Mommy Issues, Daddy Issues, Brunches And Butt Stuff: ‘Girls’ Returns With A Bang

This is a spoiler-filled recap of the season four premiere of Girls.

–

“All we have are days,” says Adam, gloomily, in his wrong-type-of-biker jacket. As an alcoholic, he’d be more than familiar with the idea of taking life one day at a time; but it’s not necessarily a comforting mantra, particularly in comparison to the ideal of a neat, narratively cohesive life journey.

Adam’s sulking a little bit in this opening episode, as he stares down the barrel of a long-distance relationship and slogging through auditions with nobody to come home to. Hannah’s embarking on something that’s clearly marked as a new chapter, but he feels the need to undermine that by toasting to disorder: “To the next step in a series of random steps”.

In that awkward, sweet cold open, Hannah’s parents – who are, as always, lovely and sensible and seem to know just how to handle her and when to let her just do her thing – are taking her out to dinner, as they did in the first scene of the pilot. She can’t help but have a dig at them for not acting the exact way she would have preferred (paying her rent, for example) — but they’d be sitting there thinking they made the right decision, surely? After they cut her off, she found herself jobs, a book deal, a place in a prestigious writing program; she’s in a steady relationship with a supportive (if weird) guy.

She’s on track – even if she looks a bit unsure about the next step, as the elder Horvaths bicker happily in the front seat.

Your parents often see you more clearly than you might think; they have a sort of bird’s eye view, with a couple of decades on you and special insight into your development. Learning to actually listen to them (if they’re not total dicks) is a useful skill to develop. It can be hard to see yourself as others do, and your parents — again, if they’re around, and not terrible — can offer that perspective with a loving eye. Your friends can do this as well, if they’re good ones.

The worst thing is to see yourself through the eyes of total strangers, people who do not love you or know you or understand your deal – or rather, to imagine what they’re seeing, to fret that they’re missing all the important context that explains Why You’re Like This. Adam and Marnie do the heavy lifting on this theme this week (though we can expect more once Hannah hits Iowa), with the depression meds ad and the performance, respectively. Both feel awkward, exposed, and insecure; Adam freaks out at the cuts made to the bleak, intimate commercial’s “narrative”, and decides the now-tainted job wasn’t worth shaving for — even as Hannah sensibly reminds him that he’s got to eat.

Marnie, already a little vulnerable from having to get through a conversation with the newly unsuspecting girlfriend of a man who motor-boated her crack that morning, freaks out when people aren’t enjoying her deeply average music. (‘Breathless’ was okay, I guess – Dunham’s boyfriend, Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and fun., is responsible for the tunes. Fey boy-girl romance-folk is less traumatic for me than for poor Shosh, but it’s not my favourite.)

Apart from the fact that judging your worth as a performer according to the taste of people who attend something called JAZZ BRUNCH is maybe not the healthiest way to gauge your progress, Marnie just seems to have retained that too-high standard for herself from the Charlie days. Everything must be perfect; she needs to be in control of as much as possible, and she gets upset if things aren’t being done her way.

It’s easy to see where she might get that from.

We’ve met at least one parent of all four of the girls now, and they all, well, make sense. Jessa’s father is a feckless, emotionally unstable wanderer; Marnie’s mother clings to a peculiarly adolescent self-image and mindset, trying to look like she woke up like this and gives no fucks, while obviously trying super hard (the Knucklecase, the undies in her handbag at brunch).

And Shosh’s parents are too perfect for words: played by Anthony “Goose” Edwards and the glorious Ana Gasteyer (whom you might recognise as Cady’s mother from Mean Girls, if not from SNL), they are both named Mel Shapiro, and apparently lost that lovin’ feeling quite some time ago. They can’t even be in the same room for a full minute without taking the conversation right into the zone… of danger.

Jessa’s also usurped BD’s daughter (Natasha Lyonne) in her affections; people who love Jessa tend to fall hard, and BD loves Jessa the way kids love a cheeky young auntie.

Without the burden of ultimate responsibility for BD, Jessa gets to be both assistant and carer, the daughter and mother roles mixed up together in both women. Lyonne comes out of the gate abrasive and pissed-off – rightly so, really, because what would you say to the rudderless hippie who suddenly became responsible for your ailing mother and within weeks decided it was okay to help her euthanase herself? Not sure what note Dunham and Judd Apatow’s script was trying to hit with the inability to pronounce “unconscionable”, but Lyonne certainly captured something of the direct, discomfiting gaze Louise Lasser was employing as a less feeble BD last season.

I’m not sure what the time-jump between the end of last season and this one was, exactly. Marnie and Clementine haven’t seen each other since the opening of Adam and Desi’s Major Barbara which suggests a few weeks at most; but Hannah is moving to Iowa now, which seems like pretty short notice if she only got the letter around that same night. Also, Marnie and Desi are banging now; either they’ve been doing it for little while already, or Desi is the type of dude to just dive on into the butt stuff early in the piece (and there are more of those dudes around than there used to be).

(A word on that scene: it’s really not that shocking. Looking and How To Get Away With Murder – the latter of which is on network primetime – both had implied or explicit analingus scenes in the past year. They’re both genuinely enjoying it, though it’s framed so that we’re too detached to really see it as particularly erotic, Marnie drops the L-word, and then it’s over. Meh. I also don’t care what Allison Williams’ dad has to say about his daughter doing her job.)

More questions: is Major Barbara still running? Is that how Adam can afford that apartment all on his own? And has Hannah seriously not told Adam about pregnant Caroline living downstairs? Is he going to wander down one morning and find her beatifically painting fertility runes on Laird’s front door, pregnant belly protruding over her lace bloomers? Or have we been denied the scene where Adam finds out his historically (and, well, recently) unstable sister is not only living in his building, but having a baby with the former junkie in the ground floor flat?

Most importantly, what actually happened to the kitten Elijah rescued? Why is everyone on this show so terrible at holding on to their cats?

Oh, Elijah. I’ve missed you most of all.

–

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

–

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