The Real Housewives of Orange County Recap: Realer and Realtor

Have we met a housewife as entitled and helpless as Jenn?

Does Alexis Bellino have no decency? I know that question could apply to so many things: her outfits, her constant proselytizing, her lying to Shannon’s face about wanting to be friends with her. What I’m speaking about specifically is at Heather Dubrow’s New Year, New Me party (brought to you by Vitamin O) when she is talking loudly about how John Janssen (the other J.J. that is not Jesus Juggs) dumped Shannon and Shannon has to ask her to keep her voice down. The nerve!

I’m not saying that Alexis shouldn’t talk shit about Shannon, but at least wait until you get in the car like a human being with some morals. Hell, she could have gone to the other side of the room, but to get angry for being shushed by someone you are talking shit about who is less than five feet away is some freaking gall. That’s so close Snooki couldn’t even lie down between them. If you are less than one Snooki away from someone, you should only be sharing compliments and good news. If you want to talk shit, I recommend three to four Snookies.

The second half of Heather’s lunch (where the portions were definitely brought to you by Vitamin O) reminded me how much I love hating Alexis Bellino and why. Just look at what she says after Shannon shushes her. “You will not shush me, lady. I will no longer be squelched,” then we are treated to an old clip of Jim Bellino’s rump roast of a face talking about how his wife shouldn’t work because Jesus united them as one flesh. We come back to Alexis saying, “So any storm that Beador wants to create. Find a new tornado. Period.”

There is not an English teacher in the known universe who could either diagram that sentence or parse it, which is sad because you know Alexis wrote that down in her diary a week before her confessional and wrote it on the bottom of her shoe like Mike Seaver studying for a history test on Growing Pains. (If you got that joke, you’re so old the text on your phone is bigger than Tina Yother’s hair.) She practiced this and it makes no sense. Like, I can’t even try to figure out what she’s trying to say. She’s saying that if Shannon wants to create a storm by shushing her, then she should find another tornado that is not Alexis because Alexis is a tornado that will not be shushed. But is Alexis a tornado? Why would she want to be a tornado? And if Shannon is a storm and Alexis is a tornado, doesn’t that make them the same thing? And if they’re the same, how can one be better than the other? Oh, I know how. Only one of them ever married Jim Bellino, an Entourage DVD box set with a dubious credit score.

However, the real illustration of how much I hate Alexis comes when Heather answers a question from the weird question machine that is also one of those flying cash machines. Heather says her favorite piece of jewelry is her original engagement ring because, of course, if you’re Heather Dubrow, you have only been married once but have multiple engagement rings. (She’s like a tree. If you count the rings, you’ll find out how old she is.) Alexis then remarks on the ring that John Janssen gave her, how she posted it on Instagram, and how she tagged it with #promised. When the other women ask if it’s a promise ring, she says no, that she didn’t write “#promise”. She wrote “#promiseD” with a big D at the end. (We are told that Mr. Janssen is quite impressive, so Alexis is awash in big Ds at the moment.)

What’s annoying is Alexis knows exactly what she’s doing. She knows there is no difference between “promise” and “promised.” She knows that everyone will see it and think that it is a promise ring and that she and J.J. will get engaged even though they’ve been together less time than it takes a whole season of Love Island to air. She knows that she is being willingly ambiguous so that people will think she’s headed for engagement, but if they ask, she can say, “Oh, I didn’t say that. I said promised with a D,” even though promised with a D is completely meaningless. She’s so annoying that she must always be at least two 2 Snookies away from me.

The only other meaningful event at the lunch was that Shannon got up from the table and Tamra went into the hallway to check on her. Shannon is upset that Tamra alluded that she talks about her behind her back. Tamra tells Shannon she said she’s a bad friend and has a big ego. Shannon says she didn’t say that and would like to have a sit-down with Tamra, who shoots her down. Tamra says, “You’re a bad person.” That seems to be taking it a little far. This woman used to be her friend. Why can’t she say, “I don’t like what you do,” or, “I’m upset you’re telling people you’re not drinking when you are”? She doesn’t go for Shannon’s behavior, which is that she’s doing bad things. She says Shannon is inherently and inexorably bad. It’s become a question of identity.

