The Real Housewives of Orange County Finale Recap: To Like or Not to Like

This season has been all about the truth, whose telling it, who is faking it, and who is using it to get what they want. The finale plays with this in a major way, tantalizing us with bits of information and waiting for us to figure it out. This last episode was much more confusing than usual. I knew that, when we were two-thirds finished and getting the title cards about what happened in the season, something was seriously amiss. Tamra’s hanging in Big Bear, Jenn is planning a wedding, and Heather lost $6 million on a house. That’s all fine and dandy, but why are you telling us now? What are you holding from us? It wasn’t just Gretchen liking homophobic posts, which those of us who follow the Housewives gossip press have known about for a while. It was about whether those could be believed, about who was leaking about whom, and just how far these women would go — what? Be vindicated? Stay on the show? I don’t even know anymore.

Most of the episode goes as planned. Heather and Emily go to Heather’s parents’ old house, and they get an impromptu tour, and Heather has a nice cry on the canal. It’s sweet. Everyone jokes about Shannon and her Spanx, which is really missing a Kerastase Thermatique trick here by not endorsing Shannon. Gina and Heather dose Shannon with mushrooms, where she hallucinates reality television music, and it is the most apt thing that has ever happened to Shannon. They head to the final dinner where Heather makes a toast that is kind of a mission statement for late-stage Housewifery: “May our glam always be flawless, may our receipts always be accurate, and may our friendships, while complicated, always be worth the ride.” Amen sister. Stitch it on a sampler and hang it in the Louvre. Wait. It will get stolen. Hang it next to the Morgan letters.

Then the dinner goes totally haywire when Gina brings up an article Tamra supposedly got from “I Heart,” the radio company that produces her podcast, that Tamra showed her. The article alleges that Gretchen liked a bunch of posts critical of the LGBTQIA+ community, one that every Housewife around that table and Real Housewives as an institution has supported from the very beginning. Heather Dubrow, whose brood is so queer that her coochie shoots rainbows, takes immediate umbrage with this, spouting off that every 45 seconds a queer child attempts suicide. She knows what this hate speech does, including to her friend Dylan Mulvaney, who filmed for this season.

Gretchen, however, seems nonplussed. She says she didn’t do it, but is defending herself as if she’s in molasses, like she’s eaten the leftovers of Shannon’s space cake. This makes her seem guilty, but she says she doesn’t feel that way, that she doesn’t hate gay people, and she doesn’t remember liking any of those posts. She says this is the first time she’s hearing about this and doesn’t know how to defend herself. Of course, she goes and calls Slade, a single house slipper floating in a stranger’s pool, and he tells her that she doesn’t have to defend herself to anyone. “That’s where he’s wrong,” Heather tells her. “You do. If you want to keep this friendship, you do.” I have never seen Heather this angry, not even when someone ate the bow off her cake. She defended the gay community the way we hope all allies will, loudly, unequivocally, and with the indignation it deserves. Carve this woman’s name in the Provincetown Dick Dock. Give her a plaque in the Meat Rack. Invite her to smoke pot at Kristen Stewart’s house. She deserves it all.

Let’s pause to discuss whether Gretchen might have liked those posts. Let’s assume, for a second, that she did. Maybe she liked those posts and really hates the LGBTQIA+ community. I don’t believe that’s true. As she points out, she hosted a drag queen Tupperware party on the show back in the day. She’s had enough glam that she’s at least comfortable around gay men. She currently has a post on her Instagram with her gay dress designer. (Convenient, I know.) The reason she’s having a hard time defending herself at the dinner is that she doesn’t know what the charges are, can’t prove if she did or did not like those things, and there’s no way you can prove that you like gay people without saying, “Some of my best friends are gay,” which looks stupid. Yes, Gretchen looked guilty, but I somehow bought her defense, just like I believe that Tamra doesn’t hate queer people, even though she was using “homo” disparagingly as recently as 2008, as Slade, a merkin made of ear hairs, and the editors remind us in a clip they foraged up.

Let’s say the likes are real, but Gretchen doesn’t hate queer people. Her initial response was that maybe she was scrolling and liking things she saw without fully reading them. I totally believe this. As Gina points out, she followed those accounts that said those hateful things. Gretchen follows many unsavory characters on Instagram, including Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Ben Carson. She’s also been a loud and open Trump supporter. So, yes, she might not hate the gays, but she sure likes and empowers a lot of people who really do. This is why the women are ready to believe that she is homophobic, because she has aligned herself politically with a bunch of people who are. She follows accounts that spout the kind of hate speech that they say is disgusting, so while she may or may not have liked those actual posts, she is endorsing them in some capacity. I don’t think that Gretchen is homophobic, but she is not an ally. She is guilty by association for supporting people with these views she doesn’t share and not speaking up for the LGBTQIA+ community when these people spout their rhetoric.

