It's Called A Breakup Because It's Broken, KATIE

A birthday! A date! An attempt to recover riding equipment! Let's rank the crappiness of the Teen Mom 3 cast's lives this week, from first to worst.

Alex

Three snaps up for Alex for having the greatest redemption arc of the season to date. It wasn't so long ago that she was screaming on the lawn at a drug-addled Matt for...well, all the obvious reasons. And now, as I sat down to write this, it took a few seconds to remember what even happened to her in this week's episode because it was drama-free! After reminding us that she's still trying to wrap up her high school classes online so that she can graduate with the rest of her class, Alex...goes on a group date. It's nothing heavy -- not only does she join a whole bunch of friends, but she also brings her younger sister and her daughter, Arabella -- but the kid she's paired up with is nice and, at least at first (or: at least on camera), not freaked out that she's a mother. All that said: I watched the after-show this week for the first time ever, and Alex needs to stop calling her daughter Belly. Forever.

Briana

Briana celebrates her eighteenth birthday by handing off care of Nova to her mother and sister for a night, getting a hotel room with a bunch of her female friends, and heading out for the evening to The Club. The last part of the plan is a secret Briana keeps from her mother Roxanne, I guess because they all get in on fake IDs, but for obvious reasons, that gets kind of glossed over in this episode of television that MTV has produced with an intended audience of impressionable young persons. And that question ends up being moot anyway, because Briana is over The Club basically as soon as she gets there, complaining that she can't dance to the music, and regretting that they didn't just decide to have a hotel-room sleepover instead. And because she's a good kid, she confesses to Roxanne that she went to The Club but didn't like it. Honestly, we could have had Alex or Briana in the top slot this week; things are going pretty well for them both. And what do they have in common? Both of them have realized that they cannot and should not be romantically involved with their daughters' fathers anymore! NOT A COINCIDENCE.

Mackenzie

So after last week's revelation that Josh has been avoiding seeing Mackenzie (and Gannon, I guess, not that I think Josh remembers most days that he has a child) by pretending to be practising his bronc riding while actually napping on the couch in his dad's trailer, Mackenzie and Josh are "on a break," and Mackenzie is depressed. To take her mind off things, a bunch of her female friends suggest that they go camping, and Mackenzie's mom Angie looks after Gannon for the night so that they can go have fun, which they mostly do as a result of adopting a "no talk about boys" policy. Still, it's impossible to turn the tap all the way off, and Mackenzie admits that she and Josh haven't really been that happy since Gannon was born, which duh, any of us in the audience could have told her that. When Mackenzie gets home, she receives a curt text from Josh asking her to come to his place and pick up her saddle, so she packs Gannon into the car and drives all the way over there, only to discover that Josh has pulled a Josh and isn't actually there. Instead of seeing exactly where this is about to go -- again, as any of us in the audience could have told her -- Mackenzie waits on the stoop for forty-five minutes, during which Josh doesn't show up and apparently doesn't respond to her calls or texts, and finally she leaves, without her saddle. At least she leaves Josh a soiled diaper on the stairs for Josh to find. Maybe that will remind him that he's a father. And maybe not! (In the after-show, Mackenzie admitted that when she and Josh were on a break, she started "talking" to another guy, and Josh found out and got pissed. Weirdly, in the after-show she talks a lot about Josh in the past tense even though now they're married and expecting their second child, so I don't know if the after-shows were filmed closer to the events of the season, or if she's just really good at mentally projecting herself backward to how she was feeling at the time...?)

Katie

Oh, KATIE. Since the awful, fighty trip to Utah documented in last week's episode, Katie and Joey have not been getting along much better. Katie's alleged friends are still giving her terrible advice about Joey -- for instance, that even though she and Joey fight constantly and are not happy together, ever, if Katie can't stand the idea of seeing Joey with another girl, that means they should stay together??? Meanwhile, a talk with his stepdad, Mike, convinces Joey that even though he "love[s] her and want[s] to be with her," they should take a break from each other for a while, or forever. Even though he knows that Katie is not going to take this well, he decides the right time and place to tell her the decision he's made is when he brings Molli to Katie's job so that she can nurse Molli on her break. Then we're forced to watch as a miserable, self-esteem-free Katie gets more and more desperate to cling to Joey, who ignores her calls and has the time of his life on his four-wheeler. ("Drive your fucking four-wheeler off a cliff," snaps Katie, and God, I wish I thought she meant it.) In their final moments together in the interview, they rehash the same issues they've fought over all season -- she wants more from him emotionally, and he interprets her disappointment as ingratitude for the material things he provides for her -- but when he points out that they should break up now, while Molli is still too young to understand when the two of them fight in front of her, he's not wrong.

I still hate Joey, and I hate the way he broke up with Katie...but I guess I'm glad he actually did it, because someone had to, and it was never going to be her.