Girls ‘Bad Friend’ recap and review

I’ll have to hand it to Lena Dunham for delivering a really entertaining, and well-written episode this week.

Hannah accepts an offer to write freelance, and her new editor suggests that the magic will happen outside of her comfort zone, prompting Hannah to track down cocaine from her neighbor. With that, Hannah and Elijah (guest star Andrew Rannells) hit the clubs. It is then when Elijah finally reveals he slept with Marnie. Hannah is furious and declares Marnie a bad friend, and gives Elijah the boot.

Marnie runs into artist Booth Jonathan (guest star Jorma Taccone), the same artist who told her last season that the first time they have sex, she might be scared. Though he said it was because he was a man who knows how to get things done, I think it’s because he meant that he is f!cking weirdo. A short, gross, poser weirdo who locks Marnie in a stack of TV’s displaying gross shiat, and then follows that up by commanding her to look at a doll while doing her from the behind, asking how the doll feels. The entire story line was absolutely awkward, and ironically made me miss Charlie.

The episode was certainly entertaining enough, but really I found myself disappointed once again with the lack of Shoshanna and Jessa, both of whom were only featured once at the beginning. The first few minutes were promising, a scene with all the girls finally together, but then the episode focuses solely on Hannah and Marnie, as usual.

I take issues with this because, a) there is too much filler in both Hannah and Marnie’s storylines, b) they have the time to divide the screen time between four characters, and c) the show was billed as a series about four girls. That’s the show I want to watch. All four of them should be in every episode, if not it makes them feel expendable. It also makes the scenes which are shared between Hannah and Jessa for instance feel like it’s being told to us they are friends, but not showing us why, or developing that relationship. It also deems characters like Jessa and Shoshanna, as projections from Hannah. We don’t see them as standalone characters if they are only there to interact with Hannah, or sometimes Marnie. Despite varying levels of importance, Sex and the City never forgot there were four main characters.