RHNJ: “I’m calm and cool as a whistle.”

Last night on Real Housewives of New Jersey. We did a lot of talking. The monkeys didn’t dance this week, not like they’re supposed to on Real Housewives. Instead, they sat around and talking about the talking that would go on later, whether that talking was Teresa’s sit-down with her brother, her eventual meeting with Melissa or Caroline’s new gig talking on the radio.

Sadly, the episode was all talk and no action. Bravo did that (not so) adorable thing that they do where they show us all the build-up to a potentially interesting plot point in one episode and then save the actual plot point for next week, which means that we sat through a whole lot of nothing for an hour last night. Well, it wasn’t nothing I guess. It was talking. And that might be worse? It’s hard to tell.

We started out with Caroline, who had been hired by the radio station that she visited last week and was starting to panic over actually having to, you know, do a radio show. She had a friend over to practice with her, and the friend decided to pretend to be Teresa so that Caroline could “practice” giving advice and the producers would have a convenient way to draw Caroline into the fight between her and Nonjuicy. Caroline thinks that they need to get together in a room by themselves and hash it out or nothing with ever be solved. And by “alone,” she means “with cameras,” naturally.

We then visited Nonjuicy, who was artfully rumpling his peach shirt and pairing it with the perfect Gucci belt so that he could properly negotiate with his sister. He also had to put on his chain, naturally, because a guido is nothing without his chain. That’d be like having Snooki without her bump. The universe would collapse in on itself and life would cease to have meaning. Thank Vishnu that Nonjuicy didn’t forget his chain. Or maybe he should have, so that the apocalypse would have arrived and we wouldn’t have had to watch the rest of this episode.

Teresa and Nonjuicy chose to meet in a public restaurant, which struck me as a questionable decision, considering what we know about Teresa’s lackluster history with restaurant confrontations. The two sat down and after some initial questioning about the definitions of a few of the words in Teresa’s letter, they set out to figure out whose spouse was at fault for the rift in the family. After arguing for a while, Teresa decided that it might actually be Kathy who’s behind all this, which might not be a bad theory if Kathy always acts like she has so far on the show. She’s been great with her own immediate family, but seems to be a troublemaker of the highest order when it comes to her cousins.

Nonjuicy wasn’t buying it, though, and thought that Teresa owed him an apology. They then proceeded to go tit-for-tat on every passive-aggressive comment that Teresa and Melissa had ever made to each other until finally Nonjuicy said something smart: Melissa and Teresa hate each other because they’re basically the same person, and that means that they both feel threatened by the existence of the other. DING DING DING, SOMEONE GIVE THE MAN A PRIZE. Naturally, Teresa didn’t like that and eventually played the old, sick, dying parents card in order to end the conversation on a conciliatory note. Nonjuicy asked her to get together with Melissa and talk, and Teresa agreed to do that. And what could go wrong with that? Absolutely nothing, of course.

At dinner at some random person’s house, Nonjuicy and Melissa got together to talk to Kathy and her husband about the conflict and whether or not things would be better going forward. Even after Nonjuicy’s meeting with Teresa, they all seemed doubtful about whether or not anything would be solved. The anonymous redheaded woman who was hosting the dinner piped up to say that one of Teresa’s daughters had been invited to her kid’s birthday and never RSVP’d, and she seemed to think that would be some sort of revelation or an interesting peek into Teresa’s psyche. Listen, we all know that Teresa is more or less a feral human being. She’s rude, tactless and has no sense of social graces. That’s why she’s on Real Housewives.

And let’s talk about Kathy for a second, even though her scene in this episode was short. Something’s off with her, right? Her family seems nice, but her interactions with everyone else are…weird. And we don’t really know anything about Kathy or her husband yet, we just know that she has two kids and one of them had a brain tumor. Usually when a new housewife is introduced, we get a scene early in her first episode that explains what she and her husband do, their backgrounds and why they’re “fabulous.” But we’ve never heard anything about Kathy’s or her husband’s jobs. I read a blind item somewhere that intimated that she’s a hairdresser and he pumps gas and they’re trying to make a quick buck via the show so they can open a baking business, which would make sense based on what we’ve seen so far. But whatever it is, I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop about those two. Something’s not right. My Real Housewives Spidey Sense is tingling.

Finally, halfway into the episode, it was time to talk about something else – Caroline’s first day at the radio. She as nervous, you guys. She didn’t realize that she’d have to read the weather or throw to the traffic guys or do any of that real radio stuff. And that stuff is hard! Reading, in general, is hard for our New Jersey cast members.

But before we could even take a deep breath, it was back to the Gorga Family Feud. Teresa sat down with Jacqueline to dish about how Melissa is just an opportunistic gold-digger that moved into Nonjuicy’s house a month after they met because he was rich. And to that I say, if you’re letting a random woman move into your house after a month of dating, then you’re going to get what you’re asking for and the other person is not to blame for your near-limitless stupidity. But Melissa seems to put up with a lot of disgusting behavior from Nonjuicy, in addition to bearing three of his children, so I’m not really sure that he’s being taken advantage of in any way, even if that was her initial intention. He’s making the most of it.

Just as quickly, we switched back to Caroline’s debut radio show. And she was…bad. They just threw her on the air, live, with what seemed like little prep and no callers waiting to talk to her. But she eventually got her footing and started rolling with the callers a little bit, even if the advice she gave was kind of surface-level and predictable. People who call into the radio for life advice probably need to be given very simple instructions from someone who’s willing to talk to them very slowly.

And then, all of a sudden, someone with exactly the same problem as Teresa and Melissa called in. It wasn’t either of them, but that’s not exactly surprising since, guess what, lots of people hate their in-laws. It’s actually sort of a broad cultural joke that everyone makes, I’m guessing you’ve heard it before. So other than the fact that Teresa and Nonjuicy are part ape, their issues really aren’t that novel or interesting. It’s merely interesting that one of them might flip a table or fling a vase or start screeching in Italian without warning. That’s why we’ve put them on the moving-pictures machine.

Speaking of which, it was time for all the pre-meeting discussions that had to happen for the cameras before Melissa and Teresa could go to Jacqueline’s house and talk. Melissa and Kathy sat down and agreed that it was a good idea to meet at Jacqueline’s house so that none of the kids would be present (except for Jacqueline’s kids, ostensibly), while Caroline told Jacqueline that she was certainly the most patient person of the group for offering to host. I hope that before she invited them over, Jacqueline secured all of the valuables and bolted the tables and chair to the floor. Just, you know, in case.

And then Melissa arrived with the requisite bottle of wine for Jacqueline and they sat down and OOPS, TO BE CONTINUED. I hate you, Bravo. I really do sometimes.