After the last dispatch of Jersey Shore, the greatest sociological experiment of our time, we thought Snooki's boyfriend was gone for good, until he wasn't. We then thought Deena was pregnant, until she wasn't. The Situation was a dick and Vinny has a big one, but we know that already.

Yes, things were not quite as they seemed last night. We thought Jionni was gone until he said he was on a train to Rome and then that was a lie too. Then all the guidos were partying in Karma, their favorite club in Seaside Heights, but that was just a mass delusion after eating some moldy bread and drinking too many Redbull and Vodkas. Oh, and The Situation behaved like a total asshole. No, that is as it seems. Definitely.

But before we can get to all the good drama, let's look at the guidos' vocabulary so we know what they're talking about.

  • A Food: This is different from "food" which is a thing that the guidos put in their mouths and chew, just like the rest of us (though all of their food seems to consist only of pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, and other cured meats). This is "a food" and it is a made up concept. If you don't want someone to know what you're up to, you say that you went to get "a food." While all of the guidos know that this is a ruse, they pretend like they are fooled and just go along with it. Some things just need to be private.
  • Central Park: One of the creatively titled clubs in Florence, this one got its moniker not from the park that we know now, but from the old Central Park that was full of drug dealers, dangerous criminals, and gay men having sex in the bushes. You can find all of those things at the club too.
  • Best Day of My Life: Any occasion that brings the slightest amount of joy to the guido is dubbed with this epithet. These creatures lead such dark and desperate existences that even the slightest glimmer of hope or mirth makes them feel like that moment is one to be preserved forever. They are easily amused, but prone to fits of depression. And do not, under any circumstances, feed them after midnight.

Alright, now that we know what they're talking about, let's look at Snooki and her great boyfriend caper.

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Last we saw, Snooki and her boyfriend Jionni got in a huge fight because Snooki lifted up her dress at the club and he got embarrassed and ran out on her. He was getting in a cab and leaving Florence for good only six hours after arriving.

The next morning was rough for Snooki. She woke up with her eyes dry and crackly, washed off mascara hardening on her cheeks, and one of her false eyelashes poking out like some sort of insane antenna. Jionni was gone and she was inconsolable. She appealed to JWOWW, but she was so hungover and angry at Snooki for yelling at her the night before that she couldn't be roused. Instead, Snooki did what any respectable guido with a hangover and serious bout of depression would do, she went drinking. Yes, she got out of bed, put on a whole look, and went to the bar where she drank and danced by herself in the middle of the room, tearfully pleading with the other patrons to ignore her because she was so heartbroken she just needed to dance and booze. No, there's nothing wrong with that at all. Completely healthy behavior. Then Kim Richards from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills showed up and was like, "Yes, sister. I got your back. I would do the same thing." Then Tennessee Williams came back from the grave and wrote a play about them.

But Snooki needed Jionni. She goes back home and calls her father and bitches to him for awhile and gets him angry. When JWOWW finally gets up, Snooki yells at her and calls her an asshole for not being there when Snooki needed her. Need we remind Snooks that this is the girl who walked around Florence barefoot and bled on the cobblestones trying to get her boyfriend back? JWOWW feels awful and while Snooki is outside having the world's most insane conversation with Sammi ("Your outfit looks cute, your hair looks cute, but your face is a mess. But who cares? The rest of you looks good!" What?) JWOWW gets Jionni on the phone and pleads with him to talk to Snooki.

JWOWW puts a tearful Snooki on the phone and she tells Jionni to come back, he says he can't because he's on a train to Rome. She freaks out and is about to call the relationship off altogether.

OK, you would think that the hero of this episode would be Snooki, considering most of the action was about her and her reaction to Jionni leaving, but it is really JWOWW. This girl is the best damn friend in the whole damn world. JWOWW is the bitch you want in your corner, because she will not only take care of you, find your man, get him back, avenge your wrong doing, seek medical attention, hold your hair, get you in a cab, remind you take of your eye makeup so you don't wake up with smudges on your pillow and some eyeliner that will never wash off, she will also beat the shit out of anyone you want. JWOWW is like having the best mom in the world who is also a bouncer. And this bitch is loyal to the end! I want JWOWW to be my friend.

