The Real Housewives of Orange County has been in its best creative shape this season, but much of that good was marred by what can only be described as a pointless finale.
The midseason trailer teased plenty of dramatic moments between the women at Jennifer Pedranti and Ryan Boyajian’s engagement party, but it turned out to be the biggest non-event in Real Housewives history.
Of course, we’re at the mercy of the crafty editors whose job it is to drum up interest in the episodes, but we can’t help but feel short-changed by the season’s conclusion.
The choppy episode would have been far more worthwhile if the filler had been removed and the 10-15 minutes of valuable content had been added to last week’s penultimate installment.
We’ll start with the drama between Katie Ginella and Heather Dubrow.
All season long, the series has been building toward a war of words between those two, but what we got was so low-key that we’re surprised it even made it into the episode.
Katie has been talking badly about Heather, as evidenced by the wealth of incriminating footage. Still, these women talk about each other to everyone, so it’s not too much of a surprise that Kaili weighed in on the drama.
The RHOC finale was a dud
The feud would have been so much more watchable if it was consistent, but maybe it will pick back up at the reunion. That’s the only way this dud of a finale will be worthwhile.
Rounding all of the women up at Jennifer and Ryan’s engagement party should have been the perfect place for conflicts to flare up, but it seemed like the eight-day filming hiatus left the women clocked out.
They were only picking up the cameras for a day or two, so there’s a chance they didn’t feel it was necessary to clock in because they still had the reunion to do that.
You know something’s iffy when the closest thing we get to any form of good drama is Shannon Beador starting an argument with Katie’s husband, Matt Ginella.
Speaking of Shannon, it was great that she was so nonchalant about John Janssen showing up to pick up Alexis Bellino because that pesky midseason trailer made us think she was fleeing the event.
Alexis got some more screen time, but given that the show forgot she existed for about four episodes, it was hard to be invested in anything she brought to the final episode.
She’s been John Janssen’s mouthpiece all season, and she’ll not thrive as a cast member unless she starts thinking for herself and forging genuine connections with the cast.
Alexis may have punched her ticket into Season 19
The good news (if you’re one of the few Alexis fans) is that she seems close to Heather, Tamra, Katie, and Jennifer, so there’s potential for her to return for Season 19.
It would have been nice to have one last argument between Alexis and Shannon because there was so much build-up and nothing of substance happened.
Even Tamra was far more subdued than she was throughout the previous 16 episodes. Unfortunately, she was still delusional and tried to get one up on Jennifer after the FBI drama.
Truthfully, it’s embarrassing that the cameras picked back up three weeks after filming to capture the fallout of Ryan being named in an FBI investigation. We got around three minutes of footage, which only seemed to vindicate Tamra.
That wasn’t a good look, especially because the show then used a disclaimer stating that Ryan was not charged, meaning the show helped perpetuate these unsavory narratives about him.
This episode even existing is surprising because nothing about it felt like a season finale.
It was like a collection of scenes to paint certain narratives. Shannon storming out of the London cast trip would have been the perfect endpoint to get people invested in the reunion, and these random scenes could have been shown at the reunion as exclusive footage.
Let’s hope this isn’t the shape of things to come because scenes that go on and on could be the death knell for RHOC.
The Real Housewives of Orange County airs on Bravo on Thursdays at 9/8c. Stream Seasons 1-18 on Peacock.