MTV
Will Catfish Help Ray And Lexi Light Up Each Other's Lives?
Ray and Lexi have been talking for four years, but they've never met. Should he be more suspicious about that, or about the fact that Lexi has two sisters named Alexia and Lexa?
Ray, age 19, of Chicago.
Lexi, age 18, of Des Moines.
Until very recently, Ray lived in Las Vegas and Lexi in Phoenix, but even though the two cities are only a four-hour drive apart, they never met in person. "Lexi never had much social media that she used or even posted on."
I hate to agree with Nev, but we're talking about an eighteen-year-old in the year 2016. It's very unlikely. (Though claiming technological ignorance does give her a good reason not to have reciprocated when Ray sent her a full-frontal nude selfie.)
Ray has had interaction with Lexi's sisters Alexia and Lexa, apparently in sting operations they've launched on Lexi's behalf to try to catch him talking to other girls online; she'd send Ray screen shots of these totally innocent-looking conversations and confront him about it.
In the four years they've been talking, they've never videochatted.
When they first started talking, Ray and Lexi were in their mid-teens -- too young to be able to drive across state lines to hang out. However, when they did get to be eighteen and start talking about getting together in person, Lexi started picking fights and going through periods when she wouldn't interact with Ray.
There's no explanation for Lexi's limited use of social media, which is odd considering that she and her sisters are knowledgeable enough about it to set traps for Ray to get caught in.
On the suspiciously similar names of Lexi's sisters? "There's families that do that," Ray claims.
As for the videochatting?
This segment is even more half-assed than usual because Lexi's full name, Alexis/Alexus/Alexa Valenzuela, is very common online, and once Max and Nev crap out on the photos she's sent Ray, they don't really get any further with anything else. ("Not even her phone number?" Good question! They don't try that at all, possibly because doing so would spoil the outcome too much.)
So they give up on sleuthing Lexi herself almost immediately, instead looking into the Facebook profile for Alexia, Lexi's older sister. The photos look pretty legit -- they're not all selfies; there are other people in them -- and there seems to be evidence that she dated someone named Jesse. They contact him through Facebook, and he gets in touch the next day; when they talk to him on the phone, his story is very similar to Ray's: he and Alexia never met in person because she'd blow off plans they made; she also told him about almost-same-named sisters; she'd run hot and cold with him and suddenly ice him out. And? She sometimes referred to herself as Lexi.
"There's only one," mouths Max. That certainly seems like the most plausible explanation! And even if it's not, that's where Max and Nev stop.
Ray is dismayed by the evidence that Lexi and Alexia are one and the same, but he still wants to meet whoever it actually is and find out what the story is behind all this. When Nev calls the number he has for Lexi (...and did not search online, as far as we know) and explains that he's with Ray and that they want to come meet her, you'll never guess why it's not a good time for her!
Is "a lot going on" one of those ubiquitous, seemingly innocent phrases that when a young person uses it actually means they're fucking, like "hanging out"? Or is it just exactly the non-excuse excuse it seems to be? I guess the latter, because Nev actually calls Lexi on it: "I mean, Ray's got a lot going on in his life too, and so do I, and so does everybody." I mean, honestly. This part is always so dumb: we wouldn't be watching the show if they didn't agree, so watching them pretend not to is a waste of time. Plus, if Production is giving them a hesitation script, they could write them something different. "I can't meet Ray right now, my uterus just fell out" is one Nev would definitely have a harder time disputing. Anyway: Lexi agrees to meet. But you knew that she would. Because you're not the idiot this show takes you for.
In Des Moines, Nev, Max, and Ray go straight from the airport to Lexi's house. Oh boy! Nev knocks on the door, and...
Well, that's Lexi.
And this is who comes to the door -- Lexi's sister, "not by blood," whose name is Lexa. Of course it is! Lexi got scared and left, Lexa says. No one really knows what to do at this point without straight-up asking if Lexa is, in fact, Lexi herself -- and maybe they're gun-shy about doing that when they were so sure they'd cracked it last time with Larrya and turned out to be totally wrong -- so they're just like, bye, and go "huddle up in the car," where they all agree that Lexa seemed to be acting weird...or maybe she's just being a loyal sister??? WHO'S TO SAY!
As they're driving off, Ray gets a call from a number with no caller ID...but it's Lexi. Even though he fully has her phone number, she's calling from where? She claims that she knows they were just at her house because her sister "blew up [her fake] phone" and texted her, and that she missed them because she'd just gone out to think. She says she's sorry, and Ray wearily says it's okay, but that she should tell him when she is ready to see him, since he came a long way to meet her. She says she will, "later," and when he asks for specifics, she's like, "Tomorrow?" When he asks what time, the phone goes dead, along with Ray's hopes for a happy ending, probably. In the silence, Max exclaims, "It's a different voice. It's a different voice!" From Lexa's, I assume, since he wasn't on Nev's earlier call with Lexi. Nev decides it's good news that Lexi called, and that maybe Lexa will tell her "that we seem nice." Not if she read your book, she won't!
