Girls - S03 E03 and E04 - Dead Inside and Only Child

        "Hanna. Why don't you place just one crumb of basic human compassion on this fat free muffun of sociopathic detachment, see how it tastes." Ray has become one of my favorite characters on this show, alongside Adam. I don't know if it's a good thing that my favorite characters on a show called "Girls" are boys, but it doesn't change the fact. Throughout these two episodes - that felt like a single episode divided in two, even more so because HBO GO had the "early view" option - Ray was repeatedly the voice of reason. In the scene where he tells Marnie what's her problem, it becomes clear how clearly Ray sees things the way they are (and how Marnie isn't really that complex of a character). I could've gone without the dry-humping, but at the same time it adds to Marnie's absolute lack of compassion - she has slept with ex-boyfriends of two of her best friends. Wow, Marnie! Way to break the gal-code!
         These episodes felt, to me, that Girls is back with all its might. Hanna is unapologetically self-centered, and this affects pretty much every aspect of her life: her family life, when she ignores that her dad had possible cancer surgery, her professional life, when she goes to a funeral home to better investigate what's happening with her book, and her love life, when she kicks Adam's sister out of the house. More on that later.
         In "Dead Inside", something quite subtle and wonderful happened. We started noticing how little Hanna knows herself. I went through a couple of ahá moments as far as self awareness during my early and mid twenties. The first ahá moment was after college, when I suddenly felt that I knew myself so well, and that nothing that I would do would ever surprise me, it would just be a part of my wonderful multi-faceted personality. Hanna has definitely had this moment, but not the second one, when one realizes how little we know about ourselves and others, how we're always changing, and how the answer to the question 'who are you' is very complex, if at all existent. Hanna has spent the last episodes (and all of season two) complaining about how much she feels. Maybe it is her defense mechanism after struggling with her OCD, but fact is that somebody very close to her dies, she can't feel, anything at all. To the point where she has to tell a fake monologue about a cousin who died of muscular dystrophy, a story Adam's sister told her, to have Adam not look at her like a monster.  Speaking of which...
         Adam's sister actually grew on me as a character (although not enough for me to remember her name). When Hanna kicks her out, she delivers one of the best monologues of the show, and, like Ray did to Marnie, she breaks Hanna down with amazing precision. Yes, Hanna will never really understand the real struggles of humanity, even if she thinks she does because, to Hanna, her own little world is all that matters. When she finally does kick Adam's sis out, it isn't because Adam's sis crossed the line, it's because Hanna is having a bad day. And when Adam comes home, she can't even understand why he would be upset because, as the episode's title said, she's an only child.
     

P.S: Also worth mentioning: I enjoyed that Jess's destructiveness has major impacts on her life. Even Shosh has had enough, and I totally bought that her friend would fake her death to get rid of Jess. It actually is a great idea that I'm starting to toy around with.