Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has made it perfectly clear that Rebecca’s track record when it comes to healthy decision-making is, at best, questionable. She’s not alone in that—Paula, Josh, Greg, Valencia, and even poor old Hector have all shown that they don’t always make the best judgment calls. In “Who’s That Cool Girl Josh is Dating?,” a solid mid-season finale, episode writer Michael Hitchcock reminds audiences of two things about all those Rebecca decisions. First, while Rebecca’s choices may be more intrusive and/or catastrophic than those of your average person, the initial impulses aren’t that far off from many people out there. Second, she has an uncanny knack for drawing other people into those bad decisions, creating a feedback loop that drives everyone involved just a little bit nuts.
It’s not totally fair to pin this all on Rebecca. Hitchcock’s episode, directed by Jude Weng, makes it clear that Valencia’s complicit in the sneaky creepy hijinks that drive the episode. Their initial impulse to research Anna Hicks (Brittany Snow in a solid guest turn) is mutual, as is the trolling of Josh’s Instagram feed that prompts the discovery of Anna in the first place. When they head out to “get to the bottom of this,” no one’s dragging anyone behind them, and no one’s hesitant, but by episode’s end, Valencia and Rebecca are firmly in “That Text Was Not Meant for Josh!” territory, and the question of how they get there—and what, if anything, about Rebecca brings out these impulses in her friends—gets more and more interesting the longer it’s considered.
Here’s the thing: after I first saw this episode, I took a few days to think it over, and was mostly interested in how exactly Rebecca’s energy rubs off on people. It seemed in season one that perhaps the musical fantasies were, in a way, contagious, and while it sometimes seemed that Paula was a classic enabler, Donna Lynne Champlin’s standout first season song “After Everything I’ve Done for You (That You Didn’t Ask For” offered an alternate perspective: Rebecca may not have blessed these choices outright, but she certainly welcomed and encouraged those she did know about. As I continued to think about this particular episode, I thought it was about how Valencia, who seems basically run-of-the-mill neurotic, suddenly starts agreeing to really unhealthy things, with or without peer pressure.
But it’s not, is it? Valencia may not have the sneaky skills down pat, but she’s the one who comes up with the fake names. She’s the one who steals Anna’s keys, and figures out her security code (“I knew that bitch weighed herself”), and by the time they’ve broken into the salon, she’s the one with the stone-cold demeanor. Like Paula in the first season, Valencia isn’t being pushed into these choices, and unlike Paula, there’s not even any pretense that her actions are designed to help Rebecca achieve anything. Valencia’s there because of, and for, herself. Josh may have told Anna that they were both nuts, but Rebecca especially so, but this particular set of bad decisions is entirely mutual.