Girls Recap: Marnie moves out, Shoshanna loses her v-card and that’s one plot twist we didn’t see coming in the season finale!
It’s the final episode: does it feel like Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna have water-birthed their truth yet? Last week, that concept came to us courtesy of Tally, the former Oberlin classmate whose literary success was a catalyst for Hannah to seek out opinions on her own essays, and for the other girls to examine where they are with their lives. The results ranged from juvenile to serious: Shoshanna tried online dating, Marnie flung a toothbrush and insults at Hannah and the two threatened to move out, and Jessa listened as her ex-boss Katherine tell her that the drama she was drawn to was crippling her from becoming the person she is meant to be. But these decisions didn’t manifest action until this episode, which, I have to say was by far my favourite yet (second: that crazy party in Bushwick) and felt like an hour passed because so much happened. So grab a plate of leftover wedding cake and let’s dig in.
Wait, wedding cake? What were the girls up to in the finale? »
Girls Problem: Your Best Friend (You Thought Was) Forever is moving out under tense circumstances.
Friendships and roommates are funny things. The goodbye between Hannah and Marnie wasn’t so much tense, but resigned. Hannah, who rarely seems to let something go without a painfully awkward vivisection of its awfulness lets Marnie leave with barely a word of protest. Is it because Adam awaits upstairs? His remark that he might move in feels offhand compared to the new-age-y advice about toxic relationships and shedding skin he gives her a moment before. What kind of ambiguous situation is it when your boyfriend wants to move in, but move into the second bedroom?
Ten Years From Now: Hannah will have moving down to a science as non-friend roommates won’t put up with her inability to pay rent and the eating of their yogurt.
Girls Problem: You’re couch-surfing until you find a new apartment.
Last week’s fight between Hannah and Marnie didn’t feel like a friendship-ender to us (despite the wound calling). That Marnie is actually moving out is surprising, and speaks more to some quarter-life crisis she’s having than any irresolvable anger. Marnie wants to be away from Hannah’s constant need for validation and sympathy so she can wallow in her own self-pity and confusion about her life. Shoshanna, with all her frivolous self-help books and Sex and the City posters is like a sleep-away camp for twenty-somethings. For all of her insecurity and over-analyzing, Shoshanna is like a hamster on a wheel, upbeat about constantly running and seemingly getting nowhere.
Ten Years From Now: We haven’t had a lot of Marnie and Shoshanna one-on-one time except for the day in the abortion clinic waiting room. We could actually see these two being the kind of friends who don’t have deep conversations, but hang out when Marnie wants someone to gush over her and Shoshanna wants to be with someone who seems more mature.
Girls Problem: Working with friends means you can’t lie to ditch work.
Did Hannah never have an after-school job when she was in high school or college? Working with friends, the first thing you learn is that calling in sick requires a black ops level of secrecy and intelligence. Hannah somehow doesn’t realize that because she and Ray have the same friendship circle (and hello, pictures from awesome parties get posted on Facebook) he’s going to find out about her faking unless it’s to go do something that takes place off the grid. For all of Ray’s complaining about the frivolity of ladies though, he does enjoy indulging them, and he kindly lets her go nonetheless.
Ten Years From Now: In the future, Hannah should avoid common excuses and go with female-centric problems (“this is my one chance to see my dreams realized!” type of crap) that will make Ray (and future bosses) feel like Gérard Depardieu in My Father The Hero hoping to look cool to his daughter.
Girls Problem: You get married to fast track the journey to adulthood.
Katherine’s little chat with Jessa seems to have struck a nerve. So when a knight-in-shining-condo appears with flowers—even if it’s the mash-ups guy who wanted to have a threesome with her and Marnie—Jessa gives him a chance. This leads to a two-week whirlwind courtship that no one knows about because, we’re assuming, Jessa had to get over some shame before showing him off. We love that Jessa’s vows tell us the story of how she fell in love with Thomas: despite finding him creepy and boring and then revolting, she eventually realized he was brilliant (or that being creepy, boring and revolting are just the hallmarks of adulthood). When he calls her “baby bird” it’s as if he knows that’s what she is, hoping this is the push out of the nest she needs to learn how to fly. When a trying-too-hard song about loving one’s ladybits blasts in celebration of their love, she looks like she wants to distance herself from his dancing rather than join in, so we’re unsure she’s even attracted to this guy. To drive the point home, Hannah asks her in a private bathroom moment if Jessa feels like a real adult now, and she gives it a moment’s thought and says: yes.
Ten Years From Now: This marriage will be as long forgotten as Lady’s “Yankin’” song.
Girls Problem: You wore white to your cousin’s wedding.
