It was a busy week for Tamra Judge, the chaos agent of “The Real Housewives of Orange,” who tossed emotional flash-bang grenades at the feet of multiple housewives on Thursday’s episode.
Tamra, who never saw a sore spot she didn’t want to poke, kept up her criticism of Shannon Storms Beador‘s decision to still have the occasional drink even after her DUI arrest in 2023.
On that topic, Tamra is at least right out in the open with her attack. With Gina Kirschenheiter, she was more of a gossip ninja, slipping the blade so smoothly into her back that Gina might not have known who’d shivved her until she saw the episode with the rest of us.
Gina and Katie Ginella had both blamed each other in previous episodes for triggering Heather Dubrow’s wrath in Paparazzi Gate. Gina groveled a few weeks back and Heather forgave her and left the blame on Katie.
In Guerneville, though, Katie finally made her case to Heather that it was Gina who’d initially stirred up this tempest in a tequila bottle. Katie threw Gina under the bus.
Tamra backed it over her and ran her over a few more times, telling Heather that Katie told her Gina was desperate to escape Heather’s blame in order to keep the Great and Powerful Heather as an advocate for Gina’s still-new real estate career.
When that all blows up at lunch on the last day in Guerneville, Gina is quickly sobbing – her unsettled relationship with boyfriend Travis is also at play here – and Heather is unmerciful until Katie reveals what Gina actually said, which was more along the lines of, “Heather’s supportive of my career,” and less as Tamra portrayed it, which was “Heather’s gonna help me make fat stacks of Benjamins.” In so many words.
They all end up hugging it out – Katie and Gina – or realizing they’d been told something untrue – Heather.
But Tamra? She sits and smiles at the table with no blowback for her sneaky li’l ways.
Elsewhere this week:
– Emily Simpson provided another highlight at dinner when she took a bite of a cheese-bedecked cracker and sent cheese chunks cascading down her front. “I lost some cheese down here,” she said more or less to herself as she fished the curds out of her cleavage.
– Shannon and Alexis and John Janssen remain the storyline that just won’t end. When several of the housewives suggest Shannon talk things out with Alexis, she says no way, no how with a handful of expletives thrown in, and that is the end of that.
— Trips out of town require activities and this week half the housewives went for biscuit-making lessons at a Guerneville bakery, while the other half went into the woods for a “forest bath.” The biscuits looked delicious. The forest bath looked … relaxing. Until Shannon started coughing up a lung and disrupting the meditation efforts of the others.
— For the second time this season, Emily ended up on a pool table in a bar with Tamra poking at her. That is all we think you can handle of that.
