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Girls Recap: Hannah Is The Villain

Well, it’s taken me a season and some change, but I think I finally understand this show. I balked at liking it for a very long time, so turned off was I by Hannah’s abhorrent personality and behavior, feeling that I was missing something since she was clearly the series’ protagonist. But after this week, I can’t help but feel like Hannah is supposed to be the villain, and Marnie the hero (at least for this episode). This feels right to me, and so I enjoyed this episode more than any other in the show’s short history, with the possible exception of “The Crackcident.”

It’s fitting, then, that this episode also involves members of the main cast doing drugs. This time Hannah has been given an assignment from an online publication that pays $200 per article (harrumph) and whose editor encourages Hannah to leave behind her “comfort zone” and do drugs or have illicit sex or something else terribly original that no one’s every written about before. She goes to her building’s resident junkie to ask him where she can find some cocaine, managing to offend him when he reveals that he’s clean, but not so much that he doesn’t procure some coke for her after all. She and Elijah snort some of it mid-afternoon and head to a warehouse party (this sequence of events is amazing, and leads Hannah wearing a yellow mesh tank top and nothing else, snorting more coke off of a toilet seat), but the party grinds to a halt when Elijah confesses that he had sex with Marnie.

Marnie, meanwhile, is plugging away at her pretty-person waitressing job when she runs into Booth Jonathan, the artist who vowed that he would have sex with her in season one, and like Chekhov’s gun, it’s clearly about to go down in this episode. He drags her away from work (uh…) to his pretty amazing place, where he locks her in an art installation that mainly features television screens showing different gross things while Duncan Sheik’s “Barely Breathing” plays, and Marnie emerges from this nightmare proclaiming Booth “so f*cking talented,” though that could just be from the PTSD. They have sex, during which Booth Jonathan asks Marnie to look at a statue beside his bed and describe its state of mind, and Marnie laughs when it’s all over, though it’s unclear if that’s because the sex was terrible or confusing or she’s just in awe of how impulsive she’s being on that particular day.

Enter Hannah, who storms in with Elijah and Laird the junkie in tow (Laird has been following her on her vision quest all day), who knows Booth’s address because Marnie used to make her walk by it hoping to get a glimpse of him — such a great detail. She tells Marnie she knows about her and Elijah, and Marnie seems genuinely sorry that she found out that way, but Hannah goes on a rant about how Marnie is no longer “the good friend” and Hannah has no interest in pretending to like what she likes or do wholesome “good friend” things, but they can still be friends as long as Marnie acknowledges that she is now the “bad friend,” which Marnie nods and does through tears. Hannah spins on her heels and goes back to her apartment with Laird, who she immediately starts making out with in the stairwell, and who seems so shocked and grateful for some female attention I have to wonder A. How old he is and B. If there was a prison stint somewhere in his past. And that’s it! Until next week, when we will hopefully hear more from Jessa or (please, oh please) Shoshonna.

What did you guys think of the episode?

TAGS: girls | HBO

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