girls

Let’s Talk About the Girls Series Finale

Photo: HBO

As you might guess, this post contains spoilers for the series finale of Girls.

After the big friend break-up in “Goodbye Tour” last week, the Girls season finale “Latching” cut out Shoshanna and Jessa, focusing primarily on Hannah, Marnie, Loreen, and, of course, Hannah’s baby. We’ll get to the big moments in a second, but first, the finale’s biggest twist might have come at the end: We didn’t get anything like the kind of closing credits song we expected. Instead, as Girls cut to black, we heard Hannah talking to her new baby boy, and humming a little bit of “Fast Car.” The baby, by the way, is named Grover, as Hannah seemingly took Paul-Louis’s suggestion from earlier in the season to heart.

Now, let’s talk about the rest of the episode.

After five months pass, and the baby is born, Hannah spends much of the episode trying to get Grover to breastfeed, hence the episode’s title. She’s living in a house upstate with Marnie, embracing a domestic, Full House–watching life.

Before the time jump, Marnie arrives out of the blue and tells Hannah she wants to help her raise the baby. “I’m here. I win. I’m your best friend,” Marnie insists. After Hannah has her baby, Marnie goes into full controlling-mom mode, driving Hannah around and singing along to the radio to Hannah’s annoyance. She still wants to go out to local wine-and-cheese nights, however, and is having FaceTime role-play sex with a personal trainer from Weehawken. She’s pondering law school because she “fucking loves rules.”

After getting fed up with her friend’s parenting skills, Marnie calls Hannah’s mom for help. Loreen tells Hannah that she can’t give up on her on her baby like she would a lease, a temp job, or a boyfriend. “You know who else is in emotional pain?” she says, when Hannah asks for some sympathy. “Fucking everyone for their whole lives.” Hannah responds by throwing her mom and dad’s failed relationship in her face, and runs out of the house.

Wandering down the street, she runs into a girl who has been in an “emergency incident.” Once Hannah learns that the girl got into a fight with her mom about doing her homework, Hannah takes the mom’s side and switches into mom mode. Since she gave her shoes and pants to the girl, Hannah ends up being escorted home by a cop.

When Hannah returns home, Marnie reveals that she and Loreen gave formula to the baby, but once Grover starts crying, Hannah goes upstairs and breastfeeds him herself and gets him to calm down. We end the series, like so many Girls episodes, with a shot of Hannah’s face.

So, has having a baby finally forced Hannah to grow up? Should Marnie go to law school? How great is Becky Ann Baker? Discuss below.

Girls Series Finale: Let Us Discuss