the "girls" finale

HBO 

The conclusive GIRLS finale basically ended the way most viewers assumed it would: Hannah found the strength to amend her failed friendship with flinty frenemy, Jessa, she fell (back) in love with gaunt creep Adam, watched as Marnie finally realized her dream of becoming a minor rock sensation on the indie folk music circuit, and saw Shoshanna, Elijah, and Ray find success as actors, entrepreneurs, and business owners. Now, if you're sitting there thinking, wait a minute, none of that happened — well, you'd be right, because for six interminable seasons, that's exactly where it seemed like this series was headed. And I don't mean interminable in a negative sense, I actually enjoyed Dunham's rich, vainglorious, and often meandering storylines when they were apropos— particularly Hannah's retreat to a rich doctor's B.K. brownstone in Season Two, as well as the critically acclaimed return of Charlie Dattolo in Season Five; reemerging from the casting grave to give his insufferable character the proper sendoff he always deserved — channeling his inner Shia LaBeouf to whisk Marnie off her feet for a stripped-down love affair.

The episodes stood out because they had no sense of urgency, agenda, or discernible path forward — free-flowing like jazz while shattering our rigid, pre-conceived TV-watching expectations (the likes of which only Lena Dunham could dream up), bursting at the seam with frothy, orgasm-induced narcissism and millennial indulgence. "One Man's Trash" works so well because it embraces the inherent schism between Hannah and Patrick Wilson's Joshua, on issues of class, gender, and age which come to a genre-defying head in the episode's ending. Hannah inadvertently reveals herself to be the very thing she hid so well; anxious, broken, and terrified of abandonment. She bears her proverbial cards, unapologetically so, playing into the very gender stereotypes she vehemently attempted to sidestep in seasons past and future. An identical pattern of self-destructive behavior is also on display in the triumphant return of Charlie D., which may have well as taken place in Marnie's conflicted mind. As a means to cope with the impetuousness of her childlike, thrice-married husband, Desi, or older, wiser (former) fuck buddy, Ray, she struggles to move past her reckless choices while embracing the erroneous decisions she continually makes along the way. 

Similar themes sprout up in other episodes, such as the brilliant ending to season six's ironically titled: "American Bitch," wherein Hannah falls victim to a more seasoned writer (played with latent sleaze-bag charm by actor Matthew Rhys), a decadent con artist/ professional who casually assaults Hannah after professing his immense vulnerability. The moment we observe dozens of other (novice) female writers passing Horvath on the street, we're reminded of the subtlety in which Dunham employs magical realism to flex her take on gender politics, a narrative that pits women at the losing end of a male-dominated power structure — which she, Jessa, Marnie, Shoshanna, Loreen, and to some extent, Elijah, try so desperately to overcome. This is also the reason the show's finale seems so underwhelming — given everything that's come before it, Dunham seemed to take pained notes from similar endings found in "Breaking Bad" or "The Sopranos," episodic powerhouses whose finales defined the show almost as much as their complete body of work. Their creators never shied away from the fact that the final episodes were in fact, a far cry from their best work — "Ozymandias" for example served as the penultimate tipping point for the series, a corroboration of lead-ups ending with Walter confronting his family (quite violently) as he takes his infant daughter hostage. "The Blue Comet" reaches similar heights, even as half of Tony's crew is murdered, we watch in awe and suspense as he sits alone on his dingy bed, clutching a machine gun, ready for revenge and unadulterated bloodshed. "Latching," the final (and most problematic) episode of "Girls," achieves this dark, hybridized-crystallization too, opting to end on a considerably happier note with Shosh's engagement party rather than a tired, screaming (and racially ambiguous?) baby.

Marnie and Loreen (rightly or wrongly) seem to be the only willing participants in Hannah's quest for single-parenthood matriarchy, let alone the only individuals she has left to lean on, yet she still manages to treat them like garbage because her newborn baby refuses to suckle her breastmilk. While this storyline was actually inspired by series co-creator Judd Apatow's trials and tribulations between real life wife Leslie Mann, it became somewhat apparent, if not downright flagrant, that the baby bore little resemblance to Dunham. Its brown lips refusing to breastfeed from Hannah's caucasian nipples compounded the fact that this was a generally overlooked flaw, not only of the final episode, but of the series as a whole. For those of us who watched six years of "Girls" evading all aspects of race, white privilege, or gentrification, the series' lack of minority characters throughout its history threw another wrench into Dunham's decision to make Hannah's baby of mixed descent, as if the writers were trolling us. Considering very few actors or actresses of color ever made it onto the show — with some exceptions; Donald Glover's Black Republican, Jessica Williams' no-holds-barred agency shill, Riz Ahmed's too-chill-to-live surf instructor, and Hiro Mizushima's Tokyo heartthrob, the choice to give Hannah's baby anything other than white skin came across more like a dubious shortcut than a thoughtful political statement. Whichever route Dunham intended to take, it's pretty clear that Hannah's baby will remain in the sunken place for its short and painful existence — and we, as an audience, can only hope Hannah takes care of him better than Lena did the many hopeful and aspiring actors who were never given the break they deserved at HBO. Maybe if they'd tried suckling the collective teat of Dunham, Apatow, Konner and Co. a bit harder, perhaps little Grover wouldn't have come across as such a glaringly mishandled, last minute fumble.