The Valley, much like Southern Charm before it, is a show about terrible men and the women who tolerate them. As we go around the horn at this reunion, we spotlight dude after dude, each of them looking uglier than Jesse’s floral-print polyester pants. (I would call them busy bottoms, but that would be an insult to this world’s true heroes: busy bottoms.) Yes, it’s just bad dudes with Luke (a set of socket wrenches that won’t quite close) and Jason (a tricycle without a rider) on the end, holding their wives’ hands, allowing them to live their dream of reality-television stardom.
Before we get to all these awful men, however, let’s take a moment for Andy Cohen, who does an even better job at this reunion than he typically does. The true pinnacle of the whole episode is when he segues from a conversation about whether Brittany went after Jax in Vegas when they first met or Jax went after Brittany to ask “Are you all upset that Hooters is going out of business?” with such deadpan seriousness that it produces a round of comedic reactions even the cast of Saturday Night Live couldn’t muster. Jax says, with hope, that it’s only restructuring, Zack mumbles that he was sad he never got his time in the pantyhose, and Brittany says she would buy one. Okay, Brittany owning a Hooters franchise is genius. This classically misogynistic franchise, taken over by a former waitress and then packed with the gays and girls who love Bravo, would be just the kind of place where I want to stuff my face with chicken wings and possibly a busy bottom or two.
The bit of Andy’s performance I especially love is how he chides Jax for not being fully transparent when he knows Jax is lying but also uses his deep institutional knowledge of these reunions to see that Jax is actually admitting he is wrong and saying that he knows he fucked up and that his life is miserable. However, I agree with Brittany; I fear the whole thing may be a performance, but at least it is a different one. It is a song and dance we haven’t seen before. It is no less destructive, but at least he’s unleashing some different WMDs from his arsenal of psychological warfare.
At the top of the episode, Jax says, once again, that some days he hates Brittany and starts these horrible fights with her but other days he feels the love and doesn’t understand why they should be getting divorced in the first place. He says he’s confused. Sorry, bro, but there is nothing here to be confused about. Brittany absolutely, unequivocally, irrevocably wants nothing to do with you. There is no confusion when a woman makes a decision regarding her relationship. It is over because she says it’s over. Listen to women; her body, her choice; maybe it’s real, maybe it’s Maybelline; and all the other slogans.
I do believe that Jax feels terrible that he has been laid low or at least knows he should and is fighting for his job. I also believe he does really miss being part of the group, if only because it provided him with some sort of job security. What I do not believe is that he is sitting at home alone every night, crying himself to sleep. Brittany has never lied to us, and if she tells us that he is sleeping with all sorts of strippers and OnlyFans models (no shame there; I support the arts) and engaging in just the sort of hard-partying behavior that landed him in this predicament, then I believe her.
The craziest part is that Brittany says these women are all up in her DMs, forwarding her the “love-bombing” texts that Jax sends them. Why are these women even messing with Brittany? If they’re fucking her ex, it is none of her business, and she probably doesn’t want to hear about it. What does it say about these women? In the words of one of the early internet’s greatest philosophers, leave Brittany alone.
That partying lifestyle, honestly, doesn’t show the level of contrition or reevaluation that Jax would like us to believe he’s experiencing, especially when we hear all about his continued rage texting, manipulation, and spying on Brittany through his cameras. Jax says that it is a way for him to take control because he feels out of control of his life right now. Andy, in his most astute moment of the episode, points out that Jax does have control. He can control his own actions, and doing so would improve his relationship not just with Brittany but also with the group. He is the only one who can get himself out of this situation. However, he still talks about it like something that has happened to him rather than an unceasing shit storm of his own creation. Nothing here has happened to him, and until he can accept that and try to change it, he is forever doomed to pecking out his own cocaine-addled liver in some kind of self-imposed mythological torture.
Next up is Jesse, who is once again failing at trying to convince us that Michelle did something unspeakable to him. She admits that she “cheated,” but we still don’t know the exact circumstances. It sounds like she made out with one dude one time, which isn’t that big of a deal, at least to me. Sure, it’s a breach of trust, but nothing that should cause Jesse to start a nuclear war with her over even the slightest things. That Michelle had to threaten Jesse’s mother with never seeing her granddaughter again so that Jesse would allow their daughter to see her dying grandmother tells you everything you need to know about him.
