"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Thursday, August 15, 2019

The Book of Rannells: Girls: Season 4, Episode 7 – “Ask Me My Name” (2015)


This is definitely one of the odder episodes of the series.  It takes a few bizarre turns and pretty effectively puts you in the bewildered shoes of the characters who are experiencing that weirdness.  Overall, I’d say it’s a fairly good one (relationship spoilers.)

Hannah has gotten herself a new job, as well as a first date with one of her new coworkers.  In classic Hannah fashion, she decides that a good first-date activity would be attending Mimi-Rose’s art show.  It’s what would seem to be her first encounter with Adam since he moved out, and he’s about as delighted to see her as her date, Fran, is to be involved in this mess.  Adam wants the situation to be over as soon as possible, but when Mimi-Rose magnanimously(?) invites Hannah to the after party, they’ve only reached the edge of the rabbit hole they’re about to go down.

Hannah’s date with Fran starts off surprisingly well, so of course she has to ruin it with this extremely ill-advised move.  The first stage of weirdness is the art show itself, a very pretentious-seeming performance installation involving smocks for the audience to wear as they mingle with the performers.  I’d imagine there are plenty of oddball shows of this nature floating around Brooklyn at any given time – pieces that come from a place of wanting to say something important but ultimately just end up drawing the attention back to themselves – and I’m willing to bet the line here between satire and reality is thinner than I would assume it to be in this case.

But it’s when Hannah joins up with Mimi-Rose, Adam, and Mimi-Rose’s “ex-partner” Ace (played by Zachary Quinto! – he doesn’t have any scenes with Andrew Rannells, so it can’t count as a retroactive Boys in the Band reunion) that things really take a turn.  Once again, I’m left perplexed by Mimi-Rose, which I know is at least part of the point, but it’s still frustrating.  As Ace explains to Adam, “What we find awkward, she finds blissful.  Your suffering is her fucking safe space.”  It’s hard to tell how much about her is genuine vs. constructed.  At times, she’s very “let’s get real with each other and not place these artificial barriers between ourselves,” but at almost the same time, she seems almost sociopathically distant/clinical, unreadable as a sphynx.  While I still don’t know what to make of it, I enjoy watching Hannah and Adam both struggling to keep up with it, and Quinto is quite funny as hipster-douche Ace.

This is another episode that suffers from a serious lack of Rannells – boo.  Just one Elijah scene, albeit a very funny one.  He hangs out in Hannah’s room as she gets ready for her date, drinking wine/champagne(?) straight from the bottle as he saves her from her own wardrobe.  They have some fun banter about dating before getting into a conversation about masturbation that’s topped off with Elijah’s awesomely-hilarious exit line.  Their friendship is so weirdly compatible, and I love it.

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