‘The Bold Type’s Aisha Dee on Kat & Ava and Moving in With Jane

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Season 4, Episode 12 of The Bold Type, “Snow Day.”]

A blizzard traps the girls where they are in Thursday’s episode of The Bold Type. That’s not a problem for writer Jane (Katie Stevens), about to launch her own vertical, or stylist Sutton (Meghann Fahy), as both are finishing up work at Scarlet magazine. But for former Social Media Manager-turned-bartender Kat (Aisha Dee), she’s stuck at her new place of work, The Belle, with one of the last people she wants to see.

As you’ll recall, Kat was fired from Scarlet after she faced off with RJ Safford, the head of the board, over his political beliefs and released his tax returns. And at the women’s club Jane was eager to join in the summer premiere, she runs into his daughter, conservative lawyer Ava (Alex Paxton-Beesley), with whom she’d also butted heads. She does so again, and it nearly costs her another job. But after she’s fired, Ava comes to her defense and tells Kat’s boss she can stay.

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Before Kat returns to work, she notes The Belle is filled with pretty liberal women and asks Ava why she chooses to belong to it. “I want to hear opinions that differ from my own, so that I can listen and process and think,” Ava explains. “If we’re ever going to heal as a nation, what we need is meaningful discourse.”

And we can expect to see more from the two women going forward. “I think the thing to me that is so surprising about the Kat and Ava story and where that goes is just the way Kat is able to learn from someone she didn’t ever expect to learn from,” Dee told TV Insider.

(Freeform/Jonathan Wenk)

“That’s what relationships are for, whether they’re romantic or not. People come into our lives to teach us things and to help us evolve into hopefully a better version of ourselves,” she continued. “That relationship, in whatever form it takes, is really just about Kat learning and growing, and it’s about just finding common ground with people.”

So, for now, Kat’s still at The Belle, and in Dee’s mind, it’s her first time working in the service industry. Therefore, it makes sense that she’d speak up like she did and nearly get fired for her debate with Ava. “Initially it made sense to me she would be scrambling and not know how to approach that from a social perspective as someone I think has probably never worked a bar and doesn’t really know how to bartend and doesn’t really know what she’s doing,” the actress said.

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That will change as the season progresses and Kat becomes more comfortable there. “Kat takes on some different roles at The Belle, too, which didn’t surprise me at all because she’s always been one to speak up and ask for what she wants even though maybe it could get her in trouble,” Dee teased.

Another change for Kat now is the loss of her apartment — her parents rented it out — and she’s moving in with Jane, which her portrayer loved. “I’ve always been very jealous of Jane and Sutton getting to live together,” she said, adding, “All of these different things that are happening in Kat’s life, stripping away all these things that were reasons why she felt so confident, because she had the safety blanket of, ‘Oh, my parents are looking out for me, and I have this great job title, and that can never go away.’ Slowly getting to see these things go away, it’s definitely going to be interesting in how it changes her relationships too.”

(Freeform/Jonathan Wenk)

The girls’ relationships will be entering the “next phase,” which is “about juggling what’s happening in their lives outside of their friendship and trying to keep their relationship as strong as possible within all of that and all of the moving parts of that,” she said. After all, Jane’s running her vertical, Kat’s dealing with the recent events in her life, and Sutton is married — and pregnant!

While Jane calls herself the “fun aunt” in the episode, Dee thought she’d “be the one to make sure there are enough diapers and supplies, especially in terms of nutrition and making sure everything is organized,” whereas Kat, based on where she is now, “would be more about making sure the baby is spiritually satisfied.”

The Bold Type, Thursdays, 10/9c, Freeform