Screen: MTV
Can Jenelle Pick A Winner Or What?
As Nathan and Jenelle continue fighting so hard their neighbours call the cops on them, none of the other Teen Moms can possibly compete.
Can you believe it's already time to say goodbye to the Teen Moms 2? At least they all provided MTV with some real barn-burners for the finale, like...Chelsea taking her esthetician certification test and not getting the results! And...Kailyn nursing her new baby all the time and being bored as a result! And...Leah taking Ali to the doctor again! "Thank God for fucking Jenelle." - Everyone At MTV.
Jenelle -- pregnant enough to be showing (and even though she keeps saying she's twelve weeks along, she looks a LOT pregnanter than that) -- has gotten into a severe enough fight with Nathan over their finances that the neighbours called the police on them, and Jenelle's been arrested again. If this charge isn't dropped, she could actually serve prison time. The incident is enough to make her try harder to get along with Nathan, but it's not easy when he keeps picking fights with her, and when his response to hearing their baby's heartbeat at a doctor's appointment is to tell her in the car afterward that if they're not going to stop fighting, they should just break up, and since their child will definitely be miserable anyway with two parents who don't love each other, maybe she should just get an abortion after all. She pulls over because she's crying too hard to drive, and he gets out for a while and then gets back in, trying to sound reasonable as he says that he does want to be with her. These two are truly a Newman and Woodward for our generation.
Back to Leah: in all seriousness, she and Corey do learn that Ali's muscular dystrophy is due to a Titin gene mutation. She's one of only twenty people worldwide who have this mutation, and the only child, and though it may lead her to experience heart and breathing problems, that would be much later in life.
But back to Jenelle: OOOOOOOOOOF. It's a weirdly unbalanced episode, but how Teen Mom 2-y is it?
| Teen Mom 2-Y Element | Present? |
|---|---|
| Crying | So much. Leah cries to Jeremy about Ali's health problems; Kailyn cries because she feels like the baby is keeping her from spending as much time with Isaac as she'd like; and Jenelle cries when Nathan picks a fight with her in which he tells her that she should probably abort their unborn baby, because he is a goddamn prince. |
| Fighting with ex or current boyfriend/husband | Jo tells Kailyn that he's (finally) gotten his own apartment, and that his new girlfriend Vee has moved in with him, and she's pissy about it with no right to be, sort of like how she reacts to everything. |
| Obligatory cute kid | Isaac, stuck alone at home with his dullard of a nursing mother, makes his own fun by spinning in circles and rolling around on the floor, which Kailyn doesn't want him to do, for some reason; after a few days apart, Chelsea and Aubree have a pretty cute, tickly, lovey reunion. |
| Crimes against the English language | Of Ali, Leah's sister Victoria notes, "Strength is getting a lot weaker on her"; Chelsea talks a bunch of shit about Adam, ending with "I'm just being rullistic." |
| Barb's accent | "It breaks my heaaaaaaht....He told me he doesn't want to go to your house anymoah. You aaaaaaah doomed." Barb's voice is the last thing you hear before you die (if you're going to Hell). |
| Financial problems | Nathan's quit his job selling time shares, so he and Jenelle have less money and have such a brutal fight about it that their neighbours call the cops on them and Jenelle gets arrested (again). Now, between this incident and Nathan's DUI, they're going to have to figure out how to pay for the services of TWO lawyers. |
| Style disasters | Chelsea puts on enough makeup to stock seven Rite Aids to drive to her hotel the night before her board certification exam, even though she's wearing sweats and Uggs and her hair is a total mess; Jenelle and Adam's new girlfriend Taylor have the world's tackiest French manicures. |
| "Shocking Reveal" we already knew about from Us Weekly/the internet | Even I had already heard about Adam getting into a terrible car accident, in which he struck a car containing two VERY elderly people, while he had no insurance. Great job, dipshit. |
| Jenelle's terrible life choices | When the cops come to follow up on the call of public disturbance, Jenelle decides not to tell them, when they ask, that Nathan choked her out to make her give him her car keys; she also stays with Nathan even after he physically abused her, I guess because she's pregnant -- and, as she tells Barb, "It's too late to get an abortion, I don’t want an abortion...." I guess she remembered the cameras were on right around the comma in that sentence. |
| Animal neglect | No animals are present. But Leah does let her infant daughter Adalynn eat Cheetos. |
| Tertiary character as voice of reason | Jenelle's new lawyer Amy is just as great as her old lawyer Justin, as she pretty much tells Jenelle in so many words that if she's going to keep fighting with Nathan with enough intensity for the police to get involved, she might want to consider staying away from him until her probation is over so that she doesn't get arrested AGAIN and end up having her baby in prison. Any one of us would read between the lines and figure out, "Hey, maybe I should break up with Nathan." But not Jenelle! |
| Obviously staged scene | "How do you think Isaac's going to do now that the baby's here?" - Vee. |
| Mom whose segments are totally worth skipping | Kailyn is just a sour bitch the whole time, and not to be glib about Ali's very serious medical issues but I feel like I've seen her and Leah in enough hospitals to last me a lifetime. Chelsea's worth watching only so you can get a load of her truly tragic makeup, and for how cute she and Aubree really are together. |
| 12 / 13 Final Score |
92% Teen Mom 2 |
| 8% mitigated happiness |