Twenty hours after finishing her “Saturday Night Live” hosting debut (I’m counting daylight savings time’s start), Lena Dunham was back at work on “Girls” Sunday with the episode she warned her fake grandma on “SNL” not to watch.
In it, her character Hannah goes to great lengths to do some role playing to spice up what she sees as a waning sex life with Adam. It ends more horribly than she’d ever imagine, and not because Adam got slugged by a stranger.
The episode began festive enough, as if at the “SNL” after party, still raging on. Actually Hannah is out with her work friends at GQ, downing as many shots as possible, dancing wildly to Nena’s “99 Luftballoons,” kissing coworkers and then, suddenly, puking and passing out.
It is up to her work friend Joe (Michael Zegan) to take her to his place and literally hose her down. She wakes up in his big bed – alone but in his down comforter and fuzzy flannel night shirt. It’s like another one of those episodes in which we glimpse an alternate life for Hannah in which she sees how comfortable and non-insane her life could be if she wanted it. But she’d probably be bored with it right away.
We cut to the other girls who had been absent from last week’s episode. Marnie shows up at the gallery in progress being run by her friend Soo Jin (Greta Lee), and heavily financed by her daddy (with whom she is on the phone as Marnie walked in). Marnie is all prepared to make a pitch to run the place, since she has experience, but Soo Jin wants only an assistant. Not only that, “an assistant who is more qualified than I am.”
Later, Marnie is making goo-goo eyes at Adam’s theater friend Ray (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as they sit and strum guitars and try to write songs. They had said casually they should sit down and trade songs when they first met and here they are doing it. First he picks some random lines from her journal, which he notes, shows “some darkness in you,” but she said she wrote a lot of it when she was on Ambien.
She freestyles some lyrics and so does he, talking about “I need you in my bed now.” Marnie pushes the issue, asking who he’s singing about. It’s his girlfriend actually. And Marnie is sad again.
But she’s better off than Jenna an Shoshana. The latter has to put up with the coke-feueled craziness of the former and the guy from rehab she’s been palling around with, crazy on drugs, Jasper, played by Richard E. Grant (who will join the next season of Downton Abbey by the way, but I hope not like this).
Jenna and Jasper have been crashing with Shoshana, who takes it upon herself to listen to one detail of his life and look up the daughter he has in New York but hasn’t seen in quite some time.
Shoshana invites father and daughter (Felicity Jones) to a restaurant so they can reunite (and Jasper can be sobered up toward responsibility). It makes Jenna mad especially after he apparently leaves.
Shoshana is unrelenting in her tough love, though, telling Jenna she looks like a junkie. “I am a junkie,” she responds.
But the whole rest of the episode is Hannah, who at first is so sorry she got so drunk and ended up at her friend’s apartment for the night. Adam, obsessing about his part on Broadway in “Major Barbara” by George Bernard Shaw, hardly noticed she was gone. “Did you have fun with your work friends?” is about all he says.
She cleans up and wants to have sexy time but he “doesn’t want to get sticky for rehearsal.” She says fine, but he mutters that he’s lost his place in his book (was it Aristophanes?).
She goes to visit him at rehearsal in a show of support but is kicked out by the director; Adam seems embarrassed.
Finally, she decides to get a platinum wig and confront Adam at a bar, pretending to be the bored wife of a hedge fund manager. When he tries to play along with her story by calling her a slut, she throws her drink in his face. She keeps up the character outside the bar where he taunts her character more. This attracts the attention of passerby who wonder if the poor woman needs help. “She’s my girlfriend,” Adam says. But Hannah won’t own up to it. “I’ve never seen him before.” So the guy slugs Adam before she actually breaks characters.
She’s put some time into this fantasy, so she brings him to a strange apartment — one he recognizes right away as Marnie’s. “It smells of cookies and air freshener,” he says.
She reveals some crazy S&M underwear and wants to be taunted at knifepoint, but soon changes their scene as a cheerleader pairing with the school weirdo.
Adam isn’t having any of it; she can’t change the story in the middle like that. Besides he’d had enough of all of this. “You have an old idea of who I am,” he says.
He explains that their sex life isn’t as crazy as it once was because they’ve settled into a relationship and that’s nice. They don’t need all this role play. Whatever role play they did before was spontaneous and not so planned out.
Finally he says he thinks he’s going to stay with Ray for a while so he can concentrate on the play and avoid all this drama, meaning Hannah.
She is upset at this. The episode ends with the new Beck song “Blue Moon” from “Morning Phase” whose opening line is “I’m so tired of being alone.”
But if Adam gets to Ray’s and Marnie is over there playing music, it might smell of cookies and air freshener too.