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"I feel like season three of Girls is steadily checking off the subheds under one all-consuming New Year&amp;#39;s resolution: &amp;quot;Grow up.&amp;quot; We talked about reality setting in during the first two eps; last week, Anna systematically proved that most of the ladies have achieved real growth since a year ago this time (OK, maybe not Shosh so much).\nAnd last night, the show took on the mother of all cold-water issues: death. And then it doubled down on the stakes by turning out an episode filled not with dainty, movie-star crying and appropriately somber tributes but with honest, sometimes unfeeling reactions and ripple effects.\nPinterestFacebookLet&amp;#39;s start with the ripple effects and work our way inward toward Hannah, the star of the grief. Hannah&amp;#39;s editor dying prompted a typically patchouli rant from Jessa&amp;#8212;something about time and place and death being an illusion of our own creation, because we choose to put a linear timeline on something that isn&amp;#39;t linear. (Shew, writing that sentence pre-coffee almost broke me for good.) Anyway, que ironico, because Jessa soon found out that her own former best friend has the death-as-illusion thing down to a science&amp;#8212;as in, she faked hers just to get away from Jessa. Sucks when you&amp;#39;re the only one who can see a ghost because to everyone else she&amp;#39;s still a real person. (Late-breaking, alternate Sixth Sense theory: Maybe people just found Haley Joel Osment really annoying and decided to pretend they were dead?)\nShoshanna&amp;#39;s take on mortality, meanwhile, was pretty much exactly what I expected: She saw the greater good in a high school friend&amp;#39;s death, because she &amp;quot;kind of took over her place in the friend group.&amp;quot; Look, we&amp;#39;re definitely building toward a moment where we have to discuss whether season-three Shosh is maximum quirky or a straight-up sociopath, but for the moment, let&amp;#39;s just enjoy what a very her response that was.\nMarnie wasn&amp;#39;t officially touched by the ripple effects of Hannah&amp;#39;s editor&amp;#39;s passing; she was, however, still being haunted by the Ghost of Angsty-Alanis Marnie Past. I loved her storming out of Grumpy&amp;#39;s after finding Ray and Hermie watching her &amp;quot;What I Am&amp;quot; cover&amp;#8212;and not just because I&amp;#39;m a sucker for Girls&amp;#39; dramatic, capricious life changes, since I&amp;#39;d never have the guts to make them. No, what I thought made this so brilliant was: Marnie might have been able to laugh off her old YouTube follies if she was in a better place right now. But her fuming said it all: &amp;quot;You think my life is so funny.&amp;quot; With that on the table, there was only one thing left to do&amp;#8212;kill the Ghost of Marnie Present, the humiliated barista. So she did.\nPinterestFacebookDeath looked pretty good on Adam, meanwhile&amp;#8212;the whole David incident took him one step closer to Disney-prince nobility. He decried Gawker and gossipers at large as &amp;quot;a bunch of judgmental creeps, celibate against their will.&amp;quot; He waxed poetic imagining life without Hannah: &amp;quot;The world would blur.&amp;quot; And he was quick to become a human record-scratch when Hannah (poor Hannah, she held out as long as she could) finally transitioned to: &amp;quot;And no one...even began to tell me...what was next for my e-book!&amp;quot; Adam&amp;#39;s integrity was so unassailable in this episode, I would&amp;#39;ve totally bought that handicapped-neighbor story if I wasn&amp;#39;t starting from a place of assuming Caroline&amp;#39;s always lying.\nThat brings us, finally, to Hannah, whose reactions ranged from tearlessness to self-absorption to, finally, flat-out lying. Which is to say: They were totally honest. I mean, come on. Are you gonna tell me that if you were rumbling toward your big break, something you&amp;#39;d wanted with all your being for ages, when suddenly the death of an acquaintance foiled it, you&amp;#39;d feel nothing but deep, respectful grief? You&amp;#39;d mourn for days before the haze cleared and the ramifications on your own life even occurred to you? I don&amp;#39;t think so. And Rachel Green circa the Bloomingdale&amp;#39;s promotion era would agree with me. Girls didn&amp;#39;t even flinch at this reality; we might be able to appreciate the sadness of every death, but the vast majority of them don&amp;#39;t interrupt our lives. That might sound cold, but it&amp;#39;s kind of the universe&amp;#39;s defense mechanism&amp;#8212;and it&amp;#39;s a neat trick when a show can make us laugh about it a little.\nThe other recaps I&amp;#39;ve skimmed today suggest we&amp;#39;re all in agreement when it comes to that fact, and Hannah&amp;#39;s reaction&amp;#8212;but I&amp;#39;ve seen a fair amount of eye-rolling over Hannah&amp;#39;s appropriation of Caroline&amp;#39;s cousin story at the end of the ep. I&amp;#39;m holding my eye-rolls; I liked that. Hannah is nothing if not sheltered through and through; clearly, if she had a real grief experience in her past to draw on, she would have trotted it out in minute two. By the time this episode came to a close, all the girl wanted was to feel. If she had to plagiarize a tale of prom do-gooding to get there, I have no problem with it. Why wish the pain of real loss on someone any sooner than the moment she has to face it for real?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/story/girls-season-3-episode-4-recap>