‘Girls’ Recap: He’s Just Not That Good For You

This is a recap of the latest episode of Girls. Spoilers!

–

Load up your grandest old-timey radio-serial narrator voice, as we ask once again: could this be the last we see of Desi, The Hand-Knitted Man?

This week Hannah and Marnie have a really nice and loving kitchen-floor conversation where Hannah straight-up tells Marnie that she’s too self-involved to notice things like, oh, I dunno, the signs of addiction in TWO CONSECUTIVE paramours. But still, the idea that Marnie might actually scamper off the psychosexual hamster wheel for good seems like too much to hope for.

It’s hard to disentangle yourself from someone who is bad for you — and not the delicious, naughty, freshly-made-fries-when-you’re-a-bit-drunk kind of bad for you. Desi is the flaccid, mealy burger* you get on your way home from work and hate yourself for giving in to kind. (*Or train station sushi, or whatever lazy fast food that tastes for you like the instant regret and self-loathing of capitulating to a 2am ‘u up?’ text. “Why am I even putting this in my mouth? I’m not enjoying this. I KNEW it would make me feel this way.”)

That kind of toxic is tough to purge because its grotty pull is tied to sticky, awful feelings: the secret conviction that you don’t actually deserve any better, the hope that the thing that has always made you feel shitty might not be terrible this time if you can just fix your shitty attitude because hey, you’re probably the real problem.

In the cold open of this episode, Marnie goes from orgasmic gratification to instant regret and self-loathing with the speed of a commuter biting into a fridge-slimy salmon roll. She also doesn’t have enough lingering respect for Desi to bother hiding it, let alone waiting until he leaves. As she lets him finish, she cringes under him, looking so much like she wants it to be over that it’s genuinely uncomfortable to watch.

Not much about the Poughkeepsie road trip is sufficiently explained. Why does Marnie want to take her gross 5pm leftover curry special of a mid-divorce affair on a romantic weekend? Why does Hannah agree to go along as chaperone? Why would Ray be okay with any of this, even if they said it was a songwriting weekend or something? Does Ray think it’s just Hannah and Marnie on the trip?

Also, why does the story keep dropping into strange genre tropes, like Joy Bryant’s possibly-unstable Charmed-reject antiques store owner, her ominous gift of the tea set (quickly and anticlimactically defused) and Desi’s slasher-film antics? This is the second time in the last few episodes of the show that a man who’s furious at a woman has violently burst through a door or window, Shining-style.

But the girls’ conversation after Desi freaks out is genuinely lovely, full of things that needed to be said without any of it being undermined by obliviousness or selfishness. The moment where they share a long, affectionate look as Hannah hoists the bloody, spaced-out Desi shows that they still have the kind of friendship where words aren’t needed at all. Between the growth that they show in those moments and their very effective shutting down of Marnie’s soon-to-be-ex, there’s a sense of (tentative, probably temporary) relief from some of the show’s most worrying recurring themes.

Shosh, meanwhile, doesn’t quite seem to grasp that her could-have-been life with the terrifying millennial entrepreneur Borg twins was actually a near miss. But she also is correct, in an accidental sort of way, that trading them and the Aruba trip in for Jessa’s mission to try and find Vincent Gallo in Rockaway was not necessarily the best move either.

Shosh is right to tell Jessa not to justify her own gross behaviour by comparing it to Marnie’s more prosaic dickishness, and she’s right that Jessa’s habit of dragging people along with her selfish schemes definitely has an effect on those people — usually a negative one.

However, Shosh is just looking back with 2020 hindsight at one of those paths-diverged moments, and wishing that she had gone on that trip instead of inviting her cousin into her life. (Remember how they’re related? The show felt it needed to remind you with that truly chilling birthday message to their grandmother.)

It’s not just the fact that she missed out on the Jamba Jeans idea — which may not even have happened had she gone on the trip, if you actually think about it —  but also the fact that being Jessa’s friend doesn’t seem to have made anyone’s lives better. (Except maybe Adam’s, and even he knows that probably won’t last). Continuing a storyline stemming from the friend who basically faked her own death to shake her off, this classic Shosh truth blitz narrows the number of people who still put up with Jessa’s bullshit to just about one.

As much as we all love an episode where Shosh loses her shit and tells people what’s what, we’ve seen that before, and she just tends to go back in that same cycle. While the show’s running out of time to tell all these stories, she’s younger than the others, and might have a few more cycles to go before she really gets going.

But, just as the last Marnie Episode started with her in a cage, the imagery of the last scene this week isn’t subtle either. Marnie is now in the driver’s seat, conscientiously checking her blind spots. She’s a free girl in Poughkeepsie, at least for now.

–

Girls is on Showcase at 8.30pm Wednesday nights.

–

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