Winston: New Girl's Plot Sorbet

I've complained in the past that New Girl has mistreated the character of Winston, and I still stood by it as recently as two weeks ago. But this week's episode does something unusual by putting Winston's weirdness to effective use, and by "effective," I mean hilarious.

Chaos is erupting all around Winston in the latest episode: Jess and Cece are in an extremely passive-aggressive fight over a purse they both want; Coach and Schmidt are at odds over which of them is best equipped to defuse it (Coach thinks he has the advantage because he learned a lot about women by growing up with three sisters, Schmidt because of his past entanglement with Cece); and Nick's first date with Tran's granddaughter Kai has metastasized into a multi-day hang. It's the last of these that's the biggest problem for Winston, because amid all this he's supposed to be studying for his police exam, but adds an investigation into his suspicions about Kai and, he thinks, determines that she's homeless and turning Nick into her sugar daddy. NICK, you guys.

Because Winston is not a great detective yet, this turns out not to be the case. In fact, Kai is loaded, and the reason she hasn't gone to work in the past several days is that she doesn't need to ("It's a scam called consulting" - Nick). But Winston's one-man task force does demonstrate that he can choose one path of procrastination for more than a couple of ADD-riddled minutes at a time. But the shorter-lived ones -- which give us a break from the episode's actual stories -- make for some gorgeously giffable moments.

"Not enough!"

"How'm I gonna study if I can't turn the pages?!"

And even though Winston may not be front and centre plotwise, he does get to close out a very important runner and teach us a lesson about conflict resolution.

I look forward to Officer Winston using this gambit when he's walking the beat.