“The Bold Type” Episode 205 Recap: Mamma Mia!

Whew, I had some reservations about the first few episodes of this season, but The Bold Type has been stepping it up these past couple weeks. “Stride Of Pride” surpasses “OMG” as the top episode of the season so far, delivering a storyline on white privilege and insidiously discriminatory hiring policies that succeeds where its episode about Kat’s biracial identity didn’t quite. It ends on a meaningful cliffhanger, and it also includes one of the greatest (and gayest?!) sequences the show has ever done.

Let’s start with that great, gay scene I’m talking about. Given that the episode is titled “Stride Of Pride,” my gay ass thought that referred to some sort of gay march or something to do with Pride and didn’t make the walk of shame reclamation connection. Alas! Even though Adena is out of town this episode, it’s still extremely gay, mostly thanks to a scene in a karaoke bar. I love karaoke, and I love when characters on television do karaoke. But Jane, Sutton, and Kat don’t merely sing karaoke together in this episode of The Bold Type. They sing ABBA! And do lite CHOREOGRAPHY! It is beautiful and magical and gay, and I’m trying to work out the logistics in my head for how The Bold Type could do a musical episode? Because all three of them can actually sing?

So imagine my disappointment when their “Mamma Mia” karaoke sesh is interrupted by A MAN. And not just any man — a lying, terrible, cheating man. Sutton wakes up with some dude named Dillon at the top of the episode and invites him out to the karaoke bar at the behest of Jane and Kat who think that she needs to be more open to commitment instead of just casual hookups in the wake of the Richard breakup. But Dillon, it turns out, has a wife who he didn’t tell Sutton about. And he’s reckless enough to hand over his phone to Sutton during karaoke even though he has text previews enabled?! Dillon, my guy, did you WANT to be caught?

At first I thought this might lead to a situation where Dillon explains consensual non-monogamy to Sutton because, again, he was so bad at covering up the fact that he was married. But nope, Dillon really is just the worst. And poor Sutton has some baggage in this department because her mother apparently only dated dirtbags. And that baggage leads Sutton to contact Allison and tell her that her husband is cheating on her.

I see both Kat and Sutton’s sides of this. Kat thinks she shouldn’t fuck with a stranger’s marriage, and Sutton definitely takes a risk by reaching out to Allison. Because this is The Bold Type, it ends up leading to a nice little moment of solidarity and strength between women. Allison ended up wanting to know and also ended up really respecting Sutton and immediately not believing Dillon’s lies that she was some crazy stalker of his. By telling her, Sutton doesn’t make the experience any less painful, but she does help Allison to get out of a shitty situation quicker. It’s likely she would have found out at some point if Dillon kept up this behavior compulsively, and hearing it from Sutton instead of finding evidence herself potentially softens the blow at least a little bit. It also makes it harder for Dillon to spin some sort of elaborate excuse. Look, it’s obviously a case-by-case thing, but Sutton ultimately made the right choice here.

This storyline, unfortunately, pushes Sutton back toward Richard. When Allison talks about how she just wants to be with someone who cares about her and is kind, you can see the wheels turning in Sutton’s mind. She had that with Richard. And I do sympathize, even though I think her relationship with Richard is troublesome given the power dynamics (not to mention the way Richard really poorly handled spending time with her friends last season). In any case, Sutton goes to Richard only to realize that he’s seeing someone else. It’s crushing, but the back-and-forth between Richard and Sutton just isn’t as gripping as the show maybe wants it to be? It’s becoming redundant.

Kat and Jane’s storylines in the episode overlap and interplay in a really compelling way. Kat needs to hire someone new for her social media team, and all the resumes coming through the door look the same and also look a lot like hers did, coming from kids with a lot of academic privilege. She wants someone with a fresh perspective and different background, so she recruits on Twitter and finds Angie, who is perfect for the job, has a strong voice, and has always loved Scarlet but never felt like there was a place for her there. Kat wants to hire her immediately, but things get tied up in board bureaucracy thanks to an insidiously discriminatory policy that requires all employees at the media company that owns Scarlet to have a college degree.

Cut to Jane, who is still having trouble locking down a job. Her anxiety about the instability of freelance life is super realistic: She’s still waiting to get paid for a piece she wrote, and she longs for structure and an office. Pinstripe helps get her an interview at a site that’s perfect for her, but she ends up not getting the job. Pinstripe mentions that the publication is making a diversity push, and Jane automatically jumps to the conclusion that she didn’t get the job because she’s white and is upset about it. Kat immediately pushes back, pointing out that Jane seems to only be for diversity when it’s convenient for her to be, and then Jane jumps to more conclusions, assuming that Kat’s calling her racist. But Kat never said that at all. It’s a highly realistic moment of a white person becoming super defensive in order to not be perceived as racist. Jane doesn’t realize that Kat is simply trying to call her out on a specific thing that she’s saying, not attacking her.

