Girls Season 4 Episode 9 recap
How could you feel sympathy for Jessa? You can’t! It’s glorious! In fact, maybe it’s a brilliant ploy on behalf of Dunham and Co. to make you see that you have to hate Adam – even though he was with Mimi-Rose who was weirdly unobjectionable – because he did the same thing Jessa did: took up with a narcissistic freak who considers a relationship ‘material’ to be worked on.
I mean, it’s actually pretty beautifully done. I couldn’t care less about Ace and Jessa and I wanted to keep it that way, but the fact that Mimi-Rose went out with him means I have to hate her. So now I hate three of them, in all their honesty-is-absolution glory and bullsh-t. And Adam is indeed a sucker, and Jessa is right, and I hate that, but I can be happy that she’s miserable and so is he, I guess. Because the show tried to somehow make him not the worst for leaving Hannah as soon as she wasn’t ever-present, but in fact it was just a bait-and-switch! He’s the worst! Karma, etc. It still doesn’t make me like Jessa at all, although at least in this episode Jemima Kirke seems to know it.
The Ray politico plot was worth it, if only for Shoshanna’s political wife Betty Draper dresses and her incessant food rules that govern her far more than his not-really-a-factor win. Still, to see Ray win means everyone’s on kind of a different trajectory. Right? Like he sees what nobody else can see, or at least can cut through it better. Marnie’s marriage will be the second marriage on this show to crash and burn (but only, as Hannah points out, if you don’t count all of the parents’ marriages on the show) and Ray will be there to pick up all of the pieces, although I suspect from the ‘common trollop’ comment, not without some barbs. How could he not? And how will his political wife Shoshanna deal with it? Also, usually when something like this is about to happen, I cringe because of how terrible Marnie is. But Desi is equally as awful and I want to see him be as terrible as he can before he goes. I believe he may have been wearing eyeliner in this episode. Ray + Marnie equals frustrations and obstacles. I look forward to it.
Hannah, of course, is no stranger. I assume there will be many pieces about how great she and Andrew Rannells are together, as always, and …yeah. But I can’t shake the feeling that Hannah is actually acting out for the benefit of her parents. Now, I don’t mean that Hannah is acting out of character, or that they had the writers do any writer gymnastics about her or anything. I am trying to say I think Hannah, the character, is consciously acting pouty (while pointing out how not-pouty she is acting) in order to allow her parents to walk through their feelings. I think it’s very interesting, not least because I think the Hannah of four years ago WOULD have walked her father into gay clubs and asked him about his preferences in porn. It’s growth, of a sort. The lecture from the teacher about not making friends with 16 year olds was appropriate, I guess, but kind of felt like a first-season lecture. Yeah, wow, Hannah and her friends sometimes act inappropriately. I wish we’d heard it from Cleo, and in fact think maybe it was written that way originally. Am I crazy?
