The Mindy Project 2.02: "The Other Dr. L."

“The worst place in the world is Fenway Park.”
-Danny

“The Other Dr. L.” starts to really deal with the logistical nuts and bolts of Mindy’s decision to return to New York from Haiti several months early. Dr. Leotard is still occupying Mindy’s office, and Mindy has no patients. Somehow, she has to rectify all of this, and quickly. Mindy’s preference would be that Dr. Leotard would go away entirely. She sees him as someone who has stolen her life, mostly because he also trades in cuteness and goes by the nickname “Dr. L.” The other major storyline in this episode is Danny’s effort to start getting over Christina. The two plots come together to explosive effect at the end of the episode. By the end of the episode, Mindy’s problem is solved, and Danny has let off some steam about Christina. The only thing left to resolve is Jeremy’s very unfortunate stress-caused weight gain. Can someone share the managing partner duties with him already? That character needs to be pretty to be funny, as shallow as that is.

This episode picks up not too much after the last one left off. Mindy and Casey are trying to figure out how to make their long-distance relationship work. At the moment, it involves Mindy and Casey Skyping while Mindy shows off a whipped cream one-piece. Because that’s how she rolls. Obviously, that doesn’t end well. It is however, a humorous and original foreshadow of the troubles that are sure to befall Mindy and Casey in the future. Casey still has about eight more months in Haiti, and something bad is going to have to happen between them after all that time. It’s a convenient distraction on the way to an eventual Mindy/Danny relationship. To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about Mindy and Danny as a potential couple, but if there’s one thing I don’t like in my television, it’s repeated manufactured reasons for a couple not to get it together.

Anyway, as I already implied, Mindy’s professional, as opposed to personal, issues take center stage in this episode. Dr. Leotard (James Franco) is still working at the practice. This means he’s still in Mindy’s office, which, of course, also means that Mindy has no office. Mindy tries to get her office back by just going in and claiming it, but Dr. Leotard doesn’t go for that. Instead, they find Mindy some office space in a storage closet. It’s in an out of the way corner of the office, so nobody stops by or even really notices that Mindy is around. As someone who has the “hall monitor” office in my own workplace, I can’t imagine what this must be like! Mindy also has no patients, which she realizes when Dr. Leotard goes out on a call for a former patient of hers.

Meanwhile, Danny is leaving the office in the middle of the day and being really shady about it. Everybody thinks he’s doing something gross, like visiting prostitutes or something, so Jeremy, as managing partner, decides to follow Danny and find out what’s up. Jeremy finds Danny enjoying a pick-up basketball game with a bunch of fellow recently single guys. These guys sort of have the older, basketball version of the He Man Woman Haters Club from “Little Rascals.” The thing that makes the bit really funny is that Kris Humphries is part of this group. My nerdy exterior disguises an encyclopedic knowledge of celebrity gossip, so I found the Kardashian dig to be pretty darn funny. Kris Humphries is a pretty terrible actor, but the joke of having him there at all was pretty great anyway.

Anyway, the problem of the two Dr. L.s comes to a head at a pretty kick-ass office happy hour. Dr. Leotard is, like me, kind of a lightweight at these events. Apparently this is the one thing about him that irritates his coworkers. Thankfully, my coworkers aren’t quite so judgey. To my face, at least. When she learns that Dr. Leotard is a lightweight, Mindy things she finally has her strategy to get her office back. She challenges the other Dr. L. to a “shots off.” Mindy is obviously able to out-drink Dr. Leotard, and he agrees to give her the office back. There’s just the tiny problem left that he’s really trashed and needs to get home.

Mindy thinks it’s the decent thing to do to help Dr. Leotard home. He can’t find the key to his apartment, though (actually Danny’s apartment, which he sublet when he moved in with Christina), so Mindy just leaves him propped up against the door. This is where Christina finds him, when she stops by to drop off some of Danny’s stuff, not realizing that Dr. Leotard still lived there, presumably. One thing leads to another, and Christina lets Dr. Leotard into the apartment and then some. Dr. Leotard blames it all on being completely wasted, of course, although that doesn’t sound like all that great of an excuse to me.

The next morning, Dr. Leotard confesses to Mindy what he has done. They both agree that Danny is going to go a bit nuts if he finds out what happened. Clearly it has to take something this major to get rid of Dr. Leotard, as before this, Jeremy and Danny were both really happy with the ridiculous amount of business Dr. Leotard had brought into the practice. Anyway, Danny walks in on Dr. Leotard and Mindy talking about what happened, and he immediately thinks that they slept together. He starts to act like an ass, coming very close to calling Mindy a slut. Paul Leotard won’t stand for that, though, so he admits that he actually slept with Christina. At first, it seems like Danny doesn’t care about this as much as somebody sleeping with Mindy, but after considering it for a second, he slugs Paul. This leads to a knock-down-drag-out fight. When the dust settles, Paul is leaving after all, and Mindy’s got her office back.