Girls Recap: Everyone from Brooklyn and two thirds of Manhattan go to a party, someone smokes crack and Hannah maybe finally gets what she wants from Adam?
Last week was more Girl than Girls, as we focused on Hannah’s solo trip home, which concluded with no rent money for her and a sex injury for her dad. This week, it’s back to full on Girlsdom (or Girls-dumb, as it were) as they go on a group outing to Bushwick. While I have been to many parts of Brooklyn, Bushwick is not one of them. So I can’t speak with authority about what the rest of it looks like, but the party they go to seems to be like if Burning Man was unpacked off a barge in an industrial area. Looking at what each girl is wearing it’s clear they had different expectations of this party: Hannah appears to be going to a barbecue, Shoshanna is out for tea with her aunt (the one who thought her place was the perfect bachelorette pad), Marnie is attending an Upper East Side lady’s handbag launch and Jessa is auditioning for whatever the bird equivalent of Cats on Broadway might be. But let’s see just what they got dressed up (or down) for…
You’re invited… to see what sort of problems these Girls got up to at the party »
Girls Problem: High expectations of a party.
We remember getting excited for parties and worrying that if it wasn’t amazing, our heart would be broken. Since we’re sure that Jessa’s seen her fair share of full moon parties on Thai beaches and found herself dancing in musty basements in Paris, we have no doubt her expectations of what would make The Best Party Ever are fairly untenable for any event. When they get to the party she is relieved that “all of Brooklyn and two thirds of Manhattan” is there. It feels like the first time we’ve seen her genuinely happy.
Ten Years From Now: The parties she remembers (and a few of the ones she cannot) will be immortalized as the best parties.
Girls Problem: Your ex-boyfriend has moved on after two weeks.
Questionable Goods is playing and Marnie puts on a big show for her friends about how she has to say hi to Charlie lest he perceive her as even more of a bitch. His band has moved on from the duo and become a full-fledged foursome; there’s even a crowd watching. Marnie looks proud as they cheer, and for a moment we have the sinking worry that she’s going to try and get him back all over again. After graciously congratulating him, she looks on dumbfounded after meeting his new piece Audrey, who looks like she still listens to MGMT and might’ve been coughed out of the barge that voyaged from Burning Man. Audrey has no idea Marnie is Charlie’s ex and instead mistakes her for “one of those Real Housewives.” (Such a great burn!) After commiserating to a hot stranger on a couch, she looks for her next set of ears and finds Elijah (Hannah’s gay college ex). He scolds her for selfishly droning on about herself, and reveals something we didn’t know: Marnie and he made out after Rent rehearsals while he was dating Hannah. (Enough with the Rent references, Girls!) He slaps her after she criticizes his performance in said play, and that makes a total of three men in one night who rebuff her.
Ten Years From Now: Since Marnie conveniently forgot about her makeout with Elijah, we’re guessing she’ll dust this whole night and Charlie’s moving on under the rug of self-preservation she’s placed in the living room that is her ego.
Girls Problem: Running into the guy you still pine for when you weren’t mentally prepared to see him.
Unlike Marnie, who knew Charlie would be there, Hannah is shocked when Jessa points out a guy with many lesbian friends that turns out to be Adam. We loved Jessa’s line: “He does sort of look like the original man.” Hannah’s shock is partly due to him not having texted her back for weeks (she thought he was dead) and partly (like us) that he’s wearing a shirt and is breathing air outside his apartment. She does that thing that shy girls who have crushes do and lurks around a corner and spies on him. And just like a shy girl she splits when he spots her—it’s like Sam in the cloakroom when Jake Ryan tries to talk to her at the dance in Sixteen Candles! Later she meets his friend Tako and learns Adam is in AA and loves books. This new info (the AA, not the reading) has changed the way she sees him: he is now a baby bird who has fallen out of a nest and so she succumbs to his silly dance moves.
Ten Years From Now: Hannah will know that someone being in recovery isn’t like what Brandon and Dylan on 90210 made it look like.
Girls Problem: You smoke crack thinking it was pot.
Of course this would happen to Shoshanna! Don’t you wish you could’ve seen how this all went down? A girl with a sequined skirt, ballet flats and a bow ring smoking off a crack stem? It’s like if the cast of Gossip Girl recited lines from New Jack City. Shoshanna is of course very high and very horrified. Jessa reassures her that: “Crack can be really fun under the right circumstances,” and offers to be her crack spirit guide, a role that she fills for less than one minute before dumping it on Ray. He also fills the role for less than one minute before Shoshanna takes off running the streets of Bushwich like Tom Cruise in, well, any Tom Cruise movie (the guy really likes to run). She loses her skirt, we’re guessing due to mobility issues but it could be the sequins were messing with her crack brain? Finally Shoshanna lets Ray catch up and uses her self-defense moves to immobilize him. Realizing what she’s done she clears out of her crack haze and gives him an apologetic non-sexual massage. (Nothing says sorry like…)
Ten Years From Now: There’s no way Shoshanna will live this down. I can just imagine Jessa at the family reunion threatening to tell everyone about the time Shoshanna smoked crack. In order to keep her quiet, she’ll be forced to look after Jessa’s kids for a week while she goes to an ashram to meditate.
Girls Problem: Your boss shows up at the party you’re at and wants to hang out.
For someone with very little patience, Jessa does a good job of being gentle with Jeff about the fact she invited him to the party unknowingly. Perhaps because of her niceness, he calls her a tease later in the night when she won’t go home with him—maybe she should’ve scolded him like a crusty punk so he’d get the picture? How long for this world is Jessa’s job?
Ten Years From Now: Let’s be honest, Jessa won’t even remember Jeff’s name, or the name of his wife, or the name of his kids. She will, however, remember her fab feather vest and wonder what ever happened to it…
Girls Problem: You hit rock bottom (a.k.a. the pavement) with a guy.
Hannah and Adam’s track record for healthy communication is filled with poor timing. Faced with how little she knows about the guy (he does love books after all), Hannah lets out her frustrations with him. His guilt over throwing her off the bike doesn’t keep him from sticking up for himself. The speech he gives her, in which he shows that he has so precisely sized her up, gives us a newfound appreciation for him for no other reason than he has been paying attention to her all those times we thought he was tuning her out. How do you respond when the person you were trying to get closer to tells you the reason you don’t know more about him is because you never asked? When he shouts, “Do you want me to be your boyfriend?” at her it’s from a place of pure frustration, but for Hannah he might as well have gone down on one knee.
Ten Years From Now: We hope Hannah is a better listener. There’s no way she’ll get the upper hand in a fight with a guy if she doesn’t listen closely to what he says so she can turn it around and throw it in his face.
Girls airs Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on HBO Canada. Tune in for our recap next week where we hope the titlecard for Girls is as awesome as this week’s Enter The Void homage.
