‘Jersey Shore’ Recap: GTGet Vinny Back
Is Danny, the T-shirt shop guy . . . God? Following Vinny‘s exit from the show to deal with clinical anxiety and the Situation‘s exit to go cry on the boardwalk for a few hours about how everyone forgot his birthday, Danny descends on the house like a deus ex T-shirt shop and threatens to replace Vinny with a new roommate/t-shirt shop worker.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO… wait, what? The thing that Danny seems to be forgetting when he chews out the cast for their general laziness and bad attitude is that he is yelling at a room filled with millionaire TV stars (note: at no point has Danny ever actually forgotten this). Not only is the cast rich, they are all straight-up 30 years old. While most of us would love a TV show in which someone just screams at 30-year-old millionaires for an hour, you’d hope it wouldn’t be just for t-shirt-shop-related slights. As for Danny’s claim that he needs extra staff now that Vinny has left and everyone else sucks….look, I’m not a small business owner, but I’m pretty sure that seven employees would be plenty to keep open a boardwalk t-shirt shop, especially considering how Danny himself pitches in, he clearly has other employees that do all the actual work and, oh yeah, none of this is real.
Having sprinted off into the midday sun in a fit of surliness, the Situation slinks back to the stench cabin. (“I’m sensitive,” he mewls by way of explanation.) Little does the Situation know that the ladies are planning a big, stripper-filled birthday party at Karma. They swing by for a meeting with stripper wrangler the Wizard of Ass, a pure, distilled creep with whom they can discuss their stripper needs. Must be outgoing. A love of wheelchairs a must.
Back at the t-shirt shop, things go terribly, then well, then allegedly terribly again. The more Danny talks, the more he seems to suggest that the entire cast dances and dangles at his whim. If so, could we please add J-Woww’s dad as the eighth housemate? You know he’s not up to anything much. JWoww keeps a stone face (a/k/a the only face she has) as Danny admonishes her for tearing down his Help Wanted sign. DANNY, KEEP IT TOGETHER. A few brunette lovelies wander in to inquire about the position, but it’s clear that none of them could possibly replace Vinny. Plus, one of them had a Michael Jackson-style fedora, which… come on. Come on.
Meanwhile… those tiny, shimmering orange lights in the darkness, Snooki and Deena, amuse themselves with fake tattoos and beseech Pauly to teach them to walk hard, which is sort of adorable. Also adorable is the Meatball’s trip to Party Lane. I could watch Snooki and Deena pretend to bone in matching oversized rabbit heads for all time. Just darling and wee, these two – like two adult-sized toddlers who can legally drink.
With everything in place, the ladies pull off the surprise party without a hitch. “It’s pretty hard to surprise me,” the Situation exclaims. “I’m pretty paranoid.” LOL. For those of you hoping to see Pauly and Mike handcuffed to wheelchairs while sexually aroused, was this ever your episode! Also, please seek counseling immediately to deal with whatever brought you here. The strippers would easily garner five stars on Yelp, and Pauly gets a cake shaped like a pair of lady’s bazooms. The Situation gets a butt cake, because poop comes out of butts and, well, you can see the logical progression here.
Later in the episode, we are reminded once again that Deena is an endearingly tragic figure. It’s couples night at Bamboo, and Deena managed to wrangle a date with Ronnie’s frend, Joey. “Are you going to be embarrassed if I bring my wings out?” she asks him, gesturing towards her pastel party wings. Why would anyone be embarrassed about that, girl? Why would anyone be embarrassed that you can fly away to a beautiful rainbow fairy world where no one is mean to you and the counters are about six inches lower and every bathtub is overflowing with the most beautiful weave you’ve ever laid your weary eyes on? Later in the evening, as she and Joey have sex, Deena’s alarm clock keeps going off, even after she yanks it out of the wall. Every time she returns to smooshing, the alarm sounds once again. I was hoping Deena would smash it with a hammer, but she’ll probably just live with it constantly ringing for the rest of her life. That’s the scenario I can see most clearly in my head, anyway.
I would like to speak kind of seriously about what I see as a real missed opportunity this week, which would be the coverage of Sammi‘s bar fight. According to Sammi, a “swarm of bitches” descended on her like a perfumed cloud of locusts, grabbing her hair. “You don’t yank my new weave that I just got,” she snarls. Now, I know you can never tell when an all-out, extension-shredding fistfight might break out, but the whole incident was so confusingly shot and edited. For most of the brawl, it looked like Sammi was straight-up wrestling herself on the ground; I’m not entirely sure she wasn’t. “It was me against the world,” Sammi declares. I will require a crossover Caged episode as restitution. On an unrelated note, we don’t get any shots of Ronnie consoling her (or, you know, helping out when she was rolling around on the booze- and glass-covered floor), so I think it’s pretty clear at this point that these two are donezo. Let me swing by Lenscrafters and we can give their relationship a 21-eyeglass salute.
Finally, it’s been about a week since Vinny left to gain some insight into his troubled mental state, and you know what that means: road trip! The rest of the cast trucks out to Staten Island to remind Vinny of everything he’s missing, i.e. everything he purposely tried to escape to feel happy again. The gang surprises him with a t-shirt with various Vinny sayings that I don’t recognize, but Vinny, complete with a new gigantic chest tat, wisely turns down their pleas for his return to Seaside by pointing out that he has a lot of personal work he needs to get through first. Just kidding! Reverse road trip! “Everything’s like peaches,” Snooki says as they race back with their prodigal son. Like Peaches, may they finally manage to fuck the pain away.
Last Week: A Tragic Situation