There may be some component of Michelle having an emotional affair with the man she “dated,” but the details around that are still fishier than the underside of the SS Minnow. What we do know is that whatever Jesse is trying to cook up about Michelle and Aaron isn’t that emotional affair. Jesse makes a lot of the fact that Michelle and Aaron used to meet up and Aaron would talk to her about his girlfriends and Michelle would talk to him about her marriage, as if sharing those kinds of intimacies is akin to her pegging him at a swinger’s party. No, talking to each other about your relationships is called having a friend. Has Jesse ever heard of it? No. Because he probably doesn’t let anyone talk about anything other than himself. The relationship that he is describing between these two seems nothing beyond a platonic friendship between a man and a woman. Even if there was some longing or attraction on either end, it wasn’t any sort of emotional affair. If Aaron was in love with Michelle, why the hell would he be talking to her about all the skanks he’s bagging on illicit Runyon Canyon walks?
After Jesse, we have a brief foray into discussing Zack, one of the heroes of this season. However, something we learn at the reunion is making me reevaluate a lot of what happened this season. When Janet accuses him of saying he wanted her to miscarry while eight months pregnant, the assumption is that this was the interaction we saw on-camera, when Michelle said that if he stressed her out, she could have complications, and he said he didn’t care. It seems like Janet is ginning up a story line out of nothing, as she is wont to do. Honestly, other than Janet’s, the only other career I’ve seen made up of absolutely nothing is Julia Fox’s.
However, this might not have been nothing. It seems like in an unaired bit of the party, Zack, while black-out drunk, said explicitly that he wanted Janet to miscarry, and it wasn’t the trumped-up insinuation we all thought it was. If Zack is saying such terrible things, then Janet has every right to be upset with him. Additionally, if Zack is becoming so intoxicated that he’s saying these things and not remembering them, that is a problem too. We’ve seen a little bit of him getting drunk and disorderly at a few of the parties, but the kind of heavy-lidded shit-talking that they’re claiming here is a level we haven’t seen before but one I can totally see Zack going to quickly. If he really did explicitly state that, I may have to revoke Zack’s hero card for the season.
However, it was a very interesting conversation about how Brittany treats Zack, Kristen, and Janet differently in all their friendships, and I have to agree with Kristen, Zack, and some others on the couch that Brittany does give Janet a pass. I think that’s because Zack and Kristen say things that are so outrageous that they’re hard to defend, whereas Janet’s awfulness is a bit more subtle and insidious. Still, if everyone is telling Brittany that she’s not valuing everyone that is close to her — especially Zack, her staunchest defender — in the same way, that is something I think she needs to examine more closely. (Welcome to the season-three story lines, because she’ll need something now that Jax is gone.)
Finally, we touch down on Darkside Danny. While I said that this is a show about terrible men, I don’t really include Danny in this. I think Danny is a nice guy who did something terrible, but some of that might be Nia and her years of pageant training spinning us on his virtue. When Jasmine tells us that at the White Party, when he first apologized, she brought up the topic of him touching her and Melissa inappropriately and he said something like, “Are you doing this now?” It wasn’t a good look. It did make it seem like he was pissed it was coming up on-camera rather than, as Nia says, caught off-guard because he thought he had repaired things with Jasmine and Melissa.
This added context also makes more sense with regard to why he needed to apologize to them again at the brewery. Still, Danny did apologize again, and he really meant it. (Again, I am susceptible to Nia’s pretty, pretty pageant face telling me anything, so I may be wrong.) The spin I do believe is that when Danny mentioned that he didn’t like it being brought up again, he wasn’t referring to Jasmine but rather to Janet. I think after the second apology, both Jasmine and Melissa were over it, and things were in a good place. The reason it got out of control was that Janet, someone without any skin in this particular game, wouldn’t let it rest. Janet claims Danny keeps making women feel uncomfortable when he gets drunk, which may or may not be true, but I have a feeling the final part of the reunion is going to turn to Janet and why everyone is upset with her — and the awful men of this show may get a chance to breathe, even if just for a second.
More than one revelation regarding Jax, Jesse, Zack, and Danny has us looking back at the season in a new light.
