The Real Housewives of Orange County Recap: Mutually Assured Destruction
Imagine that on your kitchen counter there are two identical sandwiches. Each has two pieces of bread, tomato slices, a solitary leaf of perfect lettuce, and then right in the middle there is an enormous, stinky turd. There’s also a little toothpick with a bit of orange plastic on the end, because as disgusting as they may be, these sandwiches are a little bit classy. One is labeled “Shit Sandwich,” and the other one is labeled “BLT.” Which one of these sandwiches is better? Which one would you rather eat?
In this metaphor, the sandwich that says “Shit Sandwich” is Tamra and the one that says “BLT” is Shannon. They have both been playing the same dirty game for years, except when confronted by it Tamra says, “Yes. I did that. It was bad, but I did it.” Shannon, when confronted, accuses the other person of lying. She couldn’t possibly be that horrible. She was just misunderstood. She’s the victim. Why are you trying to hurt her? I’m not saying either are commendable and I certainly wouldn’t take a big fat bite out of either one of them, but for my money I would at least prefer the shit sandwich that knows what it is rather than the shit sandwich trying to hide behind a label.
This is all coming out now because Tamra and Shannon are on a path toward mutually assured destruction. Like two enemies with nuclear weapons, if one is going to go down because of the terrible things she did playing Housewives in the past, then she is sure as shit (sandwich) going to take her partner in crime down with her.
The shit sandwich metaphor is also apt because this whole episode is fixated on poop. Between the jet lag and the terrible English food, everyone is stopped up. Katie says her GI doctor gave her some pills that will sort them out right quick. She gives one to Emily and tells her that it will start unclogging the pipes in about six hours. Emily shows up to dinner and reports that it was not six hours, it was two, and now she might need to get up from their etiquette lesson to go blow up a hotel toilet. At least the pills didn’t wait a full six hours, because then Emily would have been shitting the bed like Countess Luann on the RHONY trip to Columbia.
Shannon has it even worse. Even before she goes to meet her daughters, who are hiding their hangovers as well as Clark Kent hides behind a pair of glasses, she is having digestive issues. When Shannon, Gina, Katie, and Jenn are supposed to take a Sprinter to Windsor, the London suburb where the Queen spent most of her time, she has to cancel her trip because her stomach pains are so bad. She decides she needs an enema and Katie goes to get one for her. I’m not sure exactly where she found it, they’re not as common here in the UK as they are in the US. She probably had to go to a specialty American pharmacy where they sell 500-tablet bottles of Ibuprofen rather than six at a time in blister packs that you can find in any Boots. (None of you even know what I am talking about, but if this is not the forum for my petty expat plights and gripes then I don’t know what is.) Katie not only finds an enema, she offers to give it to Shannon, and the rest of the ladies hang around in the toilet waiting to hear the roadblock come tumbling out of Shannon like so much sandwich filler.
As scatological as this episode was, it’s really about all of the fights that Tamra and Shannon are now making public because they are at each other’s throats. Tamra is pissed that Shannon told Jenn that she did a background check on Ryan, a man who is so obviously slimy that you don’t need to do a background check on him. You don’t even need readers to know this guy is a creep, you just have to look at him with the naked eye and then protect everyone in your life close to you. Tamra says that both she and Shannon were active in digging up dirt about Ryan from a variety of sources, and that if Jenn read all of the text messages she would see that Shannon incriminated herself as well. Here’s the thing about all of the stories we learn about this episode: Tamra and Shannon did them together. They each seem to want credit for being the one to bring their misdeeds to the ladies, but in handing the rest of the group the shit sandwich they don’t seem to think they’re gonna get any doo-doo on their fingers. Well, both of them reek. They were equally active in smearing and digging up dirt on everyone in the cast. The fact that one is telling them a certain story and the other is telling another story doesn’t mean either of them is any less guilty.
When Gina meets Heather and Tamra for caviar lunch, Heather mentions that she doesn’t like people excavating secrets for drama, which is why she didn’t like Katie, because she was looking for this paparazzi drama before she even knew her. Tamra then tells them that when Tamra and her daughter hung out with Katie and her daughter Kaili, that Kaili told a story about Heather. Apparently Kaili was babysitting Emily’s twin boys and they said that Heather is mean because she yells at their mom all the time and their mom said Heather is “bossy.” When Emily is confronted with this story, she says her kids never said that and it was Kaili who brought it up to the boys.
