‘Girls’ Recap: Everyone Has A Messed Up Story To Manage

This is a recap of Girls. Spoilers!

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Hannah has never been an unreliable narrator; the warts-and-all storytelling style of Girls has shown us how she thinks about herself and constructs her self-image, but never framed the story from her specific perspective. The show allows us to observe and judge all its characters’ behaviour as we see fit, rarely offering a distinct moral position, simply presenting actions and self-expression.

It usually does this with enormous compassion for the fallible humanity in everyone (even, right up until her awful behaviour in this episode, Marnie). A lot of the show’s funniest and most devastating moments come from shifts in perspective: declarations from the characters that show the audience how at odds with reality their self-image is, and those split seconds where they are shown how others perceive them.

This episode, which takes us to the halfway mark of the final season, sees everyone wrestling with the shape their personal stories have taken at this point in their lives. Hannah is already thinking of her lentil as “My Baby”, even though it’s no such thing yet; in her head, she’s already committing to the storyline, as it were. Note that she’s even referring to Paul-Louis as a “water-ski instructor” even though she met him at surf camp, perhaps because that was his preferred activity but also because it’s funnier — she’s already establishing a wry mythology around how her life took this turn. And yes, it really looks like she’s going to go through with it; you can see it in the mix of naked vulnerability and determination Lena Dunham fixes on Hannah’s face whenever she talks about it.

Loreen, meanwhile, feels like her life is basically over. She sees her imminent grandchild as heralding the end of her book, so all that’s left to her is a lonely epilogue.

The Hannah/Loreen portion of the episode inverts the most recognisable cliches of the mother/daughter dynamic. Loreen describes the optimism she drew from her own pregnancy, before snarling at Hannah’s beatific encouragement with the venom of a teenager telling her parents she didn’t ask to be born and disappearing into the street. She leaves Hannah picking up stray laundry like a harried housewife and hunting around Brooklyn for her. Eventually, with the help of the weed gummi worms (an undoubtedly delicious but pointedly infantile way to get high, like Liza’s weed lollipop in Younger last season), Loreen regresses entirely into a petulant toddler and vomits down her own front in public.

This emotional Benjamin Buttoning continues the theme of Hannah being at her most responsible and calm when she’s parenting her parents through their dramas — think of her going to pick up Tad’s wallet from his one night stand’s house last season. But it’s also still sort of understandable that this news would send Loreen into a stoned tailspin — if you’re in a bad place emotionally or feeling stagnant, a bit of major life news from someone you love can feel like the universe rubbing the coarse salt of other people’s joy into your wounds, no matter how much you try to be rational about it.

Adam and Jessa are watching their story being told and realising in the process just how differently they see what they thought was the same narrative — one they believed they experienced together. Jessa thinks their movie is about their great romance, which actually boils down to shared sobriety and sexual chemistry (and lord knows she still has to deal with her addiction to drama as well as substances). Adam, as he tells the story of his relationship with Hannah both from the bird’s eye view of director and the intimate re-enacting of it with a stand-in, is gaining a new perspective on the depth of his connection to her.

Jessa wants the story to be meaner to the Hannah surrogate, but Adam can’t help but treat the actress playing “Mira” with a tenderness we haven’t seen in him in a long time, even after he murmurs “cut”. Regardless of whether their dynamic was healthy, Adam knows it makes for a better love story — nobody really wants to get emotionally invested in the story of two hot people having hot, mean sex when they could watch two slightly broken people tenderly try to keep each other together, and the latter’s certainly more likely to get picked up at Sundance. From the look on Jessa’s face as she watches the bed scene and her bitchy CC Babcock vibe as producer, she’s starting to realise what the real story is.

Also, Hannah’s only six weeks along, so let’s all marvel at how quickly Adam wrote that script — by hand, apparently — and pulled a whole shoot together. He clearly had a lot to get off his chest (and a fair bit of spare cash).

And poor Elijah — yes, poor Elijah — who goes from an Adderall- and a capella-fuelled angst session about a college crush to being left behind in life by his best friend, all in the one day. The kitchen scene between him and Hannah is so great, and so brutal. It’s all in the shifts in expression as he slides a pin beneath the fingernail of Hannah’s worst fear. He subtly cracks for a second when he sees her face crumple, but can’t backtrack. His comment about her parenting skills feels as much aimed at himself as her — after his brief attempts at grown-up love with Dill last season, he’s been in full, cheeky, self-indulgent flight. He’s still the same old Elijah, and suddenly Hannah is diving into the next adventure without even consulting him.

Andrew Rannells and Dunham are beautiful here. Their dynamic has always been the real best friendship on the show, since the coked-up mesh-shirt night in season one. While they can probably come back from this, it’s a savage, childish fight about a hard, grown-up thing. Elijah has been broadly supportive of Hannah since he became a series regular, and she quite easily brushes off the bitchiness that makes him one of the most fun characters to watch (“You say so many mean things, and I can’t make one salvia joke?” Hannah says, quite fairly). But it’s hard to picture your messy mates becoming someone’s mum, and because he is so resistant to growth, he can’t imagine Hannah making the changes she’ll need to make to her life either.

In other words, nearly everyone is somewhere on the spectrum between bemused and frightened, examining their lives in some way and exclaiming “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” But then, in that beautiful final scene, Hannah meets her doppelganger — a version of herself who has three kids already and characterises Hannah’s life as a fun, complicated, meaty challenge.

Not only has the actress spent her time getting inside Hannah’s mindset (albeit as filtered through the viewpoint of Adam, who knows her very well), she has the added experience of already being a mother. Her advice, “Kids are easy — it’s being a grown-up that’s hard”, may be a little too neat, but it feels true to the show’s central thesis. It sets a course for the rest of the season.

Hannah may not feel ready for a baby because she’s not mastered being an adult yet, but so few of us have. The maternal figures we’ve met on the show so far — Loreen, Caroline, bitter Mel Shapiro, Marnie’s shallow nightmare of a mum, suicidal BD — haven’t exactly had it all worked out themselves. While the pregnancy storyline might not be the final-season arc a lot of fans were picturing, Girls is taking an honest and original tack in building a case for it. As mothers go, this kid could do worse than the self-involved but loving Hannah; and as endings go, the show could do worse than starting a new story.

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Girls is on Showcase at 8.30pm Wednesday nights and is available to stream now on Foxtel Play.

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