‘Jersey Shore’ Recap: Ronnie Vs. the Situation Vs. a Wall
When we last left the gang, Ronnie and the Situation were preparing for a battle royale such that will rip this tiny clan apart for good, or at least until they all sober up in four hours. In case you had forgotten, the guys are about to come to blows over something that Sammi told Ron that the Situation told her that Ronnie told him FORGET ABOUT IT LET’S FIGHT. But just as Ronnie is at his most shirtless and ready to rumble, The Situation….slams his own head into a concrete wall. That just sums it alllllllll up now, doesn’t it? Not that the scrum was over, per se. “I’ve been waiting a long time to fuck you up,” Ronnie snarls. There was much more grappling to come. The image of the two of them scrabbling over overturned bed frames, tripping over piles of barely-worn t-shirts and empty bottles of product, elicits discomfort. It elicits despair. It elicits a crack team of…what, security guards? Bouncers? Boom mic operators? Whoever these men are, I want an hour-long documentary about their lives and livelihood. As soon as things started getting really ugly, two burly angels dove into the melee from off-camera and wrestled each cast member to the ground. Can we get them to start intervening at random?
The Situation is taken to the hospital, as a precaution for all the damage he did to himself. Back at the ranch, Ronnie needs psychological counseling, straight-up. Anyway you slice it, Ron is currently traveling through life, waiting for any reason to unleash his inner rage on the nearest warm body, usually one of the few people who are still able to tolerate his volatility. While the Situation remains under observation for a light concussion, Ronnie attempts to pack his 10,000 deodorants to leave the house before Vinny, the Dr. Phil of the house, convinces him to stay. So…Dr. Phil tells you to fight the last remaining self-preservation instinct in your body, I take it?
I don’t mean to brush off their “fight,” because it’s probably footage that should be reviewed by a licensed psychiatrist. However, the Situation’s post-hospital moping just made me want to drill my own head into the concrete. He milks his (self-induced) injury for all it’s worth, wandering around, despondently eating a sandwich before weeping, audibly, into his blanket. After virtually no time has passed, Ronnie and the Situation reconcile. Through his giggles, the Situation reveals that he slammed his head against the wall because he had, in a previous fight, successfully avoided getting his veneers kicked in by smashing his face into a layer of sheetrock. To which I say, WHAT WHAT WHAT?
By following a dark, misogynistic thread of crazy-person logic, the house seems to have decided en masse that Sammi is the one to blame for causing the Situation to act like the biggest damn fool imaginable. They really A to C this one: Sammi just gets Ron so riled up and he wanted to fight! Just the presence of an angry Ron made Mike react like a parakeet in front of a mirror! “You’ve got to be an adult and walk away from a relationship,” a still-wise JWoww warns Ronnie. Sure, because clearly when Ronnie starts dating someone else, all of these issues will just disappear on their own. Despite Ron’s seemingly genuine apology, and multiple promises that it won’t happen again, everyone is already getting that thousand-yard stare that was so familiar from last season.
Back at the apartment, Ronnie attempts to reconcile with Sam once again, and in doing so admits that all of the horrible vitriolic things he screamed at her during the fight were true. No, not the part about her not being “shit,” the part where Ron’s been talking to mystery phone pal Hannah about coming to visit. Sammi belatedly flips out and berates him, vowing never to talk to him again or to talk to him in a few hours, whichever comes first. Later she stacks all of her gifts from Ronnie on his (still incredibly disheveled) bed in a little blue leopard print pile. Ronnie throws the returned gifts in the garbage, Sammi pulls them back out to treasure them. It’s all a little on the nose, emotionally-speaking.
Later on the guys head out to the club, where Pauly D almost gets into it with some irate Florentines. “You’re on the streets of Florence,” they scream at him, which is a nice reminder when we’ve spent the last 23 hours in Ron and Mike’s squalid fight pit of a room. On the way back to the apartment, Ronnie picks up a bouquet of roses for Sammi. Using the Victorian flower code, we know that the red ones convey passion, while the white ones indicate, as he puts it, “Let me be an adult, and show you ‘you’re the asshole, I’m not that the asshole.’” The language of love! As Ronnie also explains when forking over the flowers, the bouquet is supposed to convey the message that he’ll be “fine either way,” with or without their relationship, which seems like a logical message to imbed in a gift bouquet. In a completely closed rage circuit, Ronnie then proceeds to gift Sammi with the flowers, baits her into an argument, acts offended when she inqueries if he brought home another woman (as if he didn’t vomit verbal bile to that effect during their many arguments), declares himself over it and throws the roses in the garbage. This all happens within the course of, what, fifteen minutes? “You don’t deserve me,” Ron declares. “You don’t deserve these roses.” Truly, there is only one person in this house who does, but can the concrete wall ever learn to experience true intimacy, or will it always be haunted by that one passionate moment it shared with the Situation’s skull?
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