TV

Girls Recap: It Felt Like Nothing Happened

Poor Marnie. Now that she’s been fired from the art gallery, she has no way of making a living, and also no way to feel like she has her life together (or…to feel superior to Hannah). She has an interview at another gallery, but the owner, played by Lena Dunham’s own mother Laurie Simmons, tells her she doesn’t see her in the art world, and anyway there are hardly any curator jobs left, and Marnie decides to change course accordingly. She ends up taking a hostessing job through Shoshonna, who, when she’s not being aggressively adorable in bed with Ray, encourages her to find a “pretty person job,” and Marnie seems to really be drinking the Kool-Aid about how much money she could make/how little effort the gig requires besides looking cute.

That ends with a passive aggressive showdown between Hannah and Marnie, in which Hannah “innocently” draws a contrast between her “clean money” at Café Grumpy and Marnie’s pretty-person money, while Marnie gives it right back to her by implying that Hannah isn’t hot enough to make money as a hostess. Hannah’s being so obtuse and dismissive of Marnie in this episode, AGAIN, that I didn’t feel too bad for her, especially when she claims that a whole range of men are interested in her — “black men, Republicans, et al.”

It’s a ridiculous thing to say, and it’s not even true anymore, as Hannah and Sandy broke up earlier in the episode. Hannah frames it to Elijah and Marnie as though she kicked him to the curb because he doesn’t support women’s and gay rights, but we see that it went down a little differently. Hannah gave him an essay to read, and while it’s heartening to know that she’s gotten around to writing at least one essay, Sandy kept putting her off, saying he’d read it later. As it turns out, he had read it, he just didn’t like it, and didn’t want to tell her he didn’t like it. Hannah reacts to this about as well as you’d expect, rolling her eyes at the compliment that it was well-written because she KNOWS that, GOD, and picking a fight with him about his conservative beliefs despite growing up black in America. Sandy kicks her out of the apartment, and rightly so.

Hannah was spurred to press Sandy about the essay by Jessa, who is spending her days painting an enormous portrait of Thomas John in a Rodin-like pose. Thomas John politely patronizes Hannah for a few minutes (sidenote: Chris O’Dowd’s Irish accent isn’t being tamped down one bit anymore. I guess it was a losing battle) before departing for a meeting, leaving a literal basket of puppies in his wake. A normal person might have a heart attack over suddenly being given three super cute puppies to raise, but Jessa is completely unfazed, taking them to the park and telling Hannah that if Sandy isn’t reading her essays, he isn’t reading HER, because Thomas John looks at Jessa’s paintings the moment she’s done with them. Sure.

And then there’s Adam, who shows up stalker-like at Hannah’s apartment, where she is wearing some improbably cute pajamas, to demand a glass of milk and ignore her screams for him to leave her alone. She considers dialing 911 for a moment, pressing the button and not letting it ring, and of course two officers show up at her apartment door asking what the problem is. Hannah tries to lie that she didn’t call 911 but is quickly found out, and they haul Adam away once they look him up in the system and find he has two unpaid parking tickets and skipped a court date for a public urination charge. What a mess — and no one has even found out yet that Marnie and Elijah boned (except for George. Poor George). See you next week!

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