It’s tempting to watch Girls as a story of the long and difficult road toward adulthood—but it would be a mistake to read the show that way. Progress is a notion the show problematizes; adulthood, too. That’s never been clearer than it has this week, which begins with Hannah’s parents Tad and Loreen—among the most stable of the characters on the show—coming out of couples therapy. Apparently their marriage isn’t going as well as it appears to be from the outside. And things are about to get a lot worse. In the lobby of their therapist’s office, Tad confesses that there’s something he’s been meaning to say: “I’ve been thinking lately…that…I’m gay.”
It’s a wonderful little scene, made all the more so by the excellent work of Peter Scolari and Becky Anne Baker—particularly Baker, who plays Loreen’s reaction to the news as a full spectrum of emotions ranging from disbelieving laughter to wounded anger. It’s a delicate balance to pull off, but pull it off Baker does, and she proceeds to maintain this balancing act throughout the show, utterly convincing in every scene as a woman who’s just had the foundations of her entire life pulled out from under her. In every scene she’s either crying, laughing hysterically, or yelling. Sometimes all three. But she’s got a tenure party to go to, and she doesn’t have the luxury of breaking down.
These scenes with Hannah’s parents are so delightful, compelling, and refreshingly different that it’s almost a shame to return to New York and check in with the young people. Hannah’s still substitute teaching, surviving awkward encounters with Fran in the hall and being inappropriately friendly with some of her students. One student in particular: Cleo, played by Maude Apatow. Hannah and Cleo’s banter is legitimately funny (Cleo regales the older girl with tales of a classmate who got HPV in Poland when he had sex with a girl in—wait for it—Auschwitz), but it’s all lead-up to one of the most painful scenes I’ve ever seen on HBO…and I’m including the scene in Game of Thrones where Theon gets his dick cut off. Anyway, Cleo wants to get a piercing between classes, and Hannah bafflingly agrees to go with her. (Seriously, how has she not been fired yet?) At the piercing place, Hannah suggests a frenulum piercing, then proceeds to watch as a man drives a needle through the under-tongue skin of her 14-year-old student, who’s screaming with pain the whole time.
Meanwhile, things with Fran aren’t going so well. When Hannah tries to get him to go out on a second date, he declines because he’s trying to be “less attracted to drama.” Hannah’s response to this is full of so many different layers of simultaneous self-deception that I barely know where to start: first she claims that Fran sees her as a “wild horse” that needs taming, calls his (at this point, nonexistent) feelings for her “the new frontier of misogyny,” then ends by saying “I’m up for it!” But Fran just wants her to leave him alone; he says, correctly, “you’re not the person you think you are, that’s the confusion here.”
It’s not the worst relationship development of the episode: that honor would go to Marnie and Desi, who need to break up and fast. Desi spent their entire advance on a couple of German distortion pedals that “gave My Bloody Valentine their sound”; when Marnie justifiably freaks out on him, he storms out only to come back later with an engagement ring. I found the proposal scene cringeworthy. The whole time I was begging for Marnie to say no, but she accepted, and the sweet piano music playing in the background makes me think that Lena Dunham wants us to see this as a good thing. We’ll see.
Shoshanna’s date—awkward though it was—looked perfect by comparison. Scott, the young soup mogul who turned Shosh down for a job before asking her on a date, might actually be the person she needs, at least for now. Shoshanna sees him as an opportunity to be a rich guy’s wife, but he doesn’t want that: he expresses confidence that she’ll find a job soon because she’s “a doer,” won’t hear any of it when she calls herself a failure, and apparently share’s Shoshannah’s affinity for The Good Wife. He’s not even phased when Shoshanna takes Jessa’s advice to “surprise him” way too literally and segues into some truly awful dirty talk at the table: “But enough about the past, let’s look toward the future. Like, I want to know about the future of your cock.” (I won’t write all of Shoshanna’s hilariously awful dirty talk here; suffice it to say it includes the words “slimy” and “pickle.”) Scott may not last for long, but at least for now, he’s making her smile.
But it’s the adults who are the true stars of this episode—not just Tad and Loreen, but their friends Avi and Shanaz, who are throwing a dinner party to celebrate Loreen’s tenure. The four friends are old and set in their ways, but not without their own dramas: they complain about their kids, snipe about “the bitchy classics professor,” and struggle in their marriages. Tad wonders aloud if he’s too old to make a change. Avi makes a pass at Loreen in the bedroom, reminding her of their fling the previous summer.
The point is, adulthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You never truly settle, you just bring your drama into a new phase in life. At the end of the episode, dramas old and new come full circle when Hannah calls up to ask her mom if she thinks she’s a dramatic person—but Loreen only wants to tell her daughter that her father’s gay. They talk past each other for a few minutes before Hannah will listen, and her reaction is appropriately speechless: “Um…” All the while, Hannah’s reading a copy of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling, probably preparing to teach it the next day. But I couldn’t help but think of the way that all the characters in Girls, young and old alike, are basically yearlings, stumbling through life on wobbly legs like baby deer. There is no growing up; only growing old. But on the bright side, it’s never too late to make a change.
Odds and Ends:
• On her date, Shoshanna calls Hannah, Marnie, and Jessa her “failure friends.” This is so casually cruel, and so revealing, too.
• I’m sorry but what exactly is the point of Jessa in this show? It’s been weeks since the show has done anything interesting with this character. At this point I care more about what happens to Ray than what happens to Jessa. And I don’t think it’s the fault of the character—the fact is that she’s been painfully underwritten this season.
