MTVP So Cal Summer 2016: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend 1.10: "I'm Back at Camp with Josh!"

“You know, all my life, I’ve wondered if I was good enough, or smart enough. But now I know you’ve always believed in me. You’ve always supported who I am. You never tried to change me. That means so much. You have no idea.”
-Josh

Now that Rebecca has admitted that she loves Josh, Paula has kicked her “Operation: Get Rebecca and Josh Together” into high gear, being more insistent than ever that Rebecca needs to be aggressive about pursuing Josh. Rebecca seems to want to have some respect for Josh and Valencia’s relationship, but Paula doesn’t care, and she hatches yet another one of her crazy schemes. Said scheme involves trying to recreate the camp atmosphere in which Josh and Rebecca started dating in the first place back in the day. The whole experience takes Rebecca through both some physical and emotional pain, but in the end, she gets more validation from Josh, which I suppose would make it worth it to her, even if I think a relationship with Josh is a kind of shaky proposition given her emotional state. Speaking of emotional states, we also learn in this episode that Greg is a commitment-phobe, which was news to me, and that Darryl is lonely and wants to make friends, which doesn’t surprise me at all.

The episode begins, as many “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” episodes do, at the boba stand. This time, Rebecca and Paula are drinking boba while squeezing over Rebecca’s love for josh. Rebecca admits she’s been Googling pictures of mixed-race babies, and they also contemplate what Rebecca and Josh’s wedding invitations would look like. While this is going on, Josh stops by the boba stand to buy a bunch of candy. He tells Rebecca that he volunteers with a program for at-risk youth, and he’s about to participate as a counselor in the program’s camp week. Paula immediately sees this as an opportunity to make Josh remember when he fell in love with Rebecca, and so she pushes Josh to see if Rebecca can volunteer with the camp, too. Josh puts in a good word with the administration, and Rebecca is invited in for an interview. The person she talks to makes it clear that they need money way more than more volunteers, so Rebecca writes a very large check for the privilege of giving a women’s empowerment seminar at camp.

Valencia, for no other reason than selfishness that I can see, really doesn’t support Josh going to camp. She thinks he should be picking up extra shifts at work instead so he can make more money. Josh gets upset because he doesn’t think Valencia really understands or appreciates him. Valencia goes really extreme with it, saying their future kids won’t have food on the table if Josh keeps acting like this. Meanwhile, Rebecca has a big plan to make a move on Josh at camp. She has a letter she wrote to him ten years ago that she never gave him, and she wants to read it to him now. Paula thinks this is an absolutely terrible idea, and she’s probably right. Who wants to revisit things that their teenage self wrote? It can only end in embarrassment.

Meanwhile, like I mentioned in the introduction, we learn that Greg is a commitment-phobe. He and Heather are talking about going to a movie, and Heather, in her dry way, says she’s excited about their relationship and wants to be exclusive. Greg panics and almost immediately breaks up with her. At Home Base, Greg tells Hector and White Josh that it never would have worked out because they have different opinions about Chuck Palahniuk from “Fight Club.” Hector and White Josh are trying to give Greg good advice when Darryl interrupts. He’s lonely because it’s Madison’s weekend to be with her mom. The guys mention they were hoping to watch a pay-per-view fight, and Darryl offers to hold the event at his place. What follows is an awesome musical sequence called “Having a Few People Over.” It’s basically Darryl getting his apartment set up set to electronica and lots of neon colors. The whole thing is very clever. The guys all quickly get bored with the undercard fights, and in a desperate move, Darryl calls a party casting service.

Meanwhile, right from the get-go, Rebecca’s camp experience isn’t what she hoped. The girls she is supposed to mentor start making fun of her before the bus even leaves the parking lot. The taunting continues once they arrive at camp. She gets injured in a game of tag, and Josh won’t sit with her at lunch, because he’s supposed to sit with the boys. Instead, Rebecca has to force her way into a table of girls who really want nothing to do with her and aren’t shy about it. Josh is busily taking selfies trying to boos his social media ratings, and this gives Rebecca an idea. She asks the girls where one can take a good selfie, and they suggest “Blowy Point” (Rebecca remains kind of hilarious naïve about the origin of the name throughout the episode). She challenges Josh to a selfie contest at Blowy Point, assuring him she’ll bring her windbreaker.

Unfortunately for Rebecca, it’s not just the girls causing her trouble at camp. She gets a crazy amount of mosquito bites to the point where she goes into anaphylactic shock. She wakes up in the infirmary and immediately has to run to “make a boy love her at Blowy Point.” Poor Rebecca. As you might expect, the photo session at Blowy Point doesn’t go the way Rebecca hopes, either. She starts reading the letter, and Josh laughs, remarking how “dramatic and weird” Rebecca used to be. She brushes it off and gets the heck out of there, throwing her letter in the trash can. When she tries to give her seminar, the girls continue to heckle, and Rebecca finally completely breaks down. The girls take pity and offer to help her get glammed up “for herself.” They even sing a song about it.

Among the twenty-five people Darryl invited to the party is Greg’s childhood crush. They hit it off at first, even though she doesn’t remember Greg at all, but it quickly fizzles. The experience leads Greg to get a “commitment for dummies” type book from the library, apologize to Heather, and agree to be exclusive. Darryl and White Josh continue to bond, this time over the fact that they were both social directors of their fraternities in college. White Josh even stays to help Darryl clean up, and on his way out at the end of the evening, he gives Darryl a kiss on the cheek. Rebecca gets a kiss on the cheek too. Josh asks to speak with her alone, and he tells her he read the rest of the letter. It talks all about how Rebecca believes he’s going to do good in the world, and Josh says nobody else has ever believed in him. A breakup with Valencia isn’t happening anytime soon, but Rebecca believes she has an in. As Paula tells Darryl and Rebecca, sometimes a kiss on the cheek can mean everything.