Something that The Bold Type is really exceptional at is making its central friendships believable. Too often, I’m watching television and wondering WHY two characters are friends with each other. (Especially when it comes to adult characters. High school friendships IRL are often based on the flimsiest of premises, so a show like Riverdale can sell me just about any character combination as a friendship.) I never have to wonder that when it comes to The Bold Type. And as counterintuitive as it sounds, the way that Kat and Jane fight in this episode really just reinforces how close they are. Kat loves Jane, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not going to call her out for saying something problematic.

When they meet again to talk about it, Kat points out that Jane sounds entitled for not thinking that the person who got the job deserved it as much as she did. (Hell, maybe that person deserved it even more! Jane really is just thinking about herself here.) But Jane immediately snaps back that Kat has no right to talk about entitlement because she lives in her parents’ loft and has never paid a bill. Again, this is extremely believable dialogue. I’ve had similar conversations with white people in my life who are quick to think that class status can potentially negate their white privilege. But Kat isn’t saying that Jane has had it easy by any means. She isn’t discrediting the burden of student debt and the fact that Jane doesn’t have a financial safety net. Kat understands the nuances of the situation. She also knows that Jane hugely benefits from her white privilege, especially in this industry. “Welcome to the entire existence of people of color, Jane,” she says.

It’s an honest wake-up call for Jane, and Kat drives it home by asking how many times she even notices that she’s in a room full of white people. Kat says she thinks about it all the time. Again, I’ve had this conversation almost word-for-word with white friends, and hey, maybe The Bold Type will save me some time in the future by spelling this out for white viewers. Because, yeah, like Kat says, it’s not a particularly fun thing to talk about all the time with the white people in your life.

And Kat indeed has privilege, but she’s using that privilege to open the door for someone else by advocating for Angie. Kat’s honestly on fire in this episode, confronting Richard to explain why the policy is discriminatory. And it’s refreshing to see Jane take the steps toward checking her privilege by also helping Angie out. Angie can’t take time off from her receptionist job, so Jane steps in. It’s a perfect example of action-based allyhood…even if it is pretty unrealistic that she could just step into a job at a business she does not work for. So much of the storyline is strikingly realistic that I’m willing to look past that little detail.

Another strikingly realistic part is the fact that while Kat is successful in getting the board to end the college degree requirement for Scarlet, it’s not a total win. The policy remains in place for the rest of the company and its other publications. Institutional change comes slowly, and Kat may have achieved some progress, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

While this episode is lite on Kat’s personal life since Adena’s out of town, it ends on quite the cliffhanger. I definitely fell for the fake out, thinking that Kat had decided to hook up with Adena’s friend who she met last week, even though it admittedly felt out of character. Sure enough, it isn’t real, and instead The Bold Type wades into territory that’s honestly more interesting and complex than just a cheating storyline. It was just a dream, suggesting that there could be an underlying attraction there. I’m curious to see where The Bold Type goes with this. A big part of Kat and Adena’s relationship development this season has hinged on emotional honesty. Will Kat tell Adena? Should she? Does the dream mean more than just a dream? I’m nervous! But intrigued! Don’t break my heart too much, The Bold Type!

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Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle and a lesbian writer of essays, short stories, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly, and her short stories appear or are forthcoming in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Joyland, Catapult, The Offing, and more. Some of her pop culture writing can be found at The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Cut, and others. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram and learn more about her work on her website.

Kayla has written 913 articles for us.

16 Comments

  1. Would a musical episode really work?

    ::remembers the Willow/Tara song from the Buffy musical episode::

    How can we make this happen?

  2. Am I the only one side-eyeing the time travel in The Bold Type. No way in hell…in NYC…Kat gets from the Scarlett offices which seem to be in Madison Square Park area to talk with Jane in Greenpoint and back to Scarlett offices in 15 minutes. It is just not realistic!

    • Hahaha, as a former New Yorker these are the kinds of questions that also sometimes drive me bananas? I know we have to suspend some belief for television, but let’s be real – once you leave Brooklyn for the day to get to work in Manhattan, you are not traveling back and forth under any circumstances. That’s entirely too much.

    • yes this has always driven me nuts, though not quite as nuts as Glee drove me with similar feats of cross-borough athleticism

  3. I loved this episode! Favorite of the season! For all the reasons you so eloquently explained. And I also loved this recap!!

    Also, I want a musical episode, like… yesterday.

    And I’m making “black people snack time” my new life motto. Give us snacks and community! Or give us nothing at all! LOL

  4. YES to everything you’ve said here, Kayla…well, except the whole musical episode…jury’s still out on that.

    I think if you’d asked me if, after the first season, I’d like an episode of this show that ostensibly did not include my two favorite characters (Adena and Jacqueline), I’d have said you were crazy…AND YET…here we are. Because there was no Adena and very little Jacqueline in this episode and I didn’t just like it, I loved it. This might be my favorite episode of TBT to date.

