Girls Season 6 Episode 4 Review: Painful Evacuation
Caralynn Lippo
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Things are finally kicking into high gear as Girls heads into the second half of its final season.
Girls Season 6 Episode 4 was a fairly standard installment of the series – until its final moments, when something huge and unexpected was revealed.
That's right, kids – Hannah Horvath is pregnant. And the father is Paul-Louis, the rapping surf instructor we (and Hannah) met on the Girls Season 6 Premiere.
And the person to deliver the big news was none other than Joshua, the hot doctor that Hannah once hooked up with way back on Girls Season 2 Episode 5, "One Man's Trash."
If there's one thing I love the most about Girls Season 6 so far, it's all of the callbacks to the show's earlier seasons.
I would never in a million years have expected to see Joshua, a relatively unimportant one-time guest star character, again. But his return didn't feel forced or intrusive. It was perfectly awkward and random, in pure Girls fashion.
Aside from the major pregnancy reveal in the final third of "Painful Evacuation," this was a pretty uneventful installment for Hannah. She was dealing with a painful UTI, which led her to the emergency room, and in turn led to her pregnancy revelation.
In a poignant parallel, "Painful Evacuation" opened on Hannah having a brief interview with Ode Montgomery, an acclaimed female author we've never seen before, who shared some pretty harsh views with Hannah about being a woman and a writer.
Hannah: Is being a woman and being a writer as hard as it seems?
Ode: Harder.
Ode also didn't think too highly of motherhood as a concept and wasn't afraid to let Hannah know it.
I am not a mother, and there's a reason for that. Because childlessness is the natural state of the female author. Okay? Write that down, get used to it.
Ode
I'm not sure we'll ever see Ode again, and I don't think that matters. She served her purpose, which was to be an unlikely harbinger (of sorts) of Hannah's pregnancy news.
Because how perfectly Hannah is it that hours after Ode shuts down motherhood, Hannah would find out she's going to be a mother herself?
I'm discussing this pregnancy as though Hannah will actually go through with it because she instantly shut down Joshua's assumption that she'd get an abortion.
In the promo for the upcoming Girls Season 6 Episode 5, we also see Hannah telling her mother that she's having a baby, which certainly makes it seem like it will really happen. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if Hannah does an eventual 180 and backs out of actually keeping her child.
It appears that, at the very least, Hannah is taking her pregnancy seriously and realizing that her other problems (like Jessa and Adam's relationship) are relatively miniscule in comparison. At least that's how it seemed, based on how she brushed past them when they ambushed her in the hallway to tell her about their movie idea.
Adam: This might be it. It explains everything about human nature. How, even with the best of intentions, we can't help but hurt each other. It's like a metaphor for war and corporations and religious strife. All that stuff!
Jessa: Oh my god. We might be a pair of goddamn geniuses.
If there's one thing I'm not loving about this season, it's how unlikable Adam and Jessa have become together. They're the absolute worst, most narcissistic and self-absorbed versions of themselves as a couple.
And I say this as someone who found the storyline where they initially got together in Girls Season 5 to be very compelling. Well, I regret that tremendously now, because holy hell, are they obnoxious this season.
Adam walked off of the set of a movie directed by a European woman named Olatta, who he didn't see eye to eye with, creatively. That led to Jessa and Adam coming up with the idea to create a movie of their own, which, frankly, sounds like a terrible plan.
Adam and Jessa are way too manic (yes, probably clinically) to pull off self-producing a movie successfully. On top of that, their idea for the movie only seems profound to the two of them.
In reality, there's nothing particularly ground-breaking or interesting about a love triangle between three self-involved twenty-something white people living in Brooklyn. And I say this as a twenty-something white person living in Brooklyn.
It was unnecessary and frankly plain mean to camp out in front of Hannah's apartment to tell her about their glorious "cinematic plan" mere hours after they came up with it. It's obvious that Hannah is still in pain over the two of them being together, and yet they could clearly care less about her feelings.
Also, this line? –
Adam! I think I may have been a child sociopath. I mean, I've completely outgrown it, but I'm a miracle. I think I may have to write a term paper on me.
Jessa
Yeah. Too on the nose. We get it, Jessa is pretty much a sociopath. Enough said about it.
