TV

Girls: A Very Special Episode

This episode of Girls was all about Hannah, Marnie and Shoshannah, fitting after we spent last week learning why Jessa is the way she is. It was a complicated episode, and I’m not totally sure that I liked it. Let’s deal with one Girl at a time.

Marnie is still feeling very adrift, working at her hostessing job (that she apparently was not fired from when she left during her shift with Booth Jonathan several weeks ago). She finds out that Charlie has created some kind of app and is suddenly mega-rich (or rich enough, at least), hanging out in an ultra cool workspace with other beautiful, tech-savvy people. Marnie goes to see him, both to congratulate him and to gawk, and he immediately asks her if she needs money. While it’s nice to see passive Charlie suddenly holding all the cards, I am also starting to feel that Marnie is not being allowed to evolve. Like the other members of the main cast, she seems content to flail around at the same level of maturity she was at when the season began, and the trouble with that is that only the supporting men in the cast seem to be able to change.

We see this phenomenon again in Adam, who is attending an AA meeting when he gets set up with the daughter of one of his fellow recovering alcoholics. She turns out to be Shiri Appleby, of Roswell fame, and they have a completely nice, normal date that’s only slightly marred by Adam’s summing up of his relationship with Hannah. Hannah, meanwhile, is very unhappily dealing with a visit from her parents, which is also triggering an obsessive compulsive disorder that hasn’t manifested since high school in which she has to repeat things in multiples of eight. Her parents end up grumpily taking her to a therapist, and there’s a very Hannah moment where she insists that nothing is wrong until the therapist remarks that hers is a “classic case,” and then she spills the details of her symptoms in order to prove that she is indeed special and unique.

Finally, there is Shoshannah, who is perhaps starting to become dissatisfied with Ray. He doesn’t want to go to a party thrown by one of her classmates, so she goes alone and is flirted with by the attractive doorman. They end up making out in what looks like the mail room, while Ray stays in Shosh’s apartment, reading and talking to Marnie about her dreams of becoming a singer. This seems like it could actually be an interesting story, given that Marnie might lack the grit and scrappiness needed to carve out a career in the arts. We’ll have to see where it goes.

This episode wasn’t bad, per se, but I really had trouble getting past the reveal that Hannah has a form of OCD. It felt like a trait cooked up in service of the story, especially since we’ve never seen Hannah act compulsively before (and that definitely seems like something she would have tried to mine for her writing already). I’ll be interested to see if it comes up again.

TAGS: girls | lena dunham

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