Lena Dunham's HBO comedy signed off after six seasons on Sunday.
After six glorious seasons of hooking up with friends, breaking up with friends, struggling with jobs, struggling with no jobs, mishaps, missteps and mistakes, Girls has come to an end.
The 20-something Hannah Horvath – played by the show’s creator Lena Dunham – and her New York City posse of Jessa (Jemima Kirke), Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) and Marnie (Allison Williams) gave the millennial generation their very own Sex in the City, with all the ups and downs that a female-driven dramedy series should deliver. And on Sunday night, they ended with "Latching," five-month jump forward for last week’s pregnant Hannah.
Shoshanna and Jessa made their final appearances in last Sunday's penultimate episode, so it was just Marnie we were waiting on for a final bow with Hannah. And while the new mother is living in her new country home in upstate New York (we assume), she’s struggling to take care of her 2-month-old baby, Grover.
Marnie swoops in, like she so often does, with a grand master plan that can’t possibly go wrong. Hannah points out that her pitch is much like Adam’s (Adam Driver) pitch earlier in the season – to help raise the baby with her – but Marnie can’t be dissuaded.
"What other friends do you have?” she asks Hannah. “I win. I'm the best friend."
The episode follows Hannah and Marnie as they slip naturally into the off-kilter dynamic that so many couples experience in the early days of raising their first child. It’s all nervous first-time mom stuff from Hannah, like asking if the scale at the doctor’s office is sanitized in between weighing different babies or sitting in the backseat of the car with the baby while her partner – in this case, Marnie – drives. It’s a sort of adorable tit-for-tat between the friends, until Hannah points out that the whole thing is “starting to feel perverse,” and not just because of breastfeeding problems that Marnie tries to help out with.
“You begged to come here,” Hannah reminds Marnie. “And now it’s not matching up to what you imagined, like some Laura Ashley catalogue or some zany, fun sitcom.”
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The friends fighting like an old married couple is the one thing that tethers this episode to the last six seasons, otherwise it might have felt like a completely different show. But Dunham makes up for that jolting change of circumstance with a soliloquy admitting to the one thing the Girls audience seems to have always known – that Hannah Horvath is a quitter. Of course, she can’t quite quit this new chapter: baby Grover.
God forbid though, that her Mom tell her that – which is precisely what Mama Horvath (Becky Ann Baker) comes upstate to do, at the behest of Marnie in the middle of the night.
“You want to act like this whole thing was an accident?” Hannah's mother asks sternly, following her around the house. “Like it happened to you? That’s fine, Hannah, but that’s not honest. You made a choice to have this child and guess what, it’s the first one you can’t take back.”
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So really, mother and daughter are saying the same thing, but Hannah needs a minute to come to that conclusion on her own. She storms out the door and walks around the town for a few hours, eventually losing her pants and shoes in an attempt to help a teenage girl fleeing an "emergency incident," that turns out to be merely a fight with her mother over homework.
The moment of clarity comes to Hannah in her pants-less walk around town – after laying into the teen about how her mother only tells her to do her homework because she loves her more than anything in the world. When she gets back home – where her own mother and Marnie are drinking wine on the front steps – and hears Grover’s cries for her inside, she calmly walks in and up to his room, brings him to her chest and, in a moment that shows just how far she's come since the pilot, finally coaxes him to latch onto her nipple.