Jersey Shore Damage Report: Launch Them Into Space

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​Last night was the penultimate episode of season two of Jersey Shore, and judging from next week's previews of the gang hitting up the Everglades, the last with the majority of the action happening in Miami. It's sort of a shame, we were just getting used to watching the gangs' escapades in our city every week. We were about ready to claim them as our own. In fact, last night the guidos and guidettes experienced two time honored rites of passage of Miami living: going to Club Space and having their car towed on South Beach.

Last week, something happened to the Situation. He turned from a charming, lovable douchebag into a giant, whiny, insufferable douchebag, and this episode opens on the aftermath. Snooki is drunk and crying. Mike is still pissed and unapologetic. The only person seemingly unphased is Vinny. Mike tried to snatch his girl, Romona from Romania last week, but he gets the ultimate revenge -- he finally got to smoosh it with the respectable Romanian.

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Snooki does not want Smoosh Smooh, she wants a "Sorry."

​Mike eventually apologizes to Snooki the only way he knows how -- climbing on top of her. Though, the tears are far from over for our lil' Snook Snook. Her visiting friend Ryder must travel back to their home planet Poofxavia 3 in the Aquanet Galaxy. Afterward, Snooki is devastated. She likes these people here on Earth just fine, but she misses her home planet (on which, oddly enough, she is widely respected as the smartest resident and premier doctor of theoretical physics). Jenny and eventually Vinny try to cheer her up.

"He's like my big brother I love him, but usually you don't have sex with your big brother," says Snooki.

Eventually, with the help of alcohol, Snooki pulls through.

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Emotions are so much more touching when expressed by such a breathtaking face

​She's mostly fine by the time Jenny is going through a book, and repeats "Junk, Junk, Junk," and Snooki enters and says, "I am drunk, I don't give a fuck." Yes, everything is right again with Snooki. She may not launch into space to return to Poofxavia 3, but she gets to do the next best thing: the gang is going to Club Space!

Club Space! It's so perfect, in retrospect, we can't believe the group wasn't there every Saturday night. If you're a non-local who's found yourself on this recap and do not know about Space, well you're lucky, but we'll explain. Space holds a unique and unquestioned place in Miami nightlife. It's far from the glitz of South Beach, in a section of downtown Miami where clubs can stay open all day with 24-hour liquor licenses. It's a gigantic. It's also been linked, though just circumstantially, to a couple high-profile crimes in the past years or so. (A model disappeared after leaving the club and wound up dead in a dumpster, a DJ and promoter who worked there killed his teenage girlfriend and drove around in his car with the body, and a musician left the club drunk and killed a bicyclist). In short, it's a wonderful place.

The kind of place that lures Miami's answer to guidos, and it's really no surprise the crew was so excited to go there. As Snooki put it, "Space means guidos, juice head gorillas, sweaty meathead boys."

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JWoww's Outfit is considered modest by Club Space standards

​Of course, once there, they instantly attracted trouble. We've been waiting for the guidos to get into an altercation with Miami's chongas. It was hard to tell if the girl yelling at Snooki was actually a chonga (her face was blurred, so we couldn't see if her eyebrows were drawn on with sharpie), but the group she was with were at least close cousins to chonga-kind. Snooki dismisses them as "wannabee guidos."

The Situation gets involved and can't resist a chance to show off his dominance, so he starts yelling at the group. This ultimately leads to the cast getting bounced out of the club.

They were devastated, not unlike astronauts who had found themselves in actual space and were plummeted unceremoniously back down to Earth. Sad music played in the background, appropriately. We could feel their pain.

Though, Pauly and Mike managed to grab two girls before leaving, and it seemed like they were going to "get it in."

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Bounced

It didn't matter that these girls had helium chipmunk voices, they were DTF. Or so it seemed. Then the duo discovered that one of the girls was actually a "good girl," meaning, no, she would not fuck around with some stranger in a bad a few feet away from her friend while cameras captured it and broadcast it on national TV.

Mike gets super pissed and bounces her out faster than security at Space did the same to him. The girl calls him an old man, because, LOL, his face. Pauly is absolutely pissed, because it seems his girl was good to go.

Pauly is "the nice guy," but lest not forget that he's fucking around with all these girls when he's already landed a nice girl in Rocio. We almost forgot she was still around, but he meets up with her at the beach the next day with Vinny and Romona from Romania. I get that Pauly wants to take it slow with her, but does that give him license to fuck around with random skanks in the meantime? Is that the code of the guido?

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Your tax dollars at work

​Later that night, Mike cooked dinner and set off the fire alarm. Apparently, that necessitated the arrival of the fire department. How much did that cost Miami Beach taxpayers?

Was it enough to warrant Snooki saying of one of the firemen, "Tall, tan, he looked Italian, so, I would have smooshed that, yes."

Yes, it probably was, because like most things out of the mouth of Snooki, it was priceless.

Here we'll insert a brief sentence about Sammie and Ronnie's fight: They got in a fight, it was boring, and Sammie is annoyingly insecure. Yawn.

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Victimized by Miami Beach's notorious parking syndicate. They're worse than organized crime in Jersey.

​Later on, a funny thing happened on the way to GTL. Apparently, Mike has been lax in following Miami Beach's notorious parking laws and so far has gotten away with neither a ticket or a tow. When you play a game like that in SoBe, the question is not if you'll get caught but when.

So Vinny and Mike went in for a quick indoor tanning touch up and parked the Escalade somewhere illegally. Ten minutes later they come out and the car is gone. It's happened to the best of us (it happened to me for the first time last week, apparently when you eat at Lime do not park in the spot that says "Not Parking for Lime," that pizza place will have you towed faster than light). The then have a "Guido Amazing Race" trying to find the car. Though, lets just illuminate the journey with this map.

​Point B is the location of the tanning salon. (OMG, have you been nude in the same light tube as the Situation?) Point A is the intersection of 17th and Meridian where they apparently had to pick up the car. The big structure circled in red is a parking garage, where you only have to pay $1 an hour, which is by far the cheapest public parking in South Beach. Yes, they ended up having to pay $175 because they didn't want to spend $1 on parking to actually park closer. The more you know.

With their car back and tans touched up, the boys are ready to head out for another night at Tantra. Once again, Pauly pulls two more random chicks to bring back.

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Classy Canadians, eh?

They're both from Canada, or "Canadia" as its known in Guidoese. What is the deal with all these hot chicks from Canada in South Beach? Mike already smooshed one earlier in the season. Is there some exchange program we weren't aware of?

History has a funny way of repeating itself, and Mike's girl does not want to let him "get it in." In fact, she's engaged.

When this happened earlier in the episode, Mike changed the story to make it out that the girl was a grenade, when in fact she was relatively pretty but just wasn't down for taking a ride on his old man face.

This time he's even ruder and kicks the girls out. One of them says she just wants to stay for five more minutes, but he shows them the door immediately and sings himself to sleep while making jokes about "five more minutes."

It was sad really. Not sad as in the way we'll feel when the gang leaves us next week. Sad as in really pathetic.