The increasing use of cutaway sight gags would usually signify a dearth of ideas but New Girl makes the format work. The idea of Bob and “some guys from the club” putting the fear of God into Glenn Ealing by racing around him in tiny white cars and dressed in green suits and fezes while he stands tied to a tree is hilarious in itself, and is great as an in-out sight gag. When the whispered conversation between Nick and Jess (book-ending the cutaway gag) is interrupted by Bob forcing them to smile for picture, commenting afterwards that he “needs to buy more flash cubes” (remember those?), that one action sums up the entire relationship between those three characters really nicely, a strength that the show has in spades.
Another strength is in the quirks of each cast member’s performance, the little things that they do that an actor wouldn’t normally do. This episode is stolen wholesale by Zooey Deschanel’s ability to give strange intonation to sentences that somehow make them ten times funnier – see her bizarrely deepened pronunciation of a whispered “he’ll kill you” to Nick, or the way she tells Nick and Bob that she has “the chance to teach kids again” – and that’s just in this tiny scene. Also the idea of Bob “gay[ing] his way out of Vietnam” is hilarious.
Cece’s perfect veneer gets cracked further with the wedding preparations, and the subplot with the mehndi tattoo getting transferred to her face the day before her wedding might possibly be virgin comedic territory, which is surprising because in hindsight it seems like such an obvious idea. New Girl‘s ongoing mining of Cece’s Indian heritage in its pursuit of humour means that there’s some great gags involving somewhat obscure elements in Indian culture (to Western ears, anyway) – “He had one scene with Salman Khan in Dabangg 2 and now he thinks he’s Amitabh Bachchan in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom”, for instance – and while it does allow itself to become entertwined into Winston’s listless search for a surprise birthday party organised by his friends, both characters support each other in their fight against their funnier, or just more exposed, castmates. It’s a shame that Cece and Winston don’t get more attention, but when it’s a choice between anyone and Rob Reiner, Rob Reiner is always going to win out.
The throughline of this episode is that Jess might potentially have a new job in the offing, as a substitute teacher in a rowdy high school. This enables everybody their own space to get together separately. The Jess we see in this episode is a very different Jess to the one we met at the beginning of the first series – she’s in command, giving everybody useful advice, spending most of the episode with her phone stuck to her ear, organising everybody’s problems for them, all while managing to sell herself to the principal of the high school and control a group of incredibly naughty children.
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