This is a strange episode, mainly focusing on the women hanging alone, either by themselves or in little groups of two. We get an advert for Shannon and Vicki’s road tour of comedy clubs, complete with a failed T-shirt slingshot. The room wasn’t that big, Vicki; you could have just thrown them or had Shannon shoot them out of her butt like an enema that got stuck in it. We see Tamra and Katie take their disaffected 18-year-old daughters to a candle bar (a Housewives activity I would gladly participate in) to talk about how their divorces messed up their daughters’ perceptions of relationships. We even got Gina stealing some lemons from Shannon’s neighbor to put nine in a bowl.
There was one home scene that really interested me, and that was Jenn’s sit-down with her son, Shane Dawson. Just kidding. It’s just Dawson, but the hair is giving me a 2010s YouTuber. I think this is one of the first times we’ve seen Jenn talk about something other than her drama with the women or her relationship. There were also a couple of telling details. How did Jenn’s ex, Will, go from living in some big, fat house in Orange County to living in a one-bedroom apartment that his son wants to share with him? We are not getting the full story about this divorce, and I would like something very trashy (I’m looking at you, RadarOnline) to interview Will and find out what is really going on.
What interested me about the conversation between Jenn and Dawson is that Jenn seems totally unprepared to parent. It’s like everything in her life came so easy that she gave her children everything so easy, but now that it’s time to discipline an unruly teenage boy, she can’t handle it. He says he wants his space and, sure, all teenagers do, but when he’s failing at school, blowing curfew, and otherwise testing the boundaries, Jenn needs to make sure that those boundaries are firmer than the crusty socks on a teenage boy’s bedroom floor. It’s interesting when she brings her complaints to the rest of the group, and Heather, who has some experience with teenage boys, says they all do this. Could you imagine the shitstorm that Heather Paige Kent Dubrow would rain down on one of her kids were they to show up past midnight on a school night? You have a better likelihood of surviving a Sharknado. But Jenn? Please, bust that curfew every night, and she’s not even going to stop buying your favorite sugary cereal.
The big topic of conversation this season and in this episode is the lawsuit between JJ Squared and Shannon Beador. At the start of the hour, Shannon tells Gina that John is holding onto the videos of her for blackmail purposes. Shannon’s lawyer texts her, “Their exact words were, ‘John needs some sort of insurance policy in case Shannon goes off the rails.’†Now, this is Shannon Storms Beador. She has never met a rail she hasn’t gone off of, including New Jersey institution Rails Steakhouse. I totally get what John is doing here. But Shannon has offered to pay him his money, she’s offered to end this thing entirely, and he’s still stretching it out.
I love that lawyer Emily Simpson pulls up the California penal code to read us the definition of extortion, which is “a criminal offense where the defendant threatens to expose the secret of another person.†Um, sound familiar? Yeah, we’re totally dealing with blackmail here, and I’m glad that Emily is calling it out in real time. I also love that Emily has a growing hatred of Alexis that mirrors what the fans are feeling. Emily is always right. Emily is our hero. Make Emily great again.
But, oh boy, did she kind of lose me in this episode. When Emily meets Jenn and Katie for breakfast — which they somehow tricked Jenn into bouncing a check to pay for — she tells them that she felt a certain type of way at Heather’s fashion show. She says that the dress she got was a size 12, and she thought that was too big for her, and it made her feel funny that Alexis was modeling the same dress in a size 2. She also says she was the only one instructed to wear jeans, so when they were all standing together in white shirts at the final curtain call, she stood out a little bit.
I totally get where Emily is coming from. She’s always been bigger than the other ladies of the OC. That’s not to say that Emily hasn’t consistently looked great throughout her tenure on the show (if I were a Bravo editor, there would now be a three-minute montage of all the times Emily has rocked the hell out of a one-piece), but she’s just made a little bit bigger than the blonde skeletons that populate this franchise. Now that she’s lost a lot of weight, she wants a little bit of recognition. But I think what Emily can’t quite say, that she has a hard time recognizing, is that no matter how little she gets, she still feels big on the inside. I don’t think this is a Heather problem; I think this is an Emily problem.
