In its sixth and final season, HBO’s Girls shifts from blindered self-sabotage to dawning self-awareness.
The last few minutes of the episode are suffused with the potent mixture of love and bemusement.
The episode deals with several kinds of love: romantic, platonic, and that sparkly feeling somewhere in between.
The show’s minor characters leave vivid impressions while surfacing some truth about the major players.
The tectonic shifts in the inner lives of Girls’s main characters sometimes bring them back together.
The episode belongs to Marnie, who breaks the seal on the superficially successful but spiritually unfulfilling life she’s clung to up until now.
The episode focuses on the surprising difficulty of figuring out who and what makes us feel at home.
Like a Jane Austen novel, Girls seems obsessed lately with pairing its main characters up with long-term mates.
This season has constructed situations for the characters that could hold steady after the series ends.
The theme of growing up, in fits and starts, is a through line in “Good Man.”
The season-five premiere of Girls is a microcosm of the series as a whole.
A cynic might view the episode as fan service, but that would discount the faltering pathways that led to the poise these characters display here.
“Daddy Issues” is all about boundaries and how quickly they can dissolve.
Like much of this season of Girl, the episode focuses on the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us.
“Ask Me My Name” traces the course of a single night that spirals unpredictably out of control.
“Close-Up” begins with a tender portrait of romantic devotion that the episode slowly, cunningly upends.
Picking up immediately where last week’s episode left off, “Sit-In” an impeccably constructed tour de force.
As it fixates on a set of characters languishing in their current situations, the episode locates the genuine comfort that clichés can offer us.
The episode’s title is an acknowledgement of the agency wielded by the show’s core group of women.
Girls’s attempts at eliciting our empathy for a privileged coterie of navel-gazers can sometimes verge on the indulgent.