Real Housewives of Orange County Recap – 7/27/15

At the airport, the women all meet up and get on the plane where Vicki works on her laptop, Heather watches Downton Abbey, and Lizzie is excited to appear on camera more than she has so far this season. I get that Lizzie is relatively calm and appears to have a happy home-life and that Bravo is not so interested in populating their shows with sane people, but I kind of like her and I’m glad she’s on this trip and I just hope that she starts applying just a wee bit less mascara to her eyelids because I fear one might fall off and get lost forever in the crystal waters of Tahiti.

Speaking of Tahiti, its beauty is almost immediately marred by Shannon coughing up something she describes as “nasty black shit.” Is Vicki concerned with the fact that her friend’s phlegm looks like tar? Don’t be ridiculous! Vicki is only concerned that Shannon has to be healthy so she can whoop it up on night one because Vicki is a really good friend and also that kind of hellish American who wonders why the woman working behind the desk at the hotel doesn’t know what “whoop it up” means. And Shannon, poor, sick Shannon. She’s really not feeling well, and even as someone who knows f*ck all about medicine and biology, I’m gonna take a stab in the dark here and say that perhaps what Ms. Beador’s got going on is a tremendously painful case of a psychosomatic illness in that she is allergic to looking at other people acting joyful when her husband is many hours away from her and she has absolutely no trust in him. Such a thing might cause any of us to feel queasy. I don’t know if it would cause us all to hock up black stuff, but then again, Shannon is special.

After Shannon goes to her room to lie down and chant mantras to herself about positivity that do absolutely no good at all, the women find the hotel bar. Lizzie orders a water and it turns out that Vicki is still that woman at fifty who she was at nineteen, the annoying chick who asked people why they weren’t drinking sh*tty beer from the keg in the basement. Turns out that Lizzie has a good reason not to be drinking since she thinks she might be pregnant and Vicki would like her to immediately pee on a stick to find out for sure so she can return to berating her for not doing shots. Since there’s no drugstore around, Vicki decides to turn her attention instead to Meghan and the fact that her husband seems to be avoiding her and how weird it is that Meghan is in California to take care of Hayley and the whole thing kind of annoys me because Meghan herself is admitting that these extended absences with her husband don’t make her want to dance a jig of joy. It’s not like she’s sitting there blankly and spouting out that everything is perfect so I think they should leave the woman alone and that’s when Lizzie randomly asks Meghan why she has such a problem with Shannon. Lizzie says that she just can’t understand it, to which Meghan perfectly replies, “You don’t have to,” though I kind of wish she just looked every woman at that table directly in the eye and asked them if anyone actually believes that Shannon is truly stable.

Betting spectacularly on a horse that I don’t think will even finish the race, Vicki shows up in the morning in Shannon’s room and makes sure to tell Shannon that Meghan still doesn’t like her – a fact that seems to stun Shannon in a way that makes absolutely no sense. The women then pile into vans and Tamra immediately gets diarrhea while the rest of them decide to go shopping for pearls. Heather tries on a necklace that costs $49,000 and the rest of them discuss how much something has to cost for a discussion with a husband to be a necessity and Vicki, the working woman of the crew, shockingly has some opinions that someone without a paycheck shouldn’t be permitted to spend too much. Look: the woman maybe has a point, but she’s whoo-hooed far too many times this episode for me to have any sort of patience for her anymore and I’m wondering if Heather packed a muzzle in some white tissue paper and if she maybe is carrying it on her person so she can throw it on Vicki because I’m not even on that trip with her and I’ve already had more than enough.

Right before they get on a ferry, Shannon reveals the sh*t she’s coughing up is now green, Vicki tells her that she better start drinking because Vicki is annoying as hell, and Heather poses the question of what everybody’s most embarrassing moment is and Shannon rolls her eyes that Meghan’s involved getting her period in public while she was at work. At the mention of “work,” Vicki decides to immediately latch onto the fact that Meghan once had a job and no longer does.

“So why did you quit?” asks Vicki in a way that reads to anybody with ears as false curiosity.

“Because of Jimmy. I met my husband and we fell in love,” responds Meghan, and I really wish she’d just get back to how badly her jeans were stained by her period blood because this is not going to be a conversation that’s going to end well for anybody, including the viewer. And just so it’s clear that Vicki could give less than one of Tamra’s sh*ts about Meghan, she happily tells the camera that Meghan should not have quit that job because what is she going to do when her husband moves on to wife number four and then she sits at the same table as Meghan and discusses her grave concerns for a woman she has already decided she hates loudly enough for the woman in question to hear her.

And that, my friends, is how a vacation with the Housewives begins. There is explosive diarrhea and a possible pregnancy and projectile mucus that changes color and Vicki.

I think I’d rather be back at Game Night.

Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon. Check out her website at nellkalter.com. Her twitter is @nell_kalter.