‘Catfish’ Season 7, Episode 25 Recap – “Dallas and Safari”

Tricia
22 Min Read

If you haven’t been tuning in lately, the first thing you’ll notice about this episode is that Nev Schulman has been working with different co-hosts since Max Joseph left the show to dedicate more time to his own film-making. The co-host for this episode is Tallulah Willis, daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, and she starts the show by introducing Nev as if he’s the new person, even nailing his signature, “Hey-oh!” as a greeting.

Nev and Tallulah have an email from Dallas. He’s 26 and lives in Los Angeles, and has been talking to girl named Safari, who is an exotic dancer who also lives in L.A. Dallas said they’ve been talking for two months and he thinks this girl has everything: face, body, and personality. She’s much too busy to hang out in real life, but he’s okay with that since she’s been sending him pictures and videos to keep him happy. But, this is Catfish, and that means there are some things that are “kind of crazy.” Most notably, Safari asked if Dallas would be down for some “group action” with him and his roommate Kevin. Dallas immediately felt confused and wondered if he was being played.

Dallas on MTV’s ‘Catfish’. Photo courtesy of MTV.

Tallulah says right off the bat that there is nothing about the entire e-mail that makes her think Safari is the actual human being behind Safari’s profile, and Nev suggests that maybe Safari is Kevin, trying to figure out if Dallas would be down to get with him.

They decide to give Dallas a call, which is where we learn that Dallas moved to L.A. for the weather – and no, not for the beaches – because he loves motorcycles and in L.A. he can ride year-round. After Nev’s prompting, Dallas jumps into the Safari story. It all started with two heart eye emojis in his DMs, which caused Dallas to go check out the page of the girl who sent them to him. After realizing that “she’s fine” he asked if she wanted to hang out since they’re both in L.A., and they exchanged phone numbers.

Next thing he knows, she’s texting him, telling him how good-looking and muscular he is (girl’s got great taste!), but whenever he asked her to hang out she always said she was busy. He’s never heard her voice on the phone, every time he’s tried to FaceTime in the past she doesn’t respond to him for 24 hours afterwards, and then she started saying her front camera’s broken.

Honestly though, do you know what is broken? That excuse! How many people actually have a phone with a broken camera, and yet that’s the #1 excuse used on this show! These catfish have got to get more creative.

Plus, as Nev points out, Safari is a girl who has a lot of followers on Instagram… who posts a lot of selfies… which uses the front camera… so that doesn’t check out at all anyway!

But Dallas has been getting photos and videos of her that aren’t posted on Instagram, and although she doesn’t say anything in them that makes them personal in any way, they’re “sexy” videos, so Dallas isn’t exactly complaining. I will give him props though, because according to him, he hasn’t sent anything sexy back because he thinks he might be getting used. Which is when we circle back to the threesome story.

Safari asked if Dallas would be down for a threesome, to which he replied it depends on who it’s with. She suggested his roommate, Kevin, and Dallas said he was down because that’s his boy. So Safari goes ahead and DMs Kevin, which is when Nev says they were wondering if the catfish might actually be Kevin, and Dallas bursts out laughing saying there’s no way it could be Kevin.

Of course, in the back of my mind at this point, I’m definitely thinking that reaction means it probably is Kevin!

Since they’re all in L.A., Nev and Tallulah decide to go meet up with him. Once the video call has ended, Nev reminds Tallulah that since Dallas and Safari have been talking for two months and he’s never heard her voice, there’s a good chance she’s not actually a she. Tallulah makes a good point in disclosing that the good news is that if it’s not Safari, Dallas doesn’t sound like he’s going to be devastated, which is true and wasn’t something I thought of until she pointed it out.

Usually on Catfish, the whole premise of each episode is that these two people who have met online are deeply in love and want to be together forever, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in this episode. This seems to be more about hooking up, which is kind of strange, but Dallas seems like such a cool guy that I am still interested in seeing who he’s been talking to. Plus, as Nev says in the car ride over, Dallas is “alarmingly handsome.”

Once at Dallas’ home, they walk in to see two trophies, which Dallas reveals are actually Kevin’s because he’s a body builder. Nev cracked me up with, “No wonder Safari is trying to make that happen!” They spend a little bit of time talking about the strange dynamic, how Dallas isn’t in love with Safari, but he insists she does make him happy and if she really is who she says she is, he’s definitely down to follow through with dating. After scrolling through some of their text messages, one exchange sticks out.

Dallas had responded to a video Safari posted of her “twerking” with, “OMG, I need that ASAP,” and Safari replied, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Whaaaat? That’s super creepy!

