Girls - "Video Games" - Review

The title of this Girls’ episode is “Video Games”; it comes from a line from the women, Petula, Jessa’s father is currently shacking up with. She’s a spacey free-spirited hippy obsessed with being organic. And she suggests that life is like a video game. The only way to move forward is to “level up”. 

This piece of advice sounds like empty hokum but when you actually consider it, it’s essentially the argument the whole series has always been making. Our protagonists, Hannah, Jessa, and Marnie (and as last week demonstrated Ray as well), are no longer kids anymore and they need to start growing up and accepting responsibility. Girls began with Hannah’s parents cutting all funding to Hannah, forcing her to face adulthood head on. And yet Hannah has constantly avoided being honest with herself. Even little breakthroughs such as the one in “One Man’s Trash” never really get taken to heart. Hence her lack of real advancement. 

The show has handled the implications of the brash self-involvement of the characters rather well so far, but it’s a theme and character dimension that can only be plumbed so much. So here, instead, we get a different aspect of our characters, one that suggests what’s wrong with them. If “Video Games” is about anything, it’s about parent problems. In another sense, it’s about the unintended effects parents can have on us. Jessa may deny that her and Hannah’s parents have nothing in common, but that’s not entirely true: their parents raised them in such ways that they’re both massively incapable of living.

We finally meet Jessa’s father this episode. He’s a mopey, loser-like fellow who keeps making excuses from the word go. When he doesn’t pick up Hannah and Jessa from the store at episode’s end, it’s not really surprising; this guy is a deadbeat that was never there for his daughter. Yet Jess can’t help but seek his approval. 

I like all the above in theory, but it didn’t need an entire episode dedicated to it. Nor did we need anyone else there besides Jessa. I would have liked to have seen the other characters (just in their own stories). Jessa has been underutilized this season, but there were other ways that she could have been sent over the edge. It’s not implausible that she’d up and leave without warning after the awkward meetup with her dad, but we know next to nothing about this guy and it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about Jessa. 

Stray Observations: 

-The moment Jessa’s dad started calling her “you beautiful creature”, I knew  he was an ass.

-“It’s not a theory, Camry drivers are cunts”

-“You’re the cushion”

-“She was a masseuse at the last rehab he went to”

-They eat pet rabbits in this family.

-Jessa’s dad can’t spend time with her because there’s lecture based on a Japanese study on “nuclear toxicity”.

-Drug of the Week: Whippits

-“I wrote a paper on corporations once. They’re evil”

-Lesson learned: don’t ever have awkward graveyard sex.

-“I was just trying to have continuity with you”

-“Who was your first time with?” “A girl…”
-Jemima Kirke's is very obviously pregnant by this point.
-The show should stop letting Hannah steal the spotlight of the story. It never seems to fully trust letting other characters carry stories. 

Grade: B-