Jersey Shore Review: Pee Like a River

At the top of this Jersey Shore hour, the kids are returning home from kidnapping Vinny, and Pauly couldn’t be more thrilled to have his “boyfriend” back. Deena makes silly noises and gestures in the confessional room to show us how delighted she is to have her Vinny Vin, but all I notice is the imminent psychological meltdown brewing behind the dead pair of eyes that insist on attempting to smile along with the rest of her.

Mike is Deena’s worthy opponent as he vies for most emotionally codependent in the house. The roomies have been looking at The Situation as a ticking time bomb since he started being relatively nice and not overtly plotting against them each day upon waking. In their shared bedroom, Pauly fills Vinny in on Mike’s recent change of attitude, and the lovers agree they’d be better off with a Mike who  consistently showed his true colors. As the saying goes, It’s better the Sitch you know than the Sitch you don’t.

Apparently, Mike is notorious for abandoning his housemates on trips to the club, and tonight at Karma is no different. While Mike heads off to “do his own thing,” as Ronnie puts it, Vinny and Pauly happily wingman each other while Snooki discovers she just can’t hold it in any longer. And so she leaves it all on the dance floor, voiding her bladder like an over-caffienated chihuahua (“I was so excited to be dancing with all my friends!”), and follows it up with a “Shore shower,” which involves dousing your body from head to toe in cheap perfume found in the cart of a bathroom attendant. Now fresh and clean, Snooki continues to dance and drink for hours before passing out in bed, waiting until morning to dispose of her underwear in the garbage outside. Later urinating a sizable bubbling brook under the backyard stairs because she can’t wait for the bathroom, Snooki is led to suspect a UTI may be the culprit. She decides to kill the pain with more tequila shots, and she won’t learn until later that she did indeed contract a UTI in the most predictable way possible. She also won’t hesitate to tell Andy Cohen on TV in a bid for more viral video action.

While her best friend is wantonly peeing her pants and drinking more alcohol to numb the shame, Deena is enjoying her now-intact “family,” wandering into Pauly and Vinny’s room after Karma and a snack of Hot Pockets to say “I love you” and demanding they each return the sentiment. Pauly eventually mumbles “loveyoutoo” as reluctantly as if he thinks the phrase might strike him blind once uttered aloud, but Vinny refuses outright to say anything of the sort, even after being asked at least a few times in a row. Yes, Deena is unreasonably needy and clueless and sad, but these two guys are assholes, and I don’t care how adorable their stupid guido bromance is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, Mike is becoming more aware of his roommates’ suspicions by the hour, and he’s particularly plagued by a comment Ronnie makes in their bedroom one afternoon. Acknowledging how nice The Situation has been acting lately, Ron wants to know what Mike’s up to. “When are you gonna blow up the house, you terrorist?,” he asks in a playful tone. Because Mike’s skin is thinner than a grape’s, he’ll remember this comment and replay it like a melody in his head for the next few days until everyone else suffers as much as he does.

After a Sunday afternoon outing at Jenks bar, during which Mike alienated himself from the gang in favor of sitting in the corner with an entourage of randoms because he’s always more comfortable surrounded by admiring strangers than with folks who expect him to be a person instead of a mascot for date rape, Snooki, Deena, and Sitch tumble into a cab to gossip. Mike is upset when the guys are two-faced, acting like friends when they’re together and complaining behind his back about his uncharacteristic niceness as if it’s something to be nervous about. Snooki instigates, telling him to call Pauly out specifically if he seems fake, since announcing his beef to the house is better than letting resentment build over time. Mike takes this to mean he should deal with this while he’s drunk by staggering shirtless down the staircase with camouflage pants hanging down to expose most of Situation Jr. while muttering about how much he needs Clearasil and then heading to the party deck outdoors to pace around and rant about how misunderstood he is. As the roommates gather to watch, Mike brings up the terrorist comment that’s been plaguing him and asks if he needs to adjust his behavior in any way. Everyone puts on their best innocent expression and pretends everything is cool. They do beg him to pull his pants up, since they can’t take him seriously with his penis threatening escape before their eyes.

Mike is not satisfied with how things went outside, so he pulls Snooki aside for more moral support for his confrontation. It’s weird that she has to prod him; maybe he really is reluctant to end his nice streak. When a second attempt at approaching the guys does nothing to provoke honest dialog, Snooki wonders with frustration at the camera. Why won’t guys say what they’re thinking? Why are they fake to each other’s faces but mean and sarcastic behind backs? Why can’t they be forthright and self-aware like their female counterparts? Snooki just can’t make heads or tails of it. So she keeps sipping on vodka, dons her prized bunny costume, and violently humps all the males in the house, continuing in her effort to slowly morph into her character on South Park, which we all once naively thought was a bit over-the-top.

Maybe Snooki is only trying to “help” Mike by diverting his attention to the boys- the real criminals here- so that he won’t bring up Jionni again. Maybe she’s nervous about all the dirt Sitch has on her, and she’d rather he be thinking about anything else. Mike seems to think this is the case after being assured by the guys that everything’s copacetic (even as they continue to make fun of him whenever he’s out of earshot) and essentially being called paranoid by Deena. Mike stews and steams and apologizes to the boys and plots revenge on Snooki. The douche nozzle is a bit rusty, so he tests it on JWoww first by tattling on her boyfriend Roger for hanging out casually on the boardwalk with friends after she’s been trying to track him down for days via phone with no success. And then, when he’s sure vengeance is his and remorse won’t be a problem, Mike picks up the phone to call Unit.

NEXT WEEK: Mike fills Unit in on why he might need his help exposing Snooki’s infidelity to Jionni, Deena tries to pull a robbery on Vinny at the club, and JWoww considers cutting off Roger’s access to the twins.

Season 5, Episode 5: “Nothing But Nice” (original airdate Febraury 2, 2012.)

For another take on this week’s episode check out “Nothing But Nice” by Tanya Lane.

Jersey Shore airs Thursdays at 10/9c on MTV.

Images courtesy of MTV.