All the ladies go over to Ryan’s house to hang out with Jenn and play a game of dirty Jenga, where we once again have to shame Gina’s BF, Travis, for being a member of the growers-not-showers community. We also get Tamra peeing in front of everyone but not on the grass or the concrete. Tamra basically says, “If you’re going to make me humiliate myself, I am going to gross you out with my pee. Take that.â€
But the worst at this event is Alexis Jesus Juggs Bellino, who takes her giant Jenga block and throws it in the gas fire, not knowing that is not how gas fires work. (To be fair, whenever my husband lights our gas fire, he throws the match in after it, so now there’s just all these used matches sitting at the bottom waiting for him to pick them up. Christian, this is officially your reminder.) The minute Alexis shows up, I imagine ripping out her Khaleesi braid structure on the top of her head. When Heather thanks Alexis for attending a GLAAD event with her, she adds she wishes that John could have joined to see Alexis fighting for a good cause. Then Alexis gets all weird and upset, and all the ladies are like, “What happened!?!?!†thinking there was some big event.
When Alexis can finally blink through her fake tears enough to say what’s wrong, she says, “It’s the whole legal battle.†Oh, you mean the legal battle that your new boyfriend started unnecessarily to harass and humiliate his ex and that he could have settled by now if he wanted to, but he doesn’t, so he keeps it ongoing? That legal battle? That’s what you’re upset about? This lady needs to work at a folding-chair factory, because she needs to take all of the seats, and she needs to take them immediately.
After the high jinks, Emily brings up how she felt at the fashion show, telling Heather she was the only one to wear jeans and that she thought the dress was too big on her, pointing out that Alexis was wearing the same dress, so to be standing next to her in that dress made her look bigger. Heather is understanding; she nods along and says all the right things, but the screwed-up look on her face says, “Why are you bringing this to me?â€
The fight devolves from there. When Heather tries to talk and Emily interjects, Heather says, “It’s my turn now,†like it’s a fight. Also, in the confessional, Heather says that the dress was tight on Emily, which was a low blow. Emily continues to harangue Heather a bit, mostly because she won’t listen and let Emily express herself. Heather calls her rude, and Emily calls her cold and condescending, but honestly, they’re both right.
This is a poor showing from both of them, but I am a little bit more on Heather’s side here. It seems like Heather thought Emily was bringing this up to somehow find fault with what Heather did. As Heather explains, she was trying to raise money for Straightless Not Dateless, she wasn’t really that worried about Emily. But Emily also framed this wrong. It did seem like she was having an issue with Heather, but I think she really just wanted to describe what was happening to her; she wanted to let the other women into her head. That had to be vulnerable for her, but then Heather went on the attack. As Katie points out, if Heather isn’t seen in her aura of perfection instead of apologizing and moving on, she makes it about herself. D-minuses across the board.
But the only F goes, once again, to JJ, who really made it about herself in a way that it didn’t need to be. “I am at my lowest point right now, and you said, ‘How dare you put me in a dress next to Alexis,’†she says. Oh God, woman. Give it a rest. What she was saying is that she didn’t want to wear the same dress as the skinniest woman in the group (minus Heather and Tamra). That’s some kind of backhanded compliment, but Alexis, the last of the Christian martyrs, needs to make herself the victim in all of this.
As the fight winds down, Heather explains to the rest of the women, except Emily and Gina, that she wasn’t doing this intentionally, and Alexis is still trying to get in on the grievance Olympics and is like, “And then she said you put me next to Alexis …†Girl, to paraphrase NeNe Leakes, now why are you in this? You have nothing to do with this.
Emily and Gina come in to announce they’re leaving, and Emily and Heather have some final words. Emily tells Heather she didn’t think that she did anything wrong, but when she said what she wanted, Heather got pissed. Alexis chimes in, “But you kept going.†This is when Emily snaps.
“I didn’t ask you! Shut the fuck up!†Emily yells at Alexis. “You’re not involved in this. You’re a friend. Shut the fuck up.†Yes, Emily! She is a friend … a friend who no one wants there, who isn’t even really friends with this woman. That blow lands and it lands hard. “Shut up, Alexis,†Emily shouts on the way out the door. “Go fuck John some more, you fucking idiot.†Thank you for saying it, Emily. Thank you for saying what we’re all thinking. She and Gina got into their black SUV and headed home, silent at first. Emily stared out the window, which was slightly ajar. The breeze nipping at her forehead was somehow calming, somehow focusing, as if she was letting the natural world distract her from all the unnatural behavior that happened that night. She turned and looked at Gina, her friend who was concerned about her, staying quiet, reading the room. Gina looked Emily dead in the eye and said the only thing she could have at that moment: “She really is a fucking idiot.†And they just laughed and laughed and laughed as their guffaws leaked out of that window crack and danced above the freeway.