On their trip to New Orleans, the ladies go to a restaurant called Muriel’s, which has a table permanently set for the ghost of one of the previous owners. I love this idea of a ghost table, and the ladies were alone in a ballroom so large they could have set a whole banquet table full of ghosts from previous seasons. How amazing would that have been? The spirit of Lynne Curtin playing with her cuff sitting next to Peggy Tanous, still mad at Alexis Bellino. There’s Noella Bergener, still trying too hard even in astral form, and Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. shouting at all of them that they need to whoop it up. Do we need Andy Cohen to become a medium just so he can host the Real Housewives of the Other Side reunion part 666?

The whole show is becoming a little bit like the ghost table. I’m not talking about bringing back Alexis, Gretchen, and, last episode, Jo De La Rosa, but that’s a part of it. I’m talking about a show that seems to be living in its glory days. Gina and Shannon have a whole conversation about Shannon’s large collection of plates just so the editors can show a snippet of Shannon’s famous “That’s not even my plate, you fucking bitch” scene. Shannon is in a confessional saying that something is her opinion so the disembodied head of Tamra Judge can float above her saying one of her million catchphrases. We’re banking on the specter of past glory for laughs, except for when Emily Simpson did her hilarious impersonation of Heather Dubrow riding her husband and getting turned on hearing about their stock portfolio. (And thank God that Fancy Pants has come far enough that she can laugh about it.)

Aside from the returning champions and the constant flashbacks, there is a ghost in the middle of every story line this season. Yes, the girlies are fighting, but about what? Everyone’s mad at Katie for lying, filming, and talking to every blogger with Fios cable internet and an Instagram profile, but what is at the crux of it? If you try to grasp on to the center of this story, your hands will just pass through the air like you’re trying to grab Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense (25-year-old-spoiler alert).

It’s even worse with this thing between Jenn and Tamra, or Katie and Tamra, or Shannon and Tamra, or Tamra’s daughter — who doesn’t want to record a song with her — and Tamra, or the ice-cream scooper down at the pier who Tamra never tips and Tamra. Yes, everyone (except for Heather, Emily, and Gina) is mad at Tamra because she’s been treating them like shit for years and is probably a terrible person to work with. Still, if it weren’t for Tamra, we’d just be watching a bunch of personal story lines that are total bummers. (My heart goes out to Emily struggling with her son and Gina struggling with her boyfriend’s ex, but if I wanted to see struggles like that, I would just talk to my actual friends, not my TV friends.) Gina’s right when she says at her housewarming that every group discussion Tamra is not in is about Tamra.

The biggest fight is between Tamra and Jenn, and I have to pull out my handy Beef Chart to even remember what this beef is about. (According to the chart, I believe this beef is a T-Bone?) Jenn is mad that Tamra said her house was raided by the FBI, which doesn’t seem like a big deal. And Tamra is mad at Jenn because … sorry, I didn’t bring my readers, and the print on the Beef Chart is a little too small to decipher. I’m sure there’s a reason, but for right now, it is a shrug emoji.

What Jenn is mad about now is that Tamra is saying she’s trying to Single White Female her and take over her life. I would be mad about this too because, of course, Jenn looks the same as her. Every woman at the Quiet Woman looks like a clone manufactured in a lab by a mad scientist who hasn’t given up his Maxim magazine subscription. They all go to the same gym, the same surgeon, the same salon, and the same stores, where they buy the same bad heels and the same tacky dresses. Of course Jenn looks like her; they all look alike! Tamra is willfully manipulating the facts so she can have something to be mad at Jenn about, which is the worst kind of fight.

Now the argument has moved on to the “fatty photo” that Tamra showed of Jenn before she had a full glow-up. Much like “rage texting,” “gaslighting,” and “white parties,” fatty photos are something I didn’t know existed or had a term for until watching reality television. I don’t like this whole idea of fatty photos because every photo of me is a fatty photo. I think I’m going to refer to them as “phatty photos,” for a full ’90s rebrand, because if you are fat in an old photo and skinny now, then I think that is pretty PHAT. Regardless, it is a dirty game to play to trot out these photos to try to shame Jenn about her past.

