This is the season finale and spoilers abound in this review.
Episode 10 marks the season two finale of Girls. This season the series took a more dramatic turn, putting laughs on the back burner. There was still humour to be found in the dramatic events that unfolded, but not the laugh out loud moments that season one gave us. But growing up is not all fun and giggles, is it?
Hannah's ear is still damaged from her Q-tip incident, and her OCD remains uncontrolled. She googles “ruptured ear drum q-tip”, “do millions of microbes really live on our skin?” and “at what age does your body start melting down?” It’s clear that Hannah is fragile and feels she is falling apart. Her editor David wants to know where her book is and threatens to sue (he paid for her work in advance) if she doesn’t turn in her pages by end of day.
Hannah calls her dad to bail her out of this recent money predicament. He is the softer parent who Hannah can more easily manipulate. No longer falling for her tales, he tells her he feels manipulated and refuses to help her out.
Marnie and Charlie go for brunch after being in bed together. Marnie assumes they are back together, this time for good. Because, as she says, there has to be an end-point when all the adventures stop, "Like we're settled down, we're old fogies now". Charlie's silence at this leads Marnie to conclude that they are just having casual sex. She gets up to leave and yells across the restaurant, “So you really don’t want to date me"? At this point we figure her fate with Charlie is sealed, but he runs after her and admits he still loves her. Marnie adds that she doesn’t love him for his money because she doesn’t know how much he has. I think Marnie believes Charlie is now going to be the boyfriend she always wanted him to be, not the push-over that once loved her more than she loved him. And his success just makes him all the more attractive to her.
Ray's fears have now become reality. Shoshanna tells him “You have no ambition and it’s really weighing on me, your lack of ambition.” Ray decides he'll go back to school to finish his PhD but his boss at Grumpy’s hands him his ambition on a platter. He is opening another Grumpy’s in Brooklyn Heights and wants to put Ray in charge. His title will be manager but Ray wants a better title to impress Shoshanna with.
Despite Ray's new job, Shoshanna admits that their relationship isn’t working. She screams “I can’t be surrounded by your negativity while I’m trying to grow into a fully formed human. You hate everything! Seriously, you hate everything! You hate the sound of children playing and you hate all your living relatives and you hate people who wear sunglasses, even during the day, and you hate going to dinner, which you know I love, you hate colors, pillows, ribbons, you hate everything. I can’t be the only thing you like". Ray counters that it is Shoshanna that needs to change so she can appreciate the difference between negativity and critical thinking.
Natalia is back in Adam’s bed even after last week's “crawl on all fours’ encounter. Adam manages to highjack the passion with the kind of word play he used on Hannah. Hannah was happy to play along but Natalia isn't impressed, and again lets him know she doesn't appreciate what comes out of his mouth.
Marnie goes to check on Hannah although I think she really wants to gloat over how happy she is now. Hannah is avoiding Marnie by hiding behind the bed. Marnie sees what Hannah has written on her computer, “A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance…” She takes something from the apartment and leaves.
Hannah, looking for more distractions from writing, tries (with scissors) but fails to copy a haircut that she admires in a magazine. She enlists her downstairs neighbour Laird to help even things out. He seems happy with his work but Hannah looks like an over-sized child who cut her own hair.
She lays down and tells Laird to be reasonable because she doesn’t have the strength to fight him off, even though there was absolutely nothing sexual coming from Laird. He tells Hannah that she’s the most self-involved, presumptuous person he’s ever met and that he had feelings for her until he realized how rotten her insides were. She apologizes explaining that she didn't think about him as a person and now realizes how wrong that was. Much of the dialogue in this scene shows that Hannah, feeling fragile and scared, wants to crawl back in the womb and have someone look after her.
Adam is in his apartment breaking things when Hannah phones him via face-time. She attempts small talk but he soon realizes she is struggling with the OCD she said she left behind in high school. She admits she is unraveling, so Adam shirtless and sweaty, takes off for her apartment. He keeps her on his phone talking to her the whole way. But when he arrives she doesn’t let him in so he breaks down the door. It's incredibly over-dramatic right up to the point where she says “You’re here,”. “I was always here,” says Adam who swoops her up in his arms and kisses her. Hannah wants to be rescued and relieved of her suffering and this is the kind of 'in' that Adam has been waiting for.
In conclusion, Hannah has come completely undone. Her friendship with Marnie is non-existent, Jessa is not around to not listen to her, her dream of being a writer almost came true but she can’t get out of her own way to submit anything in time. Her OCD is raging, making it difficult to do what she needs to do and now, the guy she once called her stalker, is the one she calls to come and help her. Because she knew he would. There is really no one else to pick up the pieces of Hannah, or rather, no one that really wants to.
Marnie's self-absorption and self-importance was never as evident as her behaviour at Charlie’s work party. She thinks she wants Charlie, that he is going to be the answer to her problems. It's only a matter of time before she realizes that she is still with the same old Charlie, just a richer version of her old boyfriend that she grew tired of.
This was not my favourite episode, but the unraveling of these characters is enough to keep me anticipating the growth, or maybe even the further decline of ‘Girls’ in season 3.
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