The Mindy Project 2.04: "Magic Morgan"

“We did actually talk about this. You don’t get heartache days. In fact, they don’t exist.”
-Jeremy

As a lawyer, this week’s episode of “The Mindy Project” was an interesting one. As somebody who doesn’t like artificial romantic roadblocks in her television shows, it was a bit frustrating. It’s quite obvious that Mindy is going t, at some point, date Cliff Gilbert, the kind of smarmy lawyer who she meets in this episode. The part that peaked my curiosity as a lawyer was the whole potential sexual harassment thread in the episode. Mindy, while really drunk, thinks maybe it would be a good idea to find out if Morgan really does bring good future dating luck to everybody he sleeps with. Holy bad idea on so many levels, Batman! Meanwhile, Danny is really not happy about Peter being a member of the practice, which causes greater friction among the group. That whole bit made Danny look kind of boring, although I’d much rather spend time around him than frat boy douche Peter.

As the episode opens, we see that Mindy is not taking the breakup with Casey well at all. Which is kind of odd considering she was the one that initiated it. Obviously everyone’s sad when they go through a breakup, whether you’re the breaker or the breakee, but Mindy’s taking it a touch too far for having been the breaker. And all over a guy who was an unfocused, inconsiderate jerk. Anyway, Mindy is a mess, ordering takeout, crying all over the place, and getting rid of anything that reminds her of her relationship with Casey. To make matters worse, when she’s out for a walk, she trips on a package in front of a building. The package belongs to a lawyer whose office is inside the building. That lawyer is the aforementioned Cliff Gilbert, of course. Cliff completely schools Mindy on why exactly she would lose if she sued him. As they would say on HIMYM, Mindy gets “lawyered.” I do enjoy a good lawyering. There’s really nothing better than intellectually kicking someone’s ass.

At the Shulman and Associates office, Jeremy has a big announcement. Since Dr. Shulman hasn’t worked there for about a year, he thinks it’s time to rename the practice. He got a fancy sign made and everything. The only problem is that instead of Lahiri, the sign has Casey’s last name on it. Mindy has to announce to the whole practice that she and Casey broke up, and the wedding is off. Mindy’s coworkers are sympathetic, but there’s really only so much they can do about what is an unfortunate situation. Morgan makes the mistake of trying to cheer Mindy up by telling her how every time he and a girl break up, the girl ends up marrying the next guy she dates. Mindy thinks this is weird, as do I. Actually, I guess it’s not so unexpected. Morgan’s such an odd duck that any other guy would have to seem spectacular in comparison, right?

Mindy says she’s taking a “heartbreak day” and leaves the office (even though Jeremy tells her that there is no such thing as a heartbreak day), and when we next see her, she’s back in her apartment, wallowing in her grief by looking at a photo of Casey on her phone and getting very drunk. Morgan decides to stop by and check on her, which of course can’t end well. Now that she’s drunk, Mindy is totally buying the “Magic Morgan” thing where dating him miraculously leads women to find their true loves. Mindy launches herself at Morgan, and Morgan tries to fend her off with a pizza box, to humorous result. Mindy finally convinces Morgan to give the plan a try by crying. Apparently he doesn’t like to see Mindy cry. Mindy wants to freshen up a bit before they have sex, and in that short amount of time, she sobers up enough to start regretting what she’s about to do. When she enters her bedroom and finds Morgan naked in her bed, she knows for sure that this was a bad idea, and she kicks Morgan out of her apartment.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned in the intro, Danny is not happy at all about Peter joining the practice. Danny is about as straight arrow as they come, and he really chafes against Peter’s frat boy douche-ness. Jeremy basically tells Danny tough luck, Peter’s excellent with patients, so he is not going anywhere. The straw that breaks Danny’s back happens in the hospital, when Peter is telling the other doctors a story about how a girl grabbed his junk. He demonstrates the maneuver with Danny, who doesn’t appreciate it at all, to put it mildly. Danny just goes completely off the deep end with his hatred for Peter after that one, and I kind of don’t blame him. I guess sexual harassment at the workplace is kind of an overall theme of this episode?

Anyway, when Mindy gets to work the next day, she finds out that Morgan is planning to file a sexual harassment lawsuit against her for the incident that happened the previous night. His lawyer is none other than Cliff, who seems pretty giddy at the opportunity, To Cliff’s chagrin, Morgan says he will drop the lawsuit if Mindy agrees to go on one real date with him. Mindy really doesn’t want to (and Cliff really wants to keep pursuing the case), but Jeremy and Danny insist that Mindy go through with it to protect the practice from liability. Danny, Jeremy, and Peter go so far as to help Mindy pick out what to wear for the date. That’s taking it way too far, if you ask me. Danny finds one of Casey’s shirts in Mindy’s closet, and Mindy completely loses it because she’s convinced she’ll always have reminders of Casey around, and she’s never going to get over what happened.

The date itself actually isn’t all that bad. Morgan reveals some of his past to Mindy, including the time he traveled to Canada to meet someone he met online. She turned out to be a he, and Morgan got beat up for his trouble. Mindy is a little weirded out by that story, understandably. The date takes a turn for the better when Morgan takes Mindy to the quarry he likes to go to when he needs to think things out. He shows Mindy how you can just yell out whatever is bothering you, and it echoes back to you. Mindy tries yelling about how upset she is over Casey, and it actually does make her feel somewhat better. It makes her feel better enough that she takes her last photo of herself and Casey out of her purse and tosses it into the quarry. Good riddance, I say.