“New Girl” Season 4: Recap and Review

4×08, “Teachers.”

     Jess and Coach take Palmdale! For a teachers’ workshop led by free-spirited education guru Brenda Brown, who is described as a woman that convinces other women to have home births. At the workshop, Jess sweats it trying to avoid any interaction that is less than strictly business or totally platonic with Ryan (whom she describes as an “angel like Denzel Washington from The Preacher’s Wife”), fearing that she will be unable to mask her emotions or prevent her feelings for him from deepening. Coach has his fair share of stress as well, doubting his abilities as a health teacher and citing his apprehension that if he messes things up, his students will get pregnant. The pair have separate breakdowns as a result, leaving Coach crying on the roof of the hotel’s pool-house and Jess drunk and unable to cope with her romantic attractions. It ends well for them both, however, as Coach feels ready to teach and Jess (whom Ryan calls “beautiful and insane”) finally gets her kiss.

     When the rest of the group is away, the boys will play. Nick, Schmidt, and Winston plan to have a ball during their boys’ weekend, but it quickly turns into something much different after Schmidt spills sangria on Jess’s beloved blanket, forcing him to do something he hasn’t done: laundry. Just as Coach and Jess spun out, the boys follow suit. Schmidt is thrilled at his new-found love of laundry and Winston is compulsively measuring things in the apartment. Drunk off sangria, singing “I Want to Know What Love is,” Nick joins the Hot Mess Express and admits that he doesn’t know how to love.

     Rating: 9/10

4×09, “Thanksgiving IV.”

     Leave it to Schmidt to turn Thanksgiving into “Bangsgiving,” a perverted twist on Thanksgiving in which everyone must invite over someone with whom a member of the group can have sex. And leave it to Coach to invite Ryan, pushing Jess in a tailspin. At the decree of Schmidt, everyone will get laid, no matter any previous self-imposed restrictions.

     For Winston, Jess invites Pearl, the school’s lunch lady. For Coach, Winston brings Pepper, an attractive and athletic future policewoman. Coach feels instantly intimidated, wishing Winston would have told him he was inviting “one of the Guardians of the Galaxy.” For Schmidt, Cece invites Lucy, a woman Nick briefly dated three years prior. For Cece, Schmidt invites Geoff – with a ‘G,’ which indicates his wealth, according to Schmidt. And finally, Nick was the luckiest of the bunch, inviting his old Asian friend Tran for himself.

     It’s unanimous among the group that Jess and Ryan “bang one out” and rid their dynamic of any sexual tension, but Jess disagrees: “I don’t think I can even look at him without getting pregnant. He just oozes sex.”

     Though it takes some wine and some courage to warm up to their dates, it doesn’t all end badly for the gang. Jess and Ryan decide to give their relationship a chance, and kiss in honor of the “American tradition of Bangsgiving,” Pepper lets Coach win an arm-wrestling match, and Nick meets Tran’s beautiful granddaughter Kai, with whom he hits it off.

     Rating: 8.5/10

4×10, “Girl Fight.”

     Nick is nervous about his first date with Kai (Greta Lee), the granddaughter of the quietly wise Tran, one of Nick’s more eccentric friends. As most first dates go, the pair’s is awkward, and Kai offers that she’d rather do nothing, though she knows that option “isn’t hot.” Nick says it is to him, and they proceed to eat pizza and watch TV at the gang’s apartment. For three days straight. This piques Winston, who is unsuccessfully studying for his LAPD entrance exam, into suspecting Kai may be homeless. After all, she and Nick do have a lot in common – they both get batteries from the smoke detector and both think the best part about America is “Kentucky women.” At the relief of Nick, it’s revealed that Kai became insanely wealthy after developing and selling a company that sells bottled water to rich people.

     Over on the girls’ side, after witnessing a DVR spat between Schmidt and Coach get resolved with a single punch, Jess and Cece open a once-closed wound: the case of the yellow purse neither of them purchased but both really wanted. Schmidt gets tangled in this already messy web, as he has seen the very purse before – in Jess’s closet. Jess insists that this stay hush-hush, as she and Cece have grounded their decades-long relationship in the avoidance of confrontation in favor of passive-aggression. Typical of Schmidt to crack under weakness, he steals the bag and gives it to Cece. This leads to a catharsis of pent-up grievances between the best friends at Cece’s roommate Nadia’s baby shower. Topics of discussion include the time Jess told Cece’s crush she was on her period when he wondered why Cece was wearing sweatpants in the pool, the time Cece bailed on Jess during senior ditch day, and when Cece left for Paris to model and Jess had to move in with Spencer (hello, Season 1 throwback!). Things escalate quickly into a fist fight, landing both girls in the hospital, physically battered but their friendship bettered.

     Rating: 8/10

4×11, “LAXmas.”

     Christmas just got less merry, as each of the gang run into some traveling troubles in the Los Angeles International Airport at the hands of a Midwest snowstorm.

     Cece is headed to New York (her mom wants to see news reporter Matt Lauer and give him a Christmas card), Schmidt is off to Long Island, Nick and Winston are tag-teaming it to Chicago, and Coach is taking a one-man vacation to Hawaii rather than visiting his family in Michigan. As for Jess, she’s headed to England to meet Ryan’s family – an invitation that “skips seven steps” in her relationship plan and causes her to worry that she may not be good enough for his posh family. This fear doubles as she begins to believe she’s not good enough for Ryan either.

     Before his red-eye flight with Cece, Schmidt pulls a classic Schmidt-ism and pretends he’s a man of status in LAX’s first class lounge. Things go surprisingly smoothly as he chats with an older gentleman named Robert (Barry Bostwick). That is until Schmidt is outed as a “first-timer” after oddly fondling the lounge’s decorative pillows. Robert then makes a pass at Cece, and Schmidt’s Long Island roots come out as he calls Robert a “dirty old bitch.” Elsewhere in LAX, Nick and Winston make multiple attempts to be moved up on the fly list, even going so far as to rip up other passengers’ tickets and imply that two pilots were heavily drinking at the airport bar.

     After run-ins with a man who looks eerily like Santa and a cynical airport clerk named Barry (Billy Eichner), Jess’s worries get the best of her and she decides to cancel her flight to England in favor of relaxing on the couch and eating pizza. Just as she’s about to board a taxi home, the whole gang comes rushing out of LAX to convince Jess to take that leap of faith.

     Rating: 8/10