Lena Dunham talks “Girls” series finale, main character’s evolution

The heavily think-pieced and often divisive series helmed by and starring Lena Dunham may not have always given us what we wanted, but it was a sometimes scarily accurate representation of a generation. To those like myself in Dunham’s peer group, those early episodes rang cringingly real: the struggle to make a career as a writer, the crappy apartments, the awful sexual encounters. While seasons 1 and 2 brought a novelty to it that most shows do, this season really brought the evolution of each character together in ways that were incredibly realistic and didn’t let audiences down. Hannah’s mother, Loreen (Becky Ann Baker), who was this episode’s MVP, sums it up best when she admonishes her daughter for claiming her own baby hates her. Thoughts expand, possibilities seem endless, life feels so entirely different and more intense than ever before.

It’s too much for the girls. Part of this, I realize now, was because I was 23 when it premiered. I personally believe seasons 3 and 4 are where you started to see “burnout”. I had to, right? They had their ups and downs, too, but I think as friends, maybe because they were older, they were perhaps better matched.

I didn’t need to spend a half-hour watching Hannah figure out her new life in upstate NY – and this is coming from someone who actually honestly really liked Hannah. The transition from girl to woman, brewing for the past season or two, finally took. And as Dunham had already warned, Jessa (Jemima Kirke) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) weren’t in the episode at all, Jessa having landed safely back with Adam (Adam Driver) and Shoshanna having surprised her friends with a new fiancé before essentially calling off the friendship in the bathroom at her engagement party. They grew and stared deep into their own guts to figure out what was actually in there, even if they only did so reluctantly. Loreen asks her if she is happy here, and she tells her she doesn’t need to be happy – that helping Hannah and the baby is more important right now.

“Yo, girl“, Marnie says, laughing. If you think about it, Williams is kind of the best at playing the worst. And this time, I realized that the moments I loved in season six had been scattered through Girls the whole time. Not all moms are lucky enough to find a Marnie, but the ones who do have a partner and steward through babyhood challenges, a companion whose diligent, careful, non-postpartum sense of composure will eventually prove infuriating.

“Of course you do”, Hannah says, in one of her more mature moments on the show. Hannah brushed off any question of why she was lacking shoes and trousers, and as if on cue, Grover started crying.

The final episode, which aired in the United Kingdom on Sky Atlantic on Monday night, showed Dunham’s Hannah five months after giving birth to her first child. And the penultimate episode had also made that clear, as the bonds between the show’s four central female characters fell apart in a very unpretty way. (In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer and director of the episode Jenni Konner said, “Episode 9 would be the traditional finale and then the 10th would be as if there was some imagined spin-off that will never be.”) We’ll just have to imagine Ray and Abigail are kissing on a merry-go-round in perpetuity; dream of the raw bar at Shosh and Byron’s wedding; wonder about the health of Jessa and Adam’s ongoing psycho-sexual true love affair; keep our fingers crossed that Elijah can learn how to dribble a basketball before White Men Can’t Jump opens on Broadway.

She gave the girl her jeans and the girl told Hannah that she ran away from home after her mother told her to do her homework. That doesn’t feel super self-actualized, so it would be amusing because the audience would be like, “Hanna and Adam are my one true pair, that’s my platonic ideal of love”, and I would be like, “I want to get together with you and talk this trough with you“.

What happens in “Latching” isn’t almost as satisfying as the blunt and teary revelations of “Goodbye Tour”.

Dunham: I know. And we really struggled in that last episode with coming up with how you’re gonna show that she learned something in a way that’s not completely clunky and completely like an Afterschool Special.

Every scene is bare bones, with rarely more than two people sharing the screen at a time. Hannah tells Marnie she sucks at being helpful because she is the immature one.

Later, Marnie privately tries to have FaceTime sex with a guy named Delvin.

Hannah agrees to Marnie’s offer because what does she have to lose? Regardless, it’s a big shift from the series’ beginning, where Hannah’s parents stop supporting her financially and leave her to find her own way in NYC.

“Do you know how insane this economy is right now?” Loreen snarls. “Fucking everyone“. Hannah has a long history of aspiring.