The Real Housewives of New Jersey Season-Premiere Recap: Double-Headed Monster

“Hello, ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between, and welcome to the latest episode of Hating Teresa Giudice. And what are we all going to do? Hate! Teresa! Giudice! That’s right, so let’s start the show!”

Seriously, that is how I felt watching this episode. Yes, I have always hated her with the fire of a million billion suns, but this year, it somehow seems even worse. Maybe it’s the new face. Perhaps it’s the new husband. Conceivably it’s when she says things like, “I was mad at God. I didn’t know why I had to go to jail.” I do. Because you broke the law! Well, maybe more accurate is to say that her husband broke the law, but even then she knows why and yet still has never apologized or taken accountability for what happened. Or maybe, and I think this is really it, that she’s so dumb she drags everyone down to her level. No one can have an actual argument; it just devolves into name-calling and shouting because that’s all she can do. Yawn.

Her personal scene was a bit touching, as she helped her daughter Gabriella pack to become a student at the University of Michigan. I have always said that Gabriella, a.k.a. the quiet one, would be the longest-serving Senator from New Jersey or the meanest woman on Wall Street. This is the one to watch. She’s packing up her own stuff, taping together her own boxes. Meanwhile, Antonia Gorga is preparing for freshman year at the University of Delaware, and she hasn’t even started doing anything other than watching her dog pee on the curtains. I love how she thinks she’s going to fit her 52 pairs of blue jeans into a college dorm closet. There was so little room in my freshman dorm closet that I had to come out of it to make room for the clothes. Hey-Yo!

While it seems like everyone on the cast is exactly the same as where we left them, what has shifted is the dynamics. In confessional, Melissa says that she doesn’t really want to answer any questions about Teresa and feels nothing when she ran into her at Jen Fessler’s surprise birthday party.

Margaret is also drawing a red line about how she will negotiate with an emotional terrorist. She visits Jen Fessler’s house and somehow manages not to go deaf while Jen practices “When the Saints Go Marching In” on her guitar. Jen brings up that Teresa texted her for her birthday, and Margaret says that Teresa and her husband are both dead to her. Jen says that she wants to talk to Teresa about what happened between her and Marge, and Marge begs her not to. “I don’t want them to utter my name,” she tells Jen, adding, “I don’t want to ever talk about her again.” Oh, I wish that I could never talk about Teresa again, but here I am, hosting a game show called Hating Teresa Giudice, so it’s kind of my job.

I don’t think this dynamic where some of the cast refuse to film with each other or even talk to each other can last, and it hasn’t played out especially well this season of Vanderpump Rules. However, as a reality television sociologist and historian, I’m very curious to see how it’s going to work. Based on the very beginning of the episode (which was not included in the press screener), it seems like it is going to go Dorinda Medley’s favorite way: not well, bitch.

While we check in on everyone at home with their daughters going to school and their dead ex-husbands, Teresa and Luis go out to dinner with Dolores and her boyfriend, Paul. Everyone’s asking Dolores when they’re going to get engaged, and Dolores says she’s waiting for Paul’s divorce to be finalized. Um, they’ve been separated for ten years, and the divorce is still not done? Who is he married to? Ashley Darby?

At dinner, we find out that Paul is dreadfully allergic to Italian food, and when Dolores’s brother made him meatballs he was in bed for two days. So where do they take him for dinner? To an Italian restaurant! I know this is northern New Jersey, and it is full of people who call bread “foccach” with no irony, but couldn’t they go to Rails Steakhouse, the most famous eatery in RHONJ history? Or how about just sushi or Chinese? I mean, there have to be other options. There’s no Red Lobster in Franklin Lakes?

At the dinner, we find out that Teresa is upset that everyone met at Margaret’s house before the last reunion to “come up with a plan to take [her] and Luis down.” This is such a bullshitty reason to get mad. Like Teresa and Jen Aydin weren’t texting for weeks beforehand, getting their stories straight and their reads together? As Dolores points out, this always happens, so why is Teresa mad this time? Also, if she and Luis didn’t give everyone else on the cast a reason to be upset, how could they come up with a case against them? Maybe the best defense against this is, I don’t know, not being an asshole to all of your coworkers, some of whom happen to also be your family members.

