I’ve occasionally been a little irritated with this season of Girls for mismanaging its various storylines, seemingly dropping certain characters for episodes at a stretch just when things were starting to get interesting. So I was pleased that last night’s finale managed to give all the main characters a fair treatment, bringing their stories to a satisfying resolution while also managing to introduce new complications that are sure to pay off next year.

It was a finale full of sound and fury, but it began with a quiet moment: Hannah slipping out of class in the middle of a panic attack to catch a breath on the sidewalk outside. Fran comes after her to make sure she’s all right, and what follows is a quietly artful scene in which so much happens without seeming to happen at all. Last we saw Fran, he was keeping clear of Hannah because he didn’t want drama in his life, and you can see him still being cautious with her, especially when she admits that her heart really isn’t racing so much as it’s slowing. His body language shows that he’s torn between staying and walking away, but eventually he sits down, speaks kindly to her, and puts his hand softly on her back. “Is this okay?” he asks. She smiles. It is—and just like that, something’s changed.

Something’s changed for Shoshanna too, as we can see in an interview with a marketer played by SNL’s Aidy Bryant. In the beginning of the season Shosh was abrasive and overly confident in interviews; now she’s humble but still confident in her qualifications, communicating in a style that is open and not at all offputting. She gets the job offer on the spot, but gets the bad news in the very next breath—she’d need to move to Japan. “Japanese is super-easy to get the hang of,” the interviewer reassures her, “it’s like just four sounds that you kind of loop around and put together.” Nonetheless, Shoshannah is taken aback, and when she shares the news with her boyfriend the decision is complicated by his request that she should stay. “I’m going to be in love with you soon,” he says, which is either really sweet or really manipulative—perhaps a bit of both. Faced with a true dilemma—the job or the guy—she runs to Grumpy’s to talk to Ray, only to get some advice from his boss (Colin Quinn) instead, care of Sheryl Sandberg: “This is your moment to lean in. Grab a seat at the table and lean the fuck in.”

Ray may be seizing his own moment with Marnie, even if he doesn’t know it. Marnie and Desi are hanging out at Grumpy’s with a music mogul, and when Desi steps up to the counter to settle up Ray takes advantage of the situation to give Marnie’s fiance a piece of his mind: “I fucking hate you.” Desi backpedals with some samples of the doublespeak we’ve come to know him for (“I know we’re from different parts of the world, and I don’t expect everyone to get my whole Pacific Northwest thing”), but Ray doesn’t back down, and it’s super satisfying. In the course of Ray’s rant, we finally hear someone in the show call Desi a “douche”; and he goes on from there. “You underestimate Marnie, every fucking day. And because of that, you will never make her happy. You’ll try, and fuck up, and try, and fuck up, and every time she’ll smile and take you back.” It’s an effective speech—you can tell by the look on Desi’s face—but is it directly responsible for Desi not showing up to one of their music gigs later? It’s hard to say. Either way, Ray convinces Marnie to take the stage without her, which turns out to be the real payoff of the storyline: not Ray finally elbowing out his rival, but Marnie coming into her own without a man beside her. It’s possible that Desi may have had something to do with Marnie’s creative flowering, but it’s clear now that she doesn’t need him anymore. Hopefully it’s clear to her too.

But last night’s main storyline came courtesy of Laird and Adam’s sister Caroline, who Hannah discovers in the downstairs apartment, lying naked in the bathtub in the throes of childbirth. This is some next-level stuff, even for Girls. And whatever else is said about this episode and this plotline, it must be said that Lena Dunham is extremely gutsy for putting this in her show—as is Gaby Hoffman, who bares everything and screams and writhes her way through most of the episode.

Caroline, you see, doesn’t want to go to the hospital—but Hannah knows instinctively that for her to give birth in her bathtub with Laird nearby acting as doula is a very, very bad idea. She’s a bit too timid to force the issue; Adam arrives later to argue a little more forcefully. But it’s ultimately Jessa who does what needs to be done. She puts her head underwater to take a look at what’s going on, quickly deduces that the baby is breach, and pep talks Laird into getting his shit together to get Caroline out of the tub and into a hospital. She’s rewarded with half of the new baby’s name (the full name is Jessa-Hannah Bluebell Poem Schlesinger-Sackler), and with a new purpose in life: she’s going to be a therapist.

The episode is called “Home Birth,” for obvious reasons—but the title could apply symbolically to the other storylines in the episode as well: Shoshannah’s entry into a new phase in her career, Marnie’s creative flowering, Jessa’s discovery of a new purpose. Becoming someone entirely new is so difficult. Like a home birth, it’s long, and painful, and you have to do the whole goddamn thing yourself, without anyone to tell you how.

And Hannah? What new phase is she being born into? It’s not entirely clear—when Adam says he made a mistake and wants her back, she sheds a few tears but turns him down. What is clear is that she’s ready to move on to something new: when she calls home to talk to her parents about what happened that day, she doesn’t want to talk to her mom, who’s so bitter about the past; she wants to talk to her dad, the man who’s living into a new identity, a new life. The man who’s being born. She asks her mother to put her dad on the line, says hi, and then the picture fades to black. Then we jump ahead six months to see Hannah and Fran walking together through the snow.

It was a good episode, a good finale—but an awkward ending, I think. The conversation with Hannah’s mother was strange and abrupt, and I felt that the scene needed at least one more beat for the emotional significance of Hannah asking for her dad to be put on the phone to really land. And the “6 months later” part was uncharacteristically clumsy for Girls. If we were going to jump ahead, I’d just as soon have seen what was happening with all the characters—Shosh in Tokyo, perhaps, Jessa in school learning to be a therapist, and Marnie having made the choice to either stay with Desi or go it alone. I guess we’ll have to wait until next season.