‘Jersey Shore’ Recap: We Love You, Idiot

What could possibly be more unpleasant than Sammi and Ronnie embroiled in a never-ending emotional cage match? How about a single Ronnie plotting to get Sammi back so he can…apologize? Change? Take her on a romantic date to Lens Crafters? Ron weeps and rages through the house with the same aggressive energy as before, only this time the target of his emotions is even easier to romanticize. “I don’t know how to pick myself up from the hole I dug for myself,” he muses. It’s clear Ronnie is genuinely hurting, but if insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then Ron is out of his mind. “A little fetal position action and you’ll be okay,” The Situation tells him as he sobs, but Ronnie cannot and will not consider moving on.

Sammi makes it to her parents’ house, where she enjoys a dose of mom and pup therapy. Back at the shore, the girls are icy silent as Ron seeks consoling from them. “I don’t even want to sleep upstairs,” he moans as they avoid his eye contact. Given all of their spunk and flashing anger, the fact that no one in the cast has confronted Ronnie about his being a constant nightmare is fairly shocking at this point. On any other show, somebody would have gotten fed up with him. Whether this suggests misplaced loyalty or a true fear of Ronnie’s capacity for violence, he continues to drag the show down like a muscle-y, emotionally volatile lead weight.

Now missing their lead story line, the Jersey gods deliver unto us a prank war/ Deena and Snooki put a unique spin on the classic prank “Put Cake In Vinny’s Hair” by jamming it directly in his eyes. Vinny proceeds to pull old dog shit out of the garbage and hid it under Deena’s pillow, thus begining Deena’s slow decent into madness. A quick game of Musical Dog Poop follows, concluding with the bag tucked into Vinny’s bed linen. The Sitchuation then squeals to a frantic Snooki as to the whereabouts of her stuffed crocodile Crocidilly (dangling by his neck from the roof), earning himself the moniker The Snitchuation. How we’ve missed you, everyone else in the cast besides Ronnie and Sammi!

As if one instance of fecal contamination wasn’t enough, Vinny is obligated to fix the toilet with a wire-hanger. If you missed last night’s episode, you missed long, lingering shots of a completely waste-filled toilet bowl, seemingly scientifically designed to trigger your gag reflex. “The toilet is clogged because I live with farm animals,” Vinny complains, but least farm animals don’t have their own show where their waste is broadcast into the homes of millions of Americas. Though the chance that most of watch that too is fairly high.

The prank war quickly fell into a lazy truce, but later the gang dove head-first into The Case Of The Period-Stained Panties. After finding a filthy set of lady undies in the bathroom (which were blurred for modesty, unlike the brown nightmare that was the toilet). Pauly D starts a witch hunt to uncover the culprit. Suspicion falls to Deena, then to the endless parade of ladies that cycle through the house, in this case literally. “You know they aren’t Snookis,” Vinny contends. “They don’t have bronzer on them.” The secret truth may be buried in an extremely short coffin either way, since the evidence was unceremoniously tossed in the trash.

SPEAKING OF MORE POOP, the group’s non-stop teasing about Deena’s constipation grates on her nerves, as does the dog poop incident; as she’s falls out of her shoes on the way home from the club, Deena finally snaps. Barely able to breathe through her sobs, she tells them how their hazing has to stop. The Situation diagnoses Deena as a slopamatotus, the equation for which is apparently slop tard plus hippomatomus. “We’re like the baby sister we never wanted,” Ronnie explains. “We love you, idiot,” Vinny tells her. Meanwhile Snooki brings the home adorable gorilla Jionni (whom she is still dating today), though she cannot for the life of her remember her hook-up’s name. “It’s Bernard,” he teases in bed. “WHAAAAAAAAAA?” she replies with horror.

Meanwhile, Ronnie has send a dozen roses to Sammi’s sister Niki for he birthday, and three dozen roses to Sammi, as well as chocolates, teddy bears, and balloons. Niki calls to thank him and puts Sammi on the phone, suggesting that Sammi also needs to get a new sister Ronnie is stunned by the sound of her actual human voice; their conversation is brief but Ron is encouraged. “Listening to Mike about relationships is like listening to a sailor about flying a plane,” he scoffs when offered advice. When Snooki points out that his relationship is noxious, Ron complains, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” In reality, everyone in America knows what she’s talking about. “I’ll get her back,” he informs Snooks. “Because I get what I want.” The promos reveal that Sammi returns in next week’s episode, which suggests the scatological shenanigans will receded in the background once again. Soon enough we’ll be looking back at that toilet footage with smile, and we will experience only a deep, deep fondness.

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