The next day, the dudes all head back to Lexi's. Is she there now?!
Well, yes and no. No in the sense that no one with the face Ray fell in love with is on the premises. But yes in the sense that this is, in fact, "Lexi." Considering everything that's happened in the episode to this point, Ray seems unduly shocked to find this out when the rest of us got it yesterday as soon as she identified herself with an even faker name than "Lexi." Max asks her name, and with the first of approximately 5,000,000 eye-rolls...
...she says it's Marlayna. Ray asks if Marlayna was also Alexia and Lexa, which seems like a stupid question...
...and Marlayna's next eye-roll agrees as she says she was. Was she playing with Ray the whole time?
I get that Marlayna is trying to act hard because she's embarrassed about all this, but she needs to pick a different reaction, because all the eye-rolling is making her seem like she considers the show a huge, boring imposition on her time, when in fact we all know it's a boring imposition on OUR time. Ray tells her he's going to need an actual answer -- since that last eye-roll was not actually accompanied by one -- so they all troop into the latest Airbnb so that Marlayna can say she was trying to end it. She can't even do THIS without more eye-rolling, in case you were wondering.
I'm going to stop now, but JESUS. (And before you email me, I've seen to the end of the episode and I know this isn't, for instance, a Tourette's reaction she's unable to control.) Marlayna gets defensive about the question of whether she was "fucking with" Ray "mentally," as he says she did; it was just the usual thing, where she posed as someone else online to make herself feel good, shit got out of hand, and then four years had gone by and she didn't know how to tell the truth. Ray also makes the very good point that her claim to have wanted to stop is sort of belied by her behaviour less than twenty-four hours ago when she lied to all the guys' faces, and Marlayna doesn't really have an answer: "I don't know what you want to hear."
Ray puts his head in his hands to take a break, I guess, which is when Max breaks in to comment on her attitude. She denies that she has an attitude, I guess because she hasn't noticed how often she's LOOKING UP AT THE CEILING IN DISGUST WITH ALL OF THIS, but Max won't let her off the hook, advising her to drop it and admit that she did something wrong. She says she knows she did, and at Max's invitation, she tells her side of the story. I don't mean to discount the unique horror and pain of Marlayna's youth, but this is a story we have heard one thousand times before. She was bullied; she was denigrated about being dark-skinned; she wasn't happy with who she was, so she created an account to represent who she wanted to be. As Lexi, she could be herself with Ray and know he wasn't going to judge her.
Nev asks how they got from this real human connection she and Ray had to all the business with the fake sisters, and she said she wanted to make him believe "it was all real." No one points out the irony of this claim, so I guess I have to? She also says, when Nev asks, that she put on a higher voice to talk to Ray on the phone, which seems like an unnecessary effort, but whatever, I guess they had to include that or else cut the part earlier when they all agreed in the car that "Lexi" on the phone wasn't the same person as "Lexa" at the door. We further learn that the girls in the pictures she used are people she knows, who are aware that she's used their pictures, and what she's used them for.
There's no follow-up, though, so I guess we have to take her word for it. (That would also explain why Nev didn't find them anywhere else online when he image-searched them.)
Finally: did Marlayna have real feelings for Ray? "I did at first," she whines. "The first two years." But then she grew older, got over her self-esteem issues, and didn't need (to use) Ray the same way anymore. She claims her feelings for Ray diminished, but that doesn't explain why she created sock puppet accounts to test his fidelity to her? Did the Alexia stings stop two years ago too? Or was that her way of trying to irritate Ray so much that he'd dump her? Nev asks why, if she didn't care about Ray, she wouldn't just tell him the truth, since why bother keeping up the effort.
OH, OKAY. Marlayna didn't want to hurt his feelings more, she lamely explains. But then she cries, so everyone kind of loses any fire they might have to confront her more aggressively. Max doesn't think people who get hurt shouldn't go on to hurt other people. HEAR THAT, EVERYONE? Ray hopes she's done faking her identity online. Marlayna says she is.
There are no hugs. But in the car leaving Marlayna's, Nev muses, "I wonder if she still has your dick pics," and everyone has a good laugh. If she did, I'm sure she's sold them by now!
Two months later, Ray hasn't spoken to Marlayna at all, nor to any of her fakes. He misses the person he had been talking to, but then he remembers she wasn't real. Marlyana -- without rolling her eyes even one time -- admits that she still thinks about Ray on occasion and can't believe they had carried on as long as they did, but the experience did make her "become a better me." Better than what?
If your online girl/boyfriend lives within a four-hour drive won't meet in person, she or her is lying about something. No parents would give three sisters nearly identical names, and if they did, you should avoid them because they are obviously a bunch of dirtbags. NEVER SEND A DICK PIC.