When the cast leaves the restaurant, the women tell Gretchen to take another car, and that’s when she loses it, wondering why all the women could think so little of her and believe these things are true. They ask her to take another car because they want nothing to do with her. In the morning, as the women drive to the airport — a treacherous journey for the women of RHOC — Gina says she found the accounts that posted the things Gretchen supposedly liked and followed them, but she can’t see a record of Gretchen liking any of the posts. There isn’t as much proof as Tamra led everyone to believe. Gina makes an excellent point on the bus: Tamra and Gretchen keep going after each other with bullshit they read on the internet, and they’re going to ruin each other’s lives. Gina says that dynamic is what she doesn’t want to be a part of, especially because Tamra preyed on her to bring it up.

Back in the O.C., Gretchen says these things aren’t true, and Slade, grundle eczema, says they’re going to expose the profile that showed the likes. Tamra is on the couch talking to Eddie about how Gretchen isn’t a good person, and she’s glad everyone sees the truth about her. For the first time all season, they’re both right and they’re both telling the truth.

But then there is a further wrinkle — one that I still don’t entirely understand, and I’ve watched it three times. After filming wrapped, someone who supposedly knew everything about the season contacted the women and said that Tamra had been leaking every detail about production. He gave them dates of when things happened, events that weren’t covered in the news or on social media, and specifics about storylines and timelines that regular fans wouldn’t know. He says Tamra leaked all this information to the “blogs” and fan pages. The season ends with everyone thinking that Tamra did this, that she fabricated these homophobic likes to frame Gretchen and make everyone turn against her. This man claims that Tamra was plotting this out with a friend of his. I don’t know — it seems likely, and the fact that the season ends with this indictment of Tamra makes me think production believes it, too.

But did she do it? Let’s assume for a minute that she did. The only thing that carries any water is making up something to attack Gretchen. If Tamra invented those likes, doctored screenshots, created deepfakes —whatever it is that the kids do with ChatGPT other than their homework —that would be a severe violation. She should lose her job over this. We all know that the shows are produced and lies are told, but to go this far is essentially fraud, and she should get fired.

However, leaking information about fights, movements, and filming activity happens all the time. While researching my book, a source at a tabloid said they had someone on production staff on the payroll who would feed them information all season. There are other places this person could have gotten this information, and even if he did, it’s not a big violation. Who cares if this guy knows? But that he knows at all gives some credence to his assertion that Tamra doctored the screenshot.

Unless this is another ploy by women who are intent on destroying each other. Just as Tamra could have leaked this information and doctored those images, couldn’t Gretchen and Slade have gotten someone to text everyone and blame this all on Tamra? Gretchen was filming at these events too. She had all the same information. Couldn’t she have leaked this to give credence to the story that Tamra made it all up, exonerating herself and smearing her enemy? Who do we even believe anymore? What is even real?

We live in a world where the truth has gotten slippery. Our elected leaders lie to us more blatantly than ever, ripping down the literal White House when they said they wouldn’t. The statistics that come from the government can’t be believed because Gretchen’s preferred candidate fired the people who gave him bad news. The internet has always been made of porn and lies, but AI makes it so that nothing can be believed, where Michael Jackson can rise from the dead to steal our chicken nuggets. Now we can’t even have this, our stupid reality shows where people are supposed to be fighting about who did or did not get invited to a party, where we’re supposed to take sides about who gets the best room on a free vacation, where the worst thing we should have to deal with is someone going to prison for fraud. But even fraud is cut and dried. There is a case, there is evidence, there is truth lurking out there somewhere, and we don’t need to work that hard to find it.

Reality shows exist so that there’s some certainty in the world. The Bachelor will always find a wife in six weeks, Kim and Khloe will always make up, and Chrishell and crew will always wear inappropriate outfits in a professional atmosphere. Now that’s not even true anymore. Uncertainty hung over this season like a layer of smog over a mid-tier city. We’ve coughed it up; we all wanted it to go away, but the world we created just made it worse until it blocked out the sun and shriveled everything that was good. It made us all into detectives, but none of us is capable. We just stare out the window, looking at the smoke, shaking our heads, wondering how it all went wrong, wondering how there’s still some light getting through when the smog is so thick that we can’t see the bird anymore. But we know they’re out there, calling to each other, singing their songs as they float above it, completely unaware that we’re choking to death on lies.