Recap: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Episode 5 – Josh and I Are Good People!

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Episode 4
Greg informs Josh and Rebecca that they're horrible people. Photo credit: Greg Gayne/The CW

Recap: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Episode 5: “Josh and I Are Good People!” – The CW, original airdate Mon. 11/9/15
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Some good — and surprising (at least, to me) — stuff happened in tonight’s episode, especially in Josh’s case! Not my favorite so far, especially musically, but this show has really drawn me in. Here’s a look at what happened in tonight’s episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, “Josh and I Are Good People!”

Rebecca and Josh meet for some boba, and she’s totally freaked out when she sees Greg. Laughing smugly, Greg tells Josh how horrible Rebecca is. “What did she do,” asks Josh. “What DIDN’T she do,” Greg retorts, grabbing the summer camp pictures the two are going though. He calls them both out on lying — about Rebecca’s lies about summer camp, about Josh hanging out with Rebecca while still dating Valencia. He informs them they’re both horrible people, and together they go through a brief bout of denial and rationalization about their mutual terribleness before going their separate ways. Rebecca, in an effort to convince herself that she is a good person, gives a homeless woman she had just snubbed (by telling her she didn’t have any change, only $20 bills … which she got by working) some money and a ride. Her rationalizations even make the homeless lady so anxious and annoyed that she has to get the H out of the car. “You can let me out here. What’s your DAMAGE?” she asks Rebecca.

Meanwhile at the office, some of the other characters (whom we haven’t really met before) are irritating Paula to no end. One won’t stop drumming on his desk or turn his music down, another (Tim) has a toy gun and keeps calling her the wrong name, and yet another (Karen) is a case assistant who has too many weird complaints and quirks to be any good at assisting. Rebecca breezes into the office with expensive lattes and fancy doughnuts — and winds up taking Darryl’s custody case — in order to convince herself she’s a good person. In order to do that, she tells the office, she and Darryl will have to be out for a few days, and she leaves Paula in charge of the place. Paula has a twinkle in her eye, and so does Mrs. Hernandez, but everyone else is a little freaked out.

So, we’ve got three story lines going here, now. Paula’s in charge of the office, Rebecca’s taking over the custody case, and Josh is also a bad person. For the sake of brevity (not my strong suit, I know — I tend to overwrite), I’m going to just streamline things and explain each story line separately.

Paula, in her attempts to get the office under control and to get people to respect her authority, gets a bit harsh. (At one point, when Rebecca checks back in to get something from the office, she asks Paula how she got everything so tidy, and Karen pipes up, “She broke our spirit!”) While organizing some of Darryl’s files, Paula discovers that Tim (the guy with the toy gun) is not an American citizen, but rather a Canadian with an expired visa. He begs her not to let the cat out of the bag.

Josh, trying to come to terms with his own flaws, goes to church. During confession, he discovers that the priest is one of his friends, who he’s nicknamed “Father Brah.” He confesses to Father Brah that though he’s still with Valencia, he is attracted to someone else. (This is where I assume they’re going to drop some surprise bomb and it won’t be Rebecca, but in fact, it is!) He can’t stop thinking about her hair, her boobs, her butt … her boobs. As they play a game of basketball, Father Brah gives Josh an assignment: Go write down any sinful thoughts for the next day. When Josh comes back the next day, he has a whole list, which includes sexual fantasies about 2 mannequins at the mall, a fantasy about a hot girl watching him have sex with 2 mannequins, and a whole host of thoughts about Rebecca. Father Brah tells Josh that it’s not the thoughts that God’s concerned with, it’s his actions. So what is he going to do about these thoughts he’s been having?

Throughout all of this, the main storyline unfolds. Rebecca takes Darryl to Home Base to work on the case, with an ulterior motive: to impress Greg enough with her kindness and attention to Darryl’s case that he’ll think she’s a good person. Greg’s not impressed; in fact, a waitress tells Rebecca, “I know you! You’re that lady on the dart board in the storage room!” As Greg’s gone home, Rebecca decides to call it a day, but Darryl tries to convince her to pour everything she has into the case for him, underscoring his love for his daughter with a song about dads’ love for their daughters. “I love my daughter, but not in a creepy way,” he sings.

Rebecca and Darryl talk to Madison, his daughter. She makes it clear that she wants to live with her dad, and Rebecca asks if she can think of anything that’ll help them win the custody case. She tells them that sometimes her mom leaves her home alone to go to a motel with her boss. “That’s something, right?” the girl asks. Indeed it is — it (along with a video Madison made on her YouTube channel, where she mentions that she’s home alone with her snails) is enough evidence for a judge to grant temporary custody to Darryl. This prompts another song — kind of a nah-nah-nah-boo-boo song where Rebecca sings to Greg about what a good person she is.

Greg is still unconvinced, and refuses to accept her apologies or validate her by complimenting her work on the case. She follows him into the break room, flummoxed (and sees her face on the dartboard — “Wow, either you really hate me or you’re super good at darts”😂), and convinces herself that the reason he’s not validating her is because she only got temporary custody for Darryl. Of course, that’s not the reason at all, but she hatches a plan: she’ll get Darryl full custody by planting $10K in his ex, Stacy’s, suitcase. That’s too much money to take to the Cayman Islands, and Stacy will get arrested. (She tells Darryl and Madison her plan, and as she walks off, Madison says, “Oh, she’s bananas.”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Episode 5
Madison and Darryl
Photo Credit: Greg Gayne/The CW

As she plants the money in Stacy’s suitcase, Stacy sees her and asks what the hell she’s doing. Stacy gets the point across to Rebecca that even though she’s made mistakes, she wants what’s right for Madison. Rebecca realizes that she’s doing all of this because of her own childhood issues, and becuase she’s made Greg some sort of moral arbiter in her life (“Who the hell is Greg?” Stacy wonders aloud). She and Rebecca head back to Home Base, where she and Darryl (who’s still sad to have found out that she was sleeping with her boss all along) agree to come up with a more amenable agreement, for Madison’s sake.

The episode wraps up nicely, kind of like sitcoms of my childhood, with everyone reasonably happy. The good person in Paula comes out when she decides, for Tim’s family’s sake (but definitely not his sake, because he’s garbage) to keep quiet and not have him deported. Greg’s still not happy with Rebecca at all — he doesn’t think she’s a good person — but he realizes that she’s a good friend (to others, not him), because of how she resolved things in the custody case. But what of Josh?

Josh, remember, was told by Father Brah that it’s not his thoughts, but his actions, that dictate whether he’s a good person. He invites Rebecca for some boba, and over the drink confesses that he is very, VERY attracted to her … but he loves Valencia and plans to remain faithful to her. Rebecca really only hears the part about his attraction — it echoes in her head over and over — and she’s elated at the end of the episode, as she and Joyce (the homeless lady) jump around excitedly over what Josh said.

I wasn’t expecting an attraction confession from Josh this early on — I’m excited to see what happens next week, in the Thanksgiving episode. In the meantime, pipe in, in the comments section. What was your favorite part of tonight’s episode?

 

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend airs Monday nights at 8/7c on The CW.

All photos courtesy of and © 2015 The CW Network, LLC.