By Holly Rasmussen

It’s time for the Sister Wives season finale! After weeks of stalling (and even a fake out on last week’s episode), it is finally time for the Browns to address Meri Brown’s catfish catastrophe! As The Ashley has previously reported, Meri got caught up in an intimate online affair with a man… who turned out to actually be a very creepy woman. Finally, we will hear Meri’s side of the story –well, the TLC-spun version of the affair, anyway.

Before that, however, we catch back up with the family while they are in Alaska on vacation. Maddie and her boyfriend, Caleb, and Logan and his girlfriend, Michelle, head out on a double date. There is a purpose for this on-camera date, of course. The producers want Maddie and Logan to talk about how they don’t want to be polygamists like their parents.

On the confessional couch, the kids’ mother, Janelle, weighs in on the polygamy issue.

“So far Logan and Maddie say they don’t want to be polygamists, but one thing I think all of them would say is that they wouldn’t trade their growing up. They love their family. They have loved having the interaction. Honestly, I think my kids like Christine and Meri sometimes more than they like me.”

(Did anyone else notice that Kody’s fourth wife, Robyn, was omitted out of this comment? Sure, she wasn’t in the family when Maddie and Logan were very young but…it was kind of a slap in the face to exclude Robyn, no?)

The next day, some of the family, including Kody (who is, unfortunately, sans his trusty visor for this scene), goes deep sea fishing and it’s pretty boring. Forget the deep sea fish, let’s get to the catfish!

While Kody and his crew are fishing, Meri, Robyn and Christine take some of the other kids dog sledding. Christine must be drunk or something because she’s acting very strangely.

“Women are just more durable than men…in a lot of aspects,” she says.

Is that a sex joke? Ew.

Then another time she compares herself and her sister wives to the sled dogs.

“It’s just thought-provoking thinking about Nick and his bitches (the dogs) and Kody and his bitches.”

Did Christine sneak a box of wine out of Meri’s wet bar before the Browns went on this trip?!

That night, a neighbor drops by with a giant fish. Caleb is showing the family how to clean and cook the fish when pregnant Robyn starts to feel sick at the smell. After a few moments, she starts gagging and bolts to the bathroom to throw up. While her older children follow her to help, Robyn’s beloved husband, Kody, stands there laughing at the fact that Robyn got sick at the smell.

What a catch he is!

Later, Maddie’s boyfriend, Caleb, decides to have an (on-camera) man-to- Kody, talk about Maddie. He, of course, asks Kody’s permission to marry her.

Kody goes on and on about how great a guy Caleb is and how Caleb stepped up and took care of his sister when her husband died. That’s sweet and all but…we’re really just interested in the catfish story.

After suffering through almost 40 minutes of Alaskan filler, we finally get to the good stuff. The wives and Kody head to dinner, where they all talk about how great the trip has been. (Robyn, meanwhile, is slurping up some disgusting-looking yellow soup.)

Meri decides that the soup slurping sesh would be a great time to basically ruin the family.

“You all know, it’s no surprise that I’ve been struggling with… stuff lately,” she starts out. “I’m going to be doing something and I don’t know what it is that I’m going to do.”

This is all very cryptic. She talks about how alone she feels now that Mariah has moved out for college. In between these scenes, clips of Meri talking directly to the camera are edited in.

“I got into this place where I was talking to people on social media,” Meri tells us. “I got into this situation where I was talking to this one person who really made me trust him. He was just saying all the right things, being very kind and very compassionate and I trusted him. We kind of just started talking online and I laughed.”

Keep in mind, however, that these to-the-camera comments were filmed much later than the Alaskan dinner table scenes. In that scene, Meri does not mention that she is having an affair. At that time, she was still unaware that her dream man, “Sam Cooper,” was actually a woman. During the Alaska trip, Meri was still in love with “Sam” and was planning to leaving the family for him. So basically, TLC filmed the confessional scenes later, after Meri’s affair was discovered, and had her explain what was really going on during the dinner table conversation.

“Don’t be surprised if I just up and leave,” she tells the family at the dinner table.

Sobbin’ Robyn, of course, gives her take. She says Meri has been different for a while and as always, Robyn starts crying. Janelle and Christine also voice concern for Meri.

Meri tells us that the relationship with “Sam” started out as a friendship, but he soon began expressing love and attraction to her. She says she “felt flattered.”

“He was making me really start to feel love for who he portrayed himself to be,” she said. “I’m sitting here married and I was feeling these other emotions directed toward someone else.”

She said she chose to not act on the feelings, however. She said that made him really press the issues. However, things began to soon unravel, and “Sam” would never meet her in person. There were “little cracks in the story,” Meri tells us.

“There were times early on where I just knew he was feeding me a line of bulls**t,” she said. “I knew this within the first week of talking him and I chose to ignore it because I enjoyed just talking to somebody.”

Meri said when she confronted him about the inconsistencies in his story, he flipped out. She said she eventually figured out it wasn’t a man she was talking to, but a woman! She said she believes the woman was watching her online and made the decision to try and trick her.

“I feel like I have been targeted. I feel like my family’s been targeted,” she said.

Meanwhile, back at the dinner table, Meri is being all cryptic and weird as she talks about leaving. She mentions how she needs to go camp out in the woods alone for awhile. (Um?) However, she never mentions to Kody or her sister wives that there is someone else in her life.

During this whole reveal, Kody is dead silent. He’s probably zoned out staring at Sobbin’ Robyn and didn’t even hear her. Maybe he’s having trouble remembering Meri’s name?

Finally he speaks to the cameras in a confessional.

“What she’s sort of saying, maybe, is that she doesn’t want to be married to me anymore but does want to be in the family. I’m afraid to ask her. I’m afraid she’s just going to get right in my face and say, ‘It’s you.’”

Okay, Kody. Just ignore it. That sounds like a good plan.

Also…can you blame Meri? Kody basically threw her overboard when Robyn came along, ignored Meri’s very obvious empty nest depression, spent his time impregnating “the hot wife” and then divorced Meri to marry Robyn. What did you expect, Kodster?

Next week, the Browns will “tell all” in a special interview with Tamron Hall. They have done one of these interviews at the end of every season, but this season’s will be much more exciting, as Meri’s affair will be discussed even further!

To catch up on the whole Meri Brown Catfishing Scandal, click here!

To read Holly’s recaps of previous ‘Sister Wives’ episodes, click here!