‘Girls’ Recap: Your Love Of Something (Or Someone) Doesn’t Always Need To Make Sense

This is a recap of the fifth season premiere of Girls. Spoiler alert.

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“Why do you even bother with that girl?” After four seasons, the question’s still being asked of this show and its fans, as well as its characters. What is the attraction of spending half an hour a week, ten weeks a year, with this “army of twats”?

For twats they are, and bless Bridget Everett (of the voluminously hypersexual musical comedy interludes on Inside Amy Schumer that made literally tens of comment section bros uncomfortable for reasons they couldn’t quite enumerate) for that line delivered as Bebe the makeup artist. Everyone — except perhaps Shosh, who is a sweet silly angel of a bridesmaid — was being their own special brand of twat in Girls’ fifth season premiere.

First up, Marnie — who has managed not to notice in the six-plus months since Desi talked over her to propose marriage in a bloody Toby’s Estate that he is a boring cartoon hippie idiot — has planned a perfect cartoon hippie idiot wedding. Everything from the flower crowns to the beauty brief of “Ralph Laurel Canyon” to “I had a vision! A vision from an Edward Sharpe video, and it is MINE!” is extremely funny.

There’s also a nice little thread running through the episode about authenticity and aesthetics, as there often is in this show, in the way each of the girls address this balance between wanting to control how they’re presented and trying to seem easygoing. It’s a balance women often maintain in real life, as we’re supposed to be flawlessly beautiful (slash whimsical) but also not be seen putting in any effort to make ourselves appear this way.

There’s loads to unpack just in that very first scene alone. Marnie is already in her Spanx, Hannah is in PJ pants and an “I WOKE UP LIKE THIS” sweatshirt, and Jessa is floating in looking like the platonic ideal of an effortless hippie bride, having bathed in a stream and then run through a field to dry herself. Marnie’s wearing ribcage-to-knee beige shapewear designed to make her look invisibly perfect under her dress, and Jessa doesn’t even need a fucking towel. The apparently perfect effortlessness with which Jessa gives no fucks is a direct affront to Marnie’s constant need to seem chill while actually trying to control everything.

This opening scene is so perfect it’s a bit of a shame the script had to trowel highlighter onto that idea and then draw a heavy brown outline around it with Marnie’s “I’m so easygoing but run literally everything by me” speech. That said, I had to pause to actually weep with laughter when she enunciated carefully that their hair and makeup should pay tribute to her “cultural heritage, which is White Christian Woman”. Girl, you and your aggressively tasteful iPad mood-board nuptials could not have nailed “authentic white lady” more if you’d had typographical bunting made from repurposed Anthropologie maxidresses spelling out a quote from Lean In.

While Jessa floats in and out of the Woman’s Hour prep party bathing in streams and being whimsical, she also puts in the rollers without complaint, and ends up rescuing the botched hair and makeup in the end by bringing it closer to her own “undone” style. (Jessa, remember, wore a flower crown, lacy bell sleeves and minimal face paint at her own hippie idiot wedding a few years earlier.)

Props to her, the queen of shrugging off feelings, for her genuine dismay after kissing Adam too, and also to the show for building this moment so patiently and yet somehow making it surprising.

I mean, it’s a bit of an about-face to have them suck face (sorry) when their entire arc last season revolved around Jessa seemingly scheming to break up Hannah and Adam so he would keep Gillian Jacobs busy enough that Jessa could bang Zachary Quinto — a storyline that was actually just about Jessa channeling her boredom while she stuck with her sobriety. But for that very reason it makes a sort of messy sense: abandoned by Hannah and determined to stay on the wagon, Jessa and Adam bonded last year, and that (and their shared world-weary, smokes-and-sex-hair, I-found-these-clothes-on-the-street vibe) gives them a connection that has clearly deepened over the past six months.

Adam’s glee at the sight of Jessa in rollers and the relative animation and intimacy of their conversation speaks to a friendship that’s become easy and maybe even liberating in the aftermath of his breakup. Just before he kisses her, his eyes flicker over her face like he’s figuring something out, looking at the rollers in particular. He knows her well enough to know that rollers are not a very Jessa thing at all, and for some reason — not long after seeing Hannah and Fran in the Leather-Bound Man-Creche of Awkward Monosyllables And Transcendence — that makes him want to kiss her.

While Adam doesn’t know it, Hannah’s inside the house at this moment refusing to do anything to her hair that isn’t “her”. Or to quote two of the several meta-comments about the protagonist’s personality: “Hannah’s being Hannah”. “Painfully narcissistic, shockingly tone-deaf and generally just one of the most insufferable people you’ll ever meet”. But she obviously means something to dear sensible Old Man Ray, as does Marnie, and Shosh, and probably even Jessa — all of whom the above description could apply to in slightly varying degrees.

People get under your skin. There is not always a good reason. Songs that get in your head are not always good songs. Sentimental value wraps itself around strange things because sentiment is not a controllable phenomenon. I know plenty of objectively insufferable people who I am incredibly fond of, because they are also wonderful. We suffer them the way you do blue cheese, or the death-burn of whiskey down your throat: because as we get older, our taste in things and people that once seemed terrible becomes refined and specific to us. You can’t understand other people’s ability to not only tolerate, but enjoy cigars, or Campari, or keeping ferrets as pets, or Metal Machine Music, or that girlfriend who supports Collingwood and calls herself an “equalist” instead of a “feminist”. They may not understand what you see in the things you love either.

Of course, sometimes we’re wrong. Like a guy who supports his total prat of a best friend through seven failed engagements and still believes eight is the magic number. But then there’s something kind of beautiful in that too — just as there is in Hannah’s ultimate ability to suck up her ego, and her very well-founded doubts about Marnie going through with the wedding, and tell her best friend what she wants to hear.

Girls is set to end after its next season, and it won’t be a moment too soon. I mean, it’s still a show about selfish idiots doing selfish idiot stuff. But its careful balance of brutally honest character work played at once for laughs and for aching, too-real relatability has paved the way for critically-acclaimed newer shows like Transparent, Love, You’re The Worst and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. These shows are a joy precisely because they mix in the right amount of unpleasantness; enough to show us that things don’t have to be perfect to be loveable.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Tuesday nights.

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