Girls Recap: Hannah’s Dad Drops A Bombshell That We All Kind Of Expected

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

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Oh, Elijah. Not only is he the blinding bright spot in many a dour or cheek-clawingly awkward Girls scene, he also has either military-grade gaydar (no need to ask or tell!), or a magical gift for making everything he says come true.

You may remember the first time we met him, in the first season: he comes out to Hannah, she doesn’t take it well, and he leaves in a cloud of sarcasm and revelation.

It’s often hard to tell how far ahead Girls is planned out – intricate plotting isn’t exactly the show’s strong suit – but Lena Dunham and co-showrunner Jenni Konner have had this one in their pockets since the beginning. I’ve always taken it at face value, but wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been left to hang in the air for the rest of the show’s run: a little character note for Tad Horvath, remaining always as unresolved as he (maybe) was. (Awwww.)

But as Tad and Hannah’s multi-layered back-and-forth at dinner a few weeks ago suggested, he’s finally outgrown the closet where he’s spent decades making a home and telling himself he’s happy. Perhaps it was set off by the very fact that he and Loreen are making progress in counselling; perhaps he could see further down the road of an ostensibly contented heterosexual marriage, and had to get off that particular freeway at the next exit. Perhaps working so hard on his marriage has forced him to realise why he’s really unhappy in it.

Either way, he’s done the equivalent of Hannah bailing on Iowa – except in this analogy, Iowa is maaaaaaaad.

In the season three episode ‘Flo‘, when we met her sisters, we saw some of Loreen’s ability to go from zero to DRAMAAAA in 3.5 minutes, and of her Hannah-like talent for passive-aggression (with hints of persecution complex) when she’s cornered or emotionally stressed. We also saw hints that the Horvaths’ marriage wasn’t entirely the breezy, loving, still-doin’-it-in-the-shower relationship it looked to be in the first season:

[Loreen] tells Hannah to keep her options open, and describes Adam as “odd, angry and uncomfortable in his own skin”. She says that it’s not easy being with “an odd man”, and not to confine herself to a life of “socialising him like a stray dog”.

Oof.

This week’s episode (titled ‘Tad & Loreen & Avi & Shinaz’) pairs and parallels Hannah and her mother very clearly, almost too pointedly, so we can see how they can both be blunt, and self-centred, and not shy about causing a scene when they just can’t be fucked pasting on a smile and absorbing the emotional blows only they can see.

And now they’re both dealing with the apparent unravelling of their relationships with their odd men, in the only way they know how: with denial and hysteria and acts of protest and wildly hurled accusations of misogyny. And the other lovely touch is that even though this is a show about people in their 20s, it doesn’t frame its characters who are parents from the perspectives of their children — the idea of that generation’s parents having sex and love affairs and grudges is never treated as unusual or inherently funny. Just because you’re not 25 and addicted to the drama any more doesn’t mean that drama won’t find you. Parents are still people: they’re making mistakes and trying to become who they are, and sometimes they’re sick of each other’s shit.

(Also: can we talk about how Dunham can apparently get pretty much any character actor she wants to come on down to the set and play a walk-on role we never see again? I would watch whole episodes of Jackie Hoffman making grilled zucchini salad and bitching about academia, or Ana Gasteyer and Anthony Edwards as the Mels Shapiro who hate each other so much. I was a bit surprised the other couple with the methhead dancer daughter at Loreen’s tenure party weren’t Felicity Huffman and William H Macy in professorially-bohemian wigs.) (Wait, are we 100% sure they weren’t? They are very good.)

In the midst of all that unravelling, the others’ relationships are at various stages of beginning. Jessa, whose schtick continues to be less endearing every week, doles out dating advice as though it will work for anyone but her, and may or may not be getting somewhere with Ace. (This might depend on whether he has a thing for children dying of exposure while working on commission.) She also boasts about allegedly driving four people to allegedly attempt suicide, which is a dumb jerk thing to brag about. That’s not Drama, it’s horror.

Shosh is onto a good thing with Scott (Jason Ritter), who not only doesn’t fake an emergency call from his grandmother’s budgie’s tarot reader or something when Shosh says the phrase “shove it into my slimy vagina”, but immediately shakes off the awkward like a sneeze, to point out that Josh Charles is at the bar. He also shuts down her reflexively negative language about herself and her friends, oh so gently, and just seems to see through Shosh’s social anxiety and obsessive self-curation to the part of her that’s actually a fun, smart human woman he likes to banter with.

And in Terrible Everything Land, Marnie has a brief flash of self-respect before being sucked in by a bit of shiny. I mean, look, that’s not entirely fair – it’s what the ring and proposal represents that she’s taken in by, not the ring Desi definitely can’t afford after spending $2k on pedals. She takes it as a sign that he’s serious about her, which he may well be, but not as serious as he is about himself and His Art.

Marnie – fucking MARNIE, to quote Shosh – is the grown-up in this relationship, and that tells you something. He can’t let her finish talking about this serious thing she wants to establish in their relationship, because he’s convinced his idea is better. He’s actually inadvertently followed the advice Jessa was giving Shosh earlier on: be a dick to your paramour most of the time and then show them an act of love when they least expect it, and they’ll fall into your arms. Even if you’re proposing in a Toby’s Estate.

For once, this recap has not been all about Hannah – and I’m not even mad, because the less said about her taking her 14-year-old student to get a deeply horrifying frenulum* piercing while cutting school, telling her about her sex life and referring to them as “best friends” before wimping out on her turn to be punctured, the better. (The frenulum is also that v-shaped joiny-up bit between the glans and the foreskin, so I guess it could have been worse. Although I’m not sure exactly how.)

Keep running, Fran. Run right out of the drama vortex and never look back.

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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.