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Reminder: Schmidt's 29th birthday.


Recap:

When Schmidt's birthday plans fall through, Jess takes it upon herself to pick up the slack even though Nick warns her that Schmidt's friends are all "d-bags" and she doesn't know what she's getting into. She approximates the party bus, messes up the stripper by a lot, but manages to deliver a pretty good party, despite her boss being there.

Nick brings his new girlfriend Julia to the party, and worries the whole time that she's going to be freaked out by the fact that he lives with three room mates, or that he invented a frat-party drink or whatever other so-called embarrassing things they come across, but she keeps insisting that everything is great and she loves them all. Until her secrets come out: she has anger issues.

Schmidt's lead-jerk friend decides he's going to take Jess home, and doesn't back off when she keeps turning him down, and after Schmidt and Nick pull him off, Julia says she's going to talk to him, and then beats him up and causes the bus to crash, ending the party. Schmidt, however, insists that it's the best party he's ever had, and is totally touched that anyone would go through so much trouble for him... and then tries to kiss Jess and messes up everything.

Poor Jess, can't catch a break.


Review:

This episode seems to have struck a better balance between hideously awkward / hard to watch and sweet, and it makes the whole thing much more entertaining than some of the previous episodes in the past have been. It was strange that Nick suddenly has a girlfriend, but his embarrassment never takes over a scene to make it impossible to care about. Neither does the fact that we can obviously see that Jess's attempts at making the ultimate bro-party are clueless at best. And in the end, we have a sweet episode where Schmidt sticks his foot in it, and we have the return of the Douche Jar, which I've been missing since the first episode.

This is how they should proceed in the future: we get that they're all awkward in their own ways, but there's no reason to play up that awkwardness until it crosses over from funny to painful. Even when things get this out of hand.

Lingering questions, though: Why wasn't CeCe invited to Schmidt's party? When did Nick get a new girlfriend? And what does Julia have to do with the tentative attraction between Nick and Jess? And will Schmidt's faux pas become a thing--is he the first one in the house to really go head over heels for the only girl on the show full time?

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