Hold on to your daddies, hold on to your FaceTune, and hold on to that Fox News job, ‘cause Gretchen Rossi’s back!
The Real Housewives of Orange County “MAGA Barbie” has made her triumphant return to the fold after a 12-year hiatus, still sporting the same Ozone-killing hair and the same vendetta against the OG Housewives villainess, Tamra Judge. If there’s one thing the Real Housewives know how to do, it’s hold on to a never-ending grudge.
Having resurrected Jesus Jugs last season only to die again on the third day (or, the third reunion episode), Bravo has once again tapped into the well to launch a nemesis back into the group, this time giving Tamra some needed comeuppance after a season of unrepentant villainy.
But first, we have to deal with the newest feud in Orange County: Katie Ginella vs. the rag-tag duo of Gina and Emily. On one end, you have a liar who lies about even the lies she’s telling. On the other, you have two super annoying women, so it just depends which you find worse.
Obviously, it was low-rent and embarrassing for Katie to DM some blogger in a feud with Tamra. And obviously, it’s bad optics for Katie to be unable to produce the receipts proving that she never called this woman. It’s certainly bad Housewifing to maneuver against your castmates out in the open like this, but it’s all so transparently amateur it almost neutralizes itself. No one believes for a second Katie’s some mastermind. As she puts it, she’s not playing chess; she can hardly play checkers!
There’s something inspiring about Katie’s inexperienced approach to the show, realizing you have to be cutthroat and villainous but not quite mastering the social dynamics of it all, which are far more important. For every Tamra-esque villain who masterfully pulls the strings of her ignorant puppets, there’s a Shannon Beador, who bumbles so authentically through the group there’s no need for her to utilize such strategy.
Maybe it’s fitting, then, that Shannon offers Katie some advice in her time of need.
“I guess it boils down to: Do you want to have relationships with any of the girls in this group?” she asks, not-so-subtly telling Katie, “If you want to stay on this show, you’ll have to work a little harder.”
Shannon could’ve quit in her first season when Heather continually tried to send her to a psych ward. She could have stormed out for good when the women tried to put her on mood stabilizers in Jamaica. And she could have handed in her orange when Bravo brought Alexis back into the fray, but she didn’t. Shannon has persisted through it all, for better or for worse, continuing her sisyphean task of finding love, friendship, and a true role in the group, only to lose it all, shortly thereafter.
If Katie’s interested, she could have that too. Those bloggers won’t keep inviting her to their birthday parties if she’s just some two-season Housewife. (Eh, who am I kidding… they’d probably invite Gina’s friend Tat just for some fame-adjacency.)
Sadly for Katie, her sisyphean task might just be finding a necessary ally only for them to go scorched Earth. Shannon may be in her corner now, but Tamra and her stooges have some info in their back pocket she might like to know. Apparently, during the filming of last year’s cast photo, Shannon had a meltdown (as Shannon does), stewing and brewing over Alexis’ inclusion in the shoot. So, Katie recorded it to send to Alexis, because she understands the golden rule of storytelling: Show, don’t tell.
That’s all fine and dandy, funny even, but it’s a ticking time bomb that’s sure to turn Shannon against Katie, and Tamra knows that. She is the master and everyone else is the puppet—even if they don’t know it.
Tamra’s biggest adversary in the modern age, Jenn, has done some necessary recon to take out the unkillable snake, but alas, she’s just playing right into her hand. She’s doubled down on her love affair with Ryan, gone all in on Katie, and invited Gretchen back into the fold, having sent out an SOS to Orange County’s Joker, who was all too eager to take the call.
Gretchen’s grand return comes in beautiful form, our delusional queen lying right on entry. If Gretchen Rossi has had no plastic surgery, I think that’s truly fantastic, but I also think that this might be her MAGA mind spewing some alternative facts.
It’s truly a meeting of the minds when Gretchen, Katie, and Jenn get together. What they lack in strategic prowess, they make up for in their ability to find men who toe the line between scumbaggery and amazing TV. Slade Smiley was the first-ever Househusband, after all. Ryan, on the other hand, may not be charged with any crimes for his involvement in the Shotei Ohtani case, but he committed a far worse offense tonight, uttering: “Tacos, tequila, and good friends!” To the gulag, immediately.
