Girls Recap: The Real Shoshanna

By Reuben Levine | Mar 21, 2016

Girls’ first uneven episode of the season moves several storylines forward without real focus.

The fifth season of Girls has been juggling a lot. Shoshanna is living in another country, Adam and Jessa are getting together, Elijah has a boyfriend, Marnie is married, and Hannah and Fran are falling apart. It’s a lot to keep track of. In “Queen for Two Days,” Girls tries to cover too much ground.

Hannah and her mother are going on a women’s retreat in order to spend some time finding themselves. Hannah wants some time away from Fran and her mother wants to figure out if divorce is the right answer. So, yes, this is the episode that features the scene of Hannah dancing that we’ve seen in the trailers. Hannah has officially begun her path of self-destruction; a common theme in every season of Girls.

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She admits to being relieved to be away from Fran, and is further pushed in that direction by a seductive female instructor. This eventually leads to Hannah’s first lesbian experience, and it doesn’t end well. It’s an odd scene that doesn’t really work. Instead of really going anywhere, it feels more like the affair that Hannah had with Patrick Wilson in season two. It’s there for Hannah to do something shocking and doesn’t accomplish much else.

The most interesting thread of the episode is Jessa and Adam who are navigating their new relationship together. They have discovered their sexual chemistry, a marked change from when they first got together. Jessa takes Adam to meet her half-sister, a meeting which brings out some classic Adam reactions. His offering to pay for Jessa’s education is an important milestone, but it also screams as setup for future drama.

We don’t get to spend all that much time with Jessa and Adam. Besides Hannah and her mother, the other story that gets the most time is Shoshanna, a plotline that was previously a highlight. Shosh is now the Assistant Manager of a Cat Cafe and appears to be having the time of her life with Yoshi. Her former company contact, played by Aidy Bryant, comes to visit and console. Bryant unfortunately is underused here — she plays what amounts to a SNL character.

Girls is about half over, and it’s about time that things started falling apart.

On first glance it appears that Shosh is having the time of her life as she wonders aloud, “Did I create this country in my mind?” It’s all a facade. Shosh is desperately homesick and lonely. While it makes sense to be homesick in a foreign country, it clashes with what we’ve come to believe a little too harshly. Girls is about half over, and it’s about time that things started falling apart.

By making Shosh miserable, Girls looses some of the authenticity it had going this season. It doesn’t feel real; it feels forced. It feels like a twist to create more drama, and if it was going to happen it should have happened sooner. Fortunately it does culminate in a haunting ending which finds Shosh wandering the streets of Japan alone, while a cover of David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?” plays. It’s perfect.

Next: Go Inside last week's episode of Girls.

The fifth season of Girls, which has been strong up this point, is starting to make the left turn that almost every other season of this show makes. Ray and Elijah are nowhere to be seen, but Ray doesn’t really have anything going on. Next week has a chance to turn it around, though the promise of a Marnie-foucsed episode is not promising. Marnie is, after all, at her most insufferable.