4 days Ago By Brian Moylan
Have we ever considered that Valley Village might be cursed? Tom Schwartz and Katie Maloney moved there, and only a few short years later, they consciously un-Bubba-ed and are both living in bad apartments on the wrong side of Mulholland. Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix moved there and then were forced to share the same domicile in indignity while Tom tried to hold on to their cookie-cutter modern farmhouse with the world’s most hideous LEGO portrait on the wall. Then Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright followed, and now Jax is puttering around in his front yard, all alone, blowing leaves down the driveway as if that is some job.
Based on all of this evidence, it seems entirely plausible that this development of too-big houses with refrigerators large enough to contain a Range Rover was built on a Native American burial ground. As we dip back into The Valley for its second season, we know a lot about what will happen. Jesse and Michelle filed for divorce before the first season aired, so we all knew where that was going from the jump.
The dissolution of Jax and Brittany’s marriage is cued up for season two with Jax heading off to a mental-health facility while cameras are up. Knowing all this, the show does something familiar to Bravo fans. It starts by showing us that everything we already know is way worse than we imagined and then rewinding back to the beginning of filming to see how we get there.
The opening montage of Jax is harrowing. We see his long-time friend Kristen telling him that he’s not allowed to be alone with his son and that it is his rock bottom and he doesn’t even realize it. We see Jason telling him that he is going to lose everything he’s built.
We see Brittany telling him he needs to get help because their son can’t grow up to be a man like him. Then we see him entering treatment. That’s like a whole season’s worth of bad behavior to look forward to.
Okay. Here comes the rewind. The words flash on the screen: “Seven days earlier.
” Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Seven days? Seven? All off this terrible shit happened in a week ? Jax Taylor’s propensity for terrible behavior should be studied in a lab. If we could harness that power, we wouldn’t need any renewable energy sources, we’d just need to keep this 46-year-old man alive at all costs to electrify the entire globe.
Seven days. Whoo-boy, are we in for a season. The episode starts with dueling conversations: Jax talks to Jesse, and Brittany talks to Michelle.
They both tell the same story in different ways. Apparently, when the season starts, they have been separated for nine months, Brittany lives in a rental, and they are both allowed to sleep with other people. Brittany took up with Julian, who was a friend of Jax’s, and everyone talks about how close they were, but they were also only friends for a year, so it’s not like, you know, when Jax slept with Kristen during a home screening of Drive when she was dating his best friend.
Anyway, they were considering getting back together, according to Jax, but then he picked up her iPad — because their son, Cruz, uses it — and he saw all of her texts to Julian, including some dirty photos. Wait. Sorry.
I want to accurately depict how Brittany tells the story. Jax didn’t see them; he “sawl” them. Want to make sure we get that right.
What happened next is definitely not a joke because Jax flew into such a rage that he flipped a coffee table and it hit Brittany. He says he was angry not only because this happened with a friend but also because she was talking about improving their marriage while still talking to another guy, and that’s why he freaked out. “Show me a guy who wouldn’t handle the situation the way I handled it,” Jax says.
Well, look no further, because I would never flip a coffee table unless there was a warm plate of chicken and waffles underneath it. Tom Schwartz later says that the behavior is completely unacceptable, as does Jason. This is what Jax does: He tries to make it seem like he’s reasonable and what he does is normal and justifiable, but it’s just not.
The other thing about Jax is, well, we all know that this is his fault. I’m sure that Brittany can argue with the best of them, but we’ve never seen her fly into a rage worse than shouting “ Rawt in hell ” repeatedly. Also, we’ve never seen her lie in all her years on reality television.
Jax, on the other hand, is well known for fighting, fibbing, and all the other words that start with F , including fornicating, filibustering, failing, and face-planting. We all know that this is almost entirely Jax’s fault, and as fascinating (another F word!) as this is going to be to watch, there are no sides to pick here, no “he said, she said,” because the sides are Jax Taylor or being right. For the entire episode, they’re apart, though Brittany tells us that she’s throwing a White Party (that tired theme? In this economy? With the tariffs?) and Jax isn’t invited.
Therefore, he’s throwing a competing party. Jason tells us that Jax has been harassing all the guys in the group chat to support his party. Both Nia and Janet tell us that the guys’ chat is disgusting and they never want to see it.
What exactly is in this chat room? Is it like car videos and then some tits and then 40 fart videos off TikTok? Is it straight-up porn and locker-room talk? Is it workout tips? Is it Andrew Tate clips followed by Jesse posting OOTD content? What? I’m going to need them to elaborate and maybe share a screenshot or two. Anyway, we see Jax’s party first, and it’s at his bar, which looks as deserted as Harvey Weinstein’s eventual funeral. The attendees are Jax, Tom Schwartz, Tom’s brother Bert, and two old carnies that production picked up outside of Union Station.
