I like to joke that Shannon Storms Beador has never had a good season. If her husband wasn’t cheating on her, then she was getting heavier, getting divorced, getting sued, and getting an enema stuck in her butthole. However, it seems like what was shaping up to be her worst season yet, with a recent DUI and her evil ex’s new girlfriend in the cast, is her best season yet. Why? Because JJ squared is absolutely abhorrent.
At the beginning of the episode, Gina, Emily, Heather, and Shannon are still in La Quinta, and they’re having a nice breakfast while Shannon sobs about her relationship problems, which have turned into legal problems. Emily tells Shannon that when John sued her for the money she borrowed, it made her look dishonest about paying for everything during the first two years of their relationship. You can call SSB a lot of things, but you can’t call her a liar. Shannon says she once spent $10,000 on a birthday trip to L.A. for John’s daughter. No one asked her to; she wanted to because she saw this as her new family.
Emily, always the lawyer, tells Shannon to offer him a settlement of $30,000, rather than the $75,000 he’s asking for, and just be done with the whole thing. Shannon says she doesn’t want to give him a dime and certainly doesn’t want to be on a payment plan with John Janssen. (This gives me a great idea. Should we open a business in the OC where we finance plastic surgery?)
All of the women rally around Shannon and support her and, honestly, I want to as well. It’s clear that John has manufactured this whole lawsuit (which is still ongoing) just to humiliate Shannon. In fact, dating Alexis Bellino, getting her back on the show, and then using her only to broadcast his plights and gripes against her is one of the worst, most underhanded things that a man has ever done on this show, and that says a lot because we all remember Brooks Ayers. What makes it even worse is that John refuses to show his face, or at least hasn’t yet. It’s all coming through Alexis, who won’t ever shut up but also has Shannon’s name in her mouth so much I’m surprised it isn’t stuck in her Invisalign.
When Tamra, Katie, Jenn, and Alexis are getting ready to leave Big Bear, Jesus Juggs gets a call from John Janssen. He’s raging about something, but we can’t hear his voice, and she keeps saying, “The gloves are off. The gloves are off,” which seems to echo something he just said to Alexis. She tells the rest of the women that he’s fed up with Shannon and then lies on the bed crying saying, “She’s such a piece of shit I think I’m going to throw up.”
It appears that Shannon did something terrible to John that pushed him to the brink, but Alexis doesn’t mention what it is. When a producer asks her about it in her confessional, she says, “That’s a question for John.” Of all the bullshitty bullshit that Alexis Bellino has bullshat on this program, this is the bullshittiest of all. She is here to be this man’s mouthpiece, to bring his literal receipts from Shannon’s face-lift. She has defamed Shannon nine ways to Sunday and said every single thing that John wanted her to say. However, when it’s something he doesn’t want us to know or doesn’t want to talk about, then, and only then, does Alexis say, “You have to ask John.” That is not how we play this game. If John wants to talk about these things, then get John on the show. If we have questions for John, why isn’t he sitting next to her on that confessional bench? He can’t be a specter on the show, wielding all of this influence, but then disappear the second things get tough.
And that’s even worse for Shannon. This woman deserves hazard pay for what John and Alexis (and, by extension, the producers) are doing, dragging the worst moments of her life on-camera for our amusement. Shannon can’t hide. She can’t go anywhere. She can’t quash a topic of conversation or refuse to see Alexis. She’s stuck. But John? No, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Seriously, fuck that dude.
All of this may or may not have something to do with the videos that John and Alexis are holding over Shannon’s head. We get a very bizarre and short flash-forward of Shannon finding out about the videos in two weeks’ time and she’s heartbroken. We also finally learn what is in the video: footage of Shannon’s drunk-driving incident where she almost runs over John’s daughter. I said in the last recap, “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.” Okay, that is bad. That’s so bad I didn’t even think it was a possibility.
Still, I feel for Shannon because John and Alexis are basically saying, “Pay me $75,000, or I am going to continue to publicly humiliate you, and then I will release these videos.” This isn’t a lawsuit; it’s extortion, and we’re all a little bit a part of it and it’s ickier than PK’s jockstrap after a ten-mile jog … if he ever jogged anywhere except from the couch to the fridge to pour himself a Malibu and Diet Pepsi.
