When we left Mindy and Danny, it was late 2015 and things were rocky. But now, we’re four months into 2016, flowers are starting to bloom, and a marriage is dead before the couple even walked down the aisle. Welcome back, The Mindy Project!
It takes an entertaining four-minute montage to get viewers up to speed: Mindy and Danny kept postponing their nuptials before finally calling them off, Annette is shown cutting up pictures of the couple, Mindy moves back into her old apartment and gives away her amazing wardrobe in order to make room for Leo. Peter (Adam Pally) makes an all-too-brief return in the montage as Mindy’s support as she readjusts to her new reality.
Danny also decides to leave the practice. It turns out seeing your ex-fiancee/love of your life/mother of your child every time you glance up from your desk wore thin. But when one door closes, another opens. Mindy’s practice has taken off like gangbusters. Where there was one lone baby success story on the board, months later there are dozens of framed pictures and a full waiting room.
The remaining employees at Schulman & Associates are on high alert whenever Mindy walks in. Apparently bursting into tears every time she walks past Danny’s office isn’t the best way to prove she’s fine, you guys. Mindy claims she and Danny had a modern uncoupling like Coldplay and GOOP. Jody is suspicious. Good job, Jody.
Jody relied on Mindy quite a bit in “Will They or Won’t They,” but neither of them proved to be responsible. Together, they’ve been tasked with freezing a dozen young women’s eggs and educating them about reproduction for the girls’ spring break. The week includes tickets to Hamilton and absolutely no drinking. So, of course, the girls get drunk at Hamilton, get kicked out of the Richard Rogers Theater, and “leash” (cut free) Seth Meyer’s dog in a bit of supreme NBCUniversal synergy.
The reason the girls got in trouble was because their chaperone was absent. Mindy had dropped Leo off at Danny’s for the evening and one story leads to another and… the two hook up. This continues for a few nights, but Mindy finds a stray lipstick in Danny’s medicine cabinet and rightly ends things (whatever constitutes as ‘things’ for them) there and then with him. Danny is sleeping with other women to fill the void in his heart left by Mindy. Mindy painfully reveals she didn’t realize he would rebound so fast and he seems just as pained at the fact. Mindy bucks up and realizes that this relationship is not healthy for either of them — or Leo.
This separation will be hard for both Danny and Mindy. Neither of them ever really saw themselves sleeping with other people ever again, which is most certainly scary. They can try to raise Leo as separate-but-equal as possible, but either one of two things will happen: They will either grow so far apart Leo never sees his parents in the same room again, or they continue to somehow always end up back in each other’s arms. Because this show is created by Mindy Kaling, I think we know the answer. (It’s the second one.)
Then Morgan rescues Seth’s dog, goes on Late Night with Seth Meyers and falls over in the chair. Synergy.