Is Caroline (Beth Behrs) really in it for the long haul? That’s what Max (Kat Dennings) was left wondering as Caroline left her standing in a ladies room at a high end department store with a group of Middle Eastern woman and some rings for sale. The rings were Caroline’s and she abandoned Max to sell them while she ran off to lunch with former friends from her former life.
Max and Caroline desperately need a new oven if they are going to make their cupcake business work. The current oven is a deathtrap that, when the pilot light goes out, requires a game of toss the match into the gas: “Is this a game poor people play?”
To get the oven of Max’s dreams Caroline pulls out her secret stash of jewelry in order to sell them. It’s fair at this point to wonder exactly why Caroline has been holding back on these allegedly $2500 dollar items until now. There is no real good answer for that.
Max thinks that Caroline is holding on to the rings for personal reasons; as in she hopes to be rich again one day. The rings are the catalyst of a relatively good plot that does what’s best for 2 Broke Girls, they get Max and Caroline out of the diner for most of the episode.
Not entirely however, as we suffer what is apparently the diner’s first employee meeting and are forced to endure a meaningless, unfunny, subplot about a spat between Oleg (Jonathan Kite) and Han (Matthew Moy) that amounts to Oleg smells bad. It’s clear that even the writers don’t care about this subplot as it is devoid of jokes and ends unresolved; Oleg still stinks.
Enough complaining, back to what was good; though there will be more complaining later. What I enjoyed about “And the Pop Up Sale” was Max showing how much she cared about Caroline by getting upset when Caroline ditched her during their makeshift sale.
Kat Dennings is terrific at playing tough but vulnerable, as we saw during the brief Max and Johnny courtship, and she’s very good in “And the Pop Up Sale” at allowing a little of Max’s insecurity to mesh with her deeply cynical view of the world that’s been well established since episode one.
We get the strong sense that Caroline is really the first person to ever get this close to Max and that dynamic, Max growing as a person, letting herself love Caroline, is rich ground for both character work and comedy as this episode demonstrated.
I also love the heart and warmth that Beth Behrs brings to Caroline. When 2 Broke Girls isn’t desperately forcing unfunny sex jokes into every scene the writers manage to find a few nice moments and many of those moments are extension Behrs’ lovable generosities.
Random notes:
- More same sex love vibes this week as the girls shared a rare hug and Max joked about Caroline asking her to marry her and then joked about Caroline sneakily undressing her as they clenched. We’re stretching here but the show is acknowledging what many fans are saying about Caroline and Max as a ‘will they or won’t they’ couple. I don’t see the show going in that direction but it’s notable enough to discuss each week especially with such a paucity of gay characters on TV, outside of Glee.
- Two uncomfortable sex jokes before the opening theme this week. Ugh. The writers could be forgiven for all the sex jokes if the jokes were as funny as they are awkward and shoehorned uncomfortably into bites of awkward conversation.