MTV
Will Catfish Help Secure A Future For Tyreme And Tomorrow?
Tyreme wants his relationship with Tomorrow to be his last, but he can't help harboring suspicions about her. Darn the luck of her phone's broken camera!!!
Tyreme, a twenty-seven-year-old unemployed (apparently single) father of two in Newport News, Virginia -- though he describes himself as "a great artist," so I'm sure his great art job in Newport News is just around the corner.
Tomorrow, a twenty-five-year-old nursing home cook in Dothan, Alabama.
Since meeting on Facebook when she liked one of his posts, they've been talking on the phone daily -- they've bonded over the fact that they're both diabetic, and Tyreme's also spoken to a bunch of her other friends and family members -- but they've never videochatted.
There was also this whole thing where Tyreme and Tomorrow briefly broke up, during which time Tomorrow slept with her best friend Letrease's ex and got pregnant -- she sent a sonogram photo -- but then Tomorrow and Tyreme got back together and were doing as well as before.
One other clue Tyreme didn't even notice is that Tomorrow seems to have a connection to Missouri State University.
When Max reads the sweatshirt, Tyreme corrects him: "Mississippi State." Nnn...no, dude.
Her camera is broken.
"I mean, COME ON," sighs Nev. "How often do cameras break?" asks Max. "They don't break that often!" Also, you know whose cameras definitely AREN'T broken? Broads who take this goddamn many SELFIES.
Or photos of sonograms, for that matter. Speaking of which: Tomorrow's pregnancy ended in miscarriage -- or so she said; Tyreme admits that she could still be pregnant.
Max and Nev don't really unravel Tyreme's Missouri/Mississippi confusion when it comes up and I sincerely think Tyreme leaves that conversation pretty sure he's right.
"The pictures you have of her look very much like a real person," Nev tells Tyreme toward the end of their first meeting. Does she, though?
Maybe that's "average-looking" for the population of women Nev talks to. I'm not a TV show host, so I would say she is, in fact, exceptionally beautiful? But whatever: that judgment plus the fact (or possibly "fact") that Tomorrow doesn't have any kind of glamorous job seem to have Nev leaning toward Tomorrow being real...which is weird given that he and Max spent the first two minutes of the episode making fun of her improbable name. But never mind: let's begin!
What Tyreme knows about Tomorrow: her phone number; her full name (Tomorrow Christina Johnson -- which, btw, since we see it all, is our first sign pointing to Tomorrow being a fake); the town she lives in though apparently not her home address; her Facebook profile; the profile of Letrease, the aforementioned best friend whose ex impregnated Tomorrow when she and Tyreme were on a break.
For whatever reason, they start with her Facebook page; looking at one of her mirror selfies, Max notes a piece of Cardinals paraphernalia in the background...
...which points to her being somewhere around Missouri, like her sweatshirt said, and not anywhere in the southeast, as Tyreme thinks she is.
They move on to searching her photos; the first three don't come up, but the fourth brings them to a Twitter profile for someone named Aryssa...
...and I guess now the interns who dummy up these alleged screen shots have to come up with Twitter handles that could not exist? Anyway: sure enough, this Aryssa lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Nev also finds her on Facebook; Nev messages her about getting in touch with him about the Tyreme situation.
While they wait, Nev searches Tomorrow's phone number, which comes up registered to a "Christ Rothwell," in Dothan. Max gets hung up on the "Christ"/"Christina" (Tomorrow's middle name) connection to what I would consider a weird degree considering that there are names for both sexes that start with "Christ" and none of them are especially uncommon. That combination of first and last names doesn't bring up anything on Facebook, though, and since they're already on Facebook, they move on to investigating Letrease.
If you didn't see this photo and instantly say out loud, "It's her," you've never seen the show before. For one thing, I would say at LEAST half the time a faker introduces a friend or sister or cousin of the same sex to the person they're online "dating," they're introducing themselves. In addition, Catfish has apparently never passed up an opportunity to find a heavy, dark-skinned woman of colour and made her debase herself for its cameras, so if you looked at Letrease's hopeful smile and immediately started dreading what was in store for her, then I know you aren't new.
So: they look around Letrease's profile and agree, based on people's comments, that it's real; however, they also note that there aren't any photos of her with her supposed best friend, Tomorrow. (One might assume that the two of them fell out after Tomorrow had got pregnant with Letrease's ex's baby, possibly badly enough for Letrease and Tomorrow both to have deleted any such photos, but Tyreme didn't say that incident had a negative effect on the friendship -- and in retrospect, that's weird, right?) What they do find is, among Letrease's Facebook friends, a Christina Rothwell, who's also friends with Tomorrow. They then do something I feel like I've never seen them do before: they search Tomorrow's phone number on Facebook...
and find it on this lady's profile. And also somewhere else where her name is spelled differently?
