New Girl – “The Crawl”

Season Four, Episode Fifteen

Grade: B-

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It’s Valentine’s Day for New Girl and everyone is happy, except for poor Nick Miller who has been recently dumped. Naturally, he’s not taking it well at all and hides his feelings by engaging in a bar crawl that will form an image of a smily face on a map. You don’t have to twist my arm for a plot that involves a bar crawl! Like the friends that they are, everyone decides to either postpone or cancel their Valentine’s plans to go on Nick’s bar crawl is attendance is mandatory.

It’s no surprise that New Girl is best when all of its characters are together, but here they run into an obstacle that even though they’re all in the same place, they all have different plots going on at the same time. In retrospect, Nick’s story-line is just the background to the more important things happening. Starting with Jess and Ryan, initially their plan is to pretend to drink during the crawl until they can leave and make their dinner reservation. During a conversation at the first bar Ryan asks Jess to move in with her, which caused her to freak out. At this point, we can just always assume Jess is going to freak out when things get into the “serious” stage of a relationship (almost as bad as Coach). She still gets away with it because she does it in such a cute way, but as a 30-something Vice Principal, when is she going to be a grown up?

The whole ebb and flow results in Ryan receiving an unbelievable job offer at his Alma mater back in England. This all just seems to move way too quickly, like the writers were tired of this healthy relationship and rather deal with break-ups and heartache. Jess and Ryan decide they’re going to try their part at the long-distance relationship thing, but we all know that’s not going to last. This is kind of a shame because what the show had between Jess and Ryan was the show’s only legitimate relationship. I saw this as growth for the characters and for the show to stray from its cartoon-ish portrayal of friendship and relationships, but it doesn’t seem like the writers want to go anywhere near something real. Too bad.

Meanwhile, we get more of the roller-coaster ride that is Schmidt and Cece. Schmidt finally gets Fawn to publicly declare her relationship with him, which happens right after Winston realizes Cece still has feelings for Schmidt. The timing just isn’t there for those two, but you have to assume that Fawn and Schmidt aren’t going to last very long. Also, Coach keeps running into an attractive girl who he feels is “relationship material” instead of the hook-up material he was looking for on Valentine’s Day. Winston was just putting out fires all over this episode with that gigantic book-bag as he slaps some sense into Coach.

In the end, Nick confronts his empty feeling without Kai, but with the help from his friends he’s able to pick up the pieces of his heart and move forward. So the show’s pointing to another round of Schmidt-Cece and even Jess-Nick. Are we prepared to go through that again? I’m not sure if I am, but I don’t think I have a choice. If there’s one thing I took from this episode, it’s that the crawl is for all! This show always makes me so thirsty for a beer.