Pictured: the face I’m making right now.
Guys, we need to talk about this episode. Real talk. Help me work this through, because whoa, Nelly, am I having trouble doing it on my own.
Shoshanna confesses her misdeeds to Ray. Kinda.
“I held hands with a doorman!” she exclaims. SURE, Shosh. We’ve all held hands with a doorman, ifyaknowwhaddamean. Ray thinks it’s cute and kisses her patronizingly on the forehead. Shoshanna is still filled with angst. I think. I can’t tell because the sock bun poised just atop her temple is so fucking huge that it obscures my ability to recognize emotion.
Marnie doesn’t know when to effing stop.
In what world is it acceptable to show up at an ex-boyfriend’s office party, stop the music, and sing a cringe-worthy acoustic cover of Kanye’s “Stronger”? Not this one, babygirl. Charlie says it best: “You need to get your shit together.” Listen to Charlie. Continue banging him, but please, please, please listen to him.
Seriously, though—that was awful. I wonder if I could’ve sued HBO if I ended up suffocating on the throw pillow I was holding in front of my face during that entire scene and passing out and hitting my head on the coffee table and possibly drawing blood. Thoughts?
Hannah is not in a good spot.
I screamed and hid behind the aforementioned throw pillow every time she came on screen, because her inner-ear exploration felt a lot like that time I saw Black Swan and was like no, she can’t possibly do that to her cuticle OH MY GOD NIGHTMARES FOREVER.
Most poignant was her phone call to her parents as she laid on the floor thrashing in post-Q-Tipping agony. “Who’s going with you to the hospital, sweetie?” her mom asks. Nobody. There’s nobody left, and oh, it is so deeply sad.
Adam is a rapist.
This was definitely the biggest dropped bomb. I don’t feel good about putting this out there, because despite his weirdness and aggression and inability to behave like a normal human being, I like Adam and want him to succeed.
That said: not fucking cool, Adam. Not cool at all.
In case you missed it, Natalia, Adam’s new girlfriend (girlfriend?) invites him to an engagement party. Adam steps outside for a breather and runs smack into Hannah, who’s trotting pantslessly home from the hospital. It’s unsettling, so naturally, he heads back inside and puts a quick end to five-plus years of sobriety. He and Natalia head back to his apartment, where Adam proceeds to enact a very, very inappropriate, boundary-crossing, and non-consensual SM scenario wherein he enters (and comes on) Natalia despite her continued requests for him to stop.
That’s sexual assault, no bones about it.
I was clinging to every excuse in the book as I watched him wipe the ‘jac off of her chest. He’s been drinking and it does fucked-up things to him—and at the end, he looks very sad and I-pushed-the-self-destruct-button-didn’t-I. Doesn’t that count for something? Nope. Not now, and not ever.
The Internet, I fear, will make these same excuses and stand by them despite how very, very problematic they are. The reaction will be that he did a dumb thing, or that he shouldn’t have been drinking, or that he fucked things up and that should be punishment enough—not that what happened in his apartment in that episode was rape. It was. It was rape, and I hate that he is a rapist, but that is what happened and I need to call it out as such.
This agonizing episode closes with Hannah on the edge of her tub, plunging a new Q-Tip into her other ear over and over and over. ROLL CREDITS, I intoned. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, ROLL CREDITS.
Stay tuned for next week, when Adam presumably (and hopefully) douses himself in vodka and sets himself on fire, Shoshanna faints under the weight of her updo, and Hannah—you know what? Let’s not talk about Hannah. Let’s not talk about anything. I’m so tired.
Photo via HBOgo.com
