Nothing would make me squeal with delight as much as having a boatload of fast food dropped at my door as it did for Brittany. As a real junk-food junkie, I can’t argue with Brit’s taste. Domino’s is a classic for a reason, and she didn’t just get pies and Parmesan Bread Bites; she also got the real winner, the Marbled Cookie Brownie, which is known in the Moylan household as the Brookie (obvs) and is the real reason that I ever Avoid the Noid. All of these are great for sharing with friends who come over to help you pack up your soon-to-be ex-husband’s clothes before he gets out of rehab. So is Taco Bell. An individual taco, a Gordita Crunch, and some sliced-up quesadillas. Perfect. What is not suitable for sharing? McDonald’s. I have never wanted to wretch harder than when Brittany poured ten large fries into a bowl. Who wants to touch a bowl full of rapidly cooling McDonald’s fries? I could already feel the weird film building up over my tongue just watching them.

Fast food aside, this episode has some great moments of the kind of pettiness that I just love. When putting all of Jax’s clothes into garbage bags, as if he’s about to move into the Jersey Shore house for the summer, Kristen breaks up the pairs of shoes, putting the individual sneakers in different bags so that Jax has to reassemble them. This is why Kristen Doute will always be famous and always have a job in the reality television arts and sciences. Also wonderfully petty is Zack and the crew putting a giant sign that says “Britt’s” over the sign at Jax’s bar. They even got shirts made with the corrected logo and posted Brittany’s photo over all of Jax’s in the bar. The editors give us this whole montage of how Jax tried to include Brittany in the planning. Okay, then, where are the pictures of her scattered around the bar? Not even one of them together? If there is one thing Jax is always doing, it is the least.

Jesse’s the only one who is upset about this whole scheme, probably because he knows that he could be as easily erased from Michelle’s life as the way the group is trying to excise Jax from Brittany’s. He’s not wrong that Jax getting out of rehab and finding out about the stunt is going to set him off in a way that is inviting trouble. But I’m with Brittany. His first day out of rehab should be the day when he’s strongest and most dedicated to living a new kind of life. If he can’t handle the news on that day, then he will have learned nothing and basically had a $60,000 hotel stay.

When they all arrive at the bar, Jason tells Jesse he thinks Jax might think it’s funny. Jesse says that Jax will think it’s funny, like Michelle thought it was funny when he called her a hooker. I agree with Jesse that Jax will find this about as funny as a T-shirt cannon to the balls, but there is no analogy here. What Zack and company did was a lighthearted prank to make Brittany feel better. As disrespectful as it may seem, deep down, it is a joke. Jesse calling Michelle a hooker was never a joke; it was an ad hominem attack based on absolutely nothing to humiliate her and to give him an upper hand in their ongoing custody battle. These two things are about as similar as a Michelin-starred meal and that wooden bowl of fries Brittany tried to pawn off on her friends.

There is another incident with Jesse that doesn’t make sense either. At Kristen’s housewarming party, where neither she nor Luke, an L.L.Bean catalogue shot at a monster-truck rally, bothered to clean, Zack introduces Jesse to Jenna, a friend of his that he met through Scheana Shay. Jenna says that 18 months ago, she dated Aaron, the man who is now dating Michelle. Jesse had previously heard a rumor that Michelle was dating Aaron, so he went to his house and caught him with another woman, and then they broke up. Now Jesse’s wondering if that woman was Jenna and if all these incidents line up. Sure, Jesse, your complicated conspiracy theory could be true. Alternatively, you could also consider that if Aaron was dating Jenna 18 months ago, perhaps he wasn’t with Michelle, and she wasn’t actually cheating on him. Or is she a hooker and was sleeping with billionaires for money? Or was she sleeping with Quentin Tarantino? I mean, which is the story, Jesse? What is the horrible way you want to defame your ex-wife this week, and why don’t we believe any of them?