Poking around Sha/edeija's profile to try to figure out how she's connected to all this, they find an image of a sonogram, and I have to apologize to Max for thinking he overreacted to the Christ/Christina coincidence earlier because their freakout about the sonogram makes that look sedate. This only proves that someone had an ultrasound once! Them shits all look the same! Even parents know it's true! Also, this one shows this woman's name spelled, guess what, a third way.
Spoiler: nothing about this woman ends up being germane to the episode. I just find it kind of astonishing. That one on the sonogram had an apostrophe in it!
Is Tomorrow friends with Shadeija? She is. "How does she have the same phone number registered to two friends?" asks Max. "Now we know Tomorrow is not the girl in the pictures," Nev recaps (save it for the professionals, and also, do we? It definitely seems unlikely that she is, but if Aryssa got back to them to deny it, we haven't seen it -- and that's assuming the owner of that Twitter feed is even the same person in the photos, which we also don't know). Nev wonders if these people are all collectively colluding to convince Tyreme that Tomorrow is a real person, and messages Letrease, Christina, and Shadeija about Tyreme, and the episode they're making. But in the meantime, they've got to go tell Tyreme this INCREDIBLY CONVOLUTED STORY.
Tyreme hasn't heard of Christina or Shadeija, joint owners of Tomorrow's alleged phone, which he says hasn't changed in the time he's been talking to Tomorrow. What about that sonogram?
Well, I still think they all look more or less alike. But the one on Shadeija's Facebook page and the one Tomorrow sent Tyreme of the baby she went on to miscarry are...actually the same. Nev says that he's messaged all four of the women involved in Tyreme's story but that none of them has responded yet, which may suggest that they're all in on something together.
The last blow Tyreme has to absorb is that the face he fell in love with (probably) (as far as we are given to understand in this episode) belongs to this Aryssa in Kansas City. After all that, he states that he's "ready to go down there" and confront someone, which is where Nev kind of has to remind him that, you know, no one's gotten back to them yet and that Tyreme is basically talking about flying to Dothan, Alabama and screaming Tomorrow's name from the middle of the town square. (I'm paraphrasing.) He offers to call "Tomorrow" and see if she'll meet, which Tyreme is eager for him to do, but of course they get her voicemail. Nev also texts her. They have to leave Tyreme on this unsatisfying note...
...but in the car on the way back to their hotel, Nev gets a text from Christina, asking what they need. While Nev drives, Max texts back and explains about Tomorrow's phone being registered to her: "Tyreme already knows something is up. For his sake, we will need to get some answers; otherwise, this is totally unfair to him." Christina responds right away.
Max and Nev find the plural pronoun pretty incriminating, because it would be hard not to. Off to Dothan all three of them go!
I know I've spent this whole season calling out all the times I've been convinced the show is setting up in Airbnbs...
...but I don't believe that's the case this time. This time, the show wants us to start forming an opinion of the people who are going to come out of it while our hosts are still in the car. Have you done so? Great!
Nev, Max, and Tyreme let themselves into the porch and wait. Who will come out the door? Is it, somehow, actually Tomorrow?
No. After admitting that she's nervous, Christina says that she's heard of Tyreme but that she hasn't talked to him -- but there's someone inside who has. Oh shit, is THIS Tomorrow?!
Well, she does say, "Hi, I'm 'Tomorrow.'" But that's Letrease. Tyreme does not handle it well.
Tyreme pretty much keeps his teeth gritted in that pained grimace as Max has Letrease admit to her real name and establish that she's not, in fact, insane. Letrease doesn't notice or care that Tyreme stopped being interested in talking to her as soon as he saw she's not a size 4: when Nev introduces her to Tyreme, she's all aflutter.
Here's the story -- and I'll tell it in chronological order, which Letrease and Christina (her best friend) don't have the courtesy to do. Letrease created the Tomorrow profile to try to get back at her ex, which didn't work. When "she," as Tomorrow, liked that first post of Tyreme's and they started talking, "I never thought I would fall in love with someone over the internet." Tyreme asks why she couldn't have been honest with him, and then probably immediately regrets it: "I have asked you questions about myself and you have gave me answers that I really didn't want to hear." In other words: as Tomorrow, she asked his opinion of Letrease -- "'Ty, would you go with her?' 'No, she's ugly'" -- and was put off from telling him the truth because of how unkind he was. Tyreme at least doesn't deny that he said those things, and looks embarrassed. "Everything I said, it's me," Letrease clarifies. "Only the picture is fake."
