‘Jersey Shore’ Recap: Snooki’s Convoluted Confessional
Well, we all knew it was coming: The Situation has finally and completely broken with reality. For the entire Jersey Shore season, Mike has been trending toward incoherence, and now he has completed his metamorphosis into a straight-up super villain. For most of the episode, the Situation sat and waited in his armchair, chuckling and petting his familiar, aka the little hat of hair he has perched on top of his head. Enraged that Snooki still denies cheating on her boyfriend with him, Mike concocts a scheme to teach her a lesson she’ll never forget or understand. A little lesson he like to call “Gym, Tan, Who’s The Rat.” “She’s the fugitive right now, and I’m harboring information,” The Situation hisses, later declaring, “I’m tired of being Mr. Nice.” God help us if he ever creates an army of cyborgs. Or, more realistically, find them under a pile of slightly soiled tracksuits.
The plan to get back at Snooki for (logically, rationally, understandably) denying their sexcapade is this: tell practically everyone in the house that Mike called his friend the Unit to call Jionni and inform him of his lady’s romantic interlude with Vinny (more on that in a few…hundred words). This did not actually happen. Once Sammi hears about the call, she warns the Situation to his face that she will tell Snooki, which she does. This will somehow prove that…what, Snooki shouldn’t listen to gossip? THE SITUATION MADE UP THE GOSSIP ABOUT HIMSELF AND TOLD EVERYONE IT WAS TRUE. “I don’t understand the drama, whatever Mike’s intention is,” Pauly muses. The human mind was not built to understand it.
Once Snooki finds out that Mike supposedly passed on the news to Jionni, she goes atomic. This fight was both intense, and a good lesson for the gang not to leave 4,000 liquid-filled containers on every surface of the house. Seriously, there was so much heavy, sticky glass just waiting to get broken; earlier in the episode JWoww walks past the coffee table with her suitcase and knocks over approximately three gallons of red wine onto the floor. Those three seconds need to be preserved in gif form forever. They should be inscribed on the next Voyager Golden Record.
Snooki rages. A wine bottle smashes spectacularly against the wall. Meanwhile, the Situation’s policy seems to be shout louder and louder and louder until everyone is too grossed out and exhausted to argue with him, thus making him the (awful)(nightmare) winner. The gang informs Snooki that Mike has made up the whole thing, and he gloats about Sammi being a rat while Snooki retires to the bird shit patio to weep. Just to make it clear, the whole encounter makes even less sense than this description describes. On the other hand, maybe this episode is enough evidence for the authorities to lock him up in Arkham.
The whole episode does, however, confirm my suspicion that any expression of emotion coming from the Situation for Snooki is the product of a (truly exceptional) staff writer’s mind, not Mike’s own wizen black heart. Not because the Situation treats her badly, mind you, by constantly throwing their sexual encounter in her face. Don’t be silly. No, it’s that the Situation cares that she hooked up with Vinny, and that just does not jive with what we know about the Reality They Live In.
In order to get a break from one another (and to provide sufficient time for the Hazmat team to clean up the thousands of shards of broken glass on the floor), the ladies head on a day trip for a wine tour in Tuscany, while the guys accompany Vinny to Sicily to visited his extended family. Luckily for them, Vinny’s relatives seem nothing if not normal and kind, stuffing their guests with dozens of pasta and turkey courses as the guys marvel at the beautiful landscape. “It looks like Jurassic Park,” Vinny says breathlessly. “We can bring these back to Deena,” the guys joke about a particularly massive zucchini they find in the garden. They see dogs, pigs, horses: it must be nice to be around animals that aren’t disgusting patio pigeons, or aren’t connected to the Situation’s scalp at the root. As a side note, do you think the cast hasn’t been using the Jacuzzi this season because it is filled to the brim with pigeon doots? Support your answers. Show your work.
Snooki is really on my last nerve, y’all. She is usually the show’s emotional “in”, if you will, and she is starting to lose her mind as well. While on the wine tour Shnooks pouts and flounces, screaming about ghosts until finally falling asleep on top of a wine barrel like a petulant Fivel. She immediately steers the conversation back to Jionni, and how he’s probably going to dump her when he finds out she slept with Vinny. Accurate! Jenny tells Snooki the truth: any reasonable person would probably break up with her after finding out she slept with someone else. That’s not even counting sleeping with Deena, which apparently no one does. Jenny almost reveals the fact that Snooki actually did sleep with the Situation, which inspires a good ol’ fashion runaway. We haven’t had one of those in a while. Snooki runs so fast and so slow at the same time, it seems like an optical illusion. She looks like she’s on the tail end of a marathon. Back on the (silent) bus ride home, Snooki fumes, “I just want to punch somebody in the face.” Perhaps yourself?
Back at the ranch, Snooki finally womans up and calls Jionni to inform him how she ended up in Vinny’s bed approximately 15 seconds after their latest phone feud. The vernacular on this show is so cutting-edge, so ever-changing I’m still not even sure what she even claims they did. I caught finger-popping which, okay, I can trace its etymological roots. When Snooki says, “He just ___ me and that’s it,” however, the word she is saying is no sexual slang I have ever heard in my life. I must know what it was. Either way, Snooks tells her man that she did not have intercourse with Vinny, and miraculously Jionni forgives her. Forty-five seconds later, Vinny informs her that they did, in fact, smoosh, thus necessitating ANOTHER CALL TO JIONNI. Whoops! Watching Snooki place yet another confessional phone call….well, the schadenfreude was strong in this one. It made me want to rub my hands together and laugh manically. As the Situation can attest, the slope toward madness is a slippery one.
Last Episode: Arrivederci, Jionni!