An Irish critic once wrote that Samuel Beckett‘s absurdist masterpiece “Waiting For Godot” is “a play in which nothing happens, twice.”
Well, it’s happening again because the current season of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” has aired seven episodes of nothing with nothing more in sight.
Alexis Bellino is still mad at Shannon Storms Beador and vice versa. Tamra Judge and Shannon are still at odds over Shannon’s recent history with alcohol. Heather is still scary to Gina Kirschenheiter.
Jenn Pedranti is still kinda sweetly clueless and Emily Simpson is her salty, funny self. Newcomer Katie Ginella is trying avoid any flak.
That’s it. That’s every episode so far this season and it’s … not good. Not good at all.
The highlight of the episode comes when Tamra and Shannon meet in the final scene to talk about the alcohol Shannon occasionally drinks in her post-DUI life, and which Tamra thinks Shannon should entirely forswear.
“I’m not going to yell,” Tamara tells Jenn on the phone as she heads off to meet Shannon. “I’m going to lead with … with my (unmentionable). No, my heart, my heart.”
She’s at the table when Shannon arrives looking on edge.
“I know this is probably difficult for you,” Tamara says in their first conversation since Tamra screamed in Shannon’s face about her drinking an episode or two ago.
“Wow, OK, after the way you spoke to me at the dinner?” Shannon replies, a hint of anger barely hidden in her voice. “You have been nothing but defaming me.”
Tamara denies defaming her.
“You keep saying, ‘You drunk, you need to be sober,’” Shannon continues. “You know nothing about me.”
“So you do not have a drinking problem?” Tamra replies.
“I used alcohol and I used it excessively in certain dark periods of my life,” Shannon replies. “If I get to a point where alcohol is a problem for me, I will deal with it.”
Shannon reminds Tamra that she has witnessed Tamra on a boozer or two herself.
“Oh God, Shannon, have I ever driven my car into a house?” Tamra replies, referencing the circumstances of Shannon’s 2023 arrest.
Shannon gets up and leaves the table, sending the producers on site scrambling to do damage control, or at least make sure the cameras and microphones capture the damage in real time.
“She has done nothing but hurt me and spread lies about me that are character-damaging,” Shannon says from behind the door of the restaurant’s bathroom.
At the table, Tamra asks a producer where Shannon has gone and whether she’s coming back. In the bathroom, he replies.
“Is she getting a drink?” Tamra asks.
“I know what I did and I don’t need Tamara Judge to be the person that decides my punishment,” Shannon says, still out of sight in the bathroom, and oblivious to the irony of not wanting to be judged by a Judge.
She returns to the table. They talk. Shannon tells Tamra about her ex-boyfriend John Janssen’s threat to sue her for $75,000. Tamra, who just got back from a trip with Alexis Bellino, John’s current girlfriend, is sympathetic to Shannon’s feelings about it.
They hug and make up. For now, at least.
Elsewhere in this week’s episode:
— The overnight trips from the previous week’s episode wrap up. In La Quinta, Gina, Heather, Emily and Shannon wake up to cook sausages and drink juice out of carved-out whole pineapples. In Big Bear, Tamra, Jenn, Alexis and Katie wake up to a trashed house. Guess which group went out to the bar and partied late into the night?
— At the bar in Big Bear, Tamra tells the bartender that she’s making an OnlyFans account for Jenn, and asks if he would pay for such a thing. He says he would not, but admiringly agrees that Jenn could make some good money doing that.
Back in Orange County, Jenn and her boyfriend Ryan go for pedicures together. She mentions that Tamra made her an OnlyFans page on their trip. “This is not happening,” Ryan says.
“I should probably check to see if he has an account,” Jenn later tells the camera.
— Gina and Emily play pickleball after breakfast in La Quinta. It involves approximately two thwacks at the ball and then a discussion about that thing that Gina said that made Emily feel those feelings.
“Everybody (bleepin’) hates me,” Gina says, crying, and flings her pickleball racket on the court and storms off.
Emily follows her and finds out why her BFF is so upset that they are fighting.
“I see what happens between Shannon and Tamra –,” she blubbers.
“– that’s not us,” Emily says, laughing and crying a little herself. “Those are two dysfunctional nutjobs.”
“They’re so (bleeped) up!” Gina replies, still crying.
“They are!” Emily says as she and Gina hug it out.
— Shannon and Heather, who had been eavesdropping on Emily and Gina’s argument, show up to play pickleball next. It involves approximately two thwacks at the ball before Heather announces, “I’m not running that far,” and they quit.
