The Real Housewives of Orange County Recap: Ladies of the Canyon

The Real Housewives of Orange County
All Bets Are Off
Season 20 Episode 7
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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As I’ve talked to fans about this season, I’ve heard that many think it’s boring. They’re both right and wrong. The drama is boring. We’re fighting about room selection in the year of our lord two thousand and … what year is it again? I had tequila shots for lunch, and I can’t remember. Still. Rooms? Also, Vicki is fighting with Carmella about her not living in the O.C.? I don’t care. I care about these fights as much as I care about fantasy football leagues, which is to say I do not care and hold it in slight contempt. But where they’re wrong is that when the ladies are just being themselves and enjoying each other’s company, I am wildly entertained. 

Just look at the scooter, which is something I haven’t said since I was trying not to creep on a hot Vespa salesman. (Don’t look at his bulge, just look at the scooter, Brian.) Shannon procures a Jazzy scooter for Vicki because her knee is so jacked up that she can’t really walk around. It hasn’t stopped her from wearing heels, but it has hobbled her. When Shannon brings the scooter up to their hotel room, she’s driving it around with a scarf on her head like she’s Jackie O. in a Porsche convertible. Then she drives it right into Vicki’s bum knee. This hilarity is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen. 

How do you even get a Jazzy in Las Vegas? Is there a website where you can just rent them? Oh! There is! Of course there is. Vicki also takes her scooter on the scavenger hunt and then rams it into a display at a souvenir shop, sending a rack of key chains that look like Nevada license plates emblazoned with American names like Dustin, Cooper, and Everleigh scattering all over the floor. The whole scavenger hunt, devised by Heather Dubrow, is great television, with the gals just being silly, having some low-stakes competition, and making me laugh out loud at least three times. These scenes are sort of like the ladies riding in the CartZilla, a giant shopping cart that drives them around: It makes no sense, and I don’t know why it’s there, but it gave me a chuckle.

The scavenger hunt is capped off with Vicki and Shannon doing a joint zip-line down Fremont Street, which I will definitely not be re-creating next November at BravoCon. I’m sorry, but zip-lining is dumb. This is just a preventable death waiting to happen. When the gals go to the Grand Canyon, the group divides into two sections: those who want to zip-line across the Canyon and those who want to listen to an Indigenous group sing cultural songs. Sign me up to sit down and listen to the chanting of the proud and ancient Hualapai people. (To answer Jenn’s question, they’re the ones who discovered the Grand Canyon thousands of years before the white man brought his diseases and firearms to these shores.) Jenn and Emily zip right across because Emily is the bravest Housewife and Jenn is the dumbest, which are the two things you need to go zip-lining. When Vicki and Shannon get to the top, they won’t go across and, as much as I was pissed to be robbed of the editors putting so much reverb on Shannon’s scream as she raced across the canyon that it would have brought the ancient walls crashing into the Colorado River, I really don’t blame them. 

That’s kind of it for what the ladies do in this episode. They go to the Grand Canyon; they do a scavenger hunt; Heather takes everyone to Nobu Vegas because she sold her secret fifth child for lifetime access to the restaurant. (I bet Cooper Dubrow makes a wonderful nigiri.) That’s it. And all of that is fun. I love every second of it, including when Heather sits at the edge of the Canyon with Tamra and tells her how much she loves her new outlook on life. Tamra says that she’s not getting in fights, she’s not letting things bother her, and she’s in a much better place. She turns, letting the wind sweep particles of the stone formations through her hair as she looks like Selena Gomez wrapped in a Navajo blanket.

Now that we’ve talked about the fun we have to talk about, bleck, the fights. Let’s start with Vicki and Carmella. As we know, and the show has well reminded us, Vicki does not like the new girls, even though this season she is a bit of a new girl herself. Oh wait. Sorry. There’s a knock on my door. “Hello?” 

“Hello, I’m Dustin Cooper from Dustin, Cooper, and Everleigh and we represent Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. We’re serving you with a cyst and deceased from ever saying that she’s a new girl on The Real Housewives of Orange County (heretofore known as RHOC) and for you to acknowledge that she both founded the RHOC franchise, the Real Housewives as a whole, and you owe your entire career and livelihood to Ms. Gunvalson Jr. Thank you. Have a nice day.”

Okay, that was weird. Anyway, Vicki doesn’t want to get to know Carmella, and so on the van ride to the Grand Canyon, she has her laptop out and is working on insurance claims rather than getting to know the new girl. I get where Vicki is coming from. She’s making total sense: Carmella seems a bit fishy, no one knows where she lives, what she does, why she’s still with this boyfriend, how she gets her eyebrows like that, or why she’s offering Jenn a job and buying Emily a $3,000 purse when she doesn’t know either of them. Vicki says she’s skeptical of people because she once had a boyfriend who faked cancer, but she defended that man for years, both before and after his fake cancer, so why can’t she take just a little, tiny chance on Carmella now? 

