Babies, Boyfriends And Big Decisions: Season Four Of ‘Girls’ Ends With A Circuit Breaker

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

–

One of the best or worst parts of this show, depending on who you ask, is watching the characters flail their way up perfectly surmountable molehills as if they’re several Everests piled up on one another. As we’ve well and truly established, this is a show about fucking up, and being self-absorbed and dumb, because it is a show about people in their 20s without (m)any real problems.

Of course, some things can be hard. Studying, having good relationships and friendships, finding your way in the world… nobody’s arguing that that shit doesn’t take a toll. But moments like birth and death, and betrayal and abandonment and sudden revelation – moments that tower over your other problems, casting bigger shadows and sending those minor irritations scurrying into the undergrowth – they give you clarity. It’s a cliché, but it’s true.

We’ve seen the Girls and their friends’ major dilemmas grow into actual adult ones this season: tragically human parents, deadbeat boyfriends, staying sober, the search for meaningful work. Each of the four main characters has actually had some success in that last aspect (though admittedly Jessa’s feels unearned, and uncomfortably close to Britta’s near-identical declaration on Community). In this episode, we see Shosh struggling, Carrie Bradshaw-style, to choose between a boyfriend and a job offer that both meet her high ideals, when just a few episodes ago she was convinced she’d never have either.

(That job offer was bonkers, though – Aidy Bryant’s sugary tone and crazy eyes as she discusses sacking an employee from an overseas position because of her mental illness? Industrial relations nightmare fuel.)

Jessa’s willingness to tie up her hair and plunge her whole head into a bath of lukewarm NYC tap water and amniotic fluid (if you can see a foot, the sac has definitely burst, people) to stare with naked eyes into an enraged hippie’s dilated cervix is the essence of the character in all her maddening glory. Fuck it, she says, it’s gotta be done, and I shall be the one to do it — as long is “it” is something wildly un-quotidian, like being someone’s suicide buddy, or a surprise wedding.

That underwater image is almost enough to make up for a frustrating season of Jessa oscillating between being very boring and openly cruel.

Marnie sings her pretty, boring song alone, and even though we haven’t heard it before, it’s so obviously better without Desi there that I’m willing to root for her to do whatever she wants next season as long as he isn’t around. Ebon Moss-Bachrach has done great work evolving the character from seemingly harmless indie douchebro to full-on scrub in distressed denim, but let’s say I’m just not as invested in his continued survival as Marnie is.

A quick note on Marnie and Ray: I don’t knooowwwww, man. On the one hand, the show hasn’t really laid the groundwork for crotchety, pragmatic Ray to be so genuinely smitten with someone so self-serious and basic; their relationship is basically them being borderline rude to each other, having sex, shame, repeat. On the other hand, seeing Alex Karpovsky with that little smile on his face is just super nice, and he could actually help her become a real person.

As for Hannah, Dunham imbues her with a beautifully ambivalent equanimity in this episode, keeping her relatively, uncharacteristically composed even in weird moments – it’s almost as though Fran’s back-pats are some kind of long-acting organic Valium. Her random spurts of sharing – like the fact that she already has a birth plan, and it involves taking Michael Jackson’s sleep aid of choice – pop up every now and then, like she’s releasing some kind of TMI pressure valve in the most innocuous way she can.

Driver is funny, though not at his best, when he’s bellowing in panic and flailing his endless limbs around cramped apartment sets; his swoon was too much, though, a tired and cartoonish note in an otherwise superb scene. There are a few moments that lean a little too far into that broad, sitcom-y sensibility, in fact. Gaby Hoffman (who really did give birth to a daughter in November last year, by the way, just in case you were keen to hire Girls’ prosthetics team) mostly manages to sell Caroline’s particular take on lady-in-labour-screaming-abuse-at-everyone-in-sight, howling about the Birth Industrial Complex and making the classic faux pas of conflating “natural” with “100% good and not incredibly dangerous and painful at all”.

The mildly-traumatised uselessness of men during labour is a dull trope. Laird and Adam may as well have been pacing the corridor outside the bathroom, clutching cigars and praying for a masculine child. Naming the baby after Jessa and Hannah is a bit syrupy as well – clearly Laird and Caroline had “Bluebell Poem” in mind already, which is basically the Jane Doe of hippie names, but now their child is half-named after her uncle Adam’s ex-girlfriend (who also slept with her dad once) and half after the transatlantic lunatic who schemed to break them up. Then again, with Caroline for a mother, Jessa-Hannah Bluebell Poem Schlesinger Sackler has bigger challenges ahead of her. (Please, for the love of god, someone make sure she gets all her shots.)

It’s hard to make predictions about this show, as plot threads are picked up and dropped again in a “realistic” (read: somewhat random) fashion, but it’s fairly clear that the beginning of season five won’t feature Adam and Hannah back together. That achingly lovely scene at the hospital, a sort of mirror image of the break-up at their kitchen table, seems to put a final full stop on the relationship, and for a good, solid, adult reason.

She’s been dumped less recently than Adam and, like a wise 20-something dispensing advice to a teenage sibling, being further along in the process gives her a perspective and a calm he just can’t access yet. He’s too new, too raw where his connection to his “centre” was snipped and tied off. He’ll get there. This kind of pain tends to shrivel up and drop off in its own time.

Fran has been a bit of a Frank Grimes to Hannah’s Homer, a baffled foil to her outrageous and apparently consequence-free drama rampages. But he’s clearly kind, patient, funny, and smart, and all that without Adam’s smouldering intenseness, which is a less important trait than all those other things. The brief six-month time-jump at the end — a narrative device the show’s never used within the space of an episode — makes a point of showing HanFran as a unit. They’re huddled together in a practical but cute mishmash of winter gear, alone and quiet in the snow. It’s calm, sweet, and has no ominous notes whatsoever — Hannah’s not looking over her shoulder, wondering if she made the right call.

All in all, however, it’s a surprisingly sweet closer – with a bitter sting sandwiched in, as Loreen and Tad remind us that you don’t get an unlimited number of fresh starts in life – to a tumultuous season. For all Hannah’s drama, she’s made great progress this year, partly because of her willingness to make big calls, and partly because real, grownup problems have landed on her, and forced her to deal with important things.

There comes a point when you’re as sick of your own minor bullshit as everyone else, and all you need is a circuit breaker. When those moments come along that are bigger than you, big enough to shut you up and drown you out? What a relief they can be.

–

The season finale of Girls will be re-broadcast on Showcase at 9.35pm Thursday. Catch up on the rest of Caitlin’s Girls recaps here. 

–

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