I don’t like this whole storyline. Yes, Katie and Kaili clearly brought this up on camera, which means they brought it to the group, but when we’re talking about what 8-year-olds may or may not have said or may or may not have overheard, it starts to get real muddy. Should we even be talking about this? Who is right? Who is lying? I don’t know, but this is all icky. Also, I don’t think Katie is malicious or a liar, I just think she’s a novice at this game and doesn’t know how to play it yet. May we also remind everyone that, in this household, we believe as firmly as we believe that JD Vance lost his virginity to a sectional that Heather Dubrow called those paparazzi. I hope that this is not something we revisit because I would like to never talk about it again, if only because I love Katie and her friendship with Jenn and I don’t want either of them to look bad.
Also at lunch, Gina says that what worries her about the background check thing is that if Tamra would do that to Jenn then she would do it to Gina. Oh, guess what? She did! They both did! After a tense dinner where Tamra called Shannon a “liar and a drunk” (and Gina batted her down and told her to stop saying that about Shannon), Tamra is back in her room with Heather, who is currently her only real ally on the show. Tamra tells Heather that last year, before the reunion, Shannon wanted to enlist the help of Tamra and Taylor Armstrong’s husband John, who is an attorney, to see if there was any truth to the allegations Travis’s ex made in the more dubious corners of the Housewives press that Gina hit Travis. Tamra also tells Emily about this when they’re in Windsor avoiding the king and his nasty sausage fingers.
It’s terrible that all these arguments had to ruin a delightful traditional English Sunday roast. It’s honestly the best meal they do. It’s usually a big slab of beef, lamb, or chicken accompanied by a Yorkshire pudding (which is like a delicious hollow roll but so much better), carrots, potatoes, cauliflower cheese, all doused in as much gravy as you can possibly make. Delicious. When having a roast you typically go around 1 p.m.-ish and eat so much that you don’t eat for the rest of the day, you just lie on your sofa watching reruns of Top of the Pops on BBC4 and hope that your stomach isn’t going to explode like you’re in a new Alien movie.
When Shannon arrives after getting rid of all of her poop, she talks to Heather about how Heather told the group about what Shannon told her in Sonoma. I’m with Heather, Shannon being upset is kind of bullshitty. Shannon told her on camera, so she knew this was going to get out. As Heather points out, Tamra already knew this story and, based on what Shannon said on Jeff Lewis (say his name three times and he shall appear), I think Jeff knew it too. So Shannon is mad that Heather shared a story that Shannon was sharing all over town. How? Why? I don’t get it, but Heather apologizes and we move on.
What happens inside isn’t so much a fight as a work meeting. It’s as if someone called HR and now we all need to talk about a toxic workplace situation. Tamra tells Gina that Shannon was digging up stuff about her and Travis, which is extra complicated because it has to do with Travis’s ex-wife who is either unstable, vindictive, or a combination of the two. The problem with all of these back-and-forths between Tamra and Shannon is that they are implicating all the other women and bringing things they would rather stay hidden onto the show. “Tamra just doesn’t care if she wants to get someone, I have a problem with that when I’m hurt in a process,” Gina says in confessional.
Tamra’s plan totally backfires. Tamra gets up, walks around the table, hovers over Gina and tells her that her bestie Shannon was the one doing this. But no! It was both of them. Tamra didn’t tell Gina about it back then and, even more importantly, Tamra never told Shannon to stop. Neither of them ever stopped each other, which to my mind makes them both culpable. When Shannon returns from her tête-à-tête with Heather, Tamra tells her what she told all of the women and Shannon finally tells the truth, that Tamra was as involved in that as she was. Finally, the BLT is possibly calling itself a shit sandwich.
Gina is rightfully incensed and she’s talking about how she is not willing to play this game or let them play it on her or the rest of the cast anymore. “I don’t deserve this, Jenn doesn’t deserve this, Travis doesn’t deserve this, Ryan doesn’t deserve this,” she says. “This shit has to stop here. I am not going to take this from anyone here ever again. It’s nasty and it’s enough.” Amen, Gina. Stand up for yourself and let both of these baddies know that they’re rotten to the core.
Naturally Shannon can’t handle any of this and she gives us an, “I’m done,” and storms (Beador) away from the table. She says that her walking out of that door is growth. Really? Is it? Isn’t that how she has treated every conflict that’s ever happened on this here reality television program? As she’s leaving, the staff nearly knocks her over with her own birthday cake, their reticent singing nearly drowned out by all of the shouting. “Happy birthday to you…” they chime over a clearly homemade cake, one stirred with love and iced with good intentions. It’s beautiful, it’s sweet, it’s totally brown. It’s the one thing in this episode that wasn’t totally shitty, and it looks absolutely delicious.