Just when it looks like Dr. Mindy Lahiri is learning to stand on her own two feet, the show goes and introduces a handsome new male nurse. How To Make It in America’s Bryan Greenberg pops up in this week’s episode as Ben, a saintly and helpful pediatric nurse who’s also the dad of a 13-year-old. He also happens to be Morgan’s friend, because of course he is.
Though Ben and Mindy aren’t putting the moves on each other yet—Mindy barely seems to know he exists for most of the episode—it seems inevitable that the two will start to get moony over each other, something that’s, honestly, kind of a bummer. The Mindy Project has always done “will they or won’t they” well, but it was nice to see Mindy love interest-less, and to wonder where that could go. Unfortunately, that only lasted about five minutes.
There’s more to this week’s Mindy than just potential bedmates, though. This week, Mindy is trying to raise $25,000 to buy Jody’s “big romantic gesture” apartment, lest some Chinese billionaire buy it for his layabout son, who’s moving to New York to intern for Buzzfeed. After much struggle, Mindy actually manages to come up with the scratch, but not before pimping out her doctoring skills and self-respect to the sleazy midwife-loving Deslauriers. The results are fairly hilarious, with Mindy’s likeness showing up everywhere from midwife-touting brochures to the side of a bus, where she’s given a speech bubble that reads, “I wish I was a midwife!” I’m always tickled by the interplay between the doctors and the midwives, something that’s probably as rooted in actual science as it is in comedy, and this sub-plot is both charming and gives us a chance to check out Mark Duplass’ hirsute new look, so that’s win-win.
The other running plot of this week’s Mindy is that the hospital’s nurses—and thus the practice’s nurses—have gone on strike. Morgan wants more money for health insurance so he can get his growth looked at, and both Colette and Tamra feel underappreciated. This leaves the practice in the lurch, meaning Mindy’s stuck doing terrible, painful blood-draws and Jeremy mistakenly tells a 90-year-old woman that she’s miraculously pregnant, much to her dismay. It’s all over the top and comical, though it doesn’t add much to the episode other than some slight conflict. Still, it’s interesting that it’s not resolved at the end of the episode, with Morgan and his “You down with P.P.O.” sign still out front of Schulman And Associates, pacing back and forth even though, as Tamra puts it, “picketing is like modeling, but with bad clothes.”
Ultimately, this week’s Mindy Project is kind of underwhelming, but it should hopefully serve to set up the season’s plotlines and move the story along accordingly, so, all things considered, it gets the job done well enough for now.
Stray observations
- Mindy steals toilet paper from the hospital because she “can’t be seen buying [it] in the quantities” that she needs.
- Mindy regrets donating so much to the Trump campaign, though she admits she doesn’t “want [her] son to grow up in a country where it’s a crime to be white.”
- The best running joke of this week’s episode is that Morgan just learned about the word “nominal,” though he appears to have only a nominal notion of what it actually means.
- Other Morgan fact: He saw The Jerky Boys seven times in concert.
- Baby Leo’s favorite show is Entourage, though he appears to also tolerate Dora The Explorer.