It’s 8:43 pm and The Real Housewives of Orange County finale music starts serenading its bittersweet tune, while pleasantries of “may our friendships, although sometimes complicated, always be worth the ride” crash to the shore like waves on Newport Beach.
It’s 8:43 pm and this episode doesn’t end for 30 more minutes. The music’s rolling, the ladies are toasting, but the big bombshell has yet to emerge. Gretchen Rossi has allegedly liked some homophobic and transphobic Instagram posts, and Tamra Judge has saved that revelation for the eleventh hour, causing a massive explosion in its wake.
It’s 9:10 pm and the trip—and thus, the season—has ended… or so you’d think. With five minutes remaining, production pulls back the curtain to try its hand at a Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 4 moment: a reveal that Tamra has leaked the entire season’s story to bloggers. Suddenly, everything’s out of whack and we’ve all face-planted into the gutter.
And just like that, the season is over.
There was once a time when the only certainty in a RHOC finale was that beautiful musical motif playing at a backyard bash where women, friend and foe, came together for one last hoorah, closing each arc with a beautiful bow—sometimes, on a cake.
Things have changed and the world that Orange County once consisted of—sky tops, Bravo blogs, and country club Republicans—has been swallowed whole by a disturbed post-Reality Von Tease landscape in which scandal is the only way of life.
Did Gretchen like posts comparing gay people to pedophiles? Has Tamra spilled every detail of the season’s drama to bloggers? Is Shannon aware the tag was sticking out of her skirt all day in Amsterdam? The world may never know, as the season has ended with a multitude of questions, at a time when a Coto de Caza soirée could save us all.
It’s a weird finale, so let’s start with the simple times before diving into the abyss. The episode begins with the ladies split into two groups, one going to swing over the city of Amsterdam while the others go through an Instagram museum where AI edits Heather Dubrow to look like the witch from Hansel and Gretel. Cute!
Not so cute? Tamra asking Chat GPT to make a friendship contract between her and Gretchen. Girl, pull open a Google Doc and type two sentences like the rest of us. The classless infiltration of AI on our Housewives shows is the darkness I won’t stand for.
Maybe it makes sense that she didn’t bother typing up those two sentences, though, given Tamra spends the next scene prodding Gina to bring up the rumors Gretchen is homophobic and transphobic. So much for that contract.
Meanwhile, across town (literally, for once), Heather takes Emily on a stroll through her parents’ former house, a scene so sincere it cuts through all the minutiae to prove exactly why Heather Dubrow’s one of the greatest to ever do it. It’s such a beautiful scene, peeling back Heather’s guarded exterior to reveal the vulnerability rooted in her upbringing, one that made her the kind of woman who says “champs” and melts down over someone eating the bow off her aforementioned cake.
It’s especially nice storytelling that Heather FaceTimes her mother in the home, only for her to not answer. That’s life!, as they say.
Next, she sits by the water to pour out her father’s ashes, and suddenly, I’m sniffly. I don’t remember hearing one word about Father Paige Kent until two weeks ago, but Heather came through with the best personal story of the season in the final moments. A queen knows to show, not tell. Heather Dubrow is not just the Other Mother; she is the Mother of all Mothers. Don’t you forget it.
That’s why the Gretchen “takedown,” so to speak, works so well. The stakes are real, raw, and simply natural in the polarized world we live in. To Tamra, this is simply a moment to get one up on her long-time foe, but it’s obviously much deeper than that, and Heather understands that wholeheartedly.
You can’t pull out posts liked by @gretchenrossi without getting into the nitty gritty. The show may blur out all the posts—which is fine by me, given we don’t need to platform such disturbed forms of bigotry—but they’re heinous, and they’re real, whether or not it’s true Gretchen liked them.
I can almost believe she just scrolls through Instagram liking everything in her midst (though that doesn’t explain allegedly commenting on one of them…), but why are those entering the feed, to begin with? My Instagram Explore page is all videos of people making sandwiches, because I like sandwiches. Just saying.
“Oh gosh, I would never do that. I mean, if I liked something, I probably didn’t know it was about that. I don’t have any issue with the LGBTQ community,” Gretchen insists in a tone that’s defeated from the get-go. This is Woke America’s last gasp of life, straight from the wine moms of Orange County, and Gretchen simply has no bandwidth to ride that wave.
“Why are you not horrified right now!?” an exasperated Heather asks, unleashing in the most passionate light we’ve seen since she was kicked out of an Irish bathroom. “This is about human decency!”
Suddenly, the whole table’s hooting and hollering, Jenn trying to ask if Gretchen only hates gays in a biblical sense, while Tamra tosses back “Jesus loves gay people, too!”
Despite Jenn’s weak attempts to help, none of the ladies truly stand for it—Shannon even breaking down in tears, while Heather exits to sob to her husband—as Tamra rallies the troops against her mortal enemy. Sure, she may have called Slade an F-slur in 2008, but Tamra Judge is all about leading with love, when it’s convenient. The only hate campaigns she launches are against blondes in Orange County.
Gretchen waddles right out of the scene almost numb to it all, a very Phaedra Parks post-dungeon reveal reaction. The truth is, she may have lost the group, but she could have quite the Conservative grift on her hands if she’s willing.
By the end of the night, she’ll have hundreds of “hold the line” comments flooding her Instagram, because these opinions—whether or not she agrees with them—have plenty of support, unfortunately. Hate has a home all over the world, though apparently not in Orange County.
Gretchen is shipped off in her own car, crying her eyes out in one moment and turning around blank-faced in the next. It’s kind of chilling, and just as you think that’s that, we cut to the next morning… and everything’s off.
“I feel awful about the way that dinner went,” Gina starts. “But I went to the actual pages of the people, and she does follow these accounts. But then I went to the posts that she supposedly liked, and I can’t find any one that she actually liked.”
And suddenly, the season is ending with everyone unsure of everything… which is a weird spot to leave in. That’s especially true in this case, when Gina said “she does follow those accounts,” so it seems odd to back-track on everything else. All it takes to unlike a post is to click one button. Let’s get a grip.
Then there’s the reveal against Tamra, taking things from convoluted to straight-up uncanny. Some blogger with the voice of Ghostface calls up the Housewives to tell them all they know about the upcoming season, all leaked by Tamra. Just five minutes after the women ousted Gretchen, they’re sitting on Gina’s sectional calling Tamra a scary, vicious woman.
So, maybe tonight wasn’t only the Gretchen takedown we thought it’d be. Maybe it wasn’t at all. Maybe Tamra’s done for, but it’s truly hard to say. Can Vicki please, please invite everyone to her backyard to get to the bottom of this? This simply can’t be the end.
When the Salt Lake Housewives spent their final moments in Bermuda sobbing over Heather Gay’s notes on a scandal, it was shocking in its subversion. This time, the book is ending and I’m desperate for just a few more pages. That’s the negative, but the stage is set for a bloodbath of a reunion, admittedly.
Tamra has lost so many allies she’ll have to buddy up to Katie Ginella, a woman who has had one scene in the last eight episodes, while Gretchen is sure to waltz in and be beaten to a pulp, once more.
Maybe it’s fitting the Tamra vs. Gretchen feud ends with two graves dug, both ladies bleeding out as carnage takes over. The finale music is long gone by the time the credits roll, as the most horrifying idea of all surfaces: Could Gina spearhead a… successful Tamra takedown? The Real Housewives of Orange County has truly flipped on its head.
