A reality cast divided doesn’t always mean trouble. If both teams are dynamic and there are go-betweens who get along with everyone, a rivalry can be fun for the entire family. But when one side brings nothing to the table other than their vitriol toward the other, it’s usually not a good move.
Regardless, this appears to be the path the flop alliance — sorry, Michelle and Janet — have chosen to walk. It may be too early to judge, but from where I’m sitting, if these people are going to dethrone the queen of the Vanderverse, they’re going to have to step their pussies up. Way up.
We open in a post-date-night-America. Janet and Jason are planning a outdoor hibachi dinner, and everyone is invited except for Kristen and Luke. “She’s an agent of chaos,” Janet offers by way of explanation. True, but this is why Kristen should be at every cast event. She is an essential worker.
Jasmine meets Kristen for charcuterie, where we finally get to the bottom of Infidelitygate. Turns out Jax threw the first brick at his steakhouse lunch with Kristen all the way back in episode two.
“You’re not filming this, are you?” Jax, who has been doing reality television since 2012, asks producers in a flashback right before he spills Michelle’s tea. “Brit told me this in confidence. I could ruin a marriage and my wife will kill me. I can’t do that.” The showman of our time.
After filming that scene, Jax texted Kristen begging her not to repeat the rumor to Michelle — it’s clear he’s trying to make it seem, retroactively, like she was the one who brought it up. Kristen, like the professional she is, sent a reply that she knew she’d have to deploy in the future to exonerate herself: “What are you talking about? I haven’t even talked to Brittany. You’re the one who said shit on camera that I’ve never even heard of.”
I love good reality gamesmanship, and this may be Kristen’s finest work. She clocked what Jax was up to, outplayed him, and now is free to spill what she knows: That Brittany told her the other man was a celebrity/actor who Michelle was texting and having an emotional affair with. This is information that should have come out around four episodes ago, but it’s out now, and I guess that’s what matters.
Despite Kristen having (relatively) clean hands (for once), she is the one exiled from the group hibachi dinner. She should be grateful, because nothing happens except for Brittany succumbing to GERD. Again. Four (4) minutes after doing a one (1) shot of sake, she flees dinner to curl up in the house: She’s having bad stomach pain and needs to go home.
“I don’t know why I feel so nauseous,” she moans. Jax wastes no time snapping at her: “Drinking. Drinking. I told you.” Not even waiting for Brittany’s Uber to show up, he leaves her as she rocks back and forth on the couch.
We also have to suffer through a couples’ trivia game. We find out that Danny and Nia do butt stuff, Jax and Brittany have fucked in Times Square (on the TKTs stairs, I bet), and pretty much every couple would pick Jasmine to have a threesome with. Also, Michelle dogwalks a blindfolded Jesse all around the backyard. This is hetero hell.
Thankfully, the rest of the episode is all about Kristen, the sun this show orbits around. She and Zack are at some house in the Valley to plan a party for James Mae. For the uninitiated, James Mae is Kristen’s t-shirt line that she founded in 2014, and has already been re-launched once on Vanderpump Rules. Nevertheless — mamma mia, here we go again.
Kristen knows she wasn’t invited to hibachi, and feels like Janet was trying to make a statement by excluding her. (Well, yes!) Zack tries to convince her to invite Janet and Michelle to the relaunch anyway to avoid more drama, and she seems to agree. Operative word: Seems.
On party day, she lies on the ground ordering food while Zack sets everything up and sweats through his shirt. Girlboss. Despite his counsel, Kristen did not invite Janet or Michelle. “I feel bad, but I have other things to worry about, unfortunately,” she declares. Zack pantomimes strangling her and looks like he wants to run headfirst into a concrete wall, Situation-style.
This, of course, does not go unpunished. Janet has been awarded The Valley’s first-season cast trip, a babymoon to Big Bear. Everyone is invited except for Kristen and Luke (because they’re chaotic) and Zack (because he’s single, allegedly). It seems unfair for Janet — who, it must be stated, has nothing to do with Infidelitygate at all — to rule Zack guilty by association with Kristen when all he did at the Mondrian was get shoved by Jesse, but I guess she’s just that afraid of having a Kristen sympathizer on her trip.
