Welcome back, everybody! This week, things get a little freaky. Then, they get a little sad. Then, depending on your tolerance for sexy Christmas trees and wedgies, they get freaky again. While our successful hedge fund manager husbands are away, Rhea and I invite you to get down and dirty with us on our Facebook page, on Twitter or, if you’re really nasty, in our comments section below!
RHEA
Even without seeing the finale, I’m going to go ahead and call it: This episode was the best of the season. It had comedy, depth, and bandanas.
It begins with Hannah grief-drinking, getting so hammered in fact that she ends up staying at a co-worker’s house. Throughout the episode, I am aware that Hannah just lost her grandma and had an emotional weekend at home, yet no one else seems concerned about that fact. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, because the characters of Girls are, in truth, too self-involved to care much about a dead grandmother.
Hannah is also concerned with how little the people in her life care about her, but in a different regard: she wants Adam to notice when she’s not around, to quote the great Thom Yorke. She also wants him to want to “get sticky” with her before rehearsal, but, for the first time, Adam turns down sex. Which makes Hannah get creative, and, as we all know, Hannah’s mind is a wild place of depravity and ottovags.
Cut to Marnie, who is on the verge of taking a terrible but sure-to-be hilarious and humiliating job with Soo-Jin, and is shoring up her self-esteem with showing her journal of Ambien-induced poetry to Desi. I would be very happy to never have to hear Marnie’s voice again. The Edie Brickell video was the apex of the joke about how much she likes to sing, and it’s been all downhill from there. Unless this character is going to become a singer as a career, can they stop trotting out this plot point?
Finally, more Jessa and Jasper. I have a strong desire to read their fake newspaper, The Daily Truth, which is apparently a gossip rag that only reports on really mundane neighborhood things. Are they hiring? I have a lot to say about who is cutting down trees in front of their house and who lost their child’s cream wool-silk sleeveless undershirt on Hike Day last week.
Shoshanna puts her sleuthy side to work by staging her own form of an intervention, which involves promises of steak and a reveal of Jasper’s daughter, Dotty, who I am instantly in love with and want a spin-off show about, STAT. I’m a sucker for long bangs, an accent, and a pronounced overbite. In fact, I think Dotty is the most interesting thing about Jasper, who, as Jessa says, has nothing to show for his life “but a box of slippers.” Apparently Jasper agrees with me, because he leaves Jessa to reconnect with Dotty.
Hannah’s elaborate plan to excite Adam is sheer genius. My favorite part of the whole scene is her names for her made-up hedge fund husband, which I can only make out to be both MARFANIEL and JARDANIEL. The entire storyline, replete with Hannah picking her wedgie once she has her trussed-up-turkey-Amelia-Bedelia lingerie on, is so classic Hannah and Adam, in a very satisfying way. I love when she says, “Do you want me to eat all the foods?”, and how genuinely scary Adam gets before it all goes wrong.
When the unthinkable happens, and Adam pulls out of having sex to have a relationship talk, it’s the perfect break to the predictability this show was falling into. His argument, that Hannah has an old idea of who he is, is an important one for any relationship: how does one person respond when the other changes? Hannah’s choice is to whisper that his acting career is “like Field of Dreams”, but I still think they have a chance here. Hannah is changing as well, but the real question is, will she grow enough in time to catch up to the leap that Adam just took by finally doing something he truly loves, or will they simply grow apart?
VICTOR
As we barrel towards the exciting conclusion of this season of Girls, all the carefully laid plans and rigorously set up dominoes… oh, who am I kidding? This season has been all over the place, Fand character-wise. But even so, with only two episodes left, it’s time for the really, really, for real, for real drama to kick in as Hannah and Adam come to a fork in the road, relationship-wise.
But before we get into all that, what say we check in with ‘ol Cokey herself, Jessa, who seems to have taken the role of surrogate daughter to fellow addict Jasper. Because as we all know, the family that snorts together, cavorts together.
