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

Thursday, October 10, 2019

The Book of Rannells: Girls: Season 5 – “Wedding Day” (2016)


Here we are on season 5 of Girls!  As is obvious from the title, someone’s getting married in this episode.  I will be spoiling who that is, along with another relationship developments from the end of last season.

Everyone has gotten together upstate to celebrate.  There are those complicated bridesmaid dresses with the long dangly things you tie together, meditation circles, and the prospect of rain looming overhead.  It’s Marnie and Desi’s wedding day!  (They got engaged at the tail end of last season.)  Marnie, as you can imagine, is a nightmare, wound impossibly tight but at the same time trying to pretend she’s totally laidback and easygoing.  This situation is greatly helped by Hannah very much being Hannah, whereas Jessa is literally all, “I just bathed in a creek and then ran through a field to dry myself” (that cracked me up.)  On the guys’ side, Desi vacillates between mellow-and-blissful and completely freaked out.  All the while, the other guys awkwardly try to make conversation with Fran, Hannah’s current boyfriend/teacher at the private school where she now works – he’s the guy she went on the disastrous first date with in “Ask Me My Name.”

As far as wedding-hijinks episodes go, I think this one is pretty good.  While it has a lot of the usual tropes – cold feet, a tyrannical bride, etc. – the characters’ reactions to all of that are very rooted in who they are.  Marnie acts exactly as you’d expect her to, and the rest of the girls are all in character as they variously help and/or hinder the situation.  And there are some incidents that are entirely the brainchild of this episode, such as Ray’s weirdly-intense “what are your intentions toward my friend?” conversation with Fran or Desi diving into a scuzzy pond in reaction to his inner turmoil; I’m still not the biggest Desi fan, but I do enjoy him when he’s being straight-up ridiculous.

Not a lot of Elijah today.  He’s mostly just there, hanging out with the guys in the run-up to the wedding.  That in itself is kind of nice because, as I’ve said, Elijah doesn’t interact all that much with the other male characters on the show (although this season will give us a bit more of that.)  As such, it’s a different kind of energy than we see in his scenes with Hannah or the other girls.  Unfortunately, there’s just not much to see.  His funniest moments here are sight gags, like the shot of him meditating with Desi and his best man or his reaction to Desi emotionally comparing him to Lucille Ball.  Also, of course Elijah is just hanging out in his underwear.

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