Of course, that’s when Kevin walks in, complete with muscles and man bun. After Nev asks him what he thinks about Safari, he says he thinks she’s hot, she’s definitely caught his attention, and now that the threesome has been dangled in front of him, that’s a moment he and Dallas haven’t had yet and it’s a little “bro bucket list” they’re waiting on to happen. Nev asks if they’ve considered that Safari is actually a guy, and Dallas said he has because his fan base is about 55% guys.

Interesting!

Nev and Tallulah take off after that, and after a short conversation where Nev discloses that because Dallas is so good-looking he doesn’t think he’s ready for the possibility of not getting the girl, they head to a cafe to get to the bottom of who Safari really is. They start with her phone number, which is registered to somebody named William, aged 53. Yikes. They decide to check if Safari follows anybody named William on Instagram, but she doesn’t. Tallulah notices that the e-mail listed for Safarai on Instagram is arrii.safffarri(@somethingtheydontshowus.com), which leads her to believe her name is actually Ari and not Safari.

They do a search for that e-mail address and come up with a bunch of results using the name Arianna and another one that uses the @the_only_saffarii on Instagram. That prompts Nev to declare that he believes there is a person behind this account with the real name Arianna. After looking through her tagged photos, they find a girl named Rachel in some of them who looks like a “real person”, so they decide to reach out to her in a DM. In another professional-looking photo, the photographer is tagged, so they message @j_alexphotos as well.

Nev thinks that Safari’s page all looks normal and real, but he can’t come up with a reason for if it is her, why she hasn’t at least talked on the phone with Dallas.

Nev’s phone rings after that, and it’s Jermaine, the photographer that they DMed. Jermaine says Safari is one of the coolest people he shoots in California, but that she actually lives in Arizona. He also knows she had a situation where her Instagram page was hacked for a while and she never figured out who did it. The hacker took photos and videos from her iCloud and just started sending them to random people.

That, at the very least, is super suspicious!

But this is Catfish, and that’s what they want us to think. I’m still placing my bet on the roommate.

Once they hang up with Jermaine, Nev’s phone rings again almost right away, and they answer to find Rachel on the phone. Rachel confirms that Safari is her best friend, almost like a sister, and they’ve known each other for eight years. They switch over to FaceTime and Nev starts to inquire about if Safari has ever mentioned somebody named Dallas. Rachel says no, she’s never mentioned anybody by that name to her before. Nev reads the cell phone number Dallas has that’s supposed to be Arianna’s number to Rachel, and Rachel confirms that is not Arianna’s number.

Rachel gives them Arianna’s actual phone number so that Nev and Tallulah can call her. Unfortunately, it goes right to voicemail. They call Dallas next and make plans to go meet up where he is at the gym. Dallas takes the opportunity to show off a little on the bars, lifting himself right up off of the ground and making it look way too easy. Then they get down to work and they walk Dallas through what they found.

He’s surprisingly shocked to discover it probably isn’t Arianna that he’s been talking to, as if the chances of talking to a hot exotic dancer who is into threesomes online isn’t just as likely as finding a real-life unicorn. Nonetheless, Nev sends a text to the phone number Dallas had for Safari, and a DM on Instagram, and then they wait. But not for long, because Safari DMs back right away saying, “Hey, I’m at work, can’t talk.”

Sounds legit.

He asks if she can talk online for a minute and she says because of work rules she can’t, but she’ll see what she can do. The next thing Nev gets is a photo! He anxiously turns the phone to Dallas and says, “Is that her?”

Not only is it her, she’s holding a sign that says, “Hey Nev, it’s Safari. I’m real. Tell Dallas I’ll talk to him later about all of this.” Dallas points out that was way too fast to be real, and there’s no way she can have a sign ready and take that picture that fast. Nev inspects the photo for any Photoshop shenanigans but can’t tell if it’s real or not. Tallulah has a good point, too, that if it was too fast to take a photo it’s way too fast to Photoshop a picture that well!

Nev, Tallulah, and Dallas do a quick mock-up of making a sign and taking a picture to see if it’s even possible to create a sign, take a picture and send it in the two minutes it took between her messages, and discover that while it’s fast, it’s possible. Since Safari said she would explain everything to Dallas, Nev and Tallulah tell Dallas to keep them posted and take off.

We get little clips of Nev and Tallulah saying they haven’t heard anything, and then the camera switches to Dallas, who says he just got a message from Safari, which says:

Hey Dallas, I thought about this a lot. Sorry it took so long to respond. There are some things I need to clear up. I need to meet you somewhere by you.

Dallas calls Nev and they make a plan with Tallulah to go meet Safari at a park close to Dallas’ house. Dallas is very vocal about being nervous and scared.

After a few minutes of waiting, they see a man walking towards them, and at first Dallas dismisses him, but then says, “I’ve seen him before.” He keeps up a running commentary, “That better not be her. Don’t come over here, dude. F**ck my life, bro. I swear, y’all are kidding.”

