After all of the drama with Danielle, the girls just need to get away. Sure. I think everyone can relate to the experience of just wanting to take a camera crew to Atlantic City to escape from the headache of producer-manipulated drama with someone else on your reality show. Recharge your bullshit batteries. And so begins an endless conversation about these women’s bodies, these women’s selves. Dina won’t be wearing a bikini because she’s gained 10 pounds. What? Teresa thinks that’s crazy. Teresa thinks Dina has a sick body. Well Dina thinks Teresa has a sick body. Everyone thinks everyone else has a sick bozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Caroline has a personal trainer come to her house for a private workout session in her basement gym (it puts the push ups in the basket) with her three kids? The family that works out in the basement gym together invests in their strip clubs and mid-level banquet halls and shitty salons together. Or something. Caroline, incidentally, does not have a sick body. But it is sicker than you might think! I think it’s just that she wears unflattering drezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So the women go to Atlantic City. Except for Danielle, of course. And also except for Jacqueline. The women don’t like that Jacqueline is still friends with Danielle, and Jacqueline doesn’t like having any kind of interaction with people that’s more intense than quietly sipping a glass of lukewarm water in a temperature control room devoid of any stimulus, so she stays home with her daughter. Seriously, Jacqueline is a human sensory-deprivation-tank.

She fawns over her daughter Ashley’s summer school homework and they have a vague conversation about what Ashley would have to do to get a car. All the kids in the area have fancy cars, Jacqueline explains, because if there is one thing that Jacqueline loves, it’s being able to lay the blame for her inability to parent at someone else’s feet. “Sure, I think that over-indulging ambitionless children as a reward for half-hearted effort is a terrible idea unless you want to hamstring them with a lifetime of entitlement and dissatisfaction, but her friends all have Mercedes so what am I going to do?” In any case, her husband already bought Ashley a car and it is sitting in a warehouse, and now Jacqueline has to decide when to give or not give Ashley the car, which she toys in her hand like a boorish asshole at a restaurant pretending like the tip is negotiable. When, as a reward for doing well at summer school, Jacqueline takes Ashley to a photo shoot that “she’s been wanting for a couple of years” (?), and Ashley reacts badly to Jacqueline’s constant and over-loud insistence that she has low self-esteem, which is one of teenager’s favorite things to have their mom say about them in public to total strangers, and is basically the fastest way to give someone high self-esteem, Jacqueline decides that she is not giving Ashley her car. Secretly denying her the thing that she doesn’t even know exists will sure teach her to modify her behavior to your unspoken rules! And she’ll only appreciate the whole situation even more when she finds out about it on national television.

Although, to be fair, the women on this show have some of the most well-developed relationships with their children of any The Real Housewives. Caroline’s family seems to genuinely love and care about each other, even if that one dude’s lifelong dream is to own all the topless carwashes in South Jersey and her daughter’s dream is to drop out of cosmetology school and marry someone, ANYONE rich. Dina clearly loves her daughter and seems engaged in her life and well-being. Danielle may be the biggest surprise of all, considering her sordid history and her nightmare face and her choice in thumbhead boyfriends. Her daughters seem…normal. And almost…happy. Jacqueline is doing the best she can. Which really only leaves Teresa who, let’s face it, is raising a miniature army of miserable disasters. Every spin-off has to have at least one! I hope those children turn out to be grounded and content, but let’s face it, they won’t.

So the women go to Atlantic City. For two days. Teresa brings just the right amount of clothes.

Teresa, come the fuck ON. COME ON! I just want to shake her like a Hawaiian baby.

Dina’s daughter comes back from Cyprus and dresses the cat up in a ladybug costume.

Danielle celebrates her 4,500th birthday. And then she breaks up with Steve.

Aw, why? How could you break up with that? And by “break up with that,” of course, I mean “not barf and try to kill that in the face.”

Oh, and Teresa gets breast implants. Her husband doesn’t care. Her breasts are to him as a couch is to him. Hey, he’s busy. Busy SHOVING FOOD into his GOON FUCKING FACE. Does the waiter care? Let’s see if the waiter cares.

Would that we could all just awkwardly walk away from this table as fast as we can.

In the end this episode just felt like…filler. You know, like how most of these women’s lives are just filler between shopping trips and spa days. Like that. “I had to raise my kids today, I deserve a treat!” But don’t worry, everyone! Based on the preview for next week’s season finale, we’re all in for the reality TV show audience’s equivalent of a spa day. I’m talking, of course, of fucking balls on the table cat fights! To quote Tony Soprano, because this is a blog, and that is what blogs are supposed to do in reference to this show, “where does she get her balls?” That is a real thing he said! That show was great. And we are going to find out where she gets her balls next week, when they are pulled out of so many pairs of skinny jeans and laid out on the banquet tables, spilling all the wine.

PULL HER HAIR!

“Whose hair?”

IT DOESN’T MATTER!