Catfish Recap: Sweet Little Lies

So here we are at the much-hyped season finale of Catfish.  The ads keep telling us that we’ve been surprised all season, but to get ready for the most shocking episode of all.  What could possibly top vampire freaks, transgender fakers paying online boyfriends, and gay felons with bus fetishes...?

Nev welcomes us tonight by telling us that, as always, the emails are POURING in.  Let’s see which high-quality individuals we’ll be tracking down this evening.  How about Mike?  He’s from New Jersey and has recently moved back in with his parents because he lost his job.  Also, his girlfriend of five years dumped him to pursue women.  Get in line, ladies!  Things were looking pretty bad for Mike until he met Felicia on the interwebs.  She’s everything he’s looking for, even though they’ve never met.  They talk on the phone every day, but Mike is too big of an idiot to figure out how to use a webcam, so they’ve never skyped.  Felicia also lives in New Jersey, in a town not too far from Mike’s, so he drove over to see her one night and called her when he got there, but she was nowhere to be found.  She finally called him back around midnight, telling him she’d been in a car accident and her phone had been shut off.  But she was okay.  And now Felicia has moved to Orlando, Florida to open her own business (or something).  Mike needs Nev to pin this girl down and find out if she’s for real.

Or if she's a middle-aged women using pictures of her younger self from the late 80s.

So far I’m in.  Felicia isn’t claiming to be a model and she actually looks like a regular person.  The car accident thing was weird, but it’s only been a few months that these two have been chatting, so there’s still the possibility of normalcy.  Max doesn’t think so.  Nev actually sniffs his finger and says something smells spoiled.  That was so revolting and unnecessary, Nev. Especially with all the foot-picking you do.  They call Mike and Mike adds another element to the car accident story, which is that when he arrived at Felicia’s building, he asked the doorman for her and the doorman said no one named Felicia lived in that building.  That’s sketchy.  But Mike would still really like to meet her, so Nev is going to be the hero who makes that happen. 

When they arrive at Mike’s house, Nev asks who painted the beautiful artwork on the mailbox, to which Mike responds his mother did. Careful, Mike.  Nev is inexplicably drawn to older, married, artistic women.  Keep your mom out of his sight.  Mike invites them in and shows them some of his own artwork, which is of a man-robot.

"His name is MegaMike.  He's made of carbon steel, and is my alter ego."

Oh DEAR.  I fear that Mike is perpetually 14 years old.  He’s hanging out at his parents’ house drawing robot men.  Maybe Felicia had the right idea when she dodged their meeting.  The guys look at Felicia’s profile pictures and she’s obviously very well endowed in the chest region.  Nev describes her as full-bodied.  Mike plays the guys a voicemail from Felicia and says he’s really hoping to be in love with the real Felicia.  Nev and Max leave to launch their investigation.

The first thing they do is pull up Felicia’s Facebook page - something Mike never bothered to do.  Her page seems legitimate - she has hundreds of friends and the pictures are of the same person Mike showed them.  They conclude that they need to get in touch with one of her friends to confirm a few things about Felicia, so they send a message to a girl named Charmaine.  They also wonder why there are no pictures on Felicia’s Facebook page of this business she owns, which is a hair salon.  They google the hair salon in Orlando and find a website.  But the website says that the salon was established in 2007, at which time Felicia would have been a senior in high school.  They try to call the salon, but the phone number is no longer in service.  They call Mike to find out the date of the alleged car accident so that they can look at Felicia’s Facebook pictures for signs of injury.  Mike tells them that she sprained her pinky, but there are no pinky splints in any pictures or anything resembling any type of injury.  The guys conclude that Felicia IS the girl in the pictures, but they can’t know for sure where she lives or whether or not she owns a hair salon.  Or if she was ever in a car accident.

"As far as I can see, she only owns a hair dryer and has two tickets for illegal turns."

The next morning Facebook friend Charmaine calls to tell Nev everything she knows about Felicia - and why not?  She knows that Felicia has been talking to Mike online, and she knows that Felicia has been living in Orlando since she was 17.  She also knows that Felicia is an online liar and has misled guys in the past about her looks and whereabouts.  So much so, that her friends and family staged an intervention to get her to stop with all the fake online living. She also says that Mike should be aware that it’s likely that Felicia is talking to other people online, and not just him.  Nev wonders if Mike is interested in being in a relationship with a liar, and Max wonders if Felicia is actually even interested in being with Mike, or if she’s just playing with him to stroke her own ego.  Let’s go see what Mike thinks.

Turns out, Mike DOES think it’s odd that Felicia would lie about where she lives.  But he still wants to meet her and see what’s up.  So Nev calls Felicia and Felicia is weird about them coming to see her.  Now’s not a good time, I have stuff I have to do tomorrow, blah, blah, blah, as usual.  And as usual, Nev guilts her into agreeing to meet, and the guys head to the airport the very next day.  As the plane lands, Mike and Felicia are texting each other, saying how excited they are to meet each other.  And later, the guys all drive to Felicia’s house, which looks totally normal.  And Felicia comes right out the main door when Mike knocks!  Although, this kind of looks like the side of the house, but at least she’s not emerging from a fort made of old mattresses in the backyard.

"I live in the crawl space."