Meanwhile, Marnie proved that Hannah's big speech to her on Girls Season 6 Episode 2 (about looking around and noticing things outside of herself) after Desi's cabin breakdown did not stick. At all.
Marnie is just as narcissistic and in denial as she's ever been. It made the scene between Marnie, Desi, and a guy I'm assuming is Desi's addiction therapist or sponsor, half rage-inducing and half hilarious.
I shut down? I gave up? Do you have any idea how hard this has been for me? I have bruises all over my body from the two-hour massages that I need to deal with the stress of your addiction.
Marnie
Marnie may be completely self-involved and irritating, but Alison Williams plays the hell out of her deep lack of self-awareness. Desi and the therapist looking at her as she said this like, "WTF is wrong with this woman?" was absolutely priceless.
The therapist was right – Marnie's narcissism is detrimental to Desi's recovery. And as silly and goofy as Desi is, I legitimately believed him when he said he was trying to recover.
Marnie's refusal to see herself as at fault was infuriating and proves that these two will never make it work. All Marnie is concerned about is reuniting their band so she can continue pursuing her musical career. Yikes.
Meanwhile, Marnie is being the worst girlfriend ever to poor Ray, who has no idea that she's been seeing Desi and just wants to take her out for dumplings to catch up on their lives. Poor deluded dude.
They had some awkwardly lame and passionless sex to start off "Painful Evacuation," with Marnie faking an orgasm and following that up with a weirdo declaration of love about dying with Ray in the mouth of a lion.
I wanna die inside the mouth of a lion with you. And that way we can be together forever, even in the moment of our own death. Your death and my death.
Marnie
I think Marnie is losing her marbles, and it's hilarious.
I'm very much looking forward to the end of Marnie and Ray's relationship. My greatest hope is that Ray dumps her spectacularly, when she least sees it coming.
Marnie doesn't deserve to be with anyone at this point – not until she curtails her raging narcissism and pulls her own pretty head out of her butt.
I suspect that Ray's realization about Marnie will come sooner rather than later, especially after the events of this installment. Ray witnessed a longtime customer Bobby die and felt guilty because he'd refused to listen to Bobby's story right before he croaked.
His ranting over that experience prompted Hermie, Ray's boss and a longtime Girls supporting character, to lay down some realness about Ray's life and the direction he was headed in.
Hermie: How long were we on the community board? Three months? Then you quietly retreated back to dating girls with six-packs and pretending death wasn't real. I'm worried about you Ray. You're smart – you've always been smart – but your priorities are cuckoo-bananas.
Ray: And what, you're some fucking golden example? You hate your wife, you hate your job. The only thing that gives you a glimmer of joy on this planet is recycling soda cans.
Hermie: It's free money!
Of course, Hermie was 100% right. Ray was just coasting and not living up to his potential.
After an amusing one-sided conversation with Shosh, Ray came to the same conclusion and went to apologize to Hermie for his stubborness. Unfortunately, Ray was dealt a two-fer by death this week – he found Hermie seemingly dead in his home.
If I remember correctly, we learned a season or two ago that Hermie was ill, so his demise has been a long time coming. But it was still heartbreaking to see Ray's reaction to finding his longtime boss and friend that way.
This is definitely the event that will catapult Ray to start pulling his life together and making some big changes. Hopefully, the first of those will be cutting Marnie lose.
Stray thoughts:
- There was an extreme lack of Shoshanna. I really hope that she's not relegated to being Ray's listening ear/shoulder to cry on for the rest of the season. Shosh deserves a better and more complete ending than that.
- What the hell were Jessa and Adam on? The bedroom scene clearly made it seem like they were hopped up on something. Adam Driver and Jemima Kirke have undeniably explosive chemistry, but this season is really driving home how dangerously manic and destructive their relationship is. They feed off of one another's craziness in increasingly scary ways.
- That said, I don't see them being together much longer. Especially once they delve into making this movie and, I'm guessing, exploring more of Adam's past relationship with Hannah.
- Why in the heck hasn't Shoshanna told Ray about Marnie sleeping with Desi? She heard about it from Elijah, and she and Ray are clearly friends. Why would she allow him to remain in this destructive relationship? Makes no sense.
What did you think of "Painful Evacuation"? Share your thoughts by commenting below, and remember that you can watch Girls online anytime here at TV Fanatic to relive the show's final season!
Caralynn Lippo is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter.
