Let’s review a few things that we learned on last night’s episode of Real Housewives of Orange County:

1. These housewives are certainly not as serious about their wigs as their Atlanta counterparts.
2. Tamra doesn’t know the difference between a beer bong and shotgunning a beer, which I found more than a tad surprising.
3. Alexis obsesses for days over eating a donut because she’s afraid that her weak-chinned husband will cheat on her. Which he probably would.
4. Ryan, Tamra’s douchey son, is balding, and that should tell you something about karma. Also, he is going to jail. Which he refers to as “hanging out” in jail.
5. I’m really, really glad that I’ve never had to go on a blind date on national television. Let alone one that lasted three days.

We’ll go ahead and call this the “transitional” episode. We’ve set the stage for the initial storylines of the season, and now it’s time to start moving toward the meat of them. But not too quickly, you know. They have to stretch this out over like three months, and don’t you forget it. So for now, we’ll just go housewife by housewife.

Vicki seems like a natural place to start, since the awkwardness that she created for her beleaguered daughter was the only part that she played in this episode. That poor girl. Her mother managed to find some dude from God knows where in the Midwest and fly him to California to go on a date with her daughter…for three days. And not only is she on the blind date that never ends, but she’s on it in front of a camera crew and with a dude that has absolutely no personality to speak of. Vicki didn’t even put him up in a hotel. He stayed in the house, so her poor daughter couldn’t even get a halfway decent lay out of it. Mom, if you’re reading this: I love you for not being Vicki Gunvalson.

Speaking of women that are probably having a horrifyingly negative impact on their kids, we also have Lynn. She and her husband thought that the best way to fix their familial problems was to bring in some quasi-qualified talking head with a book to promote to figure out why their teenagers hate them. Hint: because they’re both Botox’d, fake tanned, narcissistic deadbeats that got them evicted from their home and probably did a fairly crappy job raising them, creating any semblance structure, teaching them about life, and all various and sundry other things that parents are supposed to do. Ya know, just a guess.

And leading the pack of bad mothers, we have Tamra. She’s like Original Gangsta when it comes to screwing up your kids, because her son Ryan has managed to fail at life in various ways: first, he lost his driver’s license. Probably by doing something asinine. Again, just a guess. But then while his parents were out of town, he took Tamra’s car out and managed to get caught.

Then he talked some smack about his stepdad on Facebook like an AMATEUR, and of course Simon found out about it because even old people have Facebook now. I hate Simon with the best of them, but I hate people that do stupid crap on the internet even more. He’s not allowed back in to Tamra’s house until he apologizes, but since testosterone turns some men into complete morons, he won’t do it. So he’s living with grandma. Apparently his male pride will allow him to do that, it just won’t allow him to admit that he said something that he shouldn’t have and managed to capture it for posterity on Facebook. Right. Secretly, I think he just hates Simon because Simon may be old, but his hair is way more thick and luxurious than his is.

To add injury to insult (he even managed to do that saying in the wrong order, that’s how much he sucks at life), he got drunk and jumped off a tour bus and broke his foot. Because he makes great decisions, he also decided that instead of completing that pesky community service to which he agreed for one of his past legal indiscretions (take your pick as to which one it might have been, I don’t remember and frankly, I don’t think it matters), he’s just gonna go to jail for five days. Obviously, you only make that choice if you’ve got absolutely nothing going on in your life. Which is true – he’s on disability and doesn’t have a job. Ladies and gentlemen, with the revelation that this slimeball is on disability for a drunken foot injury, I think he managed to single-handedly turn me into a republican.

…

Sorry, I had a rage blackout there for a minute.

I might as well get ready for another one, though, because Alexis and her sniveling chimpanzee of a husband are up next. She said that he didn’t have to change diapers because he was “her king,” and I threw up in my mouth a little bit. He also managed to make fun of her for spending so much time on her appearance while simultaneously pointing out that she hadn’t worked out as much as he expected her to, and the condescension and superiority contained in that interaction alone were enough to make my brain want to jump out of my head and run away, screaming and waving its tiny brain-arms the entire time.

Not only that, but in one of her one-on-one interviews that was spliced in with that scene, Alexis talked at length about how she beats herself up for days if she eats anything unhealthy, and also that she feels like she needs to stay in the best physical shape humanly possible because she’s afraid that her husband will cheat on her if he finds someone hotter.

So much for putting God first in order to create a strong marriage. But then he gave her a really tacky, really expensive necklace and all was right in the world. In her world, at least. And if she’s willing to sell her soul to a man that wears wide-collared pastel shirts and has no chin (but, inexplicably, somehow still manages to grow a douchey goatee) in exchange for a white Bentley and some jewelry, then…well, I’ll continue to make fun of her, I suppose. They must have a good prenup, otherwise I bet she would have divorced him and be banging the pool boy by now.

Ok, so, what are we forgettiing? Tamra had a party where everyone wore ugly wigs and poured vodka in each others’ mouths, but oddly, nothing of any interest whatsoever happened as a result. It seemed like the producers were hoping that that party would anchor the episode, but then the housewives just drank and played bunco, which is almost too stereotypical to even laugh at.

The lone bright spot in the episode was, surprise surprise, Gretchen. She went to Michigan to see her late fiancee’s kids, and for me, that was enough proof that whatever she and Jeff were doing was legit. Kids know, man. They know and they won’t pretend, and if they’re still in contact with Gretchen, let alone friendly with her, then things must have been okay. The daughter even let her question her boyfriend like a mother would, and as far as I know, that’s not something that a 20-year-old girl lets people do lightly. So Tamra, STFU. You can’t even get all the people in your family to be civil to each other and stay out of jail, you have no room to criticize anyone.