The other bone of contention at the dinner is that Luis texted John Fuda so that the two of them could “clear the air” about why Luis may or may not have hired a PI to investigate him. (I totally believe he did this and I’m just a little upset he didn’t hire Meghan King Edmonds PI.) John responded that they were both going to be at Jen Fessler’s surprise party, so they should just talk there.

I think this is completely reasonable. When John and Paul start fighting about this at Jenf’s birthday party, John says, “Why would I give a man who disrespected my family the respect to meet him somewhere?” That’s exactly it. Luis did him dirty, and now this guy should make a special appointment to see him. No way. Teresa brings up at the party that Luis wanted to clear the air before everyone was together, which is also a valid point. Rachel tells her that John would have taken Luis aside to talk to him one-on-one so that all the “minions,” as Luis calls him, don’t get into the conversation.

Actually, these are all fairly valid points, but why couldn’t they hash this out on text? Couldn’t Luis say, “I’d rather talk to you alone” and couldn’t John have said, “When you get to the party let’s find a quiet corner and do this just you and I.” Problem solved. But it’s all moot (or “mute” as Teresa would probably say) because Luis doesn’t even go to the party and he uses the dog ate his homework excuse of getting out of parties. “A business meeting came up in Florida, but in his business things come up last minute,” Teresa tells us. Um, but what is his business, exactly? What is his job title? What does he actually do? Because last I checked, his business was fending off lawsuits.

Instead, at the party, John and Paul get into it instead with these two macho meat-heads just getting aggro at each other and telling each other to “shut the fuck up” before Dolores arrives and escorts her man out of the party to stop a fight from happening. It was actually a pretty cute party with lots of Jenf’s family there, and a woman wearing a giant skirt that was a table, and the table was full of candy. I want exactly that at my next birthday, but it’s going to be Evan Goldschneider shirtless with that candy skirt.

As the party is wrapping up, Teresa approaches Rachel and says, “I don’t want to talk about it here, but your husband went after my husband, trying to ruin his reputation.” Okay, well, if you don’t want to talk about it there, why are you even bringing it up? Rachel, much like Homie the Clown, don’t play that. Rachel calmly tells Teresa that their husbands need to work it out and that’s when Teresa talks about how Luis was such a “gentleman” that he reached out to John to clear the air. I mean, Teresa wouldn’t know a gentleman if it hit her in her original mouth.

This is what I can’t stand about Teresa, is she makes up the rules as she goes along to benefit herself. Now she’s talking about how a gentleman would meet with someone privately if they had an issue. Um, no. A gentleman wouldn’t have gotten into that position to start with because he wouldn’t go around hiring private investigators to stalk his wife’s coworkers.

What really galls me, though, is how she treats the news that apparently went out on the internet that morning. Apparently, John’s ex, the one that his son wants nothing to do with, said that John was a huge drug dealer and that he likes to get it on with double-headed purple dildos. Who cares what he does in the bedroom or shoves up his ass. Have any of these guys tried a double-headed dildo? It can be fun for the whole family (if the rest of your family is also kinky sluts into assplay).

But when Teresa see’s John she shouts “double-headed dildo” and tells him he’s a drug dealer. “Who said that?” John asks. Teresa responds it’s all over social media. Ugh. This woman! Remember when Margaret tried to get Luis to respond to a video on social media before it could be used against him, and Teresa destroyed their friendship over it? Teresa didn’t think that anyone should bring up anything negative about him, even if it was already all over the internet. Now here she is using internet rumors (from a vicious ex no less) to taunt and harass John Fuda. It’s not that the rules don’t apply to Teresa; it’s that she makes up the rules as she goes along and then gets mad at people when they don’t follow her own arbitrary, selfish rules. I really can’t with this woman, but I did love Jen Fessler’s final quote at her party, as these screaming matches are raging all around her, “I’m having a great time, regardless of the bloodshed.”