CBS putting their sitcoms on hiatus is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because last week was my first full week of work, and I’m trying to get back into a schedule; it’s a curse because I am super rusty, and two weeks off feels like an eternity.
We start things off with Max and Caroline coming back from the “Under a Dollar,” where the former bought steak and a steak-eatin’-chair and the latter bought sheets. There’s some really great stuff here when Caroline tears her new purchase, and reads the bag it came in, “Thread count: Yes. Washing instructions: Do not wash.”
Keep in mind that I don’t ever see ads for this show, so seeing Andy lying next to Caroline in her Murphy bed was a surprise to me. We haven’t seen the dude since right before he bailed in “And Too Little Sleep,” and that was seven episodes ago. Him and Caroline did the dirty on her new sheets, and really broke ‘em in, but it was naught but a booty call.
Caroline is bad at booty calls, and salutes her beau before leaving to go get changed.
Further evidence of this lies in the fact that she would like her second booty call ever to maybe be accompanied by a “booty breakfast.” Max beats that joke like a particularly disobedient dead horse ["booty dinner," "booty engaged," "booty married," et cetera] but ultimately hints that Caroline is looking for more than just casual sex. Then we get the first hints that Caroline might have caught the herp.
Back in their apartment Caroline logs on to Web MD, which is a helpful onlnie resource if you want help pinpointing exactly what kind of cancer you have. She can’t see her nethers to get a good enough look, though, so she snaps a picture of her iPhone 3, leading to Max quoting the title of the episode. Her fear at having herpes brings her to a free clinic with a sassy black receptionist who tells her the test will cost $250, from which point Max starts to track her own sexual history and also get tested.
Let me say, before I summarize this plotline in the next paragraph, that Max tracking her sexual history is a comedy gold mine. It’s essentially when Joey on Friends found that he had slept with too many women in New York, and was approaching people he’d already had one night stands with. Max’s past is just as sordid and not more so, and watching as she scratched names or occupations down as her and Caroline walked around New York would’ve been great stuff.
Essentially Caroline talks to Andy a little bit and finds that the other women he’s slept with since their breakup have been a dental hygienist and a special ed teacher, and that he has tested clean. He’d had a little bit of unsafe sex, but only with himself, and only when he couldn’t sleep. And a lot of other times.
Later on in the diner the sassy black receptionist comps Caroline the price of the test for some free fries, and, surprise surprise, she’s clean. Even later on in their apartment the two girls have a heart to heart, as they are wont to do. Carolineadmits that she has been filling the cupcake-business-shaped hole in her heart with Andy, take that as you will, and that when the two of them try again they need to give it their all. A pretty interesting development, seeing as their business crashed [literally] and burned three episodes ago and they only have three left in the season.
The B-plot that I was infinitely more interested in was Han trying out online dating. He managed to get a blind date! She was ”pretty, blonde, and clearly not a man”! And she bailed! I am not a person who claims to be emotionally invested in this show, but that crushed me. It’s more or less okay, though, because Max sets him up with a woman who, according to her forum posts online, may or may not have herpes.
One thing this episode really did was open up potential conversation about STDs. They’re pretty prevalent among sexually active people [and there are a lot of them], and Caroline’s fear that she caught something is one that many can relate to. If she had actually tested positive it would’ve forced people on a broader scale to realize that it’s a consequence of casual sex, and that it can happen to anyone.
As I mentioned earlier, with only three episodes left it’s anyone’s guess exactly how Season 2 of 2 Broke Girls will end. Max and Caroline chasing their dream of a cupcake business is going to seem an awful lot like a retread of the past season, and I have strong doubts that the network will be able to keep that fresh. My hope is that the somehow decide to go a different direction, which is doubtful in light of Caroline’s passionate insistence that they do things better this time.
Oh, and their Current Total of $205 remains unchanged.
Stray Observations:
- “Have you heard about Doctors Without Borders? Well, we were nurses without credentials.” In my observations of how people react to Sophie’s presence and jokes, allow me to say that I heard a man laughing so hard that he sounded like he was going to die.
- “Hah! That candy was just a decoy so you didn’t see my Push Pop when I got out of bed.” Oh, Andy, it really is just candy jokes with you, isn’t it?
- “Speaking of dragging on the ground, maybe you can drag an antelope back to your cave and have sex with it!” Han justifies his reason for putting “sense of humour” on his dating profile.
- “I once had a date with a blonde woman, turns out the curtains matched the penis on that one.” Some of Oleg’s dating experiences have been unpleasant ones.
- Apparently Max is also clean, which truly boggles the mind. Something like 1 in 4 people has an STD, and with the amount of sex she claims to have had, there’s a definite suspension of disbelief there.
- 2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu: Caroline gets out of bed wrapped in her less-than-a-dollar sheets like “the Greek Goddess of Booty Calls, Aphro-whitey.”