As for Slade, well, let’s thank the Bravo gods he can only hurt us so much from the friend-of capacity.
Captain Evil—Slade’s nickname for Tamra—however, can cause so much pain. Having gone to therapy once and dabbled with the autism spectrum, she’s returned to her post as Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. She had a good run. Normally, Tamra launches into it in Episode 1.
Now that Tamra’s taken her foot off Shannon’s neck, she can dedicate her time to accusing Jenn of Single White Femaling her—something that only makes Jenn more exponentially cool. At least she knew to emulate a star!
But first, Tamra has to reintroduce herself to Gretchen, who has doubled down on Jesus Juggery in the absence of Ms. Bellino, tossing out Bible verses and prayers with the flare of a woman who knows exactly which pages to read, and which to pretend never existed.
Naturally, the group meet at a hotpot restaurant named Nice to Meet You for their grand reunion. It’s a lovely visual metaphor, the pots boiling further and further as smoke fills the room while the tension grows. This is not a happy-go-lucky dinner party. It’s a place to start fresh… by fighting incessantly.
Just as Katie gets to a better place with Tamra, Gina sideswipes the entire situation by bringing up the Shannon-sized elephant in the room. And thus, we’re off! It’s utterly gorgeous watching Tamra maneuver, having dropped the bomb in Gina’s lap knowing she’d be too hotheaded to hold it in, and realizing so much chaos would ensue that it wouldn’t even matter that she’s the one who initiated it.
“Me, Alexis, and Katie were coming back from a Mother’s Day lunch. We happened to talk about Shannon being nasty to people, and Katie brought it up. She told me the whole story, Alexis had already heard it. And it was just kind of left there. Never thought about it again… until recently,” Tamra says with the most devilish smirk.
The ripple effect is massive: First, Jenn denies all knowledge of the video, creating the first rift between her and Katie. Then, Shannon excuses herself from the table so she can process it all—and next week’s promo shows the results of that process: She hates Katie, now. It’s a vicious one-two punch isolating Katie from all her allies, except for one.
The hero of our story (in her deluded mind), Gretchen comes to the defense of her fallen friends to remind everyone exactly why she came back: to take down Tamra, or at least, attempt to. She’s a very necessary member of this modern ensemble, willing to call out Tamra’s rather obvious machinations. Even though the whole group are well aware of her M.O., Tamra still skates by just being so good at it that it almost feels moot pointing it out, until now.
Gretchen chooses her first line of attack in classic Gretchen fashion: You called Slade a deadbeat dad! Tamra simply replies, “Was he?”
Of all the things Gretchen wants to relitigate, this should be the last one. Tamra rarely has the moral high ground, but she most certainly has it in her dealings with Slade. Yet, just as she takes the upper hand, she back-hands herself with a reminder of her estranged daughter, who Gretchen once reached out to. It’s a nasty fight, going so low so quickly, unleashing 12 years of pent up rage on both sides.
“I think the problem with Tamra and Gretchen is that they’re both so intensely going after each other all the time, they can’t see their own part in the feud,” the wise sage, Heather Dubrow, says in a confessional. That, of course, makes for the best kind of feud. The winner in any good feud is always the viewers.
For now, though, Tamra and Gretchen are putting their swords down until the next snafu. While the premiere was a solid start, this episode comes across exponentially stronger, Gretchen’s return proving RHOC knows how to be a legacy franchise like no other. The history is just so rich and the drama so layered that it all just comes together with a giddy grin.
It can be hard to bring back the old guard without feeling like lifeless nostalgia slop (i.e. Deadpool & Wolverine and all its pointless cameos), but RHOC brings back these women exactly when their stories need a reprise, making for such beautiful television. Next week, we launch into Katie vs. Shannon, which is sure to be the most incoherent feud this show has ever attempted. I can’t wait!
