With
Hannah halfway across the country from the rest of the characters, this is
close to a bottle episode, with screentime for most of the other regulars who
appear being limited to phone calls or Skype sessions. As such, the story hangs on how invested you
are in Hannah doing her thing in Iowa.
For me, I’d say it mostly works (premise spoilers for Hannah’s plot this
season and a mild spoiler as to Elijah’s involvement in the plot.)
Hannah is
officially a grad student, and she’s finding Iowa a mixed bag. She’s floored by how cheaply she can rent
there (“We should all move here and start the revolution!”), but she gets into
a losing battle with some local fauna.
As for her writing program… well, let’s just say it’s a roomful of
people honestly critiquing Hannah’s work while she sits and listens – how do you think it’s going? She feels lonely and uncertain on her own,
disconnected from everything going on with her friends, but at the same time,
she’s reluctant to let on that she’s having a hard time.
A lot of
what goes on here is peak Hannah, from her awkward conversation with the
bookstore cashier to her ungainly bike-riding around campus. Naturally, her first round of feedback with
her fellow grad students is packed with cringe comedy as Hannah gets more and
more defensive (it doesn’t help that D’August, the student who reads before
her, is given such a universal tongue bath.)
There are points where it gets to be a little much for me, but for the
most part, I think the show keeps it right on the edge.
One thing
I like is seeing how Hannah pulls back from letting people in on her
struggles. There’s a great scene where
she collect-calls her parents in desperation, but as soon as she gets them on
the phone, she starts wallpapering over her stresses, making up friends she
doesn’t have and sweeping her problems out of sight. It’s still painfully obvious that she’s
drowning, even as she tries to bring it up in a transparently-nonchalant way,
but she simply can’t let herself get real about it. That’s very relatable, and I feel for her in
that scene.
While I
think the episode is mostly effective in what it sets out to do, it kicks up
several notches once Elijah arrives on the scene. He materializes in Iowa in an incredibly
Elijah way, and while he initially purports to be there solely out of concern
for Hannah’s well-being, Elijah doesn’t do many things solely for the good of
someone else. He and Hannah have some
fun “us against the world” banter – my favorite being, “I hate everyone but
you!” “Me too! I’ve been saying
that for years!” – and then he immediately takes her to a party that he’s
already found out about.
Including
Elijah gives the episode a much-needed injection of fun and energy. Going to a party doesn’t solve anything for
either of them, but it’s a break from all the discomfort, and that balance
helps bring the episode home. The
montage of Elijah and Hannah ludicrously dancing together is great, and the
closing scene is both funny and sweet.
It might seem a little disingenuous to fly Elijah out to the Midwest to
essentially hang out in service of Hannah’s storyline, but I think the show carries
it off well enough. In the previous
episode, we see some of Elijah’s disillusionment with New York that fuels his
decision to come out to Iowa, and sidestepping his problems is certainly an
Elijah thing to do. And honestly, it’s
so much fun to see him there that I can’t complain too much.
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