When Nicky Met Abby...

Two and a half seasons in to the run of New Girl seems like a weird point at which to meet the titular new girl's older sister and only sibling for the very first time — a girl who's never appeared, to my recollection, in any of Jess's flashbacks to her youth, for example.

But as we get a quick backgrounder for Abby, the notion that she might have basically never come up in Jess's conversations starts to become clearer: while Jess is a sweet, goofy apple-polisher who reacted to her parents' divorce by trying to keep the peace in virtually any sort of conflict she ever experienced from that point forward, Abby went another way. To wit: she's been arrested, their mother needs Jess to go bail her out and put her on a plane home, and from their mother's manner, this is not the first entry in Abby's jacket. (Yeah, I watch crime shows too.)

Abby's legal issues put a crimp in Jess's plans — not just because she has to cancel her attendance at a soup-based dinner party thrown by Winston's girlfriend Bertie, but because she has to keep everyone (except Cece, who knows what Abby's about) from finding out the truth about why she's appearing without notice. Because she especially wants to keep Abby and Nick apart so that Abby's craziness doesn't ruin their relationship or embarrass her, her excuses get more and more desperate and sketchy, and even Nick can detect a tone — except he misinterprets the situation and assumes that she is embarrassed to introduce him to Abby and not the other way around.

After a (failed) reprise of his old role as Schmidt's wingman — this time, as he crashes a bar mitzvah to hit on a Hebrew school teacher; normal stuff — Nick shows growth by coming home and asking Jess about it directly. But Jess has hardly even denied it before Abby emerges from Jess's room and tells him that Jess has actually been hiding her. And her first-ever interaction with Nick shows how right Jess was.

Jess: WHAT does that MEAN?
Nick: Nothing.
Abby: Everything.