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The Mindy Project Recap: Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

It’s time to admit that my beloved The Mindy Project has a problem. A B-plot problem. While the main storyline in every episode this season has been very strong, much of the supporting cast is consistently left out or handed storylines that are so flimsy that they can be resolved in seconds. Jeremy isn’t even in this episode! It’s encouraging that Amanda Setton, the office hottie with the terrible accent, will be leaving the show and that Anna Camp, who is hardly in it anyway, is going from a series regular to a recurring character. Perhaps the problem is too many characters to write for. In the meantime, though, it’s a bit of an annoyance.

In the only outside-the-A-plot developments in the show, Morgan the male nurse basically beat an intern to death after spotting him teaching Mindy martial arts and thinking it was a real attack. Ike Barinholtz also co-wrote this episode, so we’re allowed to be a little mad at him. Chris Messina was also wasted this week in a subplot about an anonymous sexual harassment complaint at the office — specifically, that Morgan can’t stop checking out Shauna. He hauls them into his office, very uncomfortably, to resolve it, when it turns out that it wasn’t Shauna that made the complaint. Mousy secretary Betsy filed it because she thinks no one looks at her they way they look at Shauna, and she also dreams of someday being sexually harassed. Or something. She basically won’t leave Danny’s office until he tells her she’s sexy, so he does. The degree to which Danny was made uncomfortably by this situation was hilarious; the storyline, not so much.

Mindy spends most of this week stalking her neighbor Sophia, a precocious 15-year-old girl who Mindy has clearly known for years and who horrifies her when she announces she’s ready to have sex with her boyfriend Henry and wants Mindy to prescribe birth control. Mindy initially refuses, then decides that she’ll take a trip to the local high school and interview this guy herself to determine if she’s worthy. Thus begins the “Mindy wants to be the coolest high school student ever while also being respected as an adult” storyline, which I thought was used to great effect.

Young Henry, while very adorable, has some boneheaded ideas about going to college and doesn’t take kindly to Mindy’s third degree, leading her to refuse to prescribe birth control again, once she manages to extricate herself from a beanbag chair in the student lounge. She tells Sophia to come to lunch with her and Josh to see what a mature, adult relationship looks like. Naturally, Josh crumbles under the weight of Sophia’s questions, saying he doesn’t know if he could picture himself with one person forever, which upsets Mindy. She leaves and calls Gwen, who wisely tells her that many people have trouble with the word “forever” and that marriage is not exactly an eternal picnic.

Inspired, Mindy heads back to the high school, where she dispenses condoms to Sophia and the rest of her volleyball team, telling them that as teens they are preoccupied with eternity and the only thing that is reliably eternal is herpes. Unsurprisingly, Sophia’s school doesn’t appreciate this solid advice and she gets hauled into the principal’s office and rescued by Danny. She returns to her apartment to find Josh on the stoop, energy drink in hand, and tells him that in order to feel secure in their relationship, she needs to feel like there’s at least the possibility that they could be together forever. He agrees that it’s possible, and then they fight about whether to be cremated or buried together. Aw!

TAGS: Female Showrunners | mindy kaling | the mindy project

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