She's all this and perceptive too. When Snooki is about to say she's done with Jionni, JWOWW says, "Stop acting like Sam." Woah! That is harsh, and Sammi was sitting right there, but she didn't care JWOWW said it because she knows Ms. WOWW (if you're nasty) is right. That got me thinking: maybe Sammi and Ronnie aren't a unique relationship. Maybe all guido relationships are like that. The only other example of a guido relationship we've seen are JWOWW's with her boyfriends, and they're always absent so they arrive for a bit, see her in some leather chaps, smush like two moldy grapes in the bottom of the pile in the produce section, and then separate again. Maybe all guidos go through this process where they are constantly testing each others' devotion and breaking up only to get back together again.

Just look at Snooki and Jionni, they follow the same pattern as Ronnie and Sammie. Jionni gets irrationally mad about something, Snooki feels like crap, apologizes and tries to win him back, and then he returns, but if he doesn't agree with her, then they're done and get in an even bigger fight and break up even though they're not broken up at all. Could this just be the way that guido's engage in monogamous relationships? Could it be that monogamy is such an unnatural state for them that it causes unnecessary complications? I think so!

So, JWOWW finds out that Jionni is still in Florence, so she rushes Snooki to the train station so they can have a reunion. All seems to be forgiven, though they are both still upset at each other, but it's too late, Jionni is going to leave. He called his mother all drunk and upset and wandering around the streets of Florence with his bag dragging behind him, and she changed his plane ticket to go back to New Jersey, but he was flying out of Rome. Though Snooki agreed to pay for him to stay (seriously Jionni, she made $100K just for this episode, get a new flight home...first class) but he's determined, and he leaves once again, with Snooki—no, Nicole!—with Nicole devastated and sobbing at the foot of the stairs trying to curl her body into a smaller and smaller ball in an attempt to disappear forever.

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Oh, that was so sad, wasn't it? Let's talk about something fun, shall we? OK! So, Vinny and DJ Paulie Decorator like to play this game where they put furniture on Deena's bed to prank her. While she was out smoking, they covered her bed with all the furniture in the room and all of her belongings on the floor which, knowing the natural slovenliness of the guido, is a lot of shit.

Now, it is well established that Deena is, in fact, a lesbian. I would say that she's closeted, but guidos don't have closets, which is why their shit is all over the floor. Since the bed is the symbol of the guido's self, then Deena's bed covered with all of her shit, is the objective correlative of her sexual orientation. She is just a bed clogged up with all this shit about gender norms and heteronormativity and authenticity and guido realness that she can't see who she truly is. And when she tries to take the crap off her bed, she is literally crushed under the weight of it. She is pinned to the floor, crying for help, and no one will come to her aid (except JWOWW, the world's greatest friend/mother figure/fertility goddess).

To get back at Vinny for pulling the prank, Deena rushes into the bathroom, the most sacred room in the guido house, and yells at Vinny in the shower. To further prank her, he runs out of the shower, his pixellated nether regions flopping all over the place, and he presses them against her. It is, literally, smushing against her will.

But as we all know, Vinny has an enormous dick and no guidette can resist its pull when she is in its vicinity. None but Deena, it seems, who is disgusted by it and tries to run away from it. Why? Because she is a lesbian. If we ever had any doubts, it was confirmed by her repulsion to Vinny's glorious and shining fist pump stick. Damn, Deena. Go clean off that bed and just be yourself.

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Deena really wants to stay closeted, and she's afraid that the roommates are starting to catch on, though none of them has shown any indication of it. She has classic paranoia of the closet (sorry, but "shit on the bed" just isn't as catchy). After her altercation with Vinny's Italian Sausage, she feels like she needs to convince everyone she is straight. She does this by dreaming up a pregnancy.

She says that she missed her period and that she gets dizzy everyday and that she has been feeling really weird, all signs that she is pregnant. Now, I don't think she's making any of these symptoms up, but they are most likely psychosomatic. Yes, Deena is having a hysterical (in both senses of the word) pregnancy.

