Girls’ Funniest Episode All Season Was Secretly Full Of Feelings

This is a recap of this week’s episode of Girls. Spoiler alert.

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“Eventually you have to realise it’s hollow,” says Ace (Zachary Quinto, in a frat version of Gideon Graves cosplay) about his Former Lover, Mimi-Rose “MEH” Eleanor Howard, to her Current Lover, Adam. “It’s curated.”

When it’s coming out of the mouth of a hypersocial art-dick, around a neon toothbrush he chews compulsively in public, this sounds richer than a dark chocolate mud cake that invested in IBM in 1952. He has a point, of course – pretty much everyone “curates” their personality. You can’t control how other people see you, but you can try and keep a handle on how you present yourself to the world and, if you’re lucky, make it match up with who you feel you are. If this season has a theme, it’s that early-adulthood anxiety: oh shit, I’m out here now, they’re all looking at me, and what if they don’t like what I have to offer? How can I make them like me — or (in Marnie’s case, usually), how can I become what they like?

Hannah and MEH’s scene in the laundromat lays this motif out as clearly as possible. MEH admits her fear that the whole world is as disdainful of her as Hannah seems to be; Hannah alludes to her insecurity about her looks, talent and creative success, particularly in comparison to tiny, blonde, celebrated MEH. Breaking down that façade in both directions means both women can see and understand each other a bit better, and get on better for it.

 

And of course, people you think you know can still surprise you. Like when Jessa casually “reveals” that she set MEH and Adam up, to ensure MEH’s ex would be single. I say “reveals”, in quotes, because we really have no idea where Jessa’s actually coming from at this point. Her two modes, for over a season and a half now, have been “Bored And Fucked Up” and “Bored And Sober”, and in either state she’s capable of staggering selfishness: from stealing from her employer, to pissing in the street in the middle of the day and acting like she’s Rosa Parks when the cops pick her up for it.

She and Adam seem to have formed a weird, blunt, shy little alliance at and around their meetings. And she can be a friend, when she actually wants to; her relationship with BD was quite sweet, inasmuch as you can still use that word about a friendship where one party was an accomplice to the other’s attempted suicide.

But she’s been so dismissive and bitchy and contemptuous in most of her few scenes this season that it’s harder than ever to get a read on her. Occam’s Razor would suggest that she’s telling the truth – that she actively set out to replace the question mark at the end of Adam and Hannah’s relationship with a Mimi-Rose-shaped full stop, specifically so she could bang this dude. (Which, again, gets an extra element of fucked-up-ness given she’s apparently known MEH for years; not only is Jessa setting up Friend 1’s boyfriend with Friend 2, she’s doing it to get into Friend 2’s ex’s pants?)

Of course, Jessa could also have been convinced that she was doing Hannah a favour (and who here is 100% sure that’s not the outcome anyway?). Recall her insistence in this season’s first episode, that Hannah was only still with Adam because she wasn’t brave enough to end it. But that also could have been Jessa’s sense of abandonment and betrayal at Hannah’s departure manifesting itself, or simply her boredom with her new, permanently unaltered state.

“Fuckin’ Jessa, she’s insane,” fumes Hannah in the laundromat; at this point, while “insane” is one way of putting it, “inconsistently and opaquely drawn fictional character” is another. So is “sociopath”. I’ve just about stopped rooting for Jessa to find what she’s looking for; partly because she’s a huge drag now, but also because it’s impossible to tell what she wants at all.

That said, it’s hard to get a read on MEH as well. Her little story about the inspiration for her art show seems entirely heartfelt, and it makes her seem a little more human (a characterisation I use hesitantly, given Ace’s offhand comment about her possibly having – or pretending to have – Asperger’s), just as her confession last week about “coming to depend on” Adam’s affection showed that there’s vulnerability under her careful curation. The scene in the laundromat built on that side of the character, just as it built on her ability to detach emotion from decisions that are usually deeply subjective, and even painful.

But while there’s no rule that says abortions absolutely must be emotionally wrenching, relationships are inherently emotional attachments. So it’s a little discomfiting to hear her discussing how she would not only give Adam up if she felt Hannah had some superior claim on him, but also how she’d expertly withdraw from the relationship so he wouldn’t even know what was happening.

And what do Adam and Hannah really want? Adam truly cares about MEH, but he seemed quite invested in the whole idea that he could forgive himself for leaving Hannah for her because it “just happened” – the revelation that Jessa engineered their relationship for her own nefarious/sexy purposes leaves him visibly shaken, as does Hannah’s gallant, almost contrite endorsement of MEH herself. And he may not be over Hannah – he seems to be particularly worked up over her presence at the art show, and at the thought of all her Frans.

Adam is right to be jealous, if in fact he is – cute, smart, young male teachers are basically unicorns as it is, let alone cute smart young male teachers with a Jason-Sudeikis-meets-Russell-Tovey vibe. And right up until Hannah dived back into the post-breakup crazy art-wank hot tub, they had a lovely chemistry.

Would Hannah take Adam back? She did appear to be enjoying the date, right up until she decided to drag that enjoyment down to parade it in front of her ex and his Current Lover. If she feels like she’d like to get back with Adam, she’d have to work out how much of that was genuine and how much was out of a desire to have at least one thing over the thinner, older, more successful MEH – who, now that Hannah’s given up on writing, has the audacity to be publishing a book too.

One positive note, though, is Hannah’s adorable rapport with her students. While I’m still highly suspicious that St Justine’s is so dodgy that a 25-year-old MFA dropout with a CV that’s half barista work could just waltz into a substitute teacher gig — and while she’s maybe a shade too casual and candid with the kids — she’s engaging them well and seems to really, really enjoy it.

There’s a simple joy in Hannah’s demeanour that’s different from the self-conscious gratification of her first week in Iowa; she’s bouncing around, confidently chatting to cute coworkers and high-fiving kids in the hallway. While the manic art-party weirdness of the rest of the episode (“Let’s take some selfies and get weird!”; “I’ve always wanted to give a stranger a poem!”) is enormously fun, that brief interlude in the cold open where everything is coming up Milhouse for Hannah is just really, really nice. If she’s lucky, she might even agree.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Mondays, with a re-run at 9.35pm each Thursday.

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