Hercy gets a tattoo, Emilie gets caviar, and Dylan gets the check.
The Setup
Episode 4 is the quietest hour of “Calabasas Confidential” so far, and the most honest. The group confrontations are on pause. Nobody gets kicked out of anything. What the show does instead is pull its characters into smaller rooms — a steakhouse, a tattoo parlor, a kitchen, a restaurant patio — and let them sit with who they actually are when nobody is watching.
What surfaces is more interesting than any beach day blowup. A woman who knows exactly what she wants and a man who is starting to realize he might not get it. A brother telling his little brother to have a backup plan. A date that ends mid-meal because one person finally said what they meant and the other one left.
Pickleball at Calabasas Pickleball Club
Suede and Emma bond over pickleball and Preston’s cookies, and most of the bonding happens at Nicole’s expense. Suede thinks Nicole was the one who sent the TikTok to Jemma. Emma says you can’t trust her. They agree she needs to stay in her lane.
Later in the episode, Suede will tell Nicole that Emma was talking badly about her at pickleball and that she shut it down immediately. None of that was shown. The edit and the retelling are doing very different things, and the show knows exactly what it is doing by putting both versions on screen.
Emma does something more interesting than the Nicole conversation, though. When Suede calls Jemma unemployed and living in the valley, Emma corrects her. “I don’t think she’s unemployed, but yeah.” She doesn’t defend Jemma, but she doesn’t let it slide either. It’s the same instinct she showed on the hike when Dylan trashed Jemma — she is not Jemma’s ally, but she draws a line at cruelty. That says something, even if Emma would never frame it that way.
Hercy drops the episode’s best line while they eat cookies and debate whether Jemma is just intimidated by Suede: “Stuff happened in the past. It is what it is. You gotta be like Elsa. Let that shit go.”
Emilie & Brandi Glanville
Emilie visits Brandi Glanville — whose face is, in her own words, a little blue from a stem cell and exosome procedure — and the conversation drifts, as conversations with Brandi tend to do, into territory nobody expected. Brandi has already told Mason’s girlfriend to get pregnant so she can have a cute Irish baby to watch. Mason says not to tell her that. Brandi says she already did.
The more useful thread is Emilie’s. She tells Brandi that Hercy has been blowing up her phone. Brandi asks if she is interested. Emilie says no, she does not think so. The way she says it trails off. Brandi: “That’s not a hard no.”
Emilie tells the cameras she does not really have a type. What she has is a timeline. She wants to be married at 26, kids before 32. She says it with the quiet confidence of someone who has already decided and is now watching the pieces arrive.
Preston’s Kitchen
Preston, Alexie, and Hercy are making cookies at Preston’s house. Preston immediately disappears into the pantry and locks the door to add his secret ingredients. Nobody is allowed in.
Preston talks about his parents. He talks about being a child of divorce, about his mom pushing him to get moving while his dad tells him to breathe. He tells the cameras that his mom was once close with a very famous family, and that people he thought were friends in school used that proximity against him.
Hercy relates. His parents divorced when he was in second grade.
The cookies are, by all accounts, worth the secrecy.
Hercy & Romeo at the Tattoo Shop
Hercy and his brother Romeo go to a tattoo shop. Carmen Electra happens to be there. Hercy is getting “Fearless” tattooed on his right bicep — the name of his clothing brand, but also something more personal. He tells the tattoo artist that he is at a crossroads. He has eaten, slept, and ground basketball since he was three years old. It is all he has ever known. And he is only now starting to absorb the reality that going to the NBA is like winning the lottery.
Romeo: “You’re just now realizing that?” Hercy: “Yeah. Just now.” Romeo: “That’s the reality of being prepared for other options. Are you going to be okay being successful without the basketball in your hand?”
Carmen tells him to try at least five things. Romeo: “Your pop’s is Master P. That’s a real-life mogul. He played basketball, but he didn’t become successful from it. He used those tools from basketball.”
Carmen confirms she has met Master P. Romeo asks how he was. She says very flirtatious. Romeo: “Yep. That’s pops.”
After Carmen leaves, Romeo tells Hercy it’s not every day Carmen Electra watches you get tattooed and speaks positivity into your life. He keeps pushing the backup plan.
Toscanova: Jemma, Nicole & Kimora
Jemma tells Nicole and Kimora something nobody expected: she wants to talk to Dylan. Not to relitigate the past, but to find out whether he is deliberately using Suede to hurt her. She says she will have to admit that it hurts — which is the part she doesn’t want to do — but that Dylan will be honest with her. She wants to be able to exist in the same room as him without it reading as obsession. She wants to dead that narrative.
Nicole and Kimora listen. Jemma tells them how much they mean to her. She means it.
Dylan & Suede at Yamashiro
The date starts the way most of their interactions start — easy, warm, both people showing their best version. Suede asks him to do an Ouija board and he declines. Dylan talks about finding God. She says she loves the 180. He says he was a dumb kid who didn’t know when to stop.
Then he brings up communication, and the date becomes something else entirely.
He isn’t angry. He isn’t even particularly intense about it. He tells her calmly that he enjoys being around her — but that after every stretch of hanging out, she goes quiet for three or four days and resurfaces like nothing happened, and it throws him off. He asks her to check her call log. She admits there may be one or two missed calls. He says there are probably more than that. She tells him she will try harder. He says it all sounds nice but he believes in action.
At this point, viewers are doing the same math Suede is doing — is he being fair, or is he being relentless? The answer keeps shifting. He isn’t wrong that she disappears. She isn’t wrong that he keeps circling back to it. He says he just wants to know it’s real. She says she is scared, that she never expected to care about him the way she does, and asks if she can move her chair closer. He lets her.
Then he says it again. A different angle, same point. She is half-assing it. He doesn’t want to be left hanging. How is he supposed to feel?
Suede: “Okay. Well, you seem like you have a chip on your shoulder.” Dylan, laughing: “I don’t have a chip on my shoulder.” Suede: “I hope you have a great night. Thank you for dinner.”
She gets up and walks out mid-meal. Dylan asks for the check.
Whether Dylan was being honest or impossible is a question the show refuses to answer for you. What it does answer is this: Suede sat there, told him she was scared and that she cared about him more than she expected, moved her chair closer — and he said it again anyway. At some point the question stops being whether he is right and starts being whether he knows how to stop.
What Episode 4 Is Really About
Everyone in Episode 4 is being asked the same question in a different room: do you want this enough to actually show up for it?
Hercy is being asked whether he wants basketball enough to build something alongside it, just in case. Emilie is deciding whether Hercy fits the timeline she has already set. Jemma is choosing whether she wants her own narrative back enough to have the hard conversation with the person who took it. And Suede — who spent three episodes being the most unbothered person in the room — walked out of a date mid-meal because someone finally asked her to be accountable, and she was not ready.
Dylan said he believes in action. He has been consistent about that. Everyone else is still deciding.
Calabasas Confidential Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.
Want to check out more episodes?
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Episode 1 Recap: Everyone Gets Hungry at Midnight
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Episode 2: The Biggest Carnival In Alaska
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Episode 3: He Needs Five More Years to Cook
For more “Calabasas Confidential,” check out our Full Calabasas Confidential Guide here.
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