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.
No comments:
Post a Comment