'Girls': Everyone Has to Just Let It Go

The theme of the week on Girls was letting go. Full-on, Adele Dazeem-style letting go. Jessa had to work to let go of her addiction. Hannah struggled to let go of her anxiety about Adam moving out and Marnie tried to let go of her… Marnie-ness.

For Jessa, letting go means channeling her cravings for drugs into dance and landing a job with a famous photographer at Marnie's gallery. For Hannah, it means throwing herself into work and then hurtling herself out of it. (She got herself fired on purpose.) For Marnie, it means a lot of delusion with an unhealthy dose of denial and misplaced attention-seeking.

Last week, things looked like they were all but over for Hannah and Adam after her failed attempt to revive their sex life with some misguided kink. He left her a mess in Marnie's apartment, and announced that he was moving in with Ray. This week, their relationship was still on, but on the shakiest of terms. Adam insisted at the beginning of the episode that he still loved Hannah and that everything was going to be okay as soon as the play started and he could concentrate on something other than performance prep. Hannah continued not to really believe that and, as her behavior ventured more and more into the crazy zone, he pulled back more and more. Next week's season finale seems primed for a for real breakup. #sadface.

Surprisingly, however, the biggest issue of the night wasn't the fate of Hannah and Adam's love. This week, another girl took center stage, in a very literal way. Marnie dragged her dearest friends out to an open mic performance that everyone (including the audience at home) expected to suck. As Elijah so perfectly puts it, Marnie has a beautiful voice, but manages to always sound desperate and overly-optimistic. With her new performance partner, Desi, however, she's transitioned from overwrought covers of pop songs on YouTube to a lovely folk duo performing original material (music by Desi, lyrics by Marnie). She wows everyone. She's finally getting the praise she's been so desperately craving.

The problem? Her inspiration for performing like a human being instead of a desperate robot is her growing affection for Desi, who has made it clear in no uncertain terms that he has a girlfriend and isn't interested. She hinted at it when they were writing together. She told him outright, moments before their show, that she thought they had palatable chemistry. And then after the show, when his girlfriend arrives and he's (gasp) excited to see her, Marnie shuts down in ice princess mode.

And how does she cope with this rejection? By running to Ray, a guy she thinks is so beneath her league that she doesn't have to pretend to care about his feelings.

As much as Marnie, Hannah, and Jessa try to let go of their hangups, anxieties, and addictions, every "solution" just feels like a temporary fix or distraction from the real problem. This is Girls, after all, and nothing can ever go quite right for our anti-heroines.

Image: HBO