Shoshanna, showing a borderline implausible level of concern for her fellow man (as well as a resourcefulness that would seem totally out of character if I had any idea who Shoshanna was supposed to be anymore), uses the pretext of steak to trick Jasper and Jessa into an attempted reconciliation with Jasper’s estranged daughter Dot, who is dating an Egyptian and has a puportedly non-contagious skin condition, which are only two of the things that make her an inspiration to women everywhere.
In the grand Dunham tradition, nobody is allowed to be just one thing. While most of what we’ve seen of Jasper is a cartoonishly manic force of chaos, we are allowed to see him through his daughters eyes, and he (much to his own shame and regret) is revealed to be an imaginative and kind individual. His rejection of Jessa is a triumph for him, and yet another blow to Jessa’s ability to deny her problems.
All this probably shouldn’t work as well as it does, but because of the strength of everyone’s performance (with a special shout-out to Felicity Jones as the lovely Dot, who has about five minutes to sketch in an entire history and pretty much nails it), It’s a pretty funny and affecting scene, and if nothing else, it’s interesting to see Jessa completely lose her cool for once.
Marnie, meanwhile, continues to flail, being offered an assistant job at Soo Jin’s new gallery. I’m already gone on about how tired I am of the endless downward spiral, and wouldn’t have even brought it up if I didn’t love Soo Jin so much. Seriously, I want to follow her around and buy her ice cream and watch her band play postmodern electronic covers of ‘Foghat’ B-sides, which I assume is what they’re all about.
But say what you will about Marnie, it’s a good friend that will lend out her apartment for sex play…
…which, of course, brings us to the sexy, sexy ballad of Hannah and Adam. I mean, I think we all knew where this was going, right? Not that ideas formed while eating burritos in bed with your GBF are inherently doomed to fail, but… generally speaking, the odds aren’t great.
(And look, I’m all for fun, sexy times, but here’s some advice for all you aspiring role players out there: by and large, strangers do not appreciate being involved in your weird, kinky foreplay.)
Actually, I’m not even sure what to say here, besides that I was genuinely bothered that we never saw the dildo that had been destroyed from overuse, which is probably not something I should be putting out there. I was all set to get into my whole spiel about how Hannah has an… interesting attitude towards sex.(Not for nothing has the gag of Hannah asking “Do you still want to have sex?” popped up multiple times over the course of the series), and how her striving to recreate what she assumed was a fantasy that Adam had speaks to what I’ve always perceived as ambivalence towards her own sexual fulfillment.
And that’s certainly a conversation worth having, even if as a dude I feel terminally ill-equipped to be leading it. But I don’t know that this particular episode is the proper place for that, since her whole gambit is less about sex and more about Hannah’s inability to directly deal with her issues.
Because as poor as her timing was in saying it, Hannah’s mom was right about Adam last week: he does jump from thing to thing. This, according to his own words: First, it was drinking; then sleazy, creepy sex; then it was Hannah; and now, acting. Adam isn’t wired to dedicate himself to more than one thing at a time, which is probably great if you happen to be that thing at the proper time. But if it isn’t, you wind up looking like a Christmas tree, choking on strawberries and wondering what the fuck happened.
And it’s even worse because Hannah was upfront about her fears on this score way back in ‘Incidentals’, which is probably the most upfront she’s been about her insecurities ever. I thought that was a step in a healthier direction for this famously dysfunctional duo. But instead of directly dealing with the root of the problem (Hannah’s sense of neglect), she sexualized it, which, even if it had gone off without a hitch, wouldn’t have truly solved anything.
At any rate, it was a spectacular scene in an altogether pretty great episode, which also happens to be one of the most quotable. The dialogue here was as good as it’s ever been, both funny and trenchant, including the simple yet shattering exchange between Jessa and Shosh that, in one way or another, applies to everyone this week:
SHOSH: You look like a junkie.
JESSA: I AM a junkie…
RHEAS QUESTIONS FOR VICTOR
1. What feelings come up for you about Shoshanna’s hairstyle in the dinner scene?
Victor: Confusion, initially, on account of I cannot tell what that even was. It was certainly elaborate. But eventually that confusion turned into respect. I am filled with admiration for the dedication Shoshanna had to making her hair look like whatever the hell it was supposed to look like. It’s like the maze of the Minotuar, but instead of a minotaur, there’s just a shitload of Garnier Fructis…
2. Do you agree with Adam, that Marnie smells like cookies and air freshener? What do the other characters smell like?
Victor: Jessa smells of cigarette butts. But like, really rare and flowery cigarette butts, the kind they only smoke in Nepal; Shoshanna smells of Paris Hilton Dazzle and headband cleaning solution; Ray smells like old books; and Hannah smells of not-so-quiet desperation.
