New Girl: That is [not] how you have sex, America!

Posted by Emily Jeanes on Oct 14, 2013 | 4 comments

Winston tries to get Ferguson laid.  Schmidt tries to drag everyone over his breakup cliff with him. Nick and Jess are stuck somewhere between superhot new-couple sex land and oh-no-we-had-one-night-of-impotence panic land.  And everybody may need to take a lesson from the wise man who once said:

“If we were needed to talk about our feelings, they’d be called talkings.”

-Nick Miller

My Rating: B- (for plot lines that linger just a bit too long)

Suggested Dinner Pairing: Apple Smacks! Now with less apple and more smack!

We open with the end of a sex session (sexsion) so obviously awesome Nick and Jess have to fall back onto their pillows in exhaustion.

 

Jess has finally figured out “what that thing underneath the thing was,” and is ready to set up the themes for our episode and talk about big abstract nouns (like Feelings, yay!).  Nick is all set to “banana it” (i.e. eat a banana…anti-inuendo, ha) and jump into a round two.

 

Meanwhile, out in ze loft, Winston, Schmidt and Ferguson can…hear everything.  Like some sad, sad children who came home from school too early on Dad’s day off.  Our single men have different ways of dealing with the excessive happiness and seductive sounds of Ness.

• Winston: Create a survival kit complete with human-sized cat bell, ear muffs and blind fold; invest time and energy into relationship with cat.

• Schmidt: Get annoyed, make royal family jokes, exact revenge using mis-placed self hate as motivation.

Nick and Jess usher in our Credits Roll as they head across the hall for some sweet bathroom sex.  Sex sex sex.  (Let’s see how many times I can say it in one recap. Answer: 20.)

Dinner time rolls around, and the topic of conversation?  Ferguson is gonna have to be snipped.  Winston, distressed by the veiled symbolic representation of his own no-sex-sex-life vows to help his little buddy out.  Nick and Jess jokingly suggest a cat bachelor party (meeeee-ooow!) and he, of course, takes it seriously.  C is for cat, once again.   And you know what…still not sick of it.

Winston + Fersuson 4eva!

Enter Schmidt with cake shaped like a giant 1 that is clearly a trap and a lie.  Schmidt leaves the cake with a “I just wanted to wish you guys a happy one month anniversary,” and a super suspicious grin.  We learn Schmidt once joined a *Billy Zane fan club, after seeing Titanic (that’s how we know he’s scary for real), and the cake is never heard from again.

*I didn’t get that reference!

Turns out, Zane played the villainous, snobby fiance to Kate: Caledon Hockley.  Heir to the throne of a steel manufacturing empire, Hockley gets his comeuppance when his family loses their dough in the financial collapse of 1929 (not to mention losing Kate to Jack).

Nick confronts Schmidt, who tries to get into his head by alluding to his many failed and short relationships and repeating the word “over thinking” over and over and over and over (4 times).  The mind games, which interrupted Schmidt in the act of what I’m pretty sure was steaming his sheets, do kind of work.

Back in the bedroom, Nick and Jess have their very first “groundhogs day situation.”  Okay, funny!  But also…a weird way to put it.  Cue: Daft Punk’s “Gettin’ Lucky” and a sex-attempt montage!  I love a good montage.  Here’s what we get:

• Reading an Indian food menu
• Temple rubbing
• Reverse psychology
• Awkward Jess-dancing
• Smurf-blue face paint
• Punch to the face

Surprisingly, none of these tried-and-true tactics do the trick.  Huh.

On to the Pet Store.  And enter, one of my personal favorite funny girls, Ms. Riki “Garfunkel” Lindhome of super hilarious (and oddly appropriate for this episode) comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates.  Check her out in Whedon’s recent Much Ado About Nothing adaptation, if you get a chance.

Anywho…Garfunkel has also come to pick up her cat at the pet store, and Winston approaches her with such sexy lines as:

“My boy cat is looking for a boy cat.”

“Does the girl cat have all of her parts?”

“Maybe she could come over some time?”

“How often do you groom your cat?”

You know…out of context, those really don’t seem that sexy, but Garfunkel sells it with her adorable smile.  Winston’s anti-innuendos (starting to become a thing) somehow simultaneously convince himself that she is bringing her cat over on a cat-date, and her that she is bringing herself over on a real date.  What could possibly go wrong?

Back at the loft, Jess tries to talk about feelings and impotence and stuff, and Nick runs off to move his car.  You know, because he’s a guy and therefore can’t talk about such things.  Swoop in Schmidt, claiming to be just the right person to help Jess with her “Nick problems.”  She (for reasons that escape us) trust him long enough to listen to Schmidt’s rambling about Nick’s supposed crazy sex fantasies.  He mentions, covertly, an act called “The Captain.”

FOX cleverly uses the old blender-covers-the-sex-description trick to mute out parts of Schmidt’s description of “The Captain.”  All we can tell is it involves some sort of fluid covering, racial slurs, getting something into something else, dolphin noises, and a spyglass.  The rest is fanfiction territory.  Get to it, internet!

Ness does “The Captain” and both are frightened by the experience.  More importantly, it does not appear to have solved their penis problems (which, you know, just started happening but must be stopped immediately).  Nick can’t express his feelings or talk about what happened, even after the truth comes out (it was Schmidt all along!)…or can he?

Turns out, in an outflooding of emotion and odd childhood memories, Nick really can express his thoughts.  He likes Jess, the cello and when rap singers have choirs backing them up on their songs.

Even Schmidt is all…what the hell is Nick talking about? Anywho, all it took was some outpouring of emotion for them to make up and head back to the bedroom.  Schmidt follows and jumps between them, then runs off to cut up all of Nick’s condoms and eat a crap-ton of birth control pills.

Meanwhile, in the C storyline, Garfunkel and her cat Fatty arrive for their “date.”  She’s brought wine.  Winston is all business.  He watches the cats.  She watches him.  He continues watching the cats.  She hits on him.  Ferguson gets scared by yelling elsewhere in the loft and messes up the cat mood.  She sees Schmidt eating birth control pills…and starts to realize that this was really about cats having sex all along.

Yeah…I’m not gonna lie.  I’m sad Ms. Lindhome won’t be a new regular on the show :(.  Her and Fatty are out the door.

Sounds like a good time for a Loft family meeting.  Schmidt, instantly feeling the *effects of Estrogen at work, sulks on the couch, very concerned with the feelings being felt by his nipples (and also his heart). Winston, our host, breaks down a few topics the group needs to address like public vs. private space, boundaries, and Ness’ newly found sexual awakening.

Gif from here 

(*Side note: I’m no a huge fan of the man-uses-woman-product-turns-into-woman trope.  The Big Bang Theory also ran this one up the flagpole recently.  I’d call it silly, but I think the word I’m looking for is closer to condescending.)

 

The scene tries hard to be funny, but ultimately my favorite takeaway line is Jess’s moment of truth to Schmidt:

“You did a bad thing. Deal with it.”

And he tries to.  He leaves Cece a note, which she uses to spit out her gum.  Maybe he’ll try again next episode?

Oh, and Nick sound proofed his room.  Nick and Jess like each other.  They’re happy.  This is the happiest month of either of their respective lives.  Nick is so happy he isn’t evening thinking about sex!  Jess has to compensate by taking off her shirt, revealing that perhaps sex and feelings are equally important themes and that we must have balance in order to succeed, or something of the sort.  Meh.

We end with boobs!

New girl airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on FOX.  You can catch it on Hulu + or FOX.com the day after new episodes premiere.