They hug and Mike says he was hoping that Felicia could show them around Orlando today and show them her salon.  She stammers that she’s lied about some things and she needs to come clean.  First of all, she hasn’t lived in New Jersey for quite a while now and she’s here in Orlando going to school.  Also, there’s no salon.  Felicia says she invented the salon because Mike kept asking her to hang out, so she needed a big story to tell him so he’d quit trying to hang out with her.  Oh okay, so the story became that she was “moving to Orlando” to “open a salon.”  She says she’s sorry and she didn’t purposely lie to him - one of my favorite lines on this show.  Um, yes, you DID purposely lie to him.  That’s exactly what you did.  She says she was afraid if she told Mike she didn’t live near him then he wouldn’t see any point in getting to know her.  That’s... a new one.  I mean, he’s meeting people on the internet, right?  Would location really be a deal breaker?  I don’t know what to believe.  Anyway, Mike says he has a hard time dealing with people who lie to him.

"Nothing could hurt a man made of carbon steel."

Nev steps in and says that since both Mike and Felicia are who they’ve said they are, why would Felicia lie about her location and her business?  Felicia says that it’s basically out of habit.  She’s lied to people on the internet for years now and Mike was the first guy she’s even been THIS honest with.  Every catfish says some version of THAT speech as well.  Felicia says she would never lie again.  HA! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!  Nev announces that it’s time for Mike to take a break and think about everything.

In the car on the way back to the hotel Nev kind of wonders what the problem is.  I mean, this is actually the girl from the pictures, so doesn’t Mike want to start ring shopping?  Mike points out that they’ve spent a lot of time talking about things that weren’t true, so he’s feeling very cautious.  Geez, finally someone who cares about honesty.  No one else on this show has ever cared that anyone has lied about something other than their appearance.  And in some cases, even lying about appearance didn’t matter!  They head somewhere to talk.  A coffee shop or living room or something.

"I forgot my iPhone."

Nev keeps at it, saying that if Mike were really into Felicia, he wouldn’t care that she lied about some small details of her life that didn’t define her.  Aren’t we kind of missing the point, Nev?  She LIED about stuff that shouldn’t have mattered.  She’s a liar.  THAT defines her.  Am I the only one agreeing with Mike on this?  Mike is worried that they’ve started off with lying.  Exactly.  If she’ll lie about nonsense, why would he trust her about anything?  Mike eventually agrees to meet up with Felicia that night and see if they can continue to be friends on a truthful basis. 

Next stop for Nev is a park with Felicia, who has changed her outfit.  Oh, so has Nev.  Nev asks Felicia what started all the lying in the first place.  Felicia says that she wanted attention and she’s always been told she was fat and ugly, so with online dating she could pretend to be someone else and get the attention she craved.  Wow, that’s pretty insightful - especially for this show.

"To this day when I panic, I revert to a behavior called pseudologia fantastica."

She adds that if her father had raised her, she wouldn’t have done any of those things.  Hmm, that’s quite a jump.  She never felt love from her mother, etc.  But she’s realized what she was doing wrong and doesn’t want to do anything that will cause her to relapse.  She’s really happy to have met Mike, who seems to like her as she is, and she feels terrible that she hurt him.  Aw, now I’m starting to come around to route for Felicia.  Just quit lying, lady!

Later, Mike and Felicia meet up at a restaurant and Felicia is back to her doorstep outfit.  Whatever.  They sit down to chat and Mike admits that he’s a bit angry about the lying.  Felicia says she understands, but she doesn’t want to start investing her emotions just to find out Mike doesn’t feel the same way.  She asks him straight out if he likes her, if he likes what he sees, and if he thinks there’s a chance for them to become “something more.”  She thinks they should be monogamous and give it a shot.  Mike says he’s not sure he agrees.

"I keep asking myself, what would MegaMike do?"

Felicia says she just wants to know if he likes her.  Mike says well yes, she’s nice and they’ve had good conversations, but that’s it for now.  But he’d like to keep talking.  Felicia says fine, but she’s clearly exasperated and says she needs to leave.  Outside, Mike tries to explain himself some more, saying that he just needs time to build a friendship with her, and if she needed time he would give it to her.  When he makes it clear that he would like things to progress, Felicia calms down and says she feels better.  Well good.

Two months later!  Mike is still living with his parents, but has found a new job and hopes to move out soon.  Is he still drawing robot men?  Felicia is still going to school in Orlando and she and Mike are still talking.  She promises she’s being totally honest with Mike and everyone else too.  That’s stellar.  Then we get a screen shot that tells us Felicia is planning to move back to New Jersey in six months because when she went to visit Mike they officially became a couple.  Aaaawwwwwwwwwwww.

  "I honestly love you."

Well goodness, that certainly wasn’t the shocking season finale that was advertised.  There weren’t really any big surprises and this wasn’t the first Catfish couple to stay together.  If anything, this was a super mild episode.  Was that the shock?  The mildness?  The lack of gender-based and/or legal scandal?  The lack of the all-powerful Google Image Search??  It’s lovely that these two appreciate each other and I wish them all the best, but this definitely wasn’t a groundbreaking episode by any stretch of the imagination.  Happiest ending, I guess? 

What do you guys think?

Thanks for reading!
-Honey Gangsta