Away from kids on crutches and the kind of permeating misery that causes film noir-style shadows to appear in an Orange County home even when it’s sunny outside, we join Meghan and Jim as they eat lunch near the beach. Jim orders a burger and fries and Meghan orders six pieces of lettuce and they debate about how long he has been gone. She thinks it’s been three and a half weeks but I guess he stopped missing her after two weeks so he thinks that must equal how long he has actually been away from home. At any rate, they discuss Hayley and her future and Meghan asks what she is going to do next, to which her father responds that she will go to college even though she has yet to apply to one. Watching this entire scene is depressing. It appears that Meghan cares more about the kid than the kid’s father does and he remains completely unemotional while his wife looks terribly concerned and he barely glances at her face since he is obviously far more in love with that hamburger than the woman sitting before him and I can only hope that the guy acted differently during the courting process so I needn’t come to the conclusion that Meghan is insane. I’m willing to bet that Jim used to pretend to really listen to Meghan and tell her how he valued her willingness to hunker down and help him parent, but I think those days are long over (they have been married for four months, you guys) and the thought of Meghan going forward and having a child with this cold douchebag scares me.
I think that maybe it’s Parent/Child night on the OC because the next scene involves Tamra and her mother and her husband in the kitchen as they discuss how Ryan is moving back to Orange County with his new family. Eddie, his biceps hurting from doing pull-ups and jerking off while his wife was away, answers that no, he will not welcome Ryan back to CUT Fitness because it’s hard to work with family. Tamra agrees; she hated working beside him at the gym and Eddie explains that they’re having way more sex now that he doesn’t have to see her all that much during the day and then they pour shots of sake because it’s really hard to be fully sober for a night while talking about plans to meet up with a psychic. See, Tamra has a spiritual advisor. His name is Scott. He has accurately predicted her custody crisis and the fact that her granny’s ghost once brushed her hair and he will be sitting down soon with Heather, Meghan, and Tamra. I saw on the previews that he will suggest that Brooks’ cancer is not real, but I also hope he tells Meghan to run away from Jim and to not even bother trying to befriend his next wife and I hope he tells Heather where she can purchase Italian marble at a discount and that he tells Tamra where a Nordstrom is so she can start wearing better clothing because the woman has effectively ruined hot pink for me forever and while I appreciate that the shirt she has on doesn’t have something like “DIVA” or “FASHIONISTA” scrawled across it in rhinestones, I’ve still officially had enough.
At Vicki’s house, she hangs a charm in memory of her mother outside in the garden and then sits in the sun beside Brooks and tells him that she doesn’t know when or how she will get out of the funk she feels following her mother’s passing. She’s grateful to Brooks for his support and for being there, especially since she has made is so abundantly clear (seriously: she’s said it over and over again and then three more times this season) that she just doesn’t want to be alone. It’s maybe because of her fear about solitude that she’s so concerned about Brooks’ health. According to Vicki, he’s been diagnosed with cancer three times and the chemotherapy is not working for him. Brooks has a plan to visit a doctor who is in remission without the use of chemo and he’s hoping whatever the doctor could do for himself might be done for him too. I don’t particularly like Brooks and I have never cared for Vicki, but watching their quiet and sad discussion was unpleasant; you never want to see people in actual pain on these shows. You want them to fight about who said sh*t about someone while she was in the bathroom or get to laugh at someone using a maiden name as some form of a misguided neo-feminist insult. Nobody wants there to be an actual body count in the land of Housewives.
On a peppier note, Heather and Tamra arrive at a restaurant where the servers already know to have the champagne ready and they briefly discuss how Shannon called Tamra “a sh*t-stirrer” in Tahiti. Tamra is probably correct in assuming that the genesis of Shannon’s problem is not with her or her alleged sh*t-stirring but instead with anything that somehow leads back to Meghan. Well, the actual genesis of Shannon’s problem undoubtedly has to do with being miserable in her own life, but since she lives a life of pure projection, let’s just hop on board and pretend for a moment that her issues really do stem from Meghan breathing air and being thirty. At any rate, Meghan then shows up and the subject changes to how Tamra has never actually met her spiritual advisor in person. She and Scott talk several times a week (you know, like how you do with your very own spiritual advisor. Housewives…they’re just like us!) but they’re meeting now for the first time and in walks Scott and he’s young and kind of cute and he pulls off bald better than any spiritual advisor I have ever seen.