Their argument gets heated at the casino after playing blackjack, and Carmella explains, yet again, that she lives in Rancho Santa Fe but has a house in Orange County for her job. Vicki then tells her that she shouldn’t be leaving her daughter, who is 14, so that she can go work in Orange County, and that her daughter would never leave her 13-year-old son to go work. This is where I died watching. Not because what Vicki says is so bad, but because Brianna has a 13-year-old son? How old am I? How old are we? How much time has passed? I need a good 20 minutes of the Grand Canyon breeze whipping through my hair like Tamra so I can think about my life.

Vicki is sort of right in that she says Carmella shouldn’t be leaving her kids at home for her job, and by that she means filming the show. Vicki is never going to tell a woman not to work, but she is going to tell them to stay in their own town and get the hell off her show if they don’t live within a 90-minute drive. Heather, Gina, and some others shut Vicki down and say that children are off-limits. I would argue that Vicki isn’t going after Carmella’s children, but Carmella’s mothering, which is different. However, this group is enforcing the limit that they don’t talk about each other’s parenting, and I think it’s a good limit to have. The group also seems behind Vicki’s apology to Carmella at the end of the episode. She says she’s sorry for going too far, takes it all back, and really lays it on thick, mostly because everyone told her she had to. Let’s hope she means it; let’s hope it sticks, but I have a feeling that this fight, like a drunken boomerang, is going to come back and barf on our feet. 

The other fight is Shannon versus Heather about the rooms. When the gals go zip-lining, Emily tells Jenn that she should say something to Shannon about how she’s annoyed at how the room swap went down. They both think that Shannon was throwing a tantrum, which, honestly, she was. This gets Jenn worked up, and she says, correctly, that it’s not really about the accommodations; it’s about Heather getting a better room and Shannon being upset about it. When they talk to Shannon, she says that she thought she made it clear that she was upset that Heather decided without consulting her. No. She did not make that clear. She said it was because of the elevator and electromagnetic pulses and something she saw on Bethenny Frankel’s TikTok about Dior bags or something. I don’t know. Can’t she just put some lemons in a bowl? 

They tell Shannon that she needs to say something to Heather, and she does, but Heather is annoyed that Shannon threw a whole hissy about designer handbags and then waited a day to bring this up. I’m with Fancy Pants on this one. If Shannon didn’t like that Heather made a decision, then she should have said it in the moment. Yes, fighting with her is surely exhausting and is going to make anyone need a case of Luna bars, but that is the time to say it. Shannon, instead, tries to hide behind MAHA magic or whatever the hell instead of just addressing what is going on. So, no, Heather shouldn’t have chosen rooms for everyone, and I could see how she could be annoying on a trip, but, yes, if Shannon had a problem, she should have addressed it rather than making everyone wear lead vests around their hotel suite to protect them from radiation. 

At the final dinner, the gals talk about sex, how much they have, how much they want, and what to do to get it. The big takeaway is that Vicki, as always, fucks. No one gets her pipes cleaned as well as the founder, creator, originator, and champion of all Housewives. (I know Dustin, Cooper, and Everleigh, attorneys at law, are reading.) Shannon mentions something that came up earlier in her fight with Heather: that everyone else has a partner to bitch about the ladies to except her. She’s starting to feel a little lonely. They tell her she deserves someone, she should put herself out there more, and she agrees. But it’s not going to help now. It’s not going to help in the morning when they all pile into a JetBlue back to Newport Beach (the PJ was only one way for the cameras), bleary with expensive Nobu sake and cheap regret. She’ll get out of the Uber, open her door, and there will be Archie Beador, waiting with a heaping of pants and a long string of drool from the corner of his smiling mouth. “Yes, Archie. Momma had a time with the gals, yes, she did,” Shannon will say in her baby voice. “Can you believe that Heather took the best room? She always does. And Auntie Vicki, she hates Carmella, but you would never hate her, would you? No, you wouldn’t.” Shannon will shook the top of his head, sending his ears back and the tendril of saliva to the floor. “Come on, Archie. Momma has so much to tell you,” she will say, wheeling her Rimowa into the house. She’ll continue to talk to him, and he’ll trot around, little bits of fur falling with his springy step. He’s all that she has. He knows this. He listens, he blinks, he smiles, he drools, he curls up next to her on the couch, his head on top of her knee, thinking about how, one day, heaven will beckon and he has no idea who will calm her then.