EPISODE three of Real Housewives of Melbourne opens at Gamble’s house, where she’s sitting down with fiance Rick for a chat about their upcoming nuptials.

Gamble asks her Luke stepson if he’s going to be bringing a date to the wedding. It’s not been mentioned yet on the show, but Luke is gay, and has spoken publicly about his sexuality.

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That’s right, Gamble has the ultimate Housewife secret weapon: A GAY STEPSON. We can only assume he’s been manning her social media accounts lately, if fabulously shady tweets like this are anything to go by.

“Would it be OK if I brought someone to the wedding?” Luke asks.

“Of course! I don’t want you to be alone, I want you to find someone in your life. It’s what anyone would want for someone that they love,” Gamble tells him.

This is very lovely and supportive, but cool your jets Gamble — the boy can sidle up to any young eligible bachelor at The Peel and brag about getting them unfettered access to Gina Liano. LET HIM PLAY THE FIELD.

Soon, conversation turns to Pettifleur, and whether she should score an invite to the wedding.

“If I do invite her, I’ve got someone saying my dress is s**t, my hair is s**t, my life is s**t. It affects me, it really does.” Yeah, stuff that for a joke.

Rick — a man so perpetually chill we’re starting to suspect Gamble’s mixing Valium into those lovingly-prepared dinners — insists that a wedding invite will act as an “olive branch” to Pettifleur. “It’ll change the dynamic completely.”

Luke, however, is unconvinced.

“I hate her, she’s a bitch [SOUND THE ‘GAY STEPSON SECRET WEAPON’ KLAXON]. I’ve seen her, I’ve seen what she does, she walks around like she owns the place, she treats everyone like s**t and she’s a massive cow,” he spits.

“You know how people talk about having an angel and a devil on your shoulder? Dad’s the angel, I’m the devil. Dad’s telling you to stop, I’m telling you to rip that bitch to shreds.”

Next we’re with Gina as she takes an important meeting to try and get her own perfume into Australia’s most prestigious and exclusive department store — Chemist Warehouse. She has her young PA Josh in tow, who again seems to have suffered a traumatic head injury mere moments before the cameras started rolling.

Asked what scents she’d like in her signature perfume, Gina apparently mishears the question and instead reels off all the ingredients in a Sizzler fruit salad: Pineapple. Coconut. Mandarin. Bananas.

Poor Josh seems utterly out of his depth, delivering panicface after panicface whenever drawn upon to answer even the simplest of questions.

We’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s not a total dunce — yes, we are doing so because he is very pretty (longtime readers will know that episode three is around the point in every season where we begin to tire of the endless Housewife arguments and instead thirst for the secondary male cast members. Honestly, you could set your watch to it).

Brace yourselves, because s**t’s about to get real over at Pettifleur’s penthouse apartment. Somebody call Grant Denyer because this is a FAMILY FEUD.

Pettifleuer’s invited her elder sister Gillian over. They were best friends when they were younger, but in recent years, “We’ve just drifted apart.”

As we discover, that’s putting it mildly.

Let’s get this out of the way first: due to their strong family resemblance, identical hybrid accents and the fact the scene is shot with them on separate couches across the room from each other, it’s hard to shake the feeling Gillian is actually just Pettifleur in a slightly different wig. We obviously can’t prove this conspiracy theory, but you probably can’t disprove it either, so it’s definitely something to think about.

“I wanted to catch up, because it’s been a while. I’ve missed you,” Pettifleur says eagerly.

“Have you,” Gillian shoots back, cold as ice.

From that, they mostly sit in awkward silence, Pettifleur’s every leading question (‘How’s the family?’) being met with monosyllabic answers (‘Good’). You can just about feel Pettifleur’s cottonmouth through the screen.

Getting more nervous by the second, Pettifleur starts to babble. All the while, Gillian sits across from her in silence:

“Why are you looking at me like that, what did I say?” Pettifleur begs.

“Nothing. Just keep going, I’m happy to listen to you. I’d rather you do the talking and I just sit and listen to you,” says Gillian.

Pettifleur reaches out — what can she do to fix this obvious rift? Here it comes:

“Well you just need to be normal and natural and … you’re up yourself. Yeah, you’re up yourself.”

“I can’t ring you and talk about everyday things. You want to talk about which Chanel bag you have, your Louis Vuitton shoes or glasses …”

And then, the most damning indictment of Pettifleur’s self-obsession:

“You didn’t even know where I worked. I’d been there for eight years,” says Gillian.

“Oh come on, I can’t remember everything! I don’t see it as a flaw. I just see it as, ‘What’s the big deal?’”

With that, Gillian’s out, leaving nothing but one small, perfectly formed ice cube in her wake.

Over at Chyka’s next, where she’s invited Jackie around for a catch-up to chat about her ticking biological clock.

We’ll be honest here: While it’s now been mentioned in all three episodes this season, we’re just not that emotionally invested in Jackie’s ‘Is she? Isn’t she?’ pregnancy subplot. Perhaps it’s because we interviewed Jackie in person the other week, and — spoiler alert — she ain’t preggers.

Over to Lydia’s, where she’s lounging around on the couch and inventing new ways to torture housefriend Johanna (who is polishing the marble coffee table with Windex — girl is cutting corners because she has clearly HAD IT).

“Let’s re-do the fridge or re-do the pantry,” Lydia suggests, literally picking random pointless menial tasks out of thin air. “That’d be cool, wouldn’t it?”

