New Girl: ‘Menzies’

There was so much going on in this episode that I’m not exactly sure where to start. While I thought this episode was good, it was far from the best work we’ve seen from New Girl and I think that’s because they tried to cram 8 stories into an episode that called for 3 or 4 at the most. Again, I didn’t think any of them were bad but there was no room for any of them to breathe.

Our starting point stems from Jess’ inability to pay the gas bill and triggers Schmidt to turn it off until Jess finds a job and is able to pay for it. So despite having her monthly visitor Jess sets out to interview for being a night school teacher but loses complete control of her emotions the first time around and fails miserably. Later on she gets a pep talk from Nick and goes back in, nails it, and sets up lots of funny potential story lines going forward. However, Jess isn’t the only one who gets a visit as Winston has come down with “male sympathy PMS” and plenty of jokes pop-up because of it. It turned out to be Winston’s way of dealing with his recent breakup but I thought that deserved more than the 4 minutes of screen time it got. Oh well.

Schmidt has his own thing going on at work as his new boss is sex-crazy and definitely feeling the vibe that Schmidt is emitting. He’s forced to sign a contract with her in order to pursue their relationship further and it’s full of insane clauses like “guaranteed mercury poisoning” that Schmidt can expect. Schmidt also gets intertwined into Cece’s fear that Robbie thinks she’s a nice girl, pushing her into the two of them almost hooking up. And thank God Cece didn’t actually cheat on Robbie because I would have felt awful about both hers and Schmidt’s characters going forward for a long time.

Nick’s little adventure with his elderly Asian friend Tram was absolutely amazing though. Tram basically sits there as a sounding board for Nick to come to his own realizations about why he has anger problems and it quickly becomes hilarious to watch Jake Johnson struggle to accept how Tram is so knowledgeable and Zen-like. I really liked this story and I think they had the right amount of it, but overall there was little too much going on everywhere else. But I suppose you’d rather have too many good things than too few so I’m guessing this is just a minor blip in season two for New Girl.

Some of my other favorite moments:

• “I will push if I want to push! I hate doors!” – Nick
• “There’s something real creepy about you pal. You want to get weird, let’s get weird.” – Nick when he is first approached by Tram.
• “I feel like I want to murder someone and also I want soft pretzels.”