From time to time, “Girls” has to concentrate on the boys.
With “Boys” the title of the latest episode, it brought back Adam, who hasn’t been seen since police were dragging him away a couple of episodes back. Ray went over to his manly apartment get his copy of Little Women back that Hannah took over there. That it’s Louisa May Alcott that he’s retrieving may remind you that Lena Dunham is writing all these episode; it’s one of her lapses when writing about guys.
Nonetheless, Adam and Ray sort of bonded on their way to another task: returning a dog that Adam had stolen from outside a coffee shop. To do so, they must travel to Staten Island, whose amusement-park like gates to the ferry are more like the gates of hell. They were really both in bad moods.
Other guys? Well, there was Booth, the self-absorbed artist who while naked in bed with Marnie (who is never naked), fired his assistant for eating a bit of his rosewater ice cream. Essentially he then made Marnie his assistant, even while she thought they were more of a boyfriend/girlfriend thing. She was crushed when she learned she wasn’t.
On the streets of Saten Island, Ray and Adam are discussing women. First Adam dismisses Hannah as a carnival game you obsess over winning, but once you do, you realize you don’t want the prize after all. “Hannah would have been this giant Tweety doll you’d be carrying around the carnival all night.”
When Ray says he could never understand the Hannah attraction in the first place, Adam questions Ray’s motives with his own girlfriend Shoshana. “You feel safe with her because you know it won’t work out – she clearly doesn’t like you.”
Adam dashes off, leaving Ray with the dog. When he finds the owner’s house, a terrible young woman there cusses him out and insults him.
He finds himself on the water commiserating with the dog and starting to cry about the failures of his life. And you think: Isn’t this supposed to be a comedy? Only as much as “Louie” is a comedy, and that tragedy is funny and absorbing every time.
But what of Hannah, star of the show, who indeed was just about the only one featured in last week’s episode?
Well, she was hired at the beginning of the episode to write a quickie e-book and sees it as her literary destiny, declaring “this is the best thing that ever happened to me!”
But not surprisingly, she immediately suffers a bit of a writers’ block. Chapter one from the sometime coffee shop worker is called “Room for Cream,” and that’s about as far as she’s gotten.
She shows up at Marnie and Booth’s art party which is kind of a drag — all new friends with odd nicknames, her friend tries to hide her raincoat because it’s not cool enough and someone disses the very idea of e-books.
The saddest scene is when Hannah calls Marnie up later and both of them just lie to one another: Hannah claims she’s doing swimmingly on her book; Marnie insists she had a lovely time at her party and is sitting out in the garden with Booth looking at fireflies.
Actually, she’s schlepping home in the subway with her futuristic dress in a plastic bag and her romantic hopes in mothballs; Hannah’s at home with nothing to write. She slugs the pillow when they hang up.
Jessa is hardly in the episode at all (Shoshana even less), but Jessa does manage to tell Hannah nastily that her book won’t matter to anyone, which does not cheer Hannah up.
Next week, the two will go on a trip upstate to see Jessa’s dad.
Hope by then Ray will have gotten back from Staten Island.