Spoiler alert: he’s not kidding.

The man introduces himself as William to Nev and Tallulah while Dallas is still moaning and groaning, “Nooo!” in the background mixed with several colorful expletives. Nev tries to calm him down by telling him they’re about to get an explanation.

Dallas’ catfish, William, on MTV’s ‘Catfish’. Image courtesy of MTV.

William explains he saw Dallas a few times around town at some social events, he’s seen really hot photos online, and one time he was drunk with his friend Safari and she said he should DM him, but he was too nervous and he didn’t think Dallas was gay. Safari said, “Just look at how he’s posting, he’s got an OnlyFans page he uses to target the gay community.”

Nev interrupts here to ask what an OnlyFans page is, and I have to say, Dallas looked more than a little called out to have that part discussed on the show. Because they don’t go into it too much on the show, I Googled it and discovered that OnlyFans is a membership platform that allows fans to pay for content of the people they subscribe to. William says Dallas is always posting his nudes and you can subscribe to his stuff. Nev asks if Dallas as subscribers and Dallas admits he does.

William says he suggested the threesome to see if Dallas would be into it, then planned for himself and Safari to meet up with Dallas and see if he could be added as the fourth. (You can’t make this stuff up!) And that’s when Catfish came in out of nowhere and ruined their plan.

Nev says he gets the feeling that William doesn’t feel like he did anything wrong, and William agrees with that, saying he didn’t do anything maliciously and he didn’t ask for money, so he doesn’t feel like he was doing any harm.

Dallas said all he had to do was ask, “Dude, are you gay?” He would have said no and that would have been the end of it.

William’s upset by that, though, asking him if he’s not gay then why does he sell to the gay community and make money off of them? Tallulah jumps in here in Dallas’ defense, telling William that what he’s saying isn’t fair, and it makes it sound like William’s making the decision of Dallas’ sexual identity for him. Kind of like how if a girl is dressed in a “certain way” that “says something” about her or what she’s after, which isn’t right. Nev says that he thinks it’s fair to interpret Dallas’ social media presence as somebody who might be bisexual (which Dallas vehemently denies with several shakes of his head), but even so, that doesn’t make it okay to do what William did.

William says his plan was for Safari to introduce him to Dallas as her friend, then he and Dallas could have started a personal relationship, Safari could have faded into the background, and, “Who knows what would have happened?”

Dallas jumps in with, “Not that!”

William goes on to apologize for having this all come out the wrong way, saying that Safari is also willing to explain her side of what happened, and Nev says he would like to hear what she has to say, so William disappears to call her and make plans for all of them to meet up.

Honestly, I don’t know what Safari will add to this, but I’m definitely anxious to see Dallas get a chance to meet her. They arrive at the house where Safari is, and Dallas gets out of the car saying, “Let the awkwardness begin!” which I thought was both very fitting and hilarious.

Safari walks into the living room where the rest of the crew is waiting, looking absolutely gorgeous with a big smile on her face. She shakes hands with everybody and Dallas says again that this is awkward. Safari explains the situation from her point of view, saying that she was really just trying to help her friend William land the guy of his dreams. After being prompted she says she does not and never has had any feelings for Dallas, but that she does think he’s gorgeous.

Safari (left) and William (right) on MTV’s ‘Catfish’. Photo courtesy of MTV.

All things considered, I have a feeling Dallas is going to take that as a win here.

Nev dives right in with the question we all wanted to know, asking if she would have participated in a threesome with Dallas and William in an effort to play matchmaker, to which she responds, “Yeah, I’m a freak. Yes!”

Tallulah says that even if Dallas did feel that way about both guys and girls, it isn’t their responsibility to lead him into exploring that, to which both Safari and William agree. That pretty much wraps it up. All of them exchange hugs outside by the car, and on the way back home, Dallas tells Nev he’s not mad at either Safari or William, he just wishes they hadn’t wasted his time.

Two months later, Tallulah and Nev check in with Dallas to learn he’s doing well and that he hasn’t spoken with either William or Safari since they filmed. They talk to William next, who says he doesn’t hold anything against Dallas, that he’s just out there to “get his coin” and he respects that.

They end the video call, and that, as they say, is all she wrote for this episode of Catfish! You can catch an all-new episode of Catfish only on MTV next Wednesday!

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By Tricia
Tricia is a full-time receptionist and mom of two who still manages to find a whole lot of time to waste on the Internet. She posts frequently on Twitter sharing hilarious things her children say, posting way too many selfies, and bragging and/or complaining about her husband (depending on the day). Tricia’s passionate about pretty much everything she loves, and is often found yelling in caps about all things Supernatural, Louden Swain, Harry Potter, and fan fiction.
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