    As much as I’ve talked about this show and how it deals with race, I didn’t realize how the failure to grapple with that intersectionality kept me from really liking it…but the conversation between Jane and Kat this week felt like, “okay, I can finally relax and really enjoy this space.” It felt like the show and the people behind it (shout out to Michelle Badillo!) got all facets of me and finally I could truly embrace the show.

    The conversation with Kat and Jane was so authentic…I’ve had those exact same conversations with white friends. I’m only ticked I missed out on the “sorry I haven’t fully interrogated my white privilege” Rosé.

    I loved the way they handled Leila and Kat’s interactions, especially the subtle way Kat tries to figure out if Leila’s flirting or not (fire emojis always equal flirting, for the record). That dream was something…and it was interesting to have it dovetail into the conversation with the conversation Sutton and Kat had about cheating. I cannot wait to see how it all shakes out next week.

  5. The preview for next week freaked me out! WHY WOULD KAT TELL ADENA ABOUT A DREAM. I had a sexual dream about Joey Tribiani once, crazy shit happens in dreams that has nothing to do with real-life desires.

    Anyhow — it will surprise nobody to hear my hatred of Jane persisted throughout this episode.

  6. I would love to hear them do the whole ABBA catalog. I may or may not be singing along at a high volume. I would, I definitely would.

    But I’m going to have to wait to read the recaps before watching the rest of the episodes. Because my big gay heart can’t take anymore heartache.

  7. Sign me up for a musical episode!

    Gotta say, I was definitely duped by that dream fakeout. I was legit yelling at my screen, because it made NO SENSE why Kat would do that. And then she woke up. And I was just like “awwwwww poor baby gay is gonna read waaaaay too much into this!” I haven’t seen the preview for next week, but if she tells Adena, I REALLY hope Adena goes the mature route and calms her down and explains that everyone has weird sex dreams and it probably means absolutely nothing.

    I too thought that the Dillon/Allison thing was gonna be how TBT did a PSA about consensual non-monogamy. I was pretty disappointed that in the end it was a just a boring run-of-the-mill “dates a douchebag and realizes ex was way better” storyline.

    Finally, while I LOVED the Kat and Jane interactions this week – they really felt like conversations real friends have! – it felt a little early in Kat’s newfound relation to her blackness for her to be making those specific points to Jane. Like from any other person of colour it wouldn’t be weird at all, but specifically with how they’ve developed Kat’s character and her relationship with her blackness and being biracial, it didn’t really fit to me. But I do really love that they’ve course-corrected that and the show is actually addressing race now (“black people snack time! I love Oliver.)

  8. I loved this episode for everything you mentioned. It was the first episode that remotely touched on race that didn’t feel problematic by The Bold Type. I love Kadena but as a Black woman, I could never really love the show because it lacked authenticity when discussing race and intersectionality. This episode finally got it right. Hopefully, this is a sign of better/tighter writing to come.

    Personally, I would never tell someone about a sex dream unless I thought it signaled a bigger issue about our relationship. I think Kat’s freak out because a sex dream is how she first realized she was attracted to Adena. She may be concerned that this may somehow mean more. She also may be concerned because it is one of Adena’s friends and what if she’s sexually attracted to her. The writers could also use the call back from season 1 about what constitutes cheating?

    I think Kat may be superficially attracted to Leila because she doesn’t really know her. I think she was also feeling the flirty vibes Leila was sending her way and didn’t know how to navigate that. So subconsciously she may have felt like she was emotionally cheating because she felt away about their meeting.

    Ultimately kat would never physically cheat unless she thought her relationship was over. She worries about other people too much for that. I think she will freak out, eventually tell Adena and Adena will take it in stride.

  9. I volunteer to write original songs for the musical episode. Fun fact: Meghann Fahy, who plays Sutton, has performed on Broadway. She’s a really good singer. In fact, she was in my musical. :)

  10. I loved this episode too! I was feeling really doubtful after the episode where Kat meets her parents but they’re really pulling the season together. Does anyone know how long it’s gonna be?

    I really think Adena is going to suggest opening their relationship. I also, somewhere deep down, fundamentally understand that Kadena cannot last forever, and so I’m preparing myself for that blow. If the show decides to L Word it and they stay friends, that’d be cute. But also so heartbreaking. But also so sweet. I’m so gay.

    I hope Jane finds a job soon because Unemployed Jane is even more annoying than Employed Jane. And her relationship with religious dude can’t really go anywhere, can it? Lol…. Sutton needs to take a break from dating.

  11. I loved the dream fake-out, it makes total sense – Kat’s realising that her same-sex attraction may not be confined to Adena.

    It really fits with her character-arc, we know she’s deliberately avoided self-interrogation around identity due to having parents of different racial backgrounds (who are also psychologists!), AND never connected deeply with previously hetero hook-ups. Now she’s started to own her black identity her sub-conscious is likely prodding at her sexual identity too. Leila is a convenient projection. It’s brilliant.

    Also Richard should go marry an age-appropriate pal and leave Sutton to her awesome self.

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