Girls Recap: It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses A Mum

This is a recap. That means spoilers. 

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After a few episodes that pushed the lives of our Girls forward in all sorts of vigorously interesting ways – new job opportunities, new dance routines, old drug habits – Girls takes a familial break and gets sad.

Some shows thrive on a natural ebb and flow. The Wire patterns itself on the rhythms of the city, Friday Night Lights jogs from one game to the next, and Puberty Blues rides the tide through summery school days. Other shows depend on the arbitrary events we deem important – big episode-long scenic splashes like Mad Men’s long weekends, and The Office’s staff Christmas blow-outs. Girls, I find, wafts between the two to varying success. Standalone episodes that divide audiences get stuck in a location – “the beach house one”, “Jessa’s parent’s place” or “Patrick Wilson’s brownstone” are some of my favourites, and tend to ruminate on an idea rather than move the plot forward. But plot schmott when it comes to Girls; that’s what shows like Homeland are for. I’ll take a delightful rummage around in some family’s emotional attic over story development any day – especially when it gives all the sides of Hannah Horvath a chance to shine.

Hannah’s Grandma is sick, so she goes home to see her mother’s family. Usually Hannah’s mum is embalmed in a glow of sympathy as we watch her be battered by the prattling tide of her self-interested daughter. This episode gives her a chance to show off where exactly Hannah’s foot-in-mouth genes came from. After announcing that Hannah’s grandmother is extremely ill, she announces that Hannah should jump on a train, as this may be Hannah’s last chance to connect with her — “if that matters to you”.

That parental stab of predetermined disappointment can hurt a lot, especially if you feel like you’ve currently got a great mature life to be proud about. Lena Dunham’s baby face is so perfect at capturing moments of pain; watch it go blank as her mother reminds her about how unloving her Grandma was about her weight. Loreen goes on to casually diagnose everyone else in the family as “misshapen” and “arrested”. You’d probably stop wondering, at this point, as to how Hannah is so readily able to unwittingly insult everyone around her — if it weren’t for the fact that everyone on this show does the same at every opportunity.

A pre-death divvy up of Grandma’s possessions and pharmaceuticals gives us a chance to watch Loreen and her sisters in their natural habitat — a fight — and plays nicely as a mature aged riff on the main cast’s season-long stoush. Why do Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shosh keep hanging out, we ask, if they don’t even like each other? Well, all sorts of groups of people who don’t like each other hang out, for all sorts of reasons.

The truth of it is that in our early twenties we often flee from our families and dive straight into whatever social group will have us, binding ourselves to others because of a special night here or there shared over a bottle of Midori. The fact that Hannah and Marnie insist on clinging to that makes about as much sense as Hannah’s aunt insisting on having an “old fashioned Easter” next year. “We have to be closer. It’s not right – we have to be.”

Hannah takes her mother and aunt’s squabbling as a chance to catch up with her cousin – or rather, her more-stressed-than-thou cousin pulls some back-handed negging shit to invite Hannah for a drink. Cousin Rebecca’s another in a long line of characters who voice all the complaints people have about Hannah Horvath and Lena Dunham. Do those who tweet on about all of LD’s supposed faults not understand that she hears them, has already thought of them herself, and is much more interested in exploring those faults through art than  ditching them all together?

Rebecca is a fantastic bitch: dissing writers, pointing out bad eating habits, dropping phrases such as “people like you”, and “Grandma also said to me behind your back that she thought you were loose”. She also texts while driving, causing a parked car back-ending, and a few bruises and stitches for Hannah and herself. Adam comes racing to check in on Hannah in true Hurricane Adam form, his arms, legs and moustache/goatee combo akimbo, spouting loud things that no one laughs at but Hannah. After observing a terrible sisterly squabble, he excuses himself to wee and stumbles through a door marked Isolation Room.

Later Hannah’s mum will say something that you know is well meaning, but just comes out like crap. And maybe that’s the kind of “bad mother” that her own supposedly was, and maybe that’s how Grandma screwed up Loreen’s sisters. She tells Hannah to keep her options open, and describes Adam as “odd, angry and uncomfortable in his own skin”. She says that is not easy being with “an odd man”, and not to confine herself to a life of  “socialising him like a stray dog”. Huh. Thanks. That’s also pretty terrible to hear about your own Dad.

No wonder Hannah clings to her Grandma’s nonsense-like aphorism that “people aren’t always right”. It was probably much easier for Hannah to hear this relationship nay saying from Patti Lupone last week than it was from her mum.

Not very much later, as Hannah walks back through New York, her cousin calls, and suddenly Hannah’s grandmother is dead. Which is exactly how people go. They are with you, sick or well, recovering or flourishing, eating cheese sandwiches, and then they’re gone. Who would have thought that this show, one that advertises its stage-of-life concerns in its very title, would take so many turns this season to ruminate on death?

Hannah’s halted pose, amidst a stream of busy people, sums up perfectly the feeling that death brings (“How are you all still doing errands when my grandmother has just died?”), and the result too: the world moves on for everyone but the deceased. Hannah’s life moved forward without her editor around, and it will without her Grandma too.

David’s passing brought hideous introspective frolics through graveyards and the hassle of socially prescribed feelings. This death, with that last still moment of Hannah (Hannah who almost never stops fidgeting physically, emotionally and conversationally), points to a different reaction this time around. We got introduced to Hannah’s family at around the same time as she seemed to notice them, too. Maybe this is that opportunity for her to realise there’s more to her, and her writing, than the immature encounters currently on lock-up at her publisher’s. There’s more to life too.

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Matt Roden is 2SER’s resident TV critic — each Tuesday morning at 8.20am — and his illustration and design work can be seen here.

Matt is filling in for Caitlin Welsh, our usual Girls critic. Follow our Girls recaps here.