New Girl - 1x15 - Injured

Nick grapples with mortality in his trademark rabid pitbull-esque way while gang try their best to be there for him in their typical manner: baffling outbursts of emotion, inappropriate nudity, and the sweet dulcet tones of freestyle rapping.

Injured showcases everything that this show does great while deftly hiding all it's usual flaws. We get a Jess that's quirky but not annoying, and even sympathetic. We get to run through the whole emotional gamut of Nick-freakouts. We have Schmidt being hilariously douchey and vulnerable. Winston gets a decent subplot and even takes part in the main story line. Cece pulls some awesome out of nowhere, as usual. Foremost though, the story rings emotionally true, skillfully weaving conversational humor and sight gags with familiar quarter-life crises, along with a great guest star or two. This is what New Girl does best.

We kick things off with Jess finally breaking Nick physically (as opposed to just mentally) by way of flying tackle in a friendly game of football. Even though no one says anything of the sort, I'm going to go ahead and assume this was a game of touch football. Knowing Jess, can you imagine it going down any other way?

I broke out my GIF-makin' tools just so I would always have this.
Forever.

Since Nick's broke-ass doesn't have health insurance (timely!), Jess takes him to the only doctor she knows: Dr. Sadie, M.D. OB/GYN! I'm not gonna lie, I let out an Aw, fuck yeah when I saw her. Even though it feels like they're introducing her in this episode, it's awesome to see her again. Also awesome? Dr. Sadie's bedside manner. That almost-apathetic mix of professionalism and obfuscation really plays well against Jess in a way other characters don't. That whole "Don't take the pills" bit probably ranks up there in this show's funnier moments. And although Jake Johnson overplays his cootiephobia at being taken to a lady-doctor, the scenes in the stirrups really more than make up for it. Men in stirrups will never not be funny.

(Un)fortunately for Nick, Dr. Sadie (it's always got to be the full title now, it's my new rule) is a damn good north of the border doctor too, cause she also finds a suspicious lump in Nick's throat. Concerned it might be cancer, she schedules him for a follow-up ultrasound the next morning.

And this is where the episode really kicks off. Faced with the possibility of a painful and untimely death, Nick first handles it with aplomb:

I'm not gonna go tomorrow.
I'd rather not, because I don't wanna get an ultrasound.
I just don't have time.
No, I've got some writing I've got to do.
The truth is, with working out,
I've got some people to see,
so I just can't make it.
I lost a stamp.
It sounds worse than it is, but it's a somewhat expensive stamp
and I planned on looking for it.
One of the reasons I moved to Los Angeles was to get closer to whales
so I could record them.
I haven't gotten around to it, cause where we live is actually east.
It's way farther from the ocean than I expected.

That right there? That's my new ringtone. There is nothing I don't love about that. It's the same calm rambling bit I loved from him in The 23rd, but more understated. It's like Parks and Rec's Pawnee infodumps but without the quick cuts to give the impression of time, and thus pad out the laughs. It all just sits out there, by itself, awkward and smooth, and without flaws. It's beautiful.

Yes. I do have issues.

Anyway, the magical power of denial is no match for the Legacy Of Steve Jobs, cause once the gang types his symptoms into an app they get what I'm pretty sure is the most irresponsible output any program can ever give to a human being.

Worst. App. Ever.

Faced with the unerring medical judgement of the Internet, Nick (and everyone else for some reason) flips from complete denial straight to utter fatalism. It's not a plot point I completely bought, but the idea that these characters automatically believe everything the internet tells them actually explains a lot about this show.

Do you like my puppy, Zooey? Call me.

Now, Nick being Nick, his remaining stages of grief are really just varying levels of barely restrained rage fueled by overwhelming self-pity. And, naturally, unwarranted lashing out at Jess. Which I really liked, but not for my normal Jess-hatin' reasons.

So let's take a second to touch on that whole scene at the bar, cause that's really the gooey center of that whole ugliness.

Why can't you see past the debilitating stroke that left
my mouth permanently in this shape, and love me?

He tells her, "You don't know how to be real", in that trailed-off tone where you suddenly realize you said a lot more than you intended to say and every attempt to qualify it, or couch it in context, just makes it worse. We all recognize that tone, we've all been there. But with that line, right off the top, his normal everyday distaste for her quirkiness has morphed into "I hate everything about what you choose to be" levels of personal insult. The way he jumped to that line, right after the vitriol of his (admittedly intoxicated) "You can't speak at my funeral" just reeks of all this irrational anger that he's obviously been harboring towards her. He's angry at her for cheering him up when he wants to be miserable. He's angry at her upbeat philosophy because it chips away at the fatalism which he thinks would have prepared him for all this. He's angry that her whole cheering people up philosophy distracts from important feelings, like wallowing about how unfair this is, and mourning him properly... and maybe his feelings for her?

It's really kind of hella ugly, and you can tell from the look on her face that Jess kind of immediately groks every layer of that. I'm really harsh on Jess a lot, but Zooey Deschanel really does bring the good stuff when it's called for, and this was one of those moments. For the first time since The 23rd you actually feel sorry for Jess, cause she didn't deserve even a little of that.

Even much later, when in the less inebriated light of ... later that night, he admits that he likes having her around, and he genuinely appreciates everything she does for him, it's kind of hard to get that scene out of your head.

Which is probably why she's the only person that didn't feel like taking part in the group's rendition of the Nick Miller Elegy Blues (The Saddest Song in the World). Now, as uncomfortable as it is to watch a grown man invest so much in his own pity party, dying or not, this is easily one of the highlights of the entire series for me. It's just perfect. From Winston's soulful chorus ("This is a sad, saaddd song") to Nick's offhand "Can I get some weird rapping?" to Schmidt's painfully bad freestyle. And then it's all capped off perfectly by Cece bringing that shit home with some mad flava.

