austen’s platonic-ness. But Austen quickly informs her that JT outed their sleepover to Shep and Craig the previous night. Taylor, at least, is much better at pretending like nothing went down between them than the marble-mouthed Austen in the last episode. It’s also likely that Austen prepped her for this scene.

Read more at The Daily Beast.