It’s the emergence of Mean Girl Angel, and it’s not a moment too soon.
Photo: Bravo via YouTube

We’re now barely a week into 2026 and have already been thrown into unprecedented waters. I am not referring to any of the endless political headlines milling about, or to the fact that my local coffee shop went on holiday break and seemingly decided to never return, much to my despair. While all of that is devastating, what honestly threw me for a loop was the rise of Mean Girl Angel Massie.

It is no secret that Angel has had a rocky introduction to the group: she has been emotionally volatile at inopportune times and has shown a remarkable combination of thin-skinnedness and overwhelmingness that doesn’t seem conducive to success on reality television. She has floundered so epically that it almost seems confounding that they went ahead and kept her in the main cast instead of letting Jassi finally step into the role she was fighting tooth and nail for — outside of brief moments that hinted at Angel being a classic mean girl, the Colorado WAG seemed to be without a paddle. After this episode, however, it’s clear exactly why they held onto her — we simply hadn’t seen her final form on her home turf yet.

Going into this Colorado trip, Wendy, Gizelle, and Ashley are clearly resting on their laurels, comfortable in the belief that they have sufficiently humiliated Angel into running off the show. Wendy crows that it’s going to be a shit show in the same breath as she brags about her and Gizelle’s bootleg barbecue, which is kind of like when I watch Top Chef and pretend that I know what is missing in a foam dish because I made a shitty latte in my house once. Gizelle, high off of finally delivering a 5-star girls trip, is talking about how Angel has big shoes to fill, which is rich for someone who once threw an event in her driveway as construction was still underway. Ashley continues to play up the eviction jokes as if she doesn’t personally know what eviction truly feels like in both childhood and adulthood. It’s childish and tacky crowing from the trio who seem to have largely built their new friendship out of trying to keep the newbies in line. It’s a shame that for all Wendy had to say about how the OGs aligned against the incomers in her early seasons, she leapt at the chance to stand with them against the newest batch of talent, which only ended up biting her in the ass when both Gizelle and Ashley seemingly crowed at her legal woes after her charges came out.

The first hint that they had prematurely celebrated victory, however, was at Monique’s launch. Monique for her self-published self-help book/memoir/journal of love letters. I’m sure Oh Hell Yes!: My Caged Bird Used To Sing is a lovely salve to her inner child, but after suffering through numerous half-baked Bravo books, I will have to take her word for it at this time. In her “creative bindering” exercise, however, multiple gauntlets are thrown amongst the women. Gizelle and Stacey continue to throw barbs at each other. Wendy calls Keiarna fake, who dully rebuts with “my bags are real,” a jab that landed with a thud but was surprisingly prophetic to Wendy’s financial future. Stacey and Monique pretend to go at each other, in a faux tug of war that works because both women are willing to laugh at themselves (cue Monique teasing that “the last time I had a table separating me, it did not end well”).

When Angel and Ashley step up to the plate, however, it quickly escalates. Angel went for a respectful middle-of-the-road jab – complimented her parenting and resilience, but rightfully maligning her for being petty. Ashley responded by calling her a “Catfish not fully walking in her truth,” which is beyond lame and tired coming from all these filler and FaceTime divas, and rightfully aggravated Angel. Ashley’s incapability of letting sleeping dogs lie, however, is what finally activates the Angel we have been waiting to see, as she quickly lets Ashley know that if she is incapable of connecting with her, she is free to not come to Colorado at all, a rebuttal that they all clearly didn’t expect.

Quickly, they attempt to regroup. Gizelle threatens not to go (with the implication that they likely wouldn’t film) if Ashley is disinvited. Wendy tells Angel not to take the hazing from the new girls personally, which is rich from the professor who spent her first two or three seasons taking any slight against her character remarkably seriously. Ashley is forced to mumble an apology for keeping up the eviction and catfish bit, and Angel receives it, but it is clear that Mean Girl Massie has finally shown up to play.

The new dynamics only intensify in Colorado. The women clearly have a bone to pick and are trying to find any excuse to poke at Angel, but none of it really works. They try to malign Angel for keeping them at her Wanderland property (which has a simply stunning view) and not her glamorous Colorado mansion, but that has never been the standard outside of Monique’s lake house trip — Gizelle wouldn’t even let Wendy use her bathroom! Angel, unfazed, proceeds with the room assignments, getting her revenge on Ashley and Gizelle by forcing them to share a tiny room with two twin beds since they claim they can’t go anywhere without each other. Readers, I thought I was done with the room assignment shenanigans, but Angel executed the exact kind of petty revenge I live for, and it clearly got under Gizelle’s skin.

Flustered, Gizelle starts making threats about leaving and can’t help but resurrect the “eviction” jabs in a clear attempt to shame Angel into silence. I don’t know if it was the home turf or the altitude, but Gizelle quickly found out that Angel was not putting up with her passive-aggressive intimidation at all, demanding that they lay out the rumors they continue to threaten her with before they enter her house. The mean girl we have heard so much about has finally arrived, and for our sake and hers, I hope she is here to stay. The drama in Colorado continues next week. See you all then!

• Monique’s picking up on the intensity with which Angel clings to her identity as an NFL wife was genuinely insightful and has the potential to be a real breakthrough moment for Angel in what has been a very fraught season for her. Unfortunately, if history is to be believed, I don’t think Angel will be able to take any conversation involving her husband very well.

• I hope Wendy appreciated what will likely be her last commencement speech for some time.

• Stacey Rusch has been everywhere recently: on podcast interviews, on daytime television, and hosting events. Somewhere in Columbia, Maryland, Gizelle is pacing around in a polyester two-piece from Fashion Nova.

• Did we really need to see Keiarna and her friends in a grassy patch off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway celebrating her billboard?

• Tia healing the generational African father wound is fascinating to watch play out, because it’s dissonance in action. Rightfully emotional at exploring her childhood home, with her kids, she continuously waxes rhapsodically about what a high standard her father set for other man and how he was a first class dad – and then her sister comes in, who reveals that this whole experience is bittersweet for her because she doesn’t have many memories with him, and doesn’t even get included in the final family picture they recreate. As someone intimately familiar with the chaos of fractured immigrant family dynamics, I think Tia is still deeply in denial about the father she remembers versus the man he actually was.

• Ashley has been taking immense backlash for her dalliance with Charrisse’s son, which is fully deserved — she seems not to understand that the disgust isn’t simply over the fact that it happened with someone so young, whom she watched grow up, but also that she seems so smug about it. That said, I am not buying Charrisse’s recriminations against the women whatsoever — if you are so far above them and don’t need their Machiavellian antics, then you can simply stop filming like everyone else who is over the show has done. Yet somehow, she remains on camera while unpaid and unkempt. Make it make sense for me!

• I say this damn near every week but Ashley genuinely has such a compelling personal story that I wish she could focus on that instead of using it as a distraction whenever things aren’t landing for her on the show. Seeing her family slowly start to heal after being so fractured for so long — a battle we all saw play out on camera — should have way more impact than it currently has. It’s largely because she has used her trauma as an escape hatch for accountability instead of as a genuine journey towards self-actualization, which is such a shame.

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