Let's Talk About the Girls Series Finale

It was a beautiful episode of some other show.
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HBO

Well, they did it. The writers of Girls took us through six seasons of Hannah Horvath living in in a Brooklyn walk-up without ever making a Hannah Takes the Stairs joke.

Yes, Girls is over, and while we'll never stop debating whether we are "Marnies," "Shoshannas" or "Hannahs" (you're not allowed to claim to be "a Jessa" because honestly Jessa would never watch Girls), first we have to talk about last night's series finale. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

The HBO show was about friends, and friendship, but it wasn't quite an ensemble show like Friends or Sex and the City or even Seinfeld. It was about individuals who knew each other, not about a group. So it's understandable that the finale would focus mostly on Hannah (Lena Dunham) and Marnie (Allison Williams). The final three episodes of the series gave each of the main characters some kind of send-off, indicating where they might be headed next; in the finale, titled "Latching," we zoom in.

The episode opens with a version of the shot that Girls has used as a season-opener a few times: Hannah being spooned in bed. This time, it's Hannah's bed in her house upstate, and Marnie has her hand resting lovingly on Hannah's big baby bump. Marnie has snuck into the house in the middle of the night to pitch Hannah on the idea of helping her raise the baby. Well, no, not pitch. Insist. Marnie needs a project, dammit, she doesn't have a lot going on, and she knows Hannah enough to know she'll need some serious help.

“Who’s here? I’m here. I win. I’m your best friend. I’m the best at being your friend. I love you THE MOST.” —Marnie

Hannah agrees, and we cut to five months later: Hannah's baby, a boy named Grover, is declared healthy at a check-up. But Hannah, her neuroticism working in her favor this time, is still fretting over how to feed him. She can't get him to latch onto her breast, so she's been pumping, but maybe formula would be OK too? Hannah and Aunt Marnie debate the pros and cons on the drive home until Marnie starts singing along to the radio—"Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman—and Hannah tells her to shut up, causing a mini fight.

At home we see that while Hannah is certainly a loving mother trying...if not her best, then at least trying...but that Marnie's really got the whole mom thing down. She's better at swaddling and comforting, and she's patient and relaxed even when Grover cries. Hannah's still caught up in herself, whining about her bodily aches and pains. She's got a point—giving birth is no walk in the park—but she also misses the point of being a new mom. Focus on your kid!

That said, she's found a way to be funny and quintessentially Hannah about the whole thing. “You think you’re the first man who rejected this?” she asks Grover when he rejects her nipple, eventually calling him an asshole. Hannah and Marnie spend a good chunk of the episode just talking titties. In a callback to the first bathtub scene in the pilot, Hannah mentions how Marnie has seen so much of her nipples, but she hasn't seen Marnie's.

That night Marnie broaches the idea of going out to a wine bar by herself, and we realize that in all this time, Hannah has never been alone with her son. Hannah quickly shuts the idea down; she can't deal with Grover, though she wouldn't admit it. Until later on, that is, when Hannah interrupts Marnie's sexy selfie photoshoot to dump a fussy Grover on her and go to bed. Her wake-up call is not nice. Loreen is in town, having been called in by a sobbing Marnie. Surrogate mom Marnie out, real mom in.

“Mom, don’t you get it? I’m mentally ill, I’m overweight, I isolate people. I’m a quitter. So what if that’s the kind of man I raise? What if thats the only man I can raise?” —Hannah

Loreen is having none of Hannah's shit. She understands that Hannah's in pain and is tired and is frustrated, but she doesn't really care because guess what? So is everyone. Hannah is still acting like she's the first person in the history of Earth to be a single mom and, after losing the fight with her own mother, picks a fight with Marnie. It's a classic Girls moment: Marnie giving Grover a bottle on the patio while Hannah, attached to a big breast pump contraption, chastises her. They fight about maturity, Hannah finally yelling, "You're the immature one!" likely a callback to their "You're the wound" and "You're the bad friend" fights in past seasons. Marnie and Hannah: that old dysfunctional married couple.

The married couple analogy is one that Loreen more or less uses to convince Marnie to move out. She stuck by her "best friend" (Tad, Hannah's gay dad) for far too long, and it ruined their relationship. Loreen, herself a former college professor like Hannah will soon be, has seen that Hannah is turning into her. But she doesn't want Marnie to turn into Tad.

