Girls Recap: The Abortion Episode That Wasn’t

This is a recap of this week’s Girls. Spoiler alert.

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While it should be satisfying to watch almost everyone making some progress or getting on a new path (except Jessa, who still – still! – has precisely nothing to do except prove that she’s boring and mean sober), this episode was more a return to the patchy holding-pattern vibe leading up to ‘Sit-In’.

It’s neatly and prettily bookended by the two morning scenes with Adam and his new girlfriend, showing us clearly why they do make sense as a couple; but it feels like a small betrayal of the beautiful and patient unravelling of Adam and Hannah to ask viewers to get this emotionally invested in his six-and-a-bit-week-old relationship. I still don’t feel the show established the open-endedness of Adam and Hannah’s long-distance arrangement well at all, which creates the sensation of having missed something big that should have been clear.

It’s possible this may have been deliberate – showing that unravelling from Hannah’s perspective does mean that viewers share in her sense of shock and bewilderment – but Girls hasn’t proven itself to be one of those tricksy prestige dramas that likes to mess you about with unreliable narrators. (That said, I would totally watch a season of this show that used as its framing device a hungover, raspy-voiced Elijah recounting his many adventures while arranging gnawed chicken wings and empty Advil bottles into dick-pentagrams.)

It’s also unclear exactly where Hannah’s head is really at; she’s been back in NYC for around three weeks, and she’s already painted and fully redecorated the apartment, retrieved Elijah from Iowa and her furniture from storage, and seen her therapist who is Bob Balaban at least twice. (Unless her therapist who is Bob Balaban was googling “MEH” on an iPad mini behind his clipboard.)

Tearily projecting Adam’s major betrayal onto Elijah’s minor one via her Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a pretty standard break-up trope — and Elijah’s likely reacting to the cereal incident specifically when he mutters, mostly joking, about her being unstable.

Because she does seem stable. She’s not living in a doona cocoon, sticking things in her ear or doing everything eight times. Whether giving up on her writing, deciding to be a teacher and going waltzing into schools armed only with her CV (which is half café work) is just part of the post-breakup crisis, or actually a new path she’s content to be on, is not obvious at this point. What is clear, though, is that if she’s really dealing with this in a healthy and mature way, approximately zero credit should go to her therapist who is Bob Balaban, because that guy sucks. If his lack of insight into Hannah’s actual problems and lazy flattery of her every “breakthough” are lost on her, his litany of creepy (and vaguely sizeist) superlatives for Mimi-Rose Eleanor Howard don’t seem to be.

Of course, now we know her true initials are not MRH but the decidedly less regal MEH, I’m never going to be able to call her Mimi-Rose again. That said, I do like Gillian Jacobs’ performance – it has the easy energy and vague, smirking aloofness of a self-assured Creative Type, but there’s a vulnerability in the scene outside her door that’s specific to her desire to maintain her relationship with Adam, and nothing to do with the fact that she wore men’s pyjamas out of the house and had an abortion the day before. (Well, it might be the abortion a little bit – I hear the cramps are a mean sonuvabitch.)

It would have been all too easy for a lesser show to make this The Abortion Episode, but Dunham and co are better and smarter than that – MEH isn’t damaged or traumatised by the procedure itself, but has to work out how to handle Adam’s emotional reaction to the news. It’s rare enough that characters actually go through with terminations; from Miranda in SATC to Juno to Jessa in Girls first season, writers too often “save” female characters from their own potentially-controversial personal choices by a convenient belated period, bittersweet miscarriage or sudden attack of maternal selflessness. It’s incredibly refreshing and edifying to see a woman on TV choose to have an abortion with total confidence that it’s the right choice for her. While it can certainly be difficult in varying degrees for some women, for many others who have had one or more abortions it’s an agency-affirming choice about their own health that’s proven to be the right one for them.

That said: while at seven weeks into a relationship, the decision to not stay pregnant is absolutely MEH’s, there are slightly more delicate ways to ease into having that conversation with your non-babydaddy. As she says, MEH has never considered it anybody else’s decision but hers before, and she’s new to “being open” about it, hence the bluntness; but while that openness is a good sign, that suggests she knows Adam well enough to realise he’d want to be told, she’s a bit taken aback and disappointed by how angry he gets.

And his emotional reaction, I think, is understandable. The tension between a man’s sense of loss or lost potentiality after an abortion, and his full and genuine respect for his partner’s right to choose what she does with her body, is ripe for further exploration in both drama and comedy — and Adam Driver manages to convey this without stepping over the line too much (momentary violence towards inanimate objects notwithstanding). It’s clearly confronting for him, to be presented with this information as a fait accompli and having to process it as such in a short space of time, but there’s no sense that he’s genuinely mad that she’s not having “his baby”.

After dating Hannah, he’s learned to associate love with being needed, and clearly finds it jarring to be excluded from what he thinks of as a moment where MEH would need his support. Hannah would have talked about it for days, written essays about it, might have cried, might have made jokes about it with Jessa, agonised over the tantalising possibility of a little person made out of her and Adam. MEH takes Sue-Ellen Garth the somnambulist instead, and casually drops it into conversation the next day. It takes time to get used to the emotional quirks of a new relationship after leaving another one; while Adam’s more hesitant tuck-in at the end of the episode signals that he’s fine with being wanted instead of needed, it’s hard to say.

At least one thing is clear: Ray needs politics, and politics needs Ray. His ambition has arisen out of a genuine desire to fix a problem that’s affecting more than just him, and his subsequent frustration with the turgid uselessness and cynicism of the municipal powers that be. The Board (including a hilariously dead-eyed Marc Maron) are so wrapped up in routine and bogged down in their own disillusionment that Ray asking semi-rhetorically why it’s so difficult to just get some shit done is all it takes for them to immediately descend into a venomous rabble. The scene where the board members start accusing each other of turning up drunk, borrowing petty cash for personal use (which would surely be some kind of misdemeanour? And certainly grounds for dismissal), and cheating on their spouses is downright cartoonish — although Alex Karpovsky’s bemused glances at his superannuated fellow petitioners kinda get it over the line.

After an extended period of railing against the lack of both cosmic and mundane justice in his corner of the world – a phase I trace back to at least the episode of Hannah’s birthday party, where he learned his boss was dying, got punched into a table and couldn’t even get his whole song request played – Old Man Ray has finally found the perfect outlet for his umbrage. Umbrage!

Meanwhile, Shosh manages to get through a job interview without making a new enemy AND introduces us to the aromatic portmanteau “badussy”, and Marnie and Desi’s relationship is showing cracks already – because he’s much, much further up his own arse than he is up hers. (Thank you, I’m here all week, do try the butt.) May that breakup scene come swiftly and gloriously.

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Girls airs on Showcase at 7.30pm Mondays, with a re-run at 9.35pm each Thursday.

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