In case you missed it, after months of anticipation, The Mindy Project is finally back! This post may contain a lot of spoilers; so if you haven’t watched the new episodes yet, go watch them now because they are wonderful and perfect in every way. And then there’s some disappointment.
Let’s start with the wonderful and perfect, namely the first two episodes. We briefly see Mindy and Danny on the plane where we last left them, but now they are struggling to hook up in the bathroom. It’s the kind of physical comedy that Mindy Kaling does perfectly. When they return to New York, Mindy and Danny are very couple-y holding hands on the elevator (and it’s adorable), but there’s one obstacle in their way: Cliff. Danny is “so Catholic” that he won’t kiss Mindy until she breaks up with Cliff. Mindy and Danny are able to be together in the end, but not without first burning down a church. Plus, there are a ton of great Mindy/Danny moments in this episode.
In the second episode, Danny has meningitis, and Mindy has a sex tape, so you know it’s going to be good. Turns out, it was more than just good. Mindy and Peter take a fun field trip to the porn website’s office, which led to some fun Mindy/Peter moments that we don’t really get enough of usually. Despite Mindy and Peter’s best efforts, Danny ends up seeing the sex tape, and he reacted in true Danny fashion, a lot of anger. If you think that’s a bad thing for the Mindy and Danny relationship we all want to see, what happens next pretty much makes it all better. When Mindy also gets meningitis, Danny wheels himself to her hospital room, gets into her bed, and reads her Bridget Jones’ Diary with his red reading glasses in a British accent. Perfection.
Before I go into the most recent episodes, here are some great GIFs from the first episode to lift your spirits:
I’ll cut right to the chase. All hope I had from the first two episodes was squashed in the next two. It all begins when a medical sales rep who Danny used to hook up with visits the practice. Danny doesn’t want to go public with his relationship with Mindy, so naturally, he basically becomes a huge jerk to Mindy. Ultimately, Mindy pretends to be into Peter (again, hilarious moments with these two) to make Danny jealous, but ultimately, he breaks up with her because he doesn’t want to lose his best friend. Danny Castellano, you stupid idiot. On the plus side, they aren’t taking any chances of ruining the show by keeping them together either.
If you managed to stick around for the second episode of the night after the break up, you probably realized it wasn’t worth it. Jeremy buys a truck with the doctors’ faces on it so that the practice can be mobile, there are a ton of awkward moments for Mindy and Danny, and the episode ends up exactly as it started. There are some pretty hilarious moments with Morgan and the other doctors, but other than that, the episode left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I kept thinking about the last two episodes and the fact that Mindy and Danny’s relationship lasted only an episode, when I found a gem of an interview with some of the cast. “Danny’s smart enough to know there will be a rough patch after their breakup, but he truly thinks things will go back to the way they were pretty soon because he didn’t let it get too serious,” said Mindy Kaling. “But the sad surprise — and we touch upon it in an upcoming episode — is that it can’t go back to the way he wants it to be…. Danny was the initiator and the ender of the relationship, and that is something Mindy picks up on and does not like.” Can things ever be the same? And if they can’t, will Mindy and Danny get back together? I hope so.