On Girls’ Season Finale, And Having Your Shit Together

This is a recap of the season finale of Girls, so: spoilers.

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We are all busy trying to become who we are. Some of us go about it with a bit more fanfare than others, trumpeting wins and milestones and bemoaning setbacks, wondering loudly into our drinks whether we’ll ever get there — and some just get on with it with a minimum of public catastrophising. But we are all works in progress. There is no point where we sit down with a cup of tea and a biscuit and a warming sense of satisfaction, having Won At Life, laughing at the poor sods still trying to get the hang of it; people who look like they have their shit together aren’t on some other, more comfortable plane the rest of us are trying to get to. That’s an illusion, and a dangerous one.

You get better at it, or used to it, or better and then worse at it, but you’re never really finished — and trying to get everything perfect at once is neither the point of life or a healthy way to live it. It’s one of the few certainties in life: every time you get all your ducks in a row, three of them wander off again, and one gets taken by a jaguar, and you get drunk and decide to barbeque a couple, and then you have to start all over again.

If there has been a theme to the third season of Girls, it might be the reshaping of the self, and getting one’s shit together; or, as Ray’s Buddhist self-help book put it, going to pieces while trying not to fall apart.

At the end of season two (and in the intervening months), there was a lot of falling apart: Hannah and Adam’s respective relapses, Jessa’s marriage and subsequent disappearance, Shosh and Ray’s relationship, Marnie’s relationship, Charlie’s start-up. Throughout season three, we’ve watched each of them teeter between success and crisis. Hannah and Adam were a stable, mutually-supportive couple for a while there; professionally they both advanced more than ever before, but while Hannah rode a career rollercoaster (EBOOK DEAL! Oh, dead editor. REAL BOOK DEAL! Oh, contract. CUSHY JOB! Oh, at a pun sweatshop.), Adam’s ride was more of a steep climb (Audition. BROADWAY!).

Having the emotional energy to throw yourself into work you find fulfilling and challenging — or to trudge to a job you don’t — while also being a good partner is hard enough when you’re not a stubborn, self-absorbed Creative Type. Hannah and Adam have stumbled at that hurdle, but Dunham is a good enough writer to have avoided a hackneyed “Oh we’re angry now so we break up now” scene in favour of several where they get upset and then walk away from every slightly-bigger version of the same argument.

Adam’s exasperation is totally justified – even for Hannah, dropping an interstate move on him as a fait accompli right before his Broadway opening night is beyond stupid – and he seems torn between sticking around with hard-work Hannah to have some input as she Becomes Who She Is, and walking away from a girl he loves because otherwise he won’t have the energy to love anything else.

The often-neglected love between Hannah and Marnie also had a nice moment: Marnie said all the right things in that first scene, both about her own behaviour (she has a knack for attaining clarity as soon as it’s too late to change paths), and about Hannah’s grad school acceptance. Marnie made some slow progress this season, but she still has that off-putting quality of being both manipulative and eager to please, as though she still thinks she both can and must trick people into liking her.

Take Desi: she can’t be happy just making music with him, so she has to duck into his dressing room before the show to give him an incredibly thoughtful, perfect gift, and make-outs ensue. Because it’s Marnie, we can’t be sure that’s not exactly how she planned it; and because it’s Marnie, it’s still kinda nice to see her unable to keep the smile off her face, even though she’s a dick.

But as of the finale, at least three people have told her she’s a dick: Shosh, twice; Ray; and now Clementine, who is putting the kybosh on Desi and Marnie’s album before it begins. How many more times does she need to be told off before she learns to use her flashes of thoughtfulness and sweetness for actual good deeds, instead of just getting what she wants?

When she wasn’t saying everything you were yelling at the TV, Shosh spent this season working on The Plan: put her head down, get laid a bunch, find a Proper Boyfriend, pass everything, graduate, get the fuck away from her junkie cousin and her poisonous buddies. It wasn’t just the flirtinis talking in her beach-house truth-bomb blitz — it was also her growing confidence that she was about to move on to that higher plane, that one where all the People Who Have Their Shit Together hang out and whiny nothings aren’t allowed in.

She was so confident of this, in fact, that she apparently didn’t check her finals results to see that failing mark; with a single F, everything comes crashing down around her. She gets that one precious flash of perspective where she and Marnie are just two fuck-ups, commiserating on her bed – it’s a sweet moment, and we all know the relief that comes when someone says, Oh, don’t worry, I fucked that up too, and I’m fine.

