'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' recap: Dream ghosts and the best joke ever
Season 1 | Episode 15 | “Josh Has No Idea Where I Am! ” | Aired March 21, 2016
This week Crazy Ex-Girlfiriend finally changed course and went in the direction I’ve been hoping for and did so in one of the best-written, most laugh out loud funny episodes of the series. When we last saw Rebecca, she’d just seen Josh and Valencia make up after Josh confessed to kissing Rebecca. She was planning to follow Josh to Hawaii, but he had canceled his trip and, well, suddenly Rebecca wasn’t in a vacationing mood anyway. So she boarded a plane to New York instead, with plans to return to her old job and her old life. It seemed like she was going to be the crazy ex-girlfriend no more, but more because she felt rejected than because she’d grown much.
Enter: The dream ghost. Rebecca finds herself seated next to her therapist, Dr. Akopian (you know, the one she’s been canceling on week after week), who says it’s a perfect time for a session. Instead of following through on the therapy, Rebecca takes some sleeping pills and passes out, where she starts chatting with Dream Dr. Akopian, who is an all-powerful, glorious singing Dream Ghost. Backed by Ricki Lake and Amber Riley (of Glee fame), she sings the showstopping “Dream Ghost” number and explains that she’s come to Rebecca as a vaguely magical trope to help her work through the issues that are plaguing her subconscious. For Rebecca, those issues all boil down to one question: Why doesn’t anyone ever love her?
It’s worth noting that before they dive into unraveling all the problems plaguing Rebecca under the surface, we get the best joke of the entire series, in which Rebecca lists what she wants do if she has access to magic ghost traveling powers. She wants to haunt Hitler and get him to rethink a few things, see what’s in Oprah’s bathroom and—BEST JOKE OF THE SERIES—travel to nearest planet with intelligent life and see a play. I can’t stop thinking about traveling to the nearest planet with intelligent life to see a play. It is just the BEST JOKE.
In one of the most clever takes on the It’s a Wonderful Life plot that I’ve ever seen, Dream Ghost and Rebecca take a journey through some of her formative memories of love. We see her as a child, when she saved up her money and concocted an elaborate plan to fly to see her dad on Spring Break, only to have her mom come pick her up on day two. The kicker? Kid Rebecca always blamed her mom, but the truth was that her dad just didn’t want her around. Instead of ruining Rebecca’s relationship with her dad, her mom took the blame and never told her that he just didn’t want his daughter around. This, Dream Ghost explains, is proof that her mom really loved her. Rebecca is unimpressed. A mother’s love is a given, she says. Even serial killers have mothers who love them. She means real love. Like boy/girl love (and yes, she knows that’s heteronormative of her to say).
Next, Dream Ghost and Rebecca journey to Harvard, for Rebecca’s college days. She was almost in a musical stage adaptation of Moby Dick in college, but she quit halfway through. Why? Because she started sleeping with the douchey senior who was directing the play, only to find out he was sleeping with another girl in the play, too. Rebecca overlooked the nerdy guy who might have really loved her, but Dream Ghost says that’s not the point. The point is that Rebecca really loved rehearsing for the play. At this point, I thought the plot was about to take a turn in which Rebecca gave up her career as a lawyer to pursue acting. After all, I’ve thought all along that she was just projecting emotions onto Josh that weren’t really accurate, that what she really loved was the time in her life (theater camp) that Josh represented, rather than Josh himself.
But then we Dream Ghost to the present, where Rebecca’s friends are worrying over her in West Covina. Thinking Rebecca was out of town in Hawaii, Paula took a personal day and used Rebecca’s apartment for a relaxing staycation away from her husband and kids. Josh came looking for Rebecca (who hadn’t been answering his calls and texts) and Paula realized that Rebecca wasn’t in Hawaii with Josh, after all. Next, Darryl comes looking for Rebecca, who missed work without calling, texting or emailing. Then, finally, even Greg is looking for her. By the time the Dream Ghost of West Covina Present takes Rebecca to see what’s happening in her absence, her friends have figured out where she is (because Paula is a REAL friend and has all of Rebecca’s passwords and a nose for snooping) and have moved on to worrying about how sad they’ll be when she leaves. At first, Rebecca is reluctant to accept that this is proof is that people love her—but then Dream Ghost freezes time so Rebecca can take a look at Greg’s call log. When he thought she was missing, he called every hospital and morgue in the area because he was that worried about her.
When Rebecca gets off the plane in New York, she’s had the kind of epiphany that you need to have before a second season and she hops right back on a plane to California. She’s back in West Covina before her friends even leave her apartment (which doesn’t seem super plausible, but whatever, let’s chalk it up to Dream Ghost magic). By then, Paula has shown Josh an envelope full of pictures of him that Rebecca had printed (which, in the time of camera phones and Instagram, is about as concerning as him finding a Josh Shrine in her closet) and he has no choice but to confront her about her feelings for him. He seems totally flabbergasted, like their kiss provided absolutely no hint that she might like him like him. Josh isn’t known for his sharp mind though, so we’ll let that go.
The point is, Rebecca seems poised to tell Josh she’s over him. She gave Greg a very meaningful, OTP-hope-rejuvenating hug. And, most importantly, she seems to have really, finally (hopefully) grown beyond being the crazy ex-girlfriend. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be imagining myself traveling to the nearest plant with intelligent life to see a play, probably for the rest of all time.
