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

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

The Book of Rannells: Girls: Season 5, Episode 2 – “Good Man” (2016)


Somewhat of a mixed bag episode – some stuff I really like, others less so.  Most excitingly, however, this episode kicks off what’s definitely the biggest Elijah storyline in the entire series, so I have to give it props for that.  (A few new relationship spoilers.)

Hannah is called away from work to help her dad deal with a crisis prompted by his first same-sex hookup.  Jessa tries to set up boundaries with Adam after the two of them shared a moment at Marnie’s wedding.  Ray gets into a feud with the hipstery coffee shop across the street from the coffee shop he manages, because Ray usually has to be railing against something or other.

On the Jessa/Adam front… I’ll admit that, my first time through the series, this took me completely aback.  While I generally do a decent job recognizing a will-they-won’t-they situation, of both the traditional and love/hate variety, I’m pretty consistently fooled when a series shows the two characters becoming close as friends first.  When Adam and Jessa started hanging out together in season 4, I liked seeing their interesting friendship dynamic and enjoyed the seemingly-platonic connection between them.  (For the record, early on in Riverdale, I also thought, “Instead of keeping Betty embroiled in the triangle, it’s nice that the show is spending so much time on her friendship with Jughea- oh, wait…”)  As such, their secret kiss at the wedding and Adam’s new apparent obsession with Jessa feels to me like it comes out of nowhere.  When he gets her to agree to them simply hanging out as “friends” (with ulterior motives,) I do admittedly like the montage of them goofing around at a carnival (Coney Island?  I dunno.)  Still, even if it’s in character for him, I don’t like that Adam consistently oversteps and erodes the boundaries Jessa tries to establish.

Hannah is surprisingly mature in helping her dad out here.  Of course, she makes up for it by being wildly immature elsewhere in the episode – such as escalating a mental-health crisis with Fran’s roommate and assigning a sexually-explicit work to 8th graders – but in this plot, she’s reasonably reassuring, practical, and focused on her dad instead of herself.  I especially like the visit she makes to the guy her dad hooked up with.  He’s played by Ethan Phillips, who I remember struggling to place when he guest-starred on Pushing Daisies and realizing with surprise that he’d been Neelix on Star Trek:  Voyager.

The Ray plot is sort of in the middle for me.  Of course he would get into a feud with another coffee shop, but I dislike some of the specific way that goes down.  Specifically, one of the baristas at the hipster place is non-binary, and they go off on Ray when he first calls them “sir” and later, tentatively asks, “Female?”  While it’s definitely believable for Ray to be perplexed by this, I don’t like the trope of a trans/non-binary person aggressively confronting someone who misgenders them, who in scenes like this is always portrayed as uninformed but well-meaning.  It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, framing the situation as “these weird, demanding non-binary people are out to trap you and jump down your throat for just not knowing any better, golly!”

Elijah has a good amount of stuff to do in this episode.  After making Fran uncomfortable with his and Hannah’s weird closeness, he heads to Ray’s coffee shop, where we see him in actual gainful employment for I think the first time in the series.  Awesomely, Elijah refers to working at Ray’s as being “like a job” (among other things, the fact that he “can’t take [his] shirt off” is what keeps him from considering it a real job.)  Naturally, he’s almost less than no help when it comes to Ray’s feud with the hipsters.  I never would’ve thought to put Elijah in scenes with Ray, but it’s actually a great comic fit, because Elijah cares so little about everything that Ray gets worked up over; Ray’s agitation and Elijah’s disinterest go well together, and Andrew Rannells is a lot of fun in these scenes.

But it’s near the end of the episode that things really get started for Elijah.  Other circumstances lead him to a bar, where he’s bought a drink by none other than Dill Harcourt, Elijah’s “number-one news source.”  This is only the start of the plot – which, like I said, is Elijah’s biggest arc on the series – but it leaves the door open for more to come.  Corey Stoll plays Dill, and Rannells does a great job moving from astounded/slightly panicked when Elijah realizes who bought him a drink to flirty/nervous/starstruck once Dill actually approaches him.

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