"Teen Mom's" Reason of the Week to Always Wear a Condom (Sept. 30, 2013)

This week, the girls look to the future, and discover not everything can go according to plan when you're a teen mom.

This week on Teen Mom 3 saw the mothers focusing on building futures for themselves and their children—and discovering that it's harder to fulfill your lifelong dreams and ambitions when you have a young child at home. Their individual dreams, of course, differ from one another: Mackenzie's wish is to start a stable family with Josh and Gannon, but Josh is just 19, and would rather spend his time training for the rodeo than hang out with his future wife and child. Briana wants to go to school, but the stress of taking care of Nova and dealing with getting Nova's father, Devoin, out of their lives leaves her too exhausted to pursue it. Alex wants to be a professional dancer, but taking care of her daughter and monitoring her daughter's father, Matt, to ensure he doesn't get back on drugs is a full time job in and of itself. And Katie, finally, wants to attend university in Salt Lake City, but fears leaving her fiancé for two years to pursue her degree might cause a rift in their already shaky relationship. 

Basically, life gets pretty complicated when you have a kid at 16. Go figure.

Mackenzie

This week, Mackenzie is dealing with the now-physical absence of her fiancé, Josh, which apparently to her is a huge change from his normal, mere emotional absence. Apparently, since he's gone back to rodeoing, he'd rather spend time with broncos instead of his 17-year-old fiancée, their son, and the whole crew from MTV. What a crazy kid.

Since Josh is so absent, Mackenzie had a lot more time to just focus on her feelings—primarily, her feelings about being engaged at such a young age with a kid already in the mix. She's confused as to how they could so easily go from being so in love to wondering why they stay together, apparently not realizing that it's probably because they're teenagers trying to play house. You know, perhaps. She feels like she comes second to the broncos that Josh hangs out with, and that's not cool.

Of course, Mackenzie does what all these other teen moms seem to do when they're having the slightest argument with their boyfriend or hubby: Go to a counselor. Later, Mackenzie reveals to her mother that she feels like a single mom with Josh so absent, and comes to the conclusion that Josh has to mature a bit more before he becomes the man that she wants and needs for her and Gannon, because right now, she feels like he doesn't care. It'll hopefully also be at that point that Josh will start speaking in full sentences, but no one should get too hopeful.

Briana

As for Briana, this week's episode saw the conclusion to the whole Devoin x court order of protection plotline. Last week, Devoin was served with official paperwork telling him to stay away from Briana and their daughter, Nova, because he had been abusive and threatening in the past and Briana didn't feel comfortable with him around the baby. This week, the official paperwork is set to expire, so Briana, her sister Brittany, and their mother, Roxanne, are headed to court to face Devoin and get a judge to grant them an order of protection.

Briana, to her credit, arrives prepared: Prior to heading into court, she takes time to print out every single one of the threatening tweets that Devoin posted online about her. The unfortunate thing about Twitter (and messages that are in text in general) however, is that it's difficult to prove who actually wrote it in the first place. Devoin claims that he didn't sent out the tweets—a blatant lie—and the case is thrown out for lack of evidence. Devoin, ever the asshole, leaves court laughing like the little psychopath he is. That is some Dexter shit right there.

Knowing Devoin lied to the judge, Briana is irritated that their request for an order of protection was denied, wondering if he lied to the judge, how could she be sure he'd never lie to her? Briana's mother explains that it'll be a lifelong fight since the two of them are forever bound by the existence of Nova, and he'll never really be able to stay away. 

Alex

For Alex, the drama doesn't really cease this episode, and it likely never will as long as Matt is in her life. She's worried that Matt is back on drugs, so as we saw last week, she's attempting to file for full custody so that Matt can only have supervised visits with Arabella. If he is back on drugs, she doesn't want him alone with their child, and rightfully so—no judge in his right mind would award joint custody to this trainwreck of a couple. 

Alex doesn't really do much this episode—her main plotline is getting a pretty large tattoo of Arabella's name and footprint on her shoulder, something she was originally supposed to do with Matt before he went off the deep end. She comments that this is something she should be doing herself anyway, and gets the tattoo done. Her grandmother's not too into it, because it takes up a substantial amount of her shoulder, and her grandfather wonders why "this guy put his phone number on here." Alex tells her grandfather that that is Arabella's birthday, and things are awkward after that.

Meanwhile, Matt's counselor tries to put him up in that youth home she told him about in last week's episode, so he's technically no longer homeless so long as he stays clean and gets his life together while he's living there. He, unfortunately, is an addict though, and tries to get out of moving in because he claims to his counselor that he doesn't want to be held back and restricted. He is five hours late meeting his counselor, though, so it's pretty obvious to everyone that he's back on drugs.

The episode ends with Alex getting a call that Matt is in the hospital, having overdosed—his future uncertain.

Katie

For Katie, this week's episode focused a lot on her desire to attend a four-year school after she finishes her general education classes at her community college. Since last week, Joey has apparently stopped smoking weed—a major drug, in Katie's opinion!—and has stepped up to taking care of Molli, which Katie is happy about. Unfortunately, the closest school to where they're living now is in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Katie isn't too keen on the idea of leaving Joey for two years while she goes to complete her Bachelor's degree in the big bad city. Apparently, she's only ever left him for two days total since they've been together. This doesn't seem healthy.

Katie is determined to get her social work degree, though, so she brings up the possibility of the entire family moving to Utah while she works on her degree. Joey isn't too into it, because he doesn't want to lose his current job coal-mining—the job that pays all their bills. Katie persuades him to at least apply to jobs in Utah, but Joey still doesn't seem too thrilled about the idea. Or, maybe that's just the way his face looks all the time. It's not too clear.

When Joey still doesn't seem too enthused about the idea of moving, Katie comments that she feels like he doesn't take her goals seriously, and will get her social work degree no matter what—with or without him. Joey looks irritated, but again, maybe that's just his face.

Teen Mom's reason of the week to wear a condom

The moms this week learned the cold, hard lesson the most difficult way of all: Have a baby when you're still a kid yourself, and you can pretty much kiss all semblance of normalcy goodbye. While it's not impossible to go to school and take care of a kid at the same time, it's hard work, and it's growing increasingly clear every week that just because these moms have an MTV film crew following them, things aren't going to be any easier should they try to pursue further education or a better career.

Which, without further ado, brings us to this week's overwhelmingly convincing reason to wear a condom, courtesy of the best extended Trojan ad in the world, Teen Mom 3: Wrap it up, and you won't have to deal with giving up your hopes and dreams of becoming a social worker, or feel compelled to get a gigantic tattoo with a string of numbers that apparently look like a phone number when it's really a birthday. Might be good to avoid that one either way, actually.

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