Girls Recap: Six Pieces Of Free Advice From This Week’s Episode

Warning: This is a recap. Run away if you’re wary of spoilers.

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The sixth episode of this season, two weeks ago, was called ‘Free Snacks’. This one is called ‘Incidentals’, named for another perk of Hannah’s total-sellout GQ gig – but it could also have been called ‘Free Advice’, because the ever-growing menagerie of guest stars and external forces keep telling our favourite whiny nothings what to do.

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Desi To Adam: Here’s How To Not Fuck Up This Audition Before You Even Get In There

Adam’s in the waiting room, announcing his (not entirely unflattering) opinion of his competition, using impolitely normal modulation, and this nice dude (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who has a very similar ugly-handsome charisma) gently gives him a tip on how not to piss off the casting director.

He has no ulterior motive, no axe to grind – just sees something in him, perhaps. It’d be nice for Adam to have a non-Hannah friend, especially if Elijah’s going to be around more.

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Patti LuPone To Hannah: Your Boyfriend Will Go Crazy

“Young writer lands interview with showbiz legend” is often a plot that ends with crushing disappointment or humiliation, so it’s nice that the show cuts Hannah a break here. Her career tunnel-vision manifests itself here as determination – most young writers, on being stood up for an interview of such lowly import, would go back to their editors, tail betwixt legs, with a perfectly good excuse, but Hannah chases it. That’s moxie, that is! And LuPone, who specialises in moxie, not only acquiesces but is incredibly helpful in a crotchety sort of way, by making up this totally fake story about her fake French bulldog called Pippin and her fake osteoporosis.

AND THEN Hannah answers a phone call from her boyfriend in the middle of said interview, and not only does LuPone not shrivel her with a glance, but actually gives her life advice. It’s maddening, but after the various social and workplace pratfalls of this season, it’s also perversely enjoyable to watch Hannah’s bullheaded obliviousness work in her favour for once.

(It’s also funny that Hannah and LuPone are making up details for advertorial while Adam auditions for Major Barbara – a play wherein the central character ponders whether ill-gotten gains can be spent on something worthwhile without tainting it.)

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Ray To Ray: Work Out What The Fuck You Are Doing 

Old Man Ray is hanging out, listening to some jazz, looking to Buddhist self-help books for guidance.

While I the viewer can’t help but resent whichever positive-thinking, patchouli-scented charlatan convinced him to break off this hot mess he had going with Marnie, I the human cheered heartily both for his forthrightness and self-respect — and for Marnie taking the pizza with her as she swept from the room.

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Elijah To Adam: Here Is How To Broadway!

Just last week we got a glimpse of how in with Theatre People Elijah is; like any young enthusiast laden with insider gossip and tips about a sexy industry, he can’t wait to share his expertise.

But Adam is having none of it. He’s not there to make friends, remember? He’s not there to feed Kristin Chenoweth, or remember the crew’s wives’ names. He’s not there to be Of Broadway. He’s doing George Bernard Shaw, not Andrew Lloyd Webber – he is a rugged individualist, ungainly and elemental, not the kind of person who takes Sarah Jessica Parker’s word as gospel.

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Jasper To Jessa: You’re Not Really Like This. Do Cocaine, Be Wild.  

Jasper finds Jessa at the absolute worst time possible: she is bored at work, bored of being sober, bored of being responsible. She is smoking on the stoop of the kids’ store she has been inexplicably entrusted with; she is hanging child mannequins with $75 scarves, and selling expensive puffery to entitled idiots. She is screaming her malaise down the street at the poor UPS guy. (I do understand why she’s acting out. A dear friend of mine spent too long working in a fancy kids’ boutique during her uni days, and I’m pretty sure she now walks around London mentally sterilising upper-class twits.)

And then Jasper bowls up all manic, yammering about his romantic search for her, and tells her she doesn’t have to be like this. She doesn’t have to be normal, happy, sober, someone else, when there are drugs and romance and wildness, the artefacts of the self she knows better. She gives in.

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Present Hannah To Several-Weeks-Ago Hannah: You Should Maybe Not Have Taken Jessa Out Of Rehab

This one wasn’t really offered as advice – for my somewhat tortured theme to work here, Hannah would have had to seem like she was genuinely pissed at her past self, instead of sighing like she’s just picked her toddler up from Grandma’s all hyper because he’s overdosed on cookies and she does not have time for this shit.

She and Shosh got Jessa out of rehab, and Hannah gave that whole speech about how much she needed Jessa around — and then they’ve only been in the same room (or at least the same scene) maybe three times since then. And even Shosh seems to have well and truly lost her patience with her cousin (who among you regularly remembers with a start that these two are allegedly related?).

Given Girls‘ tendency to cherry-pick which howlingly ill-advised decisions and incidents will have major ramifications for its characters and which will sink back into the mire of poor life choices, it’s hard to speculate on just how Jessa’s swift leap off the wagon and into the petty cash box will blow up in her face. But even within the erratic moral logic of this show, stealing cash from your workplace while on drugs in order to buy more drugs should be treated as the monumental fuckup that it is. You can already see the disgust in Jessa’s body language as she and Jasper put her boss’ money up their noses and he paws at her again — not just because she doesn’t want to be pawed, but maybe also because, as often happens when you’re trying to keep an initial high going, her triumphant return to wildness now just feels sad and wrong.

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There is a tentative air of impending triumph and success in the hotel scenes. Hannah can treat her friends and herself thanks to her fancy new job that actually pays her more than her rent (and if you didn’t feel a sympathetic burst of familiar warmth and relief when Hannah saw her paycheck, I’m not sure what you get out of this show); Adam is suddenly a working actor; Shosh is about to graduate. Marnie has shaken off the Ray thing, had a nice moment with Hannah, and is hitting it off with a handsome drifter type who likes her voice and doesn’t laugh at her high school email address ([email protected], bless her heart) or her musical knowledge (Michelle Branch wrote ‘Roll On John’, right?).

So with all that promise in the air, we can only wait for the crash next week.

(PS: I have requested comment from Lena Dunham regarding the wellbeing of Marnie’s cat, and am currently awaiting a response. Please RT.)

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Girls season three screens on Monday nights on Showcase.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer. She has written for The BRAG, Mess + Noise, FasterLouder, Cosmopolitan, TheVine, Beat, dB, X-Press, and Moshcam.

Follow her Girls recaps here.