And then Marnie does her dumb idiot Marnie thing, and Shosh becomes an audience surrogate again and screams in her face.

Whether out of real love or just because she’s trying to rewind her whole life for a do-over, Shosh realises she wants Ray back, and he rejects her. It’s a hard ending for her in a season where she’s often been the only one some viewers are actively cheering for.

Ray, on the other hand, may have lost Shoshanna, but as he tells her with heart-rending earnestness in the finale, the relationship forced him to get his shit together. He’s running a successful business, everyone keeps commenting on how great his place is, he has a cactus. The most self-sabotaging thing he’s done all season is to bang Marnie and keep banging Marnie; while that decision made it clear he’d moved past pining over Shosh, he kept framing the Marnie relationship as a product of his own weakness and lack of self-respect, something that was stopping him from becoming who he wanted to be. He went to pieces and remade himself. Nice one, Ray.

And death was everywhere, in almost every episode. Ray’s dying boss. Flo. David. Marnie’s cat, probably. Frolics through cemeteries, the Cousin Margaret story, two funerals, Tad Horvath’s ominous procedure that we heard no more about. And BD, who was so convinced that she was finished — that she had become the old shell of a woman she deplored in TV and movies, that she knew enough of the world — that she weighed up her pain against oblivion and decided to give it all away. The scene where she realises she’s not done is terrifying: her eyes bulge with the horror of someone who’s jumped and only then looked down, and as she dials 911 Jessa also has the look of someone who’s glad they decided not to leap.

Maybe having led someone to the edge with a handful of pills and then dragged them back will finally put a damper on Jessa’s hedonism next season, or at least spur a rethink as to where she seeks pleasure and adventure. At any rate, it was a chilling underscore to our ongoing theme: even people who seem sure about what they want, even adults, even successful artists, can get it horribly wrong sometimes.

And hey, even fuck-ups can get it right. The opening scene is hysterical: the cemetery frolic was apparently the beginning of Laird and Caroline’s love story, though Hannah kicking Caroline out apparently helped (we never found out where she went that night, but one now assumes she went straight downstairs and knocked on Laird’s door). Caroline says they’re being “healthy”, and they have a dreamily prosaic conversation about kombucha while gazing into each other’s eyes; fingers and toes crossed that this means they’re both as clean and content as they seem.

We are denied Adam’s reaction to the news that his sister has moved into Hannah’s building and is pregnant to a former crack and heroin addict (at what point ought Hannah to mention this? Probably soon, right?), but Hannah’s is priceless enough.

At the beginning of the season, Hannah and Adam were the picture of domesticity and Caroline was a human hurricane of broken glass and emotional warfare. Now Caroline’s apparently leapfrogged Hannah into adulthood, straight from half-naked fuck-up to the fermented-tea-drinking earth-mother, while Hannah’s life has been upended several times over.

That last, lovely shot, as her face shows the swirling mess of feelings about her immediate future, the tension between her career and her relationship, is a perfect way to cap off a season where Hannah and Adam were in constant flux, where things went wrong as often as they went right, and usually both at once.

So what’s next? A couple of episodes set in Iowa before Hannah rage-quits that too, or runs back to Brooklyn to rescue Adam from himself? It’s hard to picture her staying in corn country for the entire season, if at all — and the fact that Andrew Rannells will be a series regular next year means that he could be returning as Hannah’s roommate when Adam doesn’t move back in (not to mention that Adam Driver is going off to be a Star War).

But it would be maddening to watch Hannah waste an amazing opportunity to keep Becoming Who She Is; how much better to see a whole season of Hannah putting her head down and reaffirming her identity as a writer by actually, you know, writing, and finding her “hole in the world”. While her choice of time and venue for that speech left much to be desired, it’s a nice bookend to the very first scene of the series, where she felt entitled to the chance to find herself at her own pace — as opposed to now, where she seems humbled by and grateful for an opportunity.

This season gave us plenty of reasons to hurl couch cushions at the screen, but it also had sublime moments of piercing insight and crushingly relatable cycles of disaster and recovery. And at its best, it gave us more glimpses than ever of the main characters in their element: the people they could be when they’re both willing and able to be their best selves. And hey, none of us are our best selves 24-7 – all we can do is try and keep our shit together, and seek out those moments as much as we can.

#freemarniescat

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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.

Read through the rest of her Girls recaps here.