But Jenn is playing this whole argument wrong. Her rebuttal to Tamra about trying to steal her life is essentially the playground classic “Are not!” This tactic is ineffective. Jenn has two better options. The first is another playground classic: “So what?” What’s so bad about stealing someone’s style, wanting to look like them, and aspiring to have their life? Isn’t that what all of us do to every single person we follow on Instagram who isn’t Caroline Calloway? If Jenn interrogated why Tamra’s mad about it, it would just expose the rotting corpse of nothingness that is Tamra’s whole argument.

The other tactic she could use, probably even more effectively, is admitting to it. What if Jenn said that yes, she moved to the O.C. and saw Tamra as a role model. She saw her on television with a handsome husband who adored her, surrounded by great friends, taking great trips, wearing stylish clothes, and flaunting a body so banging that it could be its own percussion orchestra. Jenn could say yes, she wanted to be Tamra … until she got to know her. Then she learned that underneath that exterior she coveted is a rotten, unhappy, angry person who treats all of her friends like crap. That would totally destroy Tamra: Admit to what she is accusing her of and show how that makes Tamra even worse. It both takes the fangs out of Tamra’s argument and turns it around on her, so she’s like Emily, taking it from behind while watching My 600-lb Life. (Emily can’t even watch a Bravo show while getting railed by her husband? Not even Love Hotel?)

This does not mean, however, that I am team Jenn with two n’s. Jenn’s relationship with Ryan, and her continued insistence on relying on a man for support, is making me want to do a self-exorcism. I do have a bit of sympathy for Jenn trying to deal with her ex-husband, Will. This show is proving that the only thing worse than being in a relationship with a terrible person is breaking up with one. This show is littered with the bodies of so many terrible exes — Katie’s ex, Travis’s ex, Simon Barney, David Beador, John Janssen, Brooks Ayers, Slade Smiley — they could populate their own ghost table. But still, Ryan is not the one. Jenn says that Will isn’t paying her child support or spousal support like he’s supposed to and he still hasn’t given her the lump sum owed her by their divorce settlement.

We learn about this at the gym, where she tells Ryan everything and Ryan says he wants to talk to Will about it. Ryan says he doesn’t want a confrontation; he just wants to ask him why he’s not paying. Dude, that is exactly what a confrontation is. Even if you say it in the prettiest voice coated in honey and dripping in love, it is still a confrontation, and Jenn asks him not to do it. First of all, even though Ryan is taking care of her and the kids, it is not his fight. Secondly, Jenn knows just what will happen if the new guy comes up to the old guy asking about his money.

At dinner in New Orleans, Jenn tells the group that Ryan did, in fact, confront Will about why he’s not paying. What is the result? Just what Jenn thought it would be: Will didn’t have a good answer, nothing was resolved, and now he’s even more angry and probably going to block her so she can’t even text him about what is going on with the kids. Will is an asshole looking for reasons to pay her back, and Ryan just gave him another one. Jenn says this “put me back ten steps with Will,” exactly as she knew it would. A good partner, a real partner, would have listened to Jenn and respected her wishes. But Ryan, a chihuahua who lives at the Testosterone Replacement Therapy clinic, can’t let that happen. He’s just the absolute worst.

That leaves the women at dinner in New Orleans slurping their turtle soup and trying to have a good time in a group that has more fractures than the first-aid tent at a boulder-throwing tournament. As Tamra walks out of the dinner, in the big empty room, she turns around and, for a minute, she thinks she hears a rumble. She turns around and, for just a glimpse, she sees the ghost table — long, laden with chandeliers and rotting fruit, with all of her former co-stars sitting at it. She made a sacrifice to get every single woman there. She outplayed them, outmatched them, out-yelled them all. At the head and the foot of the table, two figures in reunion dresses stand up and then the eyes of everyone assembled turns to Tamra, their eyes chilling her bones like a cryo chamber. At either end of the table, Lizzie Rovsek and Kelly Dodd each raise one bony arm toward Tamra, pointing an accusatory finger. Then their mouths fall open as if their jaws detached, and they let out a shriek in her direction that stops even the mighty Mississippi in its tracks.

 Jenn could easily turn the whole argument back around on Tamra by just admitting that she modeled her O.C. life after hers.