Has Any Reality TV Participant EVER Been More Miserable About Her Pregnancy Than Liz?

VH1's Couples Therapy is almost over, and though previous episodes have shown us threatened walkouts, verbal abuse, under-the-table-at-a-bowling-alley temper tantrums, and moments in which Joe Francis was not the grossest show participant, last night's episode may have inspired the most questions of all. So let's get to them!

Why is Joe Francis up in everyone's business?

Previous episodes have shown us that walking trash bag Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, probably among the top 1000 worst people in America today, has no respect for his fellow couples' therapy participants; he's described the behaviour of Liz Trujillo, Flavor Flav's girlfriend, as a "sideshow" and complained that her and other patients' lack of seriousness will make him look bad by comparison. And while he's not really wrong about Liz (of whom more later)...dude. "Pornographer" is probably the nicest thing I could call you based solely on published reports of your doings over the years, given that "accused rapist" is also in the mix. But given this, and the fact that he has by his own admission been conducting his own in-patient eating disorder clinic at home with his girlfriend Abbey Wilson, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Joe has nominated himself as Deputy Dr. Jenn, inserting himself into Chingy and Temple Poteat's dispute over whether they're going to live together when Chingy relocates to Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, that Joe appears to have helped break through the couple's impasse only emboldens him to try to demand answers from Flavor Flav, at the next group therapy session, as to what specifically he and Liz have been fighting about, masking as collegial concern what is clearly just gossipy nosiness (and while that is my own characterization, I promise you...it takes a nosy gossip to know a nosy gossip). Dr. Jenn does essentially tell Joe, for the fiftieth time, to mind his own business, but judging from the scenes from next week, it doesn't take.

What is...going on with Liz?

I mean, I know what's going on with Liz: she's pregnant. But she's...really pregnant. In last week's episode, as she was bustling around in night-vision, threatening to leave the program, it was pretty clear either that she's far enough along to be showing or that a medical professional should look into her abdominal tumour. I know she's not a kid, but she's only thirty-nine, which would be a bit soon for her to assume she was in menopause. So since, as we learn in the peek at next week's episode, she's already in her second trimester at this point and therefore arrived at the house already pretty pregnant, is this wailing and carrying on just because of the confirmation of her pregnancy?

Was she so deep in denial that she thought missing a minimum of three periods was just a fluke?

Has any reality TV participant ever been more miserable about her pregnancy than Liz?

I kid about the pregnancy shows, but if I could get serious for just a second: in the past year, "unhappily pregnant adults" have really become a growing sub-genre of reality TV. It started with Secretly Pregnant, in which women explained why they were hiding their pregnancies, generally for financial reasons (and, as I posited during the season, because they were strategically keeping the truth from coming out until they were past the point where the people they knew would disapprove of their pregnancies could encourage them to terminate). Then My Teen Is Pregnant And So Am I profiled eight women, of whom I would guess a maximum of one (Lorna) got pregnant on purpose, though even that might be an overestimate; it's been a while since I watched the series premiere, and her pregnancy might have been accidental as well. Now we have Liz, a woman who's certainly old enough to know how to prevent unwanted pregnancy, being captured on tape sobbing about this one. If I'm being charitable, maybe what happened is that Liz found out about the pregnancy after she knew she and Flav were going into couples' therapy, and hoped to keep the secret until she could tell that their relationship was on a better footing. It...obviously isn't getting any better, but here she is anyway, being a lot less responsible about her reproductive health than her fellow patient, Catelynn Lowell, who was smart enough to figure out how to place her child for adoption when Catelynn was still a child herself.

How will the pregnancy affect Liz and Flav's treatment?

I want to give Dr. Jenn credit for advising her patients on the actual best course of action for them regardless of societal pressures or prejudices, by which I mean that if she thinks a couple shouldn't be together, she will say so, unlike some Dr. Phils or Drews I could mention. And after Liz's walkout stunt last week, Dr. Jenn told the camera that it was pretty clear Liz and Flav are terrible for each other. But will she pull her punches now that there's a new baby to come? It's not like said baby is going to make them hate each other any less!

For real, what is going on with Liz?

I'm not a doctor, so I won't speculate about what would have made Liz fall asleep sitting up in bed or slur her words. Exhaustion? Uh, okay. Even if that's true, does it explain how the episode ended? I'll just leave this here.