It falls to Jax to deliver the news. He can’t help but be dramatic about it, gathering the cast on some Colosseum-like bleachers to make Janet’s announcement for her. Poor Zack, who’s already struggled with feeling excluded from the group after everyone moved to the Valley, starts to cry.
As much as I’d like to blame the flop alliance for this episode, Kristen let her personal feelings get in the way of making good television, too. A real conversation between Kristen, Michelle and Janet about their issues is long overdue, and as the veteran on the cast, I expect her to pull more weight than her newbie colleagues.
It would have been so simple for Kristen to position herself as the bigger person and buy herself an “I can’t believe they rejected my overtures of peace” storyline. All she had to do was say, “Hi, I’m having this event and would love to include you. I want to move forward if you want to move forward. If you’re open to it, let’s put our shit aside for the day and just break the ice. We can have a real conversation in a more private setting.”
In the Bravoverse, it’s literally that easy. One of the most important skills a cast member can have is knowing how to move the story along. But Kristen has always been more of a Shannon Beador than a Tamra Judge. She’s strategic to a point, but her genius lies in her total inability to manage herself.
Meanwhile, Janet lacks the shamelessness and bravado that make Tamra such a delight to watch. (That’s MY opinion!!) It’s fine not to invite someone on a trip, or to dislike them, but you’ve got to own it if you want to play at this level. Sending Jax to do her dirty work is a cop-out, and is just another way to avoid the uncomfortable conversations that she is being paid to have.
It’s never as fun to watch people talk about their feuds as it is to watch them deal with each other head-on, and someone needs to be the first to engage. Janet and Michelle refuse to own what they’ve said and done, and Kristen refuses to reach out, so we’ve been relegated to an unconvincing plot about how chaos is bad for the group. With Big Bear approaching, this crew needs to get their act together and start bringing storyline of their own.
Balls and chains
- Even when Kristen’s not around, she’s still shaking things up. When Jesse asks a dead-eyed Michelle what she wants him to get out of his “plant-based ayahuasca therapy,” she doesn’t mince words: “Your whole personality.” But the unhappiest couple in Los Angeles managed to rediscover their spark in the face of teaming up against Kristen. The flashback to them joking about her getting “butthurt” over her hibachi exile was the most chemistry they’ve ever displayed. Practically foreplay.
- Kristen ate gecko food this week! A sentence I never thought I’d write but also feels preordained. Five seconds of her tasting Bronx’s gel formula (“it’s really good, actually”) was more captivating to me than anything Janet has done so far this season. Doute will never be tamed.
- Congrats to Jasmine for being the first person in the Vanderverse to articulate a fundamental truth about Kristen and Jax: They are the same. Not only are they two of the best reality stars the genre has ever known, they are also the only two people in LA (and maybe the world) who can match each other’s freak. I also believe that they are deeply in love with each other. It explains why Jax is so judgmental of Kristen’s relationship: He finds Luke personally offensive, the same way Lala — and Ariana, for that matter — felt about Rachel. I just know that every time Brittany GERDs, he’s dreaming of Kristen, who can do 27 shots with zero gastrointestinal distress.
- I did not appreciate Jesse bragging about how he deleted Kristen from the group chat. Kristen did not get tricked into wearing a green dress to Sandoval’s and scapegoated for the Miami Girl debacle just so Jesse could remove her from group texts. Show some respect.
- It’s a little homophobic that only hetero couples are allowed to participate in the newlyweds game at hibachi. I’m obsessed with Bravo relegating the gays to supporting roles: Sparkles (Jared Lipscomb’s drag persona) as emcee, Zack as Brittany stand-in, and Jasmine as scorekeeper. What was their plan if Brittany wasn’t felled by GERD? Have Zack help Jasmine write tally marks on her mini whiteboard?
- A new addition to the list of things Kristen labels herself as: A peacemaker. God, I love her.