Max also sneaks in a question about the phone: it is Letrease's, but she and Christina are "on the same account with me." Shadeija is Letrease's baby sister. Only Letrease is reading Tyreme's texts. As for the pregnancy? Letrease was never pregnant, but she got the idea that this story would push him away: "But it didn't work! He stayed!" Christina only heard about the Tomorrow profile "a couple of months ago," but she thought at some point Letrease would have to "come clean," "so that's why we're here." So then Christina or both she and Letrease are definitely actually the ones who contacted the show this time.
Tyreme starts making guttural grunts of shock and walks outside, as Nev asks whether Letrease is in love with Tyreme. She readily confirms that she is.
Outside, Tyreme gathers himself; he's glad that now he knows the truth. "Do you feel bad about the things you said about Letrease?" Max witness-leads. "Yeah," says Tyreme, with a shrug in his voice. "I do." And...that's it for today...
...except for some car philosophy from Max: "It's too bad that looks matter so much, isn't it? I wish we could just get over that, but I think we're programmed not to." Max, I have really come around on you, but stop talking out of your good-looking-person privilege, and no, that's not a suggestion that you pitch MTV a show where you put on troll makeup and film what life is like for you.
The next day, everyone goes over to Latrease's to hear more of her story. The attempt to entrap her ex didn't work: he never engaged with the Tomorrow profile in any way, which suggests that he's watched this show before, and good for him. Letrease wanted to find someone to do normal couple stuff with -- talk about her day, get a foot massage -- but she knew she couldn't have that as herself: "Men these days, they don't look at us plus-size, how much we have to go through, and get bullied and called fat. That really hurts!" She meant everything she said to Tyreme: "The only thing that wasn't real was the picture. I love you. I want a life with you, but I guess you don't want that." "No," says Tyreme -- but reluctantly and sadly, and even if it's just put on for the cameras, I appreciate the effort.
Letrease then tries to argue him into returning her feelings -- "The love you had for me, it was for me, it was just the picture. Why I'm not good enough for you, to be with you" -- but that approach, as you might guess, is not successful, because that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. "I can't give you a reason why," says Tyreme. "Because of what people might say?" guesses Letrease. Tyreme says that's not it. "I feel like I deserve answers for the same reason you deserve answers," Letrease tries, which she doesn't really have a right to do under the circumstances, but instead of hitting her with recriminations, Tyreme just says that's the best answer he has at the moment. Letrease cries as she asks again, "Why I'm not good enough for you?" Tyreme doesn't try to answer this time. "Yes, you have told me you don't like big girls. But at the same time, Ty, you was talking to me. And the only thing that was fake was the pictures. My feelings are real for him." END THIS, IT IS BRUTAL.
As Tyreme helplessly covers his face, Max takes over: "Tyreme fell in love with somebody, and he just found out that somebody wasn't the somebody he thought he was in love with. Sure, parts of them are true, but the whole package is not true. Same would be true if he met the girl from the pictures? But her personality was totally different and she sucked. So it goes both ways." I feel like Aryssa would have to be a real shithead for Tyreme not to be willing to try to get to know her if the show put her on a plane to meet him, but since that's not happening, let's pretend Max is right. He goes on to tell Letrease she can't "trick" anyone into loving her, and that she will meet someone someday who loves her as she is, but for now she needs to let Tyreme come to terms with this whole experience.
Nev finally decides he and Max have said enough and offers to clear out so Letrease and Tyreme can have a moment alone together. And I'm sure Tyreme is really glad they did because the first thing Letrease does is ask him, AGAIN, why she can't be with him. Tyreme smiles awkwardly before exclaiming, "You want me to say it!" She does, but she seems like she finally understands that she's not going to get what she wants. Tyreme remembers a time that Tomorrow asked him, if they ever broke up, would they still be friends; he told her they would: "That's not going to change." She can call him or text him whenever she wants. And he loved their conversations and will keep them in his heart all his life. Letrease doesn't seem very comforted, but she has no choice but to accept it.
Yes.
One that gives me a little hope for their friendship, weirdly!
Two months later, Tyreme says he and Letrease still talk almost every day. He'd promised her they'd stay friends, and he intends to keep that promise. Letrease confirms that she and Tyreme speak often: "Feels like we best friends." She's not dating at the moment and instead is trying to sort out her own life. But she's doing well.
No one's named Tomorrow. (Though someone is named Tu Morrow, you shouldn't try to be her online boyfriend, because she's fifteen.) No one's camera is broken. Missouri and Mississippi are not the same and aren't even spelled the same. Some people should spend less energy working on their relationships with their internet girlfriends and quite a bit more on finding a job and spending time with their children.