But who is she going to tell? Who is going to take care of her? JWOWW, of course, the world's best friend! JWOWW marches her out of the club, wakes up the pharmacist so that she can get a pregnancy test in the middle of the night (I have a feeling this isn't the first time this has happened), and brings her back home to take it. Not only that, JWOWW listens to Deena ramble about how she's been drinking and boozing and smoking even while thinking that she's pregnant. JWOWW is just the best and Deena is the world's worst fake mother.

Of course they get home with their little package and Deena finds out she is not pregnant, which somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind she know all along. Now she is relieved, not that there isn't a bun in the oven, but that she has planted the bun of her heterosexuality in the oven of her friends' minds. God, what an awful metaphor. Sorry, guys. For a minute I was on a roll. (Get it?!)

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After Jionni is gone, Snooki is still upset that he left. She talks to him on the phone and tells him that and he gets all angry at her because the reason he left was predicated on the way she behaved. But didn't he know that going in? Jionni says that she isn't behaving like her self, that she's getting drunk every night and being slutty and hooking up with girls. Um, isn't that Snooki? She's always been like that since you met her. It's in her (very lucrative) contract that she behave like that. And he has a problem with it now? He needs to get over it.

Snooki also needs to take responsibility for her actions. She seems to think that she is always right and she can treat people however she wants and they have to be OK with that. While Jionni is wrong to try to change her, she needs to realize that if she wants to be with him, she may have to change. Though he is wrong to leave, it is her behavior that could get him to stay, so she either needs to change or boot him. I say boot him, but no one listens to me.

To make herself feel better Snooki decides that everyone should turn the living room into Karma. This is a very sweet idea and shows just how homesick all the guidos are. Everyone leaps at the chance, and they all look like a bunch of 6th graders playing make believe in their cushy home in Florence. It was just like an episode of Muppet Babies but JWOWW was the one wearing ridiculous striped tights. Figures, being the mother figure and all.

But just like any night at Karma, The Situation has to be all creepy and gross. He sees that Snooki and Jionni's relationship is on the outs and wants to insert himself, quite literally. He starts playing on Snooki's emotions letting him know he loves her and she can act however she wants around him and he'll still care about her. She's not having it, and only likes him as a friend and publicly denies, once again, that they had sex after she got together with Jionni (an assertion I'm beginning to think might be true). Though Deena and Sammi and JWOWW (of course) defend her honor, The Sitch insists it's true and doesn't like being made out to be a liar. However, everyone knows that he is an instigator and that he's just trying to take advantage of the situation (har) to cause some drama in the house.

But, no Snooki doesn't want anything to do with The Situation. She has other things in mind, cut to later when...

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...Snooki hooks up with Vinny! How did we not see this inevitability coming? The enormous penis can not be resisted!

And in the next bed, DJ Paulie Dopamine is listening to the rustle and roll going on across from him and trying to fall asleep and Deena is imaging that wonderful night at the beach where she played the same game with Snooki and she longs for the soft warmth of another woman in her bed—to cuddle, to comfort. Down the hall, Sammi lies in the smush room with Ronnie (what is up with that, bee tee double you?) staring at the ceiling, wondering where her relationship went wrong and trying to figure out what she can learn from Snooki to give it one final shot. Just one last time. JWOWW lies in her room alone, wondering where Snooki is, worried about her and wishing she could help, but knowing there are some things that even a best friend can't do. There are some things that are out of her power. Snooki, she was silent except for a few stuffled moans coming out from under the blanket while Vinny pierced the night with his sharp yelps. Biting his lip to hold it back, to keep it quiet, to endure the pleasure so that no one else would know what would soon become evident to everyone. And then he let it out, he released it all, a giant scream that echoed so loud through the streets it got on a train to Rome and flew all the way back to New Jersey, where it didn't deafen everyone, but on the tarmac at Newark International Airport one man fell to his knees, his face curdled in an ugly rictus as he clutched his ears and blood seeped through his fingers.