‘Girls’ season 2, episode 6 review: Ray and Adam’s story
While there may be some viewers out there who prefer “Girls” to be the straightforward story of four young women in Brooklyn, the risks being taken by this show at the moment are what delights us and attracts us to it. There were many occasions in season 1 where we accused the show of borrowing elements from other less interesting shows, but for the past two weeks especially we have seen half-hours that were funny, poignant, and presented interesting sides to characters that we haven’t quite seen before.
The particular highlight for us this week was seeing the bizarre odyssey of Ray and Adam to Staten Island, where they were attempted to return a dog (named “Dog”) that Adam for some ridiculous reason decided to steal. This was basically the worst buddy-cop movie ever: Ray was desperate to make a connection, but every road he went down led to Adam strangely slamming it in his face. There’s something rather horrifying but compelling about this character: Adam’s undoubtedly psychotic, but he also has a heart in there and probably cares more for Hannah and understands her than anyone else on this show. In his own bizarre way, he stood up for her this weekend … though abandoned Ray with the dog in the process.
As for Ray, perhaps he took something from Adam’s comment that he knew that his relationship with Shoshanna wasn’t going to last, and he knew that his life is going nowhere and he sees no escape from it. Despite the show’s title, this may have actually been the perfect portrait of a modern-day 30-something man: completely lost and in some ways alone despite living in a very social world.
With all of the layers that were present here, we almost found Hannah’s attempts at writing an eBook this week to be a little bit dry. Not only that, but the Marnie story was more of the same thing: the friendship between these two slowly is falling apart, and it was hard to really get anything new out of the awkward silence at the end since we assumed before the episode even started that this is what their conversations were like.
The only other problem we had this week is simple: why didn’t Marnie think it was a problem that Booth Jonathan laid in front of his “assistant” completely uncovered? Was she so busy thinking of him as “the artist” that she failed to notice the most obviously wrong thing in the world?
Overall, what did you think about this “Girls” season 2 episode? Be sure to share some more of your thoughts below, and you can check out another clip from this episode by visiting the story over at the link here.
Photo: HBO