This party is so busted that Jax couldn’t even get the full set of Schwartz triplets. He only got Bert. It is an affair so sad that even Lana Del Rey is like, “No one wants a song about this.
” Meanwhile, at Brittany’s, things are really popping off with the rest of the cast, mostly because of Janet. Thankfully, the episode recaps the most salient bits of why Kristen and Janet are fighting — because Kristen told everyone Janet said Michelle is “probably racist” because she’s a Republican — but we don’t get to why Janet and Zack are fighting. What it seems like, however, is that they’re really fighting over best friends.
Zack refers to Brittany as “his person,” and they are long-time friends who go all the way back to Kentucky. But then he laments that Brittany has crawled so far up Janet’s, and I quote, “punani” that she built a nest up there. What if the guys’ group chat is just them all saying “punani” back and forth to each other.
That is disgusting. Meanwhile, Kristen keeps referring to Zack as her best friend. So is Zack just mad that Brittany has a new bestie, and is Kristen mad that it’s her old bestie, Janet? I have no idea.
Kristen and Zack are mad about something that Janet said on a podcast hosted by my friend, part-time Speedo model Gibson Johns. Janet alleges that last season, both Kristen and Zack didn’t care if she miscarried and didn’t want her pregnancy to go full term. I’m sorry, but that is one of the most out-of-pocket things I have ever heard on reality television.
No matter how much someone hates someone, to wish their unborn baby dead is just absolutely wild, and I don’t blame Kristen and Zack for being mad about it. Janet and Kristen sit down to chat, and Janet apologizes, but not really. She first says, “I’m sorry that I roped you in with Zack’s demonic behavior.
” Okay, from the clip we saw, Zack never said that, but even that isn’t an apology, especially when Janet follows it up with the fact that she finds it hard to separate Zack and Kristen’s behavior. They leave things unresolved because, hello, there is a whole season to look forward to, not just the next insanely action-packed week. Also at the party are Jesse and Michelle, and, well, this divorce is getting so wild that there is going to be a roller coaster inspired by it at Universal Studios one day.
(OMG, imagine a Bravo theme park! What would the rides be? Mary Cosby’s Wild Sprinter Van Ride?) As we check in this season, they’re sharing custody. Michelle says they aren’t co-parenting well, and they have both moved on. Jesse is dating someone in Orange County who is probably Heather El Moussa’s clone, and Michelle is with a guy named Aaron who looks like a cousin of the bride I would flirt with at a straight wedding to keep myself entertained.
Unlike Jax and Brittany’s divorce, which is clearly all Jax’s fault, this one is going to be a lot harder to parse because I think they’re both a little bit terrible and are treating each other very terribly. Michelle is right; Jesse is the kind of guy who will want to ruin her life for leaving him, and we see it on full display in a conversation they have at the end of the episode. Michelle says that she met with a specialist who helped their daughter get into one of the best schools in L.
A. Jesse is upset because she had a meeting about their daughter, and he wasn’t part of it. I totally get that.
Part of co-parenting is coming to mutual decisions about when, where, and how the child is schooled, and Michelle considering a certain avenue without consulting Jesse at all seems a bit odd. However, Jesse then says, “Well, look at the Newport schools,” as if saying he is going to move to Orange County and take their daughter full time so she can be schooled there. Why? Because the woman Danny has been dating for two months lives in Shannon Beador country.
So, yeah, Michelle is totally right about that, too. Jesse can’t be making solo decisions for them either, and he certainly shouldn’t be planning their daughter’s future on some girl who hasn’t even farted in front of him yet. Michelle is right to say that if he wants to move to Newport Beach, he can go ahead and do that, but then they’ll be in front of the judge again talking about who has custody.
They’re both right, they’re both wrong, and it goes back and forth, back and forth like some Ping-Pong game, but the ball isn’t round and white; it is a floppy chode of recriminations that the two of them keep batting back and forth with their bare hands. While their turmoil may be more fun to watch, I still think it’s going to pale in comparison to Jax and Brittany’s. After his sad, sad party with only one Schwartz triplet, Jax makes the short drive back to the $2 million house that he lives in alone.
He parks the car, closes the front gate, kicks a few leaves out of the driveway, and strides toward the door, when he notices something out of the corner of his eye. It comes up from the grass, blue and glowing, like the undercarriage of a Magic Eight Ball. It slowly rises, inch by inch, until Jax finally sees that it is a skeletal hand with flesh half rotting off it, some of the tendons and gristle preserved.
Jax jingles his keys as fast as he can because he can feel that hand coming for him, that cold grip on his ankle threatening to pull him right under. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us..