3. Did Shosh do the right thing by meddling/intervening in the Jessa-Jasper situation?
Victor: Yes, because it was hilarious.
4. More importantly, did ADAM do the right thing? Was it a good call for him to distance himself from Hannah and her drama right now, or was it cowardly?
Victor: If he’s serious about his craft, then Hannah is a headache he doesn’t need right now… on the other hand, if they were really in as healthy a relationship as they’re supposed to be, they would have talked all this stuff out way before things got to this point, and Adam wouldn’t have gone and moved in with Ray without telling her, which is an all-around shitty thing to do to someone you’re supposed to love…
5. What article would you love to read in Jessa’s newspaper, The Daily Truth?
Victor: I’d like to read my obituary, because I think Jessa would give me a touching and meaningful sendoff. Although I suspect she’d probably get my name wrong…
*BONUS FOLLOW-UP QUESTION* OMG, what would Jessa’s name for you be?!
Victor: Rodger Palmers, Jr. I have no idea how I know that, by the way…
VICTORS QUESTIONS FOR RHEA
1. As we learned in this episode, Marnie does her best work under the influence of Ambien. What’s your writer’s drug of choice? (Mine is tequila and snickerdoodles…)
Rhea: I’m a morning writer, so I could be all Hemmingway and say “Woodford Reserve” but in reality it’s scads of caffeine. Preferably in latté form, but I’ll take what I can get.
2. Are we really supposed to believe that Adam’s play is “easily the most anticipated of the coming season” (The Daily Telegraph)? How does that even work?
Rhea: I’m pretty out of touch with the people who still go to see plays, so I have no measuring stick for this. I imagine the anticipation level to be pretty low all around, so a Broadway production of a Shaw play could create such a spike in interest. It’s possible.
3. Does Adam’s explanation for the change in his behavior check out with you?
Rhea: A little. I like that he’d thought about it, and that there was finally an acknowledgement that Adam’s character is really different this season. But what I think he was really saying was his whole relationship with Hannah was a way to keep from drinking, not just his sexual predilections. Now that he has found a new obsession, he’s distancing himself from Hannah, which may be a good move for his life, as Hannah = Major Drama and he’s more into Major Barbara right now, but it’s sad, because he’s shown this season that he has real love for Hannah. It would be great to see this relationship grow, and to have both of them deepen as a result of that. Who else is going to get into a random fight with a stranger as a part of a grand sexual scheme with Hannah, if Adam leaves her for good?
4. Better way to spice up your love life: Role playing or Improvisational Songwriting?
Rhea: Speaking from experience, you’d think it would be role playing (and Hannah did look sultry in that wig, if not the Christmas Tree lingerie), but creating music together is an incredible aphrodisiac. Role playing is really as risky and embarrassing as they make it out to be, but improvisational songwriting is actually more fun and sex-producing in real life than it was for Marnie and Desi. Let’s be honest, I just hate Marnie by now, so I think that every scene would be better without her.
5. As an erudite and sex positive San Franciscan, please discuss the relative atavistic merits of the hedge fund manager’s lonely wife fantasy versus the slutty high school cheerleader paradigm.
Rhea: Cheerleader is sexier, hands down. But I agree with Adam — she should have just gone with that role from the start. If she had shown up to the bar in a cheerleading uniform and pompoms (keep the wig, it works with either scenario), I think Adam would have been able to bust his nut and the relationship would have been saved. But who am I to say? I would never date anyone who ever wanted to think of me as a “child with a disease” during sex, so I could be way off base about what gets Adam off.
6. Have you ever gotten that drunk in front of your co-workers?
Rhea: Not that I remember, but that’s honestly not saying much.
Next week: Jessa headbanging in a Wu-tang shirt.