Hannah, meanwhile, has simply taken off. She's strolling around her bucolic, idyllic upstate town in a hoodie and ill-fitting jeans, angry at her friend and mom but mostly frustrated with herself. It's not a negligent act—she knows her son is with two competent caretakers in a safe location with food and electricity—but it is a selfish one. Who said she got the day off from being the mom of the kid she decided to have? Eventually she runs into a weeping, pantsless, shoeless teen girl fleeing her house like someone escaping a terrible situation (rape? abuse? John Mayer music?) might. Hannah snaps into big sister-level responsibility mode, giving the girl her pants and shoes and offering to take her home so she can call her boyfriend. But it turns out it wasn't a crisis at all. Like Hannah, the teenager has just fought with her mom about responsibility. Hannah goes into mom mode, chastising the girl and demanding her clothes back. She doesn't get them, and walks home (accompanied by a very friendly cop, Officer Schpoont, the second of two men in cars whose help Hannah declines in the episode).

She sees Marnie and Loreen on the porch and sits with them for a moment. They put Grover to bed with a belly full of formula. Soon, though, he's awake and hungry, crying through the baby monitor. Marnie starts to get up, but Hannah tells her to sit back down. She goes upstairs and patiently coaxes Grover into latching on to her nipple. Over the credits, we hear her singing to him: "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman.

"Your son is not a temp job." —Loreen

It's a beautiful episode of television. But it didn't feel particularly like an episode of Girls. It felt, actually, a little like Gilmore Girls. Lotta moms, lotta children. Girls has done bottle episodes and out-of-town episodes every season, often to massive success. But it still felt like a Brooklyn show about Brooklyn people. Whatever town Hannah resides in, on the other hand, is like the country that time forgot. We don't see any computers or smartphones for the whole episode. Hannah and Marnie eat TV dinners in front of an antenna set playing a Full House rerun. Hannah's drinking a juice box. While Girls was all about the here and the now, this episode could very well have taken place in 1995. But maybe that makes thematic sense. Hannah's life is a little more traditional these days. And we left the people of New York, and New York itself, in "Goodbye Tour"...maybe "Latching" is more like a coda or an epilogue. It wasn't about the Girls, it was about Girl. Hannah. Her journey, her story.

In that way, there are some obvious, and lovely, ways that "Latching" functioned as a bookend to the events of the pilot. When we first meet Hannah, she is gorging herself on restaurant food her parents will pay for. She's a "hungry girl," and they're feeding her, though they're about to cut her off financially. By "Latching," Hannah is the one doing the feeding and the taking care of; she's gone from suckle-er to suckle-ee, to put it in kind of gross terms. Girls marked the time in Hannah's life between being dependent and having a dependent, her six-year window of true freedom.

Lena Dunham has said that she's known for a few years how Girls would end, how Hannah's story would end. It's trendy, for lack of a better word, for writers to do this nowadays, promising that they've had a plan the whole time. In a way it makes for more satisfying stories, to be able to build toward something, to write with a goal in mind. But it's hard not to wonder if setting your target so early becomes a hindrance. What if you miss it? What if you start writing the character in a different direction, only to force yourself back to some preconceived notion of how things "should" end based on what you thought years ago?

Then again, they could have abandoned the pregnancy storyline at any time; Hannah gets knocked up after a one night stand and we know she's not against abortion. So feel free to debate 'til kingdom come whether Hannah really would have had that baby, whether it was the best ending for the character, the show, the things the show came to represent. Hannah always made it up a bit as she went along and then tried to piece things together in retrospect, through her writing. She took the somewhat random and often chaotic events of her life and said, "This is a story."

"Latching" wasn't a perfect way to end the story of Girls, but maybe there was no perfect end, unless Hannah had a few months to spin it. It felt a little like the start of a new adventure, and maybe that's why it felt so different. It was the first day of the rest of Hannah's life, or whatever. And most of all, it was sweet. I mean that in a good way. For many people, myself included, this often difficult show meant a lot, and you know, it's really fucking satisfying to see your protagonist have a moment of happiness and success. We've seen a lot, more than our share, of Hannah's bad times. And surely there will be (or would be, I understand she's fictional) more to come. But you have to fade to black some time. Why not pick a moment that's just...nice? It's just very nice.

P.S. Veep is back!