Dicks, Sitcom Crazy, And Some Actual Feelings: This Week ‘Girls’ Bared All

This is a recap of the most recent episode of Girls. Spoiler alert.

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It’s almost a little disappointing to see the show going back to mining the admittedly rich vein of Lena Dunham’s “unconventional body type” this week — or, it would be if it didn’t come with such good lines. The scenes of Elijah screeching “NOT THE KATIE HOLMES!” and Hannah comparing keeping nudes from exes to “killing someone then keeping their shrunken head as a trophy” and exclaiming that she won’t be “edged out of [her] own life by girls who don’t even have any interesting fat deposits on them” prove the writing is sharper than ever.

Unlike the boobs vs bush nightshirt challenge of last week’s cold open, this episode’s extra helping of nudity also serves an actual purpose: an uncharacteristically sitcommy subplot about Fran’s spank bank of ex-nudes.

Let’s run through everything Hannah gets wrong in this episode:

1. Never, ever swipe through photos on somebody else’s phone unless they tell you to. Never, ever. If they’re showing you an old picture of their great-aunt who’s a nun holding their adorable nephew holding an adorable puppy that’s holding a tinier, more adorable toy bunny rabbit that’s holding the tiniest, most adorable teddy bear in the world, assume there are also pictures of their colonoscopy to the left in their camera roll, and screenshots from a dino-furry sexting app to the right. DO NOT SCROLL.

2. Porn is just one thing people masturbate to, and there’s no such thing as normal. C’mon, dude.

3. Thinking porn is gross does not automatically stick you on Andrea Dworkin’s level, and well, even Dworkin had some nuance.

4. Just because your significant other doesn’t think about you when they masturbate, it doesn’t mean they don’t find you attractive. Sexuality is a terrifying beautiful nebulous existential mystery and most of the time you just need to go with it, stay safe and hold on for the ride. (Seriously, were these kids not raised on Savage Love?)

5. Don’t keep having sex with someone if you’re not going to be present for any reason, whether that’s your level of sobriety or your level of preoccupation with the dumb fight you had earlier because YOU SWIPED THROUGH THEIR PHOTOS.

6. Deleting. Photos. Off. Your boyfriend’s. Phone. Is. Not. Cool. Seriously, this one is some ’90s-sitcom women-be-crazy regressive shit. That is like taking out a box of your ex’s mementos and throwing it into the sea. Ross Geller would draw the line at this one, and we all know Ross has zero boundaries or consideration of women he dates as people.

7. Number 6 again, because I am mad about it.

Here’s what Fran gets wrong in this episode:

1. There’s nothing specifically wrong with jerking it to your exes, but he is WAY too blithe about it to Hannah. It’s a little boundary-pushing in terms of ongoing consent, and that’s also quite a collection he has there. He’s usually more emotionally intelligent than this.

2. There are actually kinds of porn where the women aren’t dead-eyed coked-up trafficking victims. Some of it is even on the internet!

3. Dude, you can’t get it up to your girlfriend being “goofy”, but a photo of your ex where one boob is covered by the Brussels Griffon she’s clutching is worth holding onto for Me Time?

Here’s what Hannah gets right:

1. Interesting fat deposits are totally underrated.

2. Getting trusted friends to help you take some nudes if you’re not getting the results you want from your selfies or your mirror is great. Nudes can be fun and sexy if you’re comfortable and safe. Just know that anyone you send them to may jerk off to them at any point in the future, and that’s the best-case scenario.

With all this, the show is clearly setting HanFran up for a fall, but aside from the first half of their date last season and their easy chatter in the background of the wedding episode, it also hasn’t really sold us on why they work as a couple in the first place. Fran just looks mildly bemused and exasperated by her pretty much all the time — so it’s hard to tell what they’re trying to do with either character or the arc as a whole.

Props for balancing out a nakeder-than-ever Dunham with Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s casual full-frontal wang, though. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s the show’s first #freethebacon moment; an instinct underscored by the fact that the script drew attention to it with Hannah’s comment. You will not find a more enthusiastic advocate for more male non-butt nudity on TV, context-appropriate or otherwise, than me. It’s only fair.

Speaking of dicks: Shosh may feel at home in Japan, but the episode takes pains to make her life there seem as much like Brooklyn as possible. It might look different, but she goes and gets coffee and pastries in the morning, goes to her cool job where she compliments coworkers on their cute outfits (I think), flirts with a cute boss, hangs out after work gossiping about boys and getting snacks with her girlfriends, goes to dinner, indie rock shows and giant blue-lit clubs.

While Shosh is feeling a little displaced by the remaining language barrier, the show doesn’t give in to the Lost In Translation temptation to lazily lean on the cultural differences. Yoshi’s douchebag friends come off as the exact kind of fuckboys Shosh could be hanging out with at home, right down to twisted cultural assumptions about her sexual behaviour that are demonstrably mirrored in Western men’s ideas about Japanese women.

It’s hard to tell exactly where the line is between Shosh’s genuine discomfort with the club and the nurse uniform and the whipping, and her general feeling of uncertainty and wanting to not play it safe on what she thinks is her last night in Japan, but that’s about her, not the city or the culture. It’s very much like Carrie Bradshaw in Paris — and while the old Shosh might have run home to pretend poor Jason Ritter is her Mr Big, the decision to stay and see what happens is the braver one. Not telling her perfectly nice boyfriend, though, is a dick move.

While Shosh is whipping people and Hannah is posing nude, Jessam are being adorable as they watch Adam’s appearance on some fictional Lucy Liu cop show (of which Ray, apparently, has seen at least five seasons). Adam’s performance is actually kind of mannered and silly — he’s very watchable, but he’s de Niroing pretty hard in the middle there — but that seems to be the point, as it allows us to see Ray and Jessa in supportive-friend mode, which is significant.

Ray’s cynicism has been slowly worn down over the last few seasons by his relationships with Shosh and Marnie, to the point where he could become a local politician working for Real Change; but as recently as last season, before she started taking her sobriety seriously, Jessa had no compunction about being brutally honest with Marnie about the boring terribleness of her boring, terrible music. Now she’s practically wrestling Adam into the couch with her goodwill, and whether it’s mostly genuine or generously padded out with her feelings for him, that’s further evidence of growth from someone who a few years ago would have run a mile from a genuine emotion.

Adam is so much more playful and goofy around Jessa too, as if he’s not weighed down by things. Obviously he’s in a better place than we’ve ever seen him (a few flashes of domestic happiness with Hannah notwithstanding), and we haven’t seen the six months of painstaking emotional progress he would have had to undergo after experiencing two breakups in quick succession, but the difference is palpable.

Look at his kayaking-swooning-frustration-dance!

Of course, run a mile is exactly what Jessa does after Adam kisses her again, muttering that she won’t do the “will-they-won’t-they bullshit” (while pulling on a killer satin bomber jacket). It’s pretty obvious however that they will, and that she wants to. Look at the way she squirms under his gaze as he makes his way across the kitchen supposedly looking for a haiku he wrote on the ceiling (a pretext the flimsiness and whimsicality of which is unprecedented in the history of flirting).

Jessa has replaced substances and emotional distance and being a shithead with actually feeling her feelings and actively trying not to be a shithead. And, while that latter cocktail of behaviours is usually healthier, it can also be a real kick in the head.

Speaking of cranial injuries: Marnie’s consonant-free pronunciation of “Ecuador”.This concludes the Marnie portion of the recap.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Tuesday nights.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Girls recaps here.