Johanna’s side-eye-to-camera-game is, as always, flawless:

Before they can embark on those exciting projects, Lydia’s razzed-up Porsche salesman Michael from last week drops by with a special home delivery: her new car.

By now understanding that her kryptonite is off-colour sexual innuendo that would’ve been considered ‘broad’ by an Are You Being Served scriptwriter, he goes all out on the flirting front. He jokes about programming his home address into the car’s GPS, while Lydia asks if the suspension will make the car ‘stiffer’ (like a penis, do you see).

Our feelings during this whole stomach-churning segment can only properly be described via the medium of a Figaro reaction shot:

Lydia then ups her foreplay, roping in Johanna for some light BDSM work. She strokes her clearly-uncomfortable employee’s hair while patronisingly telling her that if she works really hard, maybe, just maybe, she’ll one day have a Porsche of her own.

“…in a billion years,” Johanna responds, having clearly done the maths.

“Johanna doesn’t like braking,” Lydia tells Michael. “It’s like ‘Johanna, we’re gonna turn left! ‘Chung Chung’, not ‘Ching Ching’! She goes, ‘That’s Chinese’. Oh, whatever, it all sounds the same to me.”

HOW ARE THESE TERRIBLE WORDS COMING OUT OF THIS WOMAN’S MOUTH.

HOW IS THIS ON TELEVISION.

WHAT IS HAPPENING.

For the final, spectacular (just you wait) scene of this week’s episode, Gamble invites the other housewives to hers so she can hand-deliver them all their wedding invitations.

The ladies are all on their way — but someone seems to have told Pettifleur it’s a costume party, as she’s come as the White Witch of Narnia:

On arrival, Lydia and Gamble head to another room for a private chat, where talk soon turns to Pettifleur — Gamble suggests that, given her rival is working out hard with a body sculpting trainer, ‘maybe she’s transgender’ (eek. Not your finest moment, doll).

Upstairs, the Pettifleur/Gamble/Lydia feud rumbles on. Janet — who, we feel duty-bound to point out, has come dressed as a fluoro highlighter — delivers the night’s best unintentional read, saying that Lydia was in the wrong for repeating Pettifleur’s bitchy comments about Gamble to the woman herself.

“I feel for Pettifleur, she told Lydia her deepest thoughts, and Lydia ran straight to Gamble.”

Pettifleur’s ‘deepest thoughts’ are nasty comments about Gamble being a black widow? Amazing.

Downstairs, Lydia and Gamble discuss the simmering tensions, stoked by last week’s horse-riding bitch-fest.

“Apparently even Chyka doesn’t like me,” Lydia says.

“Chyka? She’d see the good in Hitler. She’d be like ‘Hey, Hitler, do you need catering?’” Gamble counters. She obviously thinks very highly of Lydia.

After her chat with Gamble, Lydia next takes Pettifleur aside for a one-on-one in a bedroom. Things get heated pretty quickly and, in attempt to take the blame off herself in front of an emotional adversary, Lydia throws literally everyone in the cast under the bus.

“Nobody else wanted to hang out with you, and all of a sudden, they’re all your friend,” she tells her. Basically: ‘Think I don’t like you? Well everyone else HATES you.’

Jackie’s soon wheeled in for a fact-check:

“Lydia’s just told me that all the ladies hate my guts,” Pettifleur tells her.

“No. That’s not true. The only thing I’ve said — and I’ve said this to your face — is that I think you’re annoying and you’re full of s**t, and I’ve said it to your FACE,” is Jackie’s response. She’s nothing if not honest.

The girls emerge from the bedroom so Pettifleur can confront the others with Lydia’s allegations that everyone hates her and talks about her behind her back. The girls rush to defend themselves, mostly using Jackie’s ‘YES I think you’re appalling but I’ll happily tell you to your face’ tactic.

Here’s Lydia, by the way, while all this madness of her own creation unfolds:

As the screaming match reaches its zenith, Gamble cuts the tension by inviting all her guests out onto the deck, where she’ll present them each with a wedding invitation.

So this is the big moment: Will she invite Pettifleur to her wedding? Well, duh — of course she will. You wouldn’t invite someone to a party held specifically so you can give the guests a wedding invite and then NOT give her one, would you?

But — in the dying seconds of the episode — TWIST. Once Gamble hands Pettifleur her invite — complete with a friendly ‘Pettifleur, my darling’, and a plus-one for her partner — the Narnian queen immediately hands it back.

“I don’t want to be too rude [WELL YOU FAILED], but you have to think about it before you give it to me. I can’t accept until you have another think about why you you’re inviting me.” With that, she stuffs the invite back into a dumbfounded Gamble’s hand.

Gina’s reaction sums up that of the other ladies and indeed, every sane person:

“What? Don’t do that to her….”

Gamble doesn’t take too long to ‘have another think about why she’s inviting’ Pettifleur.

“OK, I’ve thought about it. GET F**KED.”

With that, she tosses the invite over her head, where it lands in the garden:

Next week: Gamble’s initial anger crumbles as she breaks down over Pettifleur’s brutal rebuff, while Lydia and Susie rake over their 30-year frenemy status.

You can catch all the Housewives goss with our next recap, right after the next episode of Real Housewives of Melbourne airs next Sunday at 8:30pm on Foxtel’s Arena channel.

In the meantime, chat all things Housewives with recapper Nick Bond — who is currently in negotiations to get his own signature perfume stocked exclusively at Clint’s Crazy Bargains — on Twitter at @bondnickbond.