When I don’t feel for Shannon, however, is when Tamra takes her out to lunch for a little bit of tough love. In Big Bear, Jenn sat Tamra down and told her she needs to stop attacking Shannon. Jenn seems kind of dumb and doesn’t know how to care for herself, but I think she might be the kindest person on this show.
When they do sit down, at the end of the episode, it wasn’t as nice as Jenn probably would have liked. Tamra starts by saying Shannon should have been the one to call the meeting to apologize. Yeah, that is the wrong foot. It’s not only the wrong foot; it’s the wrong foot of a corpse Tamra dug up from a zombie cemetery on the way to lunch, and it’s twitching on the table. She then starts mimicking Shannon to show her how ridiculous she looks. Tamra’s biggest concern is that Shannon isn’t getting the help that she needs after her DUI. Shannon tells her, “If I get to a point where alcohol is an issue with me, I will look at it.” If? If?! In Shannon’s very first reunion on the show, Andy asked her if she had a drinking problem. It’s been a recurring theme throughout her many years as a Housewife. In the immortal words of Heather Dubrow, “If everyone says you’re dead, it’s time to lie down.”
Shannon then says she’s seen Tamra in plenty of compromising positions where alcohol was involved. “Have I drove my car into a house?” Tamra asks calmly, if not a bit incorrectly. Shannon then gets up from the table to take a minute in the bathroom to bitch to a producer about Tamra, who asks her own producer where Shannon is. When Tamra hears she’s in the bathroom, she asks, “Is she sneaking a drink?” Reader, I laughed. I laughed hard.
I have a hard time with this whole conversation. I get that Tamra wants the best for her, but it has been nothing but attacks and low blows all season. Going low is not going to get Shannon to get the help that she needs. But Shannon can’t be that mad at Tamra for the specific remark about driving her car into a house. She did it. Those are facts. But Shannon doesn’t see it as her problem, alcohol or otherwise. John Janssen drove her to drink, and just like in the past, she blamed her husband or Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. for hitting the sauce. Until Shannon takes some kind of agency in her life, until she realizes that she is the only one responsible for her bad decisions, she’s never going to improve. If she can’t even face the literal facts about what she’s done, she’s a long way off.
While the lunch ends on a positive note, with Tamra telling Shannon that she loves her and will support her, I have a feeling this fight is going to come back up. It reminds me of another fight in this episode, one that happened between two real friends. Yes, Gina and Emily, for the first time I can remember, came at each other, and on a pickleball court, no less. Well, where else are middle-age, white, suburban ladies going to fight these days?
Emily has a problem with Gina not only bowing down for Heather Dubrow as soon as Heather criticized Gina’s new friend Katie, but also that Gina was talking shit about her being too mean now that she’s closer with Tamra. Gina has a problem with Emily being too aggressive and says that it seems like Emily and Tamra are trying to out asshole each other, to which Emily immediately rebukes that Gina bowed down to queen Heather the moment she was critical.
This was a real fight between actual friends. This was like eavesdropping on two real ladies who have very real concerns outside of a show or lawsuits or rumors or legal battles. These are two besties who need to get back on the same page. Unlike so many Housewives fights, which come from a place of hatred, this was coming from a place of love. Emily loves Gina so much that she cares about her opinion and it hurts her when Gina thinks less of her. Gina doesn’t want to walk on eggshells around Emily and worry about her wrath because she needs her support right now while things at home are pretty bad.
It says a lot about these two and their bond that they can turn the fight around pretty quickly and get back to a place of mutual agreement. I wish all of the shows could be like this: honest, raw, and real. Instead we get Alexis showing up with her marching orders and then clamming up as soon as the battle gets difficult. While there was plenty of drama with a capital D this whole episode, this actual spat is the one that I won’t forget anytime soon.
And then they blessed us with this perfect piece of dialogue at the end.
“I just see what happened with Tamra and Shannon [breaking up],” Gina worries.
“That’s not us,” Emily reassures her. “Those two are dysfunctional nutjobs.”
“They’re so fucked up.”
“They are!”
“That’s not us. We’re totally normal.”
