New Girl – “The Box”

Season Three, Episode Five

Grade: C

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You know how I’m always questioning why Schmidt and Nick are even friends? Well it looks like I’m going to start questioning why Jess and Nick are even going out. For the first two seasons it made sense. Nick was actually a decent human being who tried to do the right things while Jess was just trying to fit in and grow up. There was large appeal to these two characters and it seemed like they both needed each other to get to the place they both wanted to go. And even though that’s exactly where we end up at the conclusion of this episode, there were plenty of moments that had my scratching my head, trying to remember why I wanted Jess and Nick to get together in the first place.

A creepy old guy drops off a brown paper bag with $8,000 in it for Nick, just a little something his dad left for him after he passed. Nick is what you would call poor, and I’m not surprised at Nick spending the money carelessly. I am surprised at the fit he threw when 1. Jess suggests he uses the money to pay off some of his bills and 2. When Winston asks Nick to pay him back the $1,900 he owes him. Seriously, what kind of person is Nick? Because he seems like the biggest asshole you could ever live with.

Nick’s temper tantrum gets worse when he finds out Jess went into his sacred box of unpaid bills and actually paid them with his bag of money. How does he get back at her (because that’s the Nick Miller way when he’s mad), he tosses all of her colorful purses out the window. I wouldn’t have minded this ridiculous scene if it were funny, but nothing about this made me laugh.

What were the other friends up to this episode? Schmidt tries to do good things to convince himself he’s a good person, so that good things happen to him. He saves a man who was choking after a bike accident, but then realizes that being good doesn’t protect him from bad stuff happening to him. While all of this makes sense to Schmidt’s character, none of it was entertaining (which is hard to do while sharing scenes with Jon Lovitz).

Winston… well all he tries to do the whole episode is to get his $1,900 back from Nick. It starts out with Winston being nice to Nick, then blackmailing Jess for the money. And that results to about four minutes of screen-time for Winston. Typical New Girl. In the end, Nick opens up a checking account and him and Jess share a cute moment getting the processing fee waived because, well that’s the Nick Miller way. Cute, yes. But seriously…

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Last but not least:

• No Cece in this episode, means that I’m not liking the direction New Girl is going in.
• I’ll never get tired of scenes where Nick gets wasted in.
• Words of wisdom from Winston, “You’re a good man. You did a bad thing, it doesn’t make you bad. You just have to try to be better, you know?”