Just as Ray makes an excellent Crack Spirit Guide, he proves his capabilities as Fashion Crisis Spirit Guide. Shoshanna spills her guts about her wearing-white anger but it’s more my-cousin-is-getting-married-and-I’m-still-a-virgin-and-oh-god-why-won’t-someone-love-me anger. In turn he confesses his attraction to her strangeness and propositions her. While Ray isn’t who we’d dream of losing our virginity to, seeing him quell the angsty Shoshanna and confess he understands the enormity of what they’re doing makes us happy it’s him.
Ten Years From Now: Shoshanna seems like one of those girls who, after the first time they have sex with a guy, will ask for the story of how he lost his virginity. We wish we could predict how she’ll spin her own deflowering, but we’re baffled as to how her brain works.
Girls Problem: You get a little freaked out by your boyfriend’s emotional vulnerability.
Hannah finally has Adam, but was she ready to have all his intense energy focused on her? She invites Elijah to move in with her even though he compared her looks to Camryn Manheim (not an insult, but maybe not a compliment either). Adam doesn’t take the news well—that is, the moving someone else in part, not the Manheim comment. Hannah told herself the offer was out of obligation and in her defense, when a guy is standoffish at the start, you still have a doubt hangover about the relationship even when he shows full commitment later on. But her assumption crushes Adam’s romantic intents and incites his anger in a similar way to the argument after the Bushwick party—it shows Hannah he is paying a lot more attention to her than she realizes. She admits she’s scared but that’s not a good enough excuse for him, because everyone is scared. Once he commits, he really commits, and he shouts, “You asked for this” referring back to that night. In what has to be the definitive way to end an argument on top: he gets hit by a passing van and won’t let her go to the hospital with him. She wanted to use an STD to make him feel bad, but now that same it’s-your-fault-I’m-sick trick is being used on her. Tables turned!
Ten Years From Now: Hannah is really not great at confrontation. As we saw with Marnie, and now with Adam, her go-to position is to bring up how aware she is of her flaws and the crushing enormity of her flaws. We hope in 10 years she has grown out of this because it’s really a tedious position to take.
Girls Problem: There’s nothing but ex-friends and ex-boyfriends populating the wedding you’re attending.
Poor Marnie. She’s trying to make a clean go of it and figure her life out and not only does she have to attend a party with Hannah, the friend she’s avoiding, but Charlie, the ex who gave her a punch to her self-esteem gut. As if stewing in an avoiding-people soup isn’t bad enough, she has to watch her friend marry the guy who she thought was cute but said friend dragged her away from. For the second time in just a few months, Marnie is left shocked and staring at a stage as life throws her lemons and she has nary a juicer, a pitcher nor some sugar with which to make lemonade. You’d think that this would make her vulnerable enough to take Charlie up on his suggestion they get it on in the bathroom, but she scoffs at him as if he was one of his girlfriend’s ironic T-shirts. There’s really no other choice for a girl dressed like J.Lo but to get drunk and hit on someone in the wedding party. We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with Thomas’s friend (played by SNL’s Bobby Moynihan), but the guy is clearly not someone she’d conjure up when making an inspiration board about who she wants to marry. (And you know Shoshanna has her making one.) But Marnie wants to party and she wants to party with him despite his having no game and being just as sad sack–like as her ex. She eats cake with her hands in a seductive food dance, asks him to pick cake out of her cleavage, and then grabs him for a kiss. Um, okay.
Ten Years From Now: Marnie will either pull a Charlotte and fall in love with this Harry or she’ll erase their hook-up from her consciousness because Marnie doesn’t seem like the type to revel in one-night stands.
Girls Problem: It does not seem better in the morning.
The highs of the party have dissipated into the lows of the after-party: a fight with your boyfriend, his wanting you to leave him alone (forever?), falling asleep on the F train to wake up in Coney Island with your bag stolen and only some leftover wedding cake to prove to you it was all real. It reminds me of that Of Montreal song “Party Crashing Us”—how intense love can be and how even if someone is confusing to you, it doesn’t mean they don’t know exactly what they want from you. For all the drama, Adam is Hannah’s first adult relationship and she needs to decide if she is mature enough to step up to the plate and hit the curveballs he’s pitching because there will be no half-assing it with this guy. In other words: there’s no just writing something on the subway at the last minute with this guy.
Ten Years From Now: Since this is the end, we are more concerned with 10 hours from now. We hope that Hannah goes to Adam and they figure it all out because these two weirdos are wonderful together. And 10 months from now (or whenever Girls comes back on our TVs), we hope that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Adam, because the show wouldn’t be the same without his pee-in-the-bathtub brand of bizarre.