While Jesse remains a monster, Jax is about to get out of rehab and tell us all the myriad ways he has changed. It sounds like he’s still the same monster that we’ve been watching for over a decade. He called his sister Jenny and told her that he was going to the hospital because his blood pressure was so high. Brittany finds out from his therapist that it was all a lie. Jax tried to get the rehab receptionist to lie for him and tell anyone who called that he was on his way to the hospital. When she didn’t comply, he got so belligerent that he made her cry. (I’m assuming that it was a woman, which is kind of sexist of me, especially considering Jax could make a grown man cry, and that grown man is often himself.)

Brittany has finally realized he’s not changing, and rather than wait for him to get out, she goes to see a lawyer. When she tells Naz, her divorce lawyer, what is going on with Jax, Naz’s expert opinion is, “He definitely has a problem, and this is not normal.” Well, thanks for that, Naz. She clearly hasn’t had basic cable for a long time, or she would already know that. Brittany also says that the reason their mortgage payments are so large is that Jax owed $1.2 million in taxes and was about to go to jail if he didn’t pay them. This all, sadly, tracks. Ugh, I do not want this man back on our television screens. I don’t want him anywhere near us. Can we please just be done with him?

Who else have I not been impressed with on The Valley? Lala Kent. She has one extraneous scene where she asks Michelle some questions. Okay, why? Couldn’t Nia do that? Or Jasmine? Or Brittany? Or some rando friend of Michelle’s? Scheana can stay, and I’m not just saying that because she’s going to keep bringing Brock to pool parties. She is the center of this friend group and brings people like Jenna into it. She has all the gossip, and she gets all the calls. She’s here organically. Lala feels unnecessarily thrust upon us like a nepo baby who is about to become an executive at the company without having to do anything.

But I did feel bad for Michelle in this scene. This is the first we’ve heard about her mother’s struggle with cancer, and that has to be the second hardest thing in her life after being married to Jesse Lally for even five minutes. Wait, it may be the third hardest thing after marrying Jesse and then divorcing Jesse, which is also terrible. I do feel for Michelle that Brittany gets parties to throw out Jax’s shit, she gets a night out at the bar to bolster her before he returns from rehab. Meanwhile, Michelle is getting dust. In the words of Erika Jayne, where is her pizza party? Maybe Michelle just needs to advocate for herself more. If she threw a “Jesse is terrible” party, everyone would come. If she asked for some support with what she’s going through, maybe it would arrive.

But should she have to? I think the difference is that Jesse has been around all the time, so people can’t openly talk shit about him like they’ve been able to about Jax. They all sat around in Santa Barbara and watched Jesse absolutely terrorize this woman, and they didn’t do that much to support her. She didn’t even get a fucking Brookie. Give Michelle a Brookie!

While most of the focus has been on Jax and Jesse and just how horrible men are in general, there are a few other feuds and fights that either wrap up or take off this episode. Jasmine and Melissa sit down with Jason and Janet to have the conversation that they should have had all along. J-Squared starts by asking Jasmine if she started the rumor about Jason not wearing his wedding ring, and she says she didn’t, and they believe her. This is a very reasonable adult conversation, and it should have always gone this way. However, we have a show to make here, people, so some flying off the handle is appreciated, if not unwarranted.

Then Jasmine apologizes for calling Janet a Karen and freaking out at her last episode, saying she was surprised and felt ganged up on. She says she doesn’t think Janet is a Karen at all. Then Janet (and every single member of the audience) says, “I’m gonna stop you right there,” because even Janet knows she’s a Karen. She looked it up in the dictionary and saw a picture of her face holding a string of Dave and Buster’s tickets and was like, “Yup. Looks like me.” Janet is so real for that.

The final fight is brewing over Darkside Danny, who shows up at One Night at Britt’s party and starts taking shots behind his wife’s back, inserting himself into a discussion between Kristen and Janet, trying to bring up the issues with Jasmine that have already been settled. He starts mumbling, making no sense at all, and Nia quickly whisks him away to get him home where he can’t cause any harm. Yes, his relationship with alcohol seems to be not great and complicated, but these charges still seem trumped up to me. No matter how terrible Danny is when he’s drunk (and grabbing a co-worker’s ass is pretty dang terrible!), he’s still better than Jax, Jesse, or a bowl full of cold fries.

 The episode tries to wrap up the season’s feuds before Jax’s return, but some fights just can’t be contained.