After lunch, we see a bit more of the new Housewife, Katie, and we meet two of her kids, Kaili and Bandon. Oh no, neither of those are typos. There is one named Kaili, which isn’t horrible, and one named Bandon, who is like 10 and has already said, “No, like Brandon but without the R” more times than Taylor Swift has written the exact same song. (It’s several hundred because all of her songs are actually the same song.)

There are a few other meetings of little consequence, including a sober dinner between Shannon and her frenemy Heather. Shannon, Emily, and Gina go to practice flag football, and Shannon tells them she had no idea that quitting drinking would be so hard. Yeah, that’s because she’s never tried before and also because she’s an alcoholic. Also, quitting drinking is famously hard. Just look at our roster of Housewives — Kim Richards, Luann de Lesseps, Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Zima Malt Beverage Morgans — all of whom tried to take a step away and came roaring back. This is a tale as old as time; this is what destroyed Beauty and the Beast. (You don’t think Mrs. Potts was really full of tea, did you?)

As bad as Shannon and Alexis’s times were in this episode, no one had it as bad as Jenn Pedranti, who is now known as Jen because she pawned the second N to make a car payment. (She got more for it than Alexis paid for her D.) We first see her at home with her boyfriend, Ryan, who is wearing no fewer than four patches on his shirt. She moved in with him because she couldn’t pay her rent, even though her father co-signed the lease with her. I’m starting to get a picture of Jenn, and it’s not a very flattering one. Her ex-husband was supporting her, which, fine. That’s how marriage works. But he was also working for the family company. And then her dad signed her lease for her. When she moves into Ryan’s, she calls her parents, and they fly from Oklahoma to support her. It sounds like everything in Jenn’s life has come from her mom and dad and she’s never bothered to figure out how to make money for herself aside from the $50 a class she gets for teaching yoga.

I’m starting to think that Gina is right about Jenn, who gets an earful from our favorite Long Island Princess when they meet for coffee. The issue is that Gina helped her find a house on short notice and even vouched for her, saying she didn’t need a credit check. Then it turns out Jenn was a squatter who didn’t pay her rent and now Gina is losing business opportunities because of it. (Those seem a bit vague and coincidental, but regardless it seems like Jenn fucked around and now she’s about to find out.)

As soon as Jenn walks in wearing a cute designer outfit with her hair and professionally done makeup, Gina is triggered, as if she were fitted with a bump stock that the Supreme Court just said is totally fine and not dangerous at all. When Jenn sits down to talk, she has no idea what she did wrong, which means she’s either stupid, lying, willfully oblivious, or a combination of all three that we have yet to see in Andy Cohen’s menagerie of broken souls. However, neither of them really gives each other the room to speak and Gina decides that she’s going to go all super saiyan on Jenn. “You need to grow up, you need to pay your bills, you need to figure out how to take care of yourself and your children, and it is not your ex-husband’s responsibility,” Gina shouts while people half a Snooki away are trying to enjoy their pains au chocolat. But, also, truth, truth, and truth.

When Gina tries to explain how Jenn is fucking up her bag, Gina looks at a producer and says she can’t do this because Jenn is a clown. “Her inability to see how this has even affected me has told me everything I need to know about her, which is mostly that she’s stupid,” Gina says in confessional. In the real world we see Gina marching toward her giant SUV, cursing Jenn the whole way. As Gina climbs in she feels something crunchy beneath her bum. She reaches into that crack between the cushions in her seat and pulls out a crusty, week-old, half-eaten French fry. She looks in the back seat and sees the crayons stomped into the carpet, sweaty and discarded soccer jerseys, someone’s homework that they never turned in, a rotting apple, and a Ziploc full of carrot sticks that someone tried to hide so they didn’t have to take them to school. Gina looks around at the mess of her life, the mess of her car, the mess that she just left, and she picks up her phone. “Siri, search dispensaries near me.”