'Jersey Shore' season finale recap: Trust No One

Whenever someone – let’s say Jenni – tells The Situation straight to his face that he is a fake human being, Sitch freaks out. He whines. He pouts. He collects himself, and delivers a thought-provoking speech on the concept of “realness.” He is a real person, viewers, real! Not like all those “fake” people. “Jenni is fake,” The Situation will say, holding a flashlight under his chin. “Jenni is the fakest one in the house." Now, you and I both know this is just the pot calling the kettle “Botox.” We can all have a good laugh about The Situation’s inability to take it vs. his varsity-level ability to dish it out. And yet, somewhere in that whirlwind of fifth-grade emotion, we will see a look of genuine fear cross Sitch’s impeccably manicured face. In order for The Situation to exist, he needs people to believe that he is real. He’s like Tinkerbell, only with prettier eyelashes. Also, Tinkerbell never had any toilet threesomes.

It’s easy to forget it when your short-term memory is bad, but the season 1 finale of Jersey Shore was a happy affair. Everyone got together for a big family dinner, and Ronnie loved Sammi, and Sitch smooched Snooki in the hot tub. Last night’s finale was different. It felt more like an apocalyptic climax, followed by the dead calm of repressed insanity.

The stage was set for a goodhearted sendoff. Vinny had dinner with his Romanian. He promised her, “I’ll look at those hot dancer girls in New York and think of you.” She smiled dispassionately. Meanwhile, Pauly D took out his Cuban. They shared a long kiss outside Stately Shore Manor, but Pauly explained, “I’m not gonna try to smash it out with Rocio before I leave.” (Who knew he was so romantic?) And Ronnie took Sammi out for dinner. They got in a fight, because they have the collective emotional intelligence of a misogynist tsetse fly. Sammi asked Ronnie, “Why are you with me?” And Ronnie doesn’t like questions, because questions are like tests. “Ronnie no test good!” he explained, before jumping on a hanging vine and swinging away through the palm trees.

But the club solved everything. Ronnie and Sammi worked through all their problems when Sammi apologized for insulting Ronnie’s intelligence by assuming it existed. Meanwhile, Vinny found himself enmeshed with a pair of girls. "Are we f---ing tonight, baby?” they flirted. “You’re gonna have the threesome of a lifetime.” (Don’t you wish you could invent a time machine and send those girls back to your freshman year of college, when you had enough free time to deal with the resulting neural syphilis?) Vinny stayed true to Ramona, but Sitch declared a “Situationsome” and carried the ladies away to the bathroom, where he drank their blood to maintain his eternal youth presumably something uncomfortable happened.

NEXT: Let's map out the season's final conflict, starring a Dr. Seussian villain.