With every emotional hand grenade that Tamra Judge metaphorically lobs into the laps of “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” there are two perfectly reasonable reactions for a viewer to have.
One is empathy for Tamra’s target du jour, which on Thursday, July 17, is once again Katie Ginella. The other? Admiration, because honestly, the housewives are done for when Terrible Tamra pulls the pin.
We’ll get to Poor Katie in a moment, but first, welcome back former housewife Gretchen Rossi, who makes her return on Thursday as a friend of the housewives this season.
Well, friend of all except Tamra. Gretchen seems likely to be a powerful adversary to her for one simple reason: neither woman can stand the other.
These two go way back – Tamra joined the show for its third season, Gretchen for its fourth – and a dozen years after Gretchen left the cast there’s no love lost between the two, as is clear when Heather Dubrow brings up Gretchen during a champagne-and-onion-rings party on Tamra’s bed. Housewives, they’re just like us!
“Oh, God,” Tamra groans after Heather tells her she’s hung out with Gretchen recently. “Does she have a nose?”
Heather replies that yes, Gretchen in fact has a nose.
“Because the pictures on Instagram, it’s all blurred,” Tamra explains, referring, it seems, to some possibly filtered social media pics that flash on the screen.
Gretchen gets her first confessional after that and uses it partly to rebut Tamra.
“It’s been 11 years since I’ve been sitting in this chair, and I would say I look like I’ve been frozen in time,” Gretchen says as the show does a video-morph effect on her face over time to back that assertion.
“And no plastic surgery, not on even on these suckers,” she adds, giving her chest a little shake to prove her point.
Turns out, Gretchen and Katie, who only joined the show the previous season, already are friendly.
“Every new housewife always reaches out to me and asks how to deal with Tamra,” Gretchen explains. ‘And I literally tell them to run. I could be making so much money if I started charging them for advice.”
Gretchen’s also friendly with Jenn Pedranti, who invites her and Katie and their spouses over to dinner. Let’s pause here to honor Gretchen’s longtime partner – 16 years, during which he took fire from Tamra, too – as possessor of perhaps the most perfect name ever for a housewife’s man: Slade Smiley.
“The irony of so many of these women claiming it’s a fake relationship is that most of these women have gotten divorced since then,” Gretchen says of her relationship with Slade. A montage of her past housewife foes Tamra, former housewife Vicki Gunvalson, and Shannon Storms Beador – and their divorce dates in 2011, 2013, and 2018, respectively – scroll by as she speaks.
“Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?” she declares as the video clips shift to archival footage of Tamra calling Gretchen a gold digger and Slade a piece of you know what, among other things.
After the season premiere a week earlier, which featured Katie on the receiving end of accusations about violating various unwritten rules of housewifery, Katie had invited everyone to lunch at Nice To Meet You Hot Pot in Irvine. She’s hoping to clear the air, rinse the dirty laundry, reboot the modem and get her friendships back on track.
Alas, Katie, she knew not what Tamra had already unleashed upon her during an earlier conversation with Gina Kirschenheiter and Emily Simpson.
“Katie’s like a silent assassin,” Tamra says. “Like she’s really sweet and nice to your face and then she’s doing all this stuff behind your back.”
A week earlier, Tamra tore into Katie for allegedly contacting a blogger who’d posted something negative about Tamra online. Emily had also blasted her for allegedly dragging Emily’s children inappropriately into the spotlight. Only Jenn and Shannon had defended her during the premiere.
Now Tamra accidently on purpose lets slip to Gina and Emily that during the previous season Katie had videotaped Shannon having a meltdown and later showed it to Alexis Bellino, Shannon’s biggest enemy in that season.
Gina gasps. “She showed it to Alexis?” she says in a whisper for some reason. “They were in an active lawsuit [at the time]”
Flash-forward to the restaurant where Katie is about to go from last week’s frying pan into this week’s hot pot. Gina has decided she simply must confront her over the Shannon Tape and thereby ensure that Katie has one less friend and defender.
It’s hard to trust you, Gina says, and turns to Shannon before continuing.
“Tamra just told me that last year she recorded you [freaking out] and then sent the video to Alexis,” she says as Shannon’s head whips around and Tamra pulls off a tricky wince-eyeroll combo move.
Katie insists there was no video, just a voice memo that she sent to her husband Matt because she was annoyed by Shannon’s noisy outbursts.
“I did some [bleeped-up bleep] and regret doing it,” Katie tells Gina, and suddenly they’re pledging to try to be friends again.
Shannon takes off early, and into that void come Tamra and Gretchen, battling like no time elapsed since their last on-camera spat. In Gretchen, Tamra faces someone who knows her and their shared history and doesn’t back down.
“You always blame it on somebody else,” Gretchen tells her at one point. “So you can spin your little lies and do all your manipulation like you do. You are the liar beyond liars.”
Elsewhere in this week’s episode:
— Emily, a week after tucking unwrapped donuts into the pocket of her coat, does a bit more foraging in the hot pot spot.
“I got a hard-boiled egg for the ride home,” she announces as the luncheon wraps up.
“Shut up and let me see it!” Heather replies. “Did you put an egg in your purse?”
The show flashes back 15 minutes to see that Emily did indeed take an egg from the hot pot buffet, and using tongs, place it in her handbag.
She takes it out of her purse to show the others, and then exclaims, “Oh! I thought it was hard-boiled!”
Emily, God bless her, had put a now-cracked-and-oozing uncooked egg in her purse, which leaves the other housewives in tears, and one of them, probably Gina, snorting with laughter.
— Shannon tells Katie about her recent medi-spa treatments, which included a facial, lasers, and Botox.
“It’s just neck up,” she explains later in a confessional. “There’s no neck down until I’m in a relationship. I don’t even know when the last time was I had a bikini wax.”
Surely Chekov’s bikini line will be waxed before the season’s finale curtain.
— Shannon has been kissing the fellas here and there, though, having smooched four gents without having to initiate the lip-locks once, she says after a conversation with her daughter Sophie about her new embrace of singlehood.
“I’m not a kissing bandit,” Shannon explains. “But I do like a kiss, if it’s good.”
— Tamra also takes some shots at Jenn during her boudoir champagne and onion rings get-together with Heather, claiming that Jenn, after first meeting Tamra, tried to become her, buying a house nearby and reshaping her body through exercise and styling.
“She went to the hair salon where I went and had my old hair extensions put in her head,” Tamra says, which we’re pretty sure is not how it works, right?