Girls Recap: Even Marnie Sucks Less Than Hannah Now

Spoiler alert. Because this is a recap.

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In a world where even Marnie can no longer be relied on to be a human shitshow, what chance do the rest of us have?

I kid. Even though Marnie is an often-terrible person whose cat is probably dead now, it was so nice to see her succeed at one thing that it seemed to outweigh the usual barrage of minor setbacks, self-induced and otherwise. I’m beginning to think Desi might be the nice, handsome, charming guy who teaches her that not every guy has to want to fuck her to like her, instead of the nice handsome charming guy who’s actually only two of those things. Every time she reads something into his Natural Soulfulness, he gracefully defuses the moment. Disaster was in the air when she feinted for the backstage snog, but he diverted it nicely and she didn’t shit her pants onstage and boy did she show her AMAZING FRIENDS up on the balcony. Could it be that all Marnie needed …was someone to believe in her?

So: that was a nice counterpoint to almost everything else Marnie does in this episode.

She crumbles at the sight of the not-at-all-made-up Clementine (certified perfect human Natalie Morales, who you may recognise as Tom’s ex from Parks And Recreation), and mumbles something about tutoring a homeless kid to make her getaway. She backslides all the way into Old Man Ray’s (cleaner) apartment, where she gets him to bail on the whole breakup thing (and whether that’s a victory or not for either of them I honestly can’t say – are they weak and lazy, or meant to be?).

Marnie’s also swallowed her pride and taken a job as an assistant to a girl her age with her own gallery, whose therapist I pity deeply (and who bends over to say goodbye to a wheelchair user as though she’s talking to a small niece). Meanwhile, she has to watch a bored, apparently re-wagoned Jessa luck into a job that basically involves hanging out in a well-regarded artist’s home all day organising her cool art stuff — in part because Marnie doesn’t have Jessa’s openness to The New or her general lack of available fucks to give. (Hell, when she insists to Desi that she can be loosey-goosey she’s so tense she looks like she left the coathanger in her sweater when she put it on that morning.)

To Marnie’s credit, she didn’t correct Jessa regarding that whole “junkie thief” thing, which reminds me that while Jessa clearly no longer has a job, she is also not in jail for stealing an unspecified amount of money.

I am now a bit sad we never got to meet Jessa’s boss, because that pretentious kids’ shop is clearly run by an immensely patient and forgiving actual child, or perhaps the cleverest squirrel in all of Park Slope.

So Shosh and her Thunderdome hairdo seems to have gotten through to Jessa, Marnie’s not a disaster, Elijah seems to have no problems ever, and Adam’s ascent continues apace despite his patently terrible Cockney accent. “It’s not always gonna be like this,” he promises Hannah, as he goes from fucking her to snapping off the condom to pulling his pants on all in one movement, like he’s in the Dance Of The Sugarplum Self-Important Twats.

They did not, in fact, break up last week, but are attempting the notoriously difficult Well We Moved In Together And Now Life Is Happening And I Need Space To Become Who I Am And That Space Needs To Not Have You In It Except During Sexy Times with triple-flip and pike.

Hannah feels stuck and powerless: Adam is moving away from her, physically and emotionally and professionally, and somewhere between Patti LuPone’s hallway and the Conde Nast building she has a horrible vision of herself in thirty years, the second wheel to Adam’s famous unicycle. In her head she’s already there, as she tries to pry quotes for advertorial about bone density out of a Broadway legend while her boyfriend, y’know, rehearses a play on Broadway.

LuPone’s (fictional) husband is the worst thing she can imagine: a writer who is actually not a writer at all. Even Shoshanna, who seems to have no love for art, understands the gulf between Hannah’s real ambition and her gig in advertising.

So it’s no wonder Hannah goes off on her coworkers the next day. She never falters as she excoriates her colleagues and fellow sell-out non-writers, and doesn’t bat an eyelid when Janice fires her. It’s a classic rage-quit as only Dunham could write it, a sitcom trope that plays out just as you’ve pictured it yourself on idle Tuesdays: both pathetic and exhilarating, life-dumb and heart-heroic.

The guys look ashamed and bemused; Jessica Williams’ Karen wears an expression that’s mostly delighted schadenfreude but also maybe grudging respect.

And so Hannah clearly thinks The Theatre People will appreciate her grand gesture. They’re artists, right? But she doesn’t explain what her job was, or why she quit – she just makes it sound like she got fired deliberately so she could mooch off unemployment payments, and also does a sort of weird “urban girl” accent that could be construed as maybe a little bit racist. Just chuck a “so now I can write for real instead of working in a pun sweatshop!” in there! Would that have been so hard?

It’s possible Hannah feels a little better about herself with the knowledge that future pop star Marnie’s banging Old Man Ray, a guy who has an exceedingly dour framed portrait of Buster Keaton in his all-brown bathroom.

So now everybody’s suddenly killing it except Hannah, and Adam doesn’t even want to be around her any more – he’s inching away, just as she worried he would. Without her supportive boyfriend, e-book deal and sense of intellectual and aesthetic superiority over most of the world, where does Hannah’s self-belief come from now?

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Girls season three screens on Monday nights on Showcase.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.

Follow her Girls recaps here.