Girls: Full Disclosure
March 21, 2017 8:25 AM - Season 6, Episode 6 - Subscribe

Marnie tries to convince Desi to follow through with their planned gig at her mother friend's birthday party; Hannah gets advice on an important decision from her father and his new partner; Elijah helps a co-worker run lines for an audition.

With a return by Rita Wilson as Marnie's mother, and Jasmine Cephas Jones.
posted by lunasol (9 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Jasmine Cephas Jones is, of course, Peggy from Hamilton, which makes it this season's second guest appearance by an actor who originated a meme-favorite character in Hamilton.
posted by lunasol at 8:27 AM on March 21, 2017


I have to say, I was pretty "meh" on the Hannah pregnancy storyline - I am on the record as hating it when TV shows get characters pregnant who would most likely have an abortion in real life, and they don't even consider it on the show. But 1. Girls has never really shied away from characters having abortions, and 2. It feels completely believable that Hannah would decide to have this baby.

I think they're also using her pregnancy in a really interesting way, by exploring how the people in her life relate to her now, and how they see their own lives. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going on this season as Hannah is finally growing up at least a little bit. She is still surrounded mostly by people who are incredibly narcissistic, which is not surprising, as she has been a very narcissistic person. But it's pretty clear she needs some new people in her life.

However, I really am not crazy with where they've taken Jessa this season. As unbearable as she can be sometimes, she had been on her own path of growing up. This season they seem to have totally abandoned that and turned her into a foil for Hannah, on what I assume is Hannah and Adam's path to getting back together.
posted by lunasol at 8:42 AM on March 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


I should have said, I was pretty "meh" on the Hannah pregnancy story at first.
posted by lunasol at 9:23 AM on March 21, 2017


Do you know what we really need in the last season? A Marnie episode!
-Nobody ever

Who else was expecting Desi to ride into the sunset? By ride into the sunset I mean "right into a truck going back to NY high as a kite". And somehow, Marnie is so self-absorbed she can't even tell his mind is not exactly there anymore. At least we know what she'll be like 20 years down the road.

But, yeah, the continuing portrayal of Jessa and Marnie this season has been awful. It's not like they had to put the other characters down so Hannah could look better; like the rest of them she has been a slowly recovering entitled narcissist throughout the series, all they had to do was step it up a bit. It was perfectly possible to have her grow in different ways than Jessa, Marnie and Shosh (thus, bringing them further apart because everyone is looking for something different in life) other than turning the first two into walking shitshows and playing out the third, because if there's someone who had enough of that shit is Shosh.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:04 AM on March 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


As much as I'm kinda dreading rehashing (or god forbid, rekindling) the Adam-Hannah stuff, the tiny flicker of a smile on Adam's face when Hannah said she was pregnant was the best thing.
posted by purpleclover at 10:34 PM on March 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also, I cheered when I saw Jasmine Cephas-Jones, and Elijah's observation that people buying leather gloves after 6 are murderers was perfect.

I am loving this season.
posted by purpleclover at 10:35 PM on March 21, 2017


Lmfsilva, I think it's a valid artistic choice to make Marnie and Jenna so horrible, especially in this climate. I think it's a way of admitting that some people struggle their way out of toxic narcissism, and some people get pulled deeper in. Just because we've gotten fond of some of these people's foibles doesn't mean they're not horrible people. Happy endings for everyone would be sickening on this show. And if it ends up making the point, some people are so stuck in adolescent selfishness that they become irredeemable, I think that's a fair point to make (whether I agree with it or not). Girls has always walked a line of making the characters cartoonishly bad but somehow believable, at I think that's hardest to do in the tying-up-loose-ends stage, but I think it's going pretty well. Hannah is still Hannah, human face-palm, but I'm rooting for her more than ever. The twenties are hard!
posted by rikschell at 5:21 AM on March 22, 2017


My problem is that it was not a slide back. Everyone had become a little better over the last seasons. This season, 6 episodes in, has Marnie said or did anything that wasn't obnoxiously narcissist?
And I'm not exactly asking for a happy ending to the series. Realistically, these people will never see each other again after the finale because they have less and less in common with each other, or are finally realising how little they always had in common. I just think flanderizing the characters back to their worst traits in the final stretch seems lazy af.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:28 AM on March 22, 2017


I think that throwing certain characters under the bus in order to elevate other characters is fair game in fiction. However, I take issue with how ham handed it is being done here, like whoa, we are in the final season so we finally have to do something that will make this all worthwhile and so we can have a proper ending, or something. There is just way too many strings showing in the rush to move things along, and that is of course why it seems like Marnie and Jessa are being ill treated by the script, because we can see the script. Ordinarily, you want all of that to be invisible.

Also, I don't find Jessa or Marnie particularly more narcissistic than the other characters. They are being blamed for the other character's unhappiness and personal issues, and I somewhat resent that. The scene in the recovery therapist's office where Desi is encouraged to say his piece about how Marni is responsible for his addiction just played so badly for me, and seemed so irresponsible as both a therapeutic directive as well as a plot device. Same with Shoshonna getting angry with Jessa for similar misdirected blame in a previous episode.
posted by nanook at 9:38 AM on March 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


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