Raise Your Hand if You Watched the Mindy Project Last Night!

Whether you hate the song or not, your favorite show’s intro music can’t just go changing on you without warning. It’s jarring.

“The Mindy Project” gave us zero warning and cold-opened with Danny catching us up to speed on life. He’s then interrupted in true “Mindy Project” form by Mindy, a reminder that just when you think the show is pulling a cheesy fast-one on you, it’s actually making fun of itself. Mindy over-shares that Danny’s turned on by weird music, cue them making out to “More Than a Feeling” by dad-band Boston, which replaces the show’s old intro song.

Spoiler alert — it’s all foreshadowing.

Here are the SparkNotes:

Everyone in the office now knows that Danny excels in the fine art of cunnilingus, which isn’t so much a plot thickener as it is a play on the theme that loose lips sink ships — meaning gossip. Gossip sunk the Titanic as far as I’m concerned.

Danny’s annoyed, Mindy says she’ll stop telling the world about their love life (besides us, the viewers, who just watched them French to a song that frequents American beer commercials).

Playing the role of the token frat boy gyno who has rescinded his love of the hook up culture for actual love with his bitchy-resting-face girlfriend Lauren, is Peter. Playing the role of someone who will take me five face-to-face meetings to remember (my bad, not hers) is the aforementioned Lauren. Lauren is planning a charity event with the weight-fluctuating Hugh Grant of prime time fall television, Jeremy.

Later that evening Danny offers Mindy his own piece of office gossip, or as he calls it: “reporting the questionable going-ons of people we know.” He caught Jeremy giving a massage to Lauren and she was not making a bitchy resting face during this interaction. Mindy would have been shocked but then she found a hot pink thong bedazzled with the word “Diamond” across the crotch in Danny’s dresser.

Intermission: why don’t I own that?

Back at the office: Peter tells Mindy that the pink thong she’s brought for office show-and-tell belongs to a stripper (hence the crotch snaps). Mindy almost tells Peter about Danny’s reporting, miraculously withholds.

…Until Morgan, the ex-inmate/now nurse, points out that the thong actually belongs to a male stripper (hence the peen-pocket), and with the aid of Google we quickly discover that the Italian Larry David, Dr. Danny Castellano, used to be a male stripper. Named Diamond Dan.

Mindy loses it, tells Morgan that Lauren is cheating on Peter with Faux Hugh Grant, and then we get a break from all the DRAMA via a commercial break wherein every commercial except the Boston Market one made me tear up. Not much of a break, FOX.

Back at the house of regularly scheduled programming, the whole cast is gathered in Lauren’s living room listening to some toast about the charity event no one wanted to attend and everything explodes:

- Mindy confronts Danny for being Diamond Dan. (It helped him pay for med school after his stint on a deep sea fishing boat didn’t work out.)

- Danny’s mad at Mindy for spilling his gossip about Lauren x Jeremy (Morgan told him, typical) which means the whole office now knows, because if there were ever doctors without borders, it’s this crew.

- Morgan’s cousin (I just can’t even get into his character right now, maybe next week) tells Peter that Peter’s girlfriend is cheating on him without realizing he was telling, uh, Peter.

- Meanwhile, Tamra is just a girl trying to charge her dead phone in the kitchen while Peter confronts Lauren, who confesses, which I don’t think anyone saw coming.

- Tamra doesn’t leave because she has too many celebrity numbers in her phone and can’t just be leaving it lying around unattended. I think we can all relate.

- Peter punches Jeremy, Jeremy refuses to back off, and now we have ourselves an old fashioned inter-office love triangle.

- But what about Mindy and Danny, are they ok? Of course they are. They make up on the fire escape just like any respectable New York couple does by accepting one another’s bedazzled pasts and accidental potential murders (Mindy drops a gigantic steak knife from many stories up, tbd on actual flesh wounds), then making up in the very place where our episode began: in the bedroom, with a very strange choice in foreplay song that we now understand hearkens back to Danny’s days as Diamond Dan.

Now let’s text (in the comments): do you want Mindy and Danny to stay together, or are you glad the focus is on the love life other characters? Do you guys like Lauren? I can’t tell why she irks me. Do we want her with Peter, or Jeremy? Should Tamra get a spinoff? Or a Twitter account?

Finally, vote: should I keep recapping this show for you, or not?

Photo courtesy of Fox