Girls Recap: Hey, Remember How Other People Have Feelings?

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

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There’s a great scene in The Affair – Showtime’s ingenious, beautifully grim drama which, as it happens, starts its Australian run on Showcase tonight – where the male lead Noah (Dominic West) has to discipline his teenage daughter for bullying a classmate. As is usual in any adult drama about people with children, the sins of the father shall be visited upon the audience as subtext, but he does give her some good advice, plain and simple: “You can’t treat other people like they’re not real.”

It’s an insightful twist on the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because for every person you’re careless with or unkind to in your whole day, there’s a whole world of person behind their eyes. There’s a life, a history, memories, trauma, secrets, bad dreams, priorities, kinks, ambitions, quiet rages – and your unkindnesses, small and large, bounce around in it all in directions you can’t conceive of. Other people aren’t extras in The Movie Of You, or NPC archetypes you can use to advance your story, or Lego folk you can place carefully, exactly where you want them. We all contain multitudes.

All four of the Girls seem to struggle with this concept to a degree. Hannah is so busy editing her own inner monologue and taking notes on it for later that she finds it hard to empathise with others; when she does try to walk in other people’s shoes, she tends to jam them on over her own and then complains she’s getting blisters. You can see it in her “apology” letter (an idea that’s high school as all hell, in both tone and execution) – a good apology should be about how you made the other person feel, not how much trouble you think you’re in and how to get out of it.

Jessa remains a cranky, unnecessarily mean cipher this season; even when she’s ragging satisfyingly on the job-hunting process and her bra matches her lipstick, she’s getting pretty unpleasant to watch. Yes, she’s sober and understimulated and Hannah abandoned her, and yes, someone does need to tell Marnie how boring her music is. But she’s sitting around like the Miss Havisham of Bed-Stuy, shitting all over everyone’s lives and ambitions because she’s bored stiff by daily acts of simple decency (like, say, choosing not to piss in the street, because there’s a social contract or whatever).

I’m certainly starting to wonder how much she knew about the advent of Mimi-Rose (on which, more later).

Marnie, of all people, is often the most emotionally intelligent of the main four; sure, she’s usually thinking about how other people’s feelings will colour their view of her, but it has the handy side effect of making her more tuned into the moods and reactions of others. That is, she’s perfectly capable of being kind and generous – arranging beach weekends for her friends, tracking down James Taylor’s guitar pick for Desi – but it’s rarely without any thought of how it will reflect on her.

It’s starting to look like her relationship with Desi will be good for Marnie, in a weird way. He’s manipulative, emotionally lazy and shallow – the classic creative type who uses their vocation as an excuse and an outlet for their personality defects – and Marnie seems to have moved past the part of their fling where she’s terribly impressed by his chambray shirts and intense, eyebrowless gaze.

And while his breakup with Clementine was definitely either initiated by her or pre-empted by him (and I choose to believe it’s because she’s moved back to Pawnee), it’s fair to cry a bunch after a big break-up, even if you’ve got an adoring side piece to hold you while you do it — so it’s to Marnie’s credit that she doesn’t push him too hard on the emotional details quite yet.

Allison Williams acts the heck out of this scene, as Marnie tries to react sensitively to Desi’s freakout, considers whether she entirely believes him, and then lets herself feel excitement and relief anyway. It can only be a matter of time before these flashes of self-esteem and unpleasant insight build into a picture of a relationship she doesn’t actually want to spend her time on.

Shoshanna clearly has a rich inner life; we see blurred hypercolour glimpses of it speeding past, mostly when she talks to Ray or ingests intoxicants. But she’s almost as bad as Hannah when it comes to unconsciously treating other people as accessories – I let out a properly onomatopeoic “gasp!” when she told the poor Ann Taylor interviewer that she was just practicing on her. (She was doing something a little similar with her box-ticking procession of undergraduate conquests last season, and even the doorman she cheated on Ray with was just a way to see how she felt about being “bad”. That, at least, she felt guilty about.)

The end of the episode – even before the spectacularly awkward deleted scene from Dude, Where’s My Couch? – is just crushing. Tad Horvath is going. through. some. stuff. There’s a very subtle callback in Hannah’s suggestion that Elijah join her and her dad for dinner – the image of the three of them at dinner jogs the memory of Elijah’s season one insistence that Tad is gay or bi. And the entire time he and Hannah are at dinner, she’s (somewhat understandably) so wrapped up in her sudden urge to bail on Iowa, to admit she’s not a certain kind of writer, that she barely questions his odd agitation, and just chalks it up to dad being weird:

Hannah: Yeah, but I feel so trapped. I feel so trapped, and there’s no way I can leave – even if I want to – because of what everyone will say. No one leaves.

Tad: You can’t think of what anyone else has to say – you just have to do what’s right for you. No matter what happens to anyone else.

Hannah: What do you mean, ‘No matter what happens to anyone else’?

Tad: I don’t know, I just – I’m upset because you’re upset.

Hannah: Yeah, but now you seem way more upset than me, when I’m the one who really should be upset, so…

Tad: All I’m saying is that sometimes the stupidest fucking decision in the world is the right decision for you.

Hannah: I dunno. I’ve made a lot of stupid decisions.

Tad: Well, no one else has to live in your mind. Only you. OK?

Then, when he drops Hannah home, he suggests they just get on a plane – as if to say, anywhere but here, anything different, anything to not have to walk back into the house and keep living in the same old mind. When Hannah rejects the idea and goes inside, without even turning for a final wave, he looks so horribly lonely, wandering across the street. Whatever is up with Tad, he’s on the edge of something. Hannah might have to look after one or both of her parents for a change.

For now, though, she might not be super focused on her dad’s mysterious existential crisis. I still have no idea how long Hannah’s been in Iowa, or what this once-a-month phone call deal she and Adam had was supposed to preserve or achieve, but I’m preeeettttyyy sure neither quite excuses his swapping his old girlfriend and her old couch for a new couch and someone called Mimi-Rose, without even giving Hannah the courtesy of a phone call. Unless it’s a tricksy fakeout by the writers, this is the worst thing Adam’s done since that scene with Natalia. It’s either the relationship equivalent of suicide-by-cop, or… well, not much else makes sense for Adam as a character. He’s got some ‘splaining to do, and it’s the first scene next week. What a fun and sexy time for everyone.

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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.