And then, of course, Jess goes and ruins it by dropping harsh truth on Nick. Now, for the record, I don't begrudge what she said. I'm only disappointed that she didn't phrase it in the form of a dope verse. I mean, come on! It's probably the only time you can set your feelings to music without everyone rolling their eyes and sneering. Why'd you kill the rap, Jess?

Buzzkill.

Regradless, Jess' Buzzkilling Truth Bomb (I reserve that name for my acapella Rage Against The Machine cover band) challenges that Nick hasn't actually accomplished anything with the life he's lamenting. Nick doesn't really try to deny it (and if "I wrote half a book about zombies" isn't my generation's mission statement, I don't know what is), and it leads to this brilliant choice on the part of the director that still holds up even after multiple viewings:

When Jess asks Nick if there's anything he ever wanted to do, there's just this split-second of Jake Johnson adjusting his upside-down-U and the director touching on it for like the barest instant, but not lingering, that just really gets across that he honestly considered saying "Yeah, you moron, you!", but chickened out. Friends, Scrubs, HIMYM, anyone of a dozen other will-they/won't-they sitcoms have all done this same scene, but they always went out of their way to draw out that moment of indecision. Usually while having the lovelorn mug for the camera. New Girl don't play 'dat. It trusts in that instinctual reptile part of your brain to recognize the split-second flicker in Nick's face and sympathize. It's not the only time they've done that, and it's one of the things that I really like about the creative direction in this show.

Admittedly, he then goes on a mini rant that essentially translates to "I would like to do you, but I'm too scared to try, even though I think I'm dying", which would make the whole thing less subtle if it didn't also explain the general holding pattern of the rest of his life.

Still, it does serve to bring us to a Nick skinny-dipping-in-the-ocean-to-capture-life moment. Which goes about as well as you'd expect in early spring at 4am. Which is to say, I think there's now another two lumps inside Nicks throat. By which I mean his testicles.

Cue more inappropriate lashing out at Jess, since he only did it to impress her it was her idea, but at least this one finally breaks through all the melodramatic self pity and excuses and bullshit and shows us just how scared he is.

"They are OVARIES now!"

Having his boys annexed by his spleen does seem to calm Nick down though, since we get that aforementioned scene where he apologizes to Jess and tells her how much he appreciates her. It's an interesting contrast with la scène ugly, since you can hear that same oversharing crack in his voice when he tells her he "really likes" her. But this time it's not tinged with fear or backpedaling. It's not even meant as a slick double-meaning. It's exactly what he means. It's both platonic and romantic, and not meant to hide anything. And Jess groks every layer of that.

You know, I've been kind of harsh on Nick this ep, but the truth is, everything he says and does in this ep plays perfectly. It feels like anyone would react like this. Even though screaming "No, I'm not okay!" is a little on the nose, Jake Johnson makes it great. Sometimes you really do just need to rage at the world and stare out for a while before it all just comes into focus and context, and you make your apologies and take the next steps.

Now, this was a Nick episode through and through, but it says a lot about this great cast that they still brought their A-games and never let them drop even when they were doing nothing but standing in the background. Everyone gets a chance to shine, even if it's just for one line.

Cece is The Man as always. Going back to the point I made earlier about how this show doesn't like to belabor the small emotional accents, Cece's stoic matter-of-fact support of Nick, and the later revelation that it's because she lost her father when she was little, serves as a perfect underline to the entire night. While the episode is ostensibly about Nick freaking the fuck out over his own mortality (and everyone else scrambling behind him), Cece's there as a sober reminder of the quiet hole you leave in those left behind. Cece's always excelled at grounding everyone's batshit crazy hijinks in reasonable, guarded terms, and so this was a perfect role for her to fill.

All that said, Cece's at her absolute best when she will fuck all that and drops some concentrated awesome on a sucker's face. Usually said awesome is in the form of fists, but this time it was in mad rhymes.

Seriously, will you be my friend? Please?

Schmidt is also in fine form once again, despite being mostly relegated to tossing one-liners in the background. Everything from his Fredo Kiss, to his bad dancing, to the return of his unhealthy obsession with Nick's penis just adds to tragicomic tone of the entire episode. When he says "I've never been through anything like this", it almost slips right by you, in the usual deluge of Schmidt-isms, but he plays it so well, it stands out as the core of his motivation the entire episode, without needing a neon sign or a swelling score or a slow close-up.

Also, even though it was probably the least charming of his interactions with Cece, I do appreciate him pointing out the perfect imprint of her ass in the sand. For without him, I would not have that image in my mind.

It was either Cece's ass-print, or Schmidt kissing another man.
I think I made the right choice.

Now, I'm not even going to touch on Winston's car subplot. It was great, it was genuinely funny, and it has some of the best visuals in the show's run, but it really just doesn't really seem to matter in the greater context of the episode. I do really really wish we'd met this car before though, because it would've been a great running gag, and a way to better tie the episodes together. It also would've given us an insight into Winston's longer-term arc. We know he was a jerk and he's trying to be a better person and find his place in a world without a basketball career. But we hardly ever see him being a jerk, and aside from the odd Latvia joke in the first few eps, we don't know much about his pre-show life. Having to decide to finally let the car go was a great way to show us how painful the transition has been for him, as well as echoing the shows intermittent theme of slouching towards adulthood. It would've been nice to have that threaded over a few eps, is all I'm saying. Okay, I guess I'll only barely touch on Winston's car subplot.

Also, "You shouldn't call them keys.
It's a paper-clip you start the car with" was a great line.

One last morbid thought: Do we really believe Nick that the growth was benign? Couldn't you just as easily take his calm state at the beach as making peace with his death and deciding not to worry his friends about it?