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" Season 3, Episodes 1 and 2: &amp;quot;Females Only&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Truth or Dare&amp;quot; We don&amp;#039;t have a lot to say about the third-season premiere of Girls beyond an exasperated &amp;quot;Huh?!&amp;quot; So you know what? We&amp;#039;re going to rewrite the episode(s). For the season two finale, we were left with Hannah (Lena Dunham) in the throes of OCD and an e-book deal gone to shit, Marnie (Allison Williams) on the cusp of a reconciliation with Charlie (Christopher Abbott), Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) kicking her first adult relationship with Ray (Alex Karpovsky) to the curb, and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) MIA and completely incommunicado. Adam (Adam Driver), who spent previous episodes redeeming himself from perpetual assholedom, royally screws up his relationship with the sweet, funny, and gorgeous Natalia (Shiri Appleby) and shows up at Hannah&amp;#039;s exactly when she needs him to. All of Girls&amp;#039; principle characters are embracing serious changes or losing themselves, and we were totally invested in the well-being of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shosh \u2014 and all the people they&amp;#039;ve brought into the small-batch shitshow that&amp;#039;s their collective young Brooklynite life \u2014 in a wholly satisfying way. Season three&amp;#039;s two-part premiere, which aired last night, unfortunately, didn&amp;#039;t capitalize on any of this momentum, and the energy and optimism brought forth by a new season was altogether absent. That emotional investment we had? Gone. Hannah, miraculously, hasn&amp;#039;t lost her first shot at an e-author career and is happily dating (and living with) Adam. Charlie disappears, leaving Marnie wailing something about how she&amp;#039;d just been planning to make grilled pizzas with the guy she thought she&amp;#039;d spend the rest of her life with. It turns out Jessa&amp;#039;s been in rehab upstate and wreaking havoc on the psyche of her fellow patients, but she gets to leave what looks like a Woodstock retreat courtesy of a rescue effort orchestrated by Hannah. And Shoshanna, back at school for her senior year, is learning how to navigate the putrid waters of dorm romance while refusing to acknowledge the fact that her relationship with Ray ever happened. Here&amp;#039;s where we get a little Choose Your Own Adventure with the Girls plotlines: We&amp;#039;re going to pretend that we emptied Lena Dunham&amp;#039;s trash can and found the plot arcs that were unceremoniously axed in favor of the storyline that ran in the episodes. Without further ado, here&amp;#039;s how we felt &amp;quot;Females Only&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Truth or Dare&amp;quot; should&amp;#039;ve and could&amp;#039;ve gone.  Jessa remains an insufferable, imprisoned bitch in rehab. The mocking of a group therapy session at Jessa&amp;#039;s rehab facility is one that passes off as more of an insult than a joke. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth has an awesome cameo as Mindy, the sharp-tongued patient and voice of reason who puts Jessa in her place when she starts bragging about &amp;quot;figuring out her shit&amp;quot; at age five. Laura, the lesbian who Jessa quite literally shoves out of the closet (with her tongue); Kelvin, the guy who compares his corner of New York to a Fellini movie; Jacques, the bearded and bewildered therapist \u2014 these are all great characters who hold Jessa accountable for her indifference and blithe bullshit, unlike the people who love her enough to drop whatever they&amp;#039;re doing to Google how old you have to be in order to rent a car. Yoinking Jessa out of rehab in &amp;quot;Truth or Dare&amp;quot; was a disappointing choice, in that it deprived us of the opportunity to get to know these people she had supposedly spent months with, and all for an opportunity to watch Hannah and Shoshanna sing along with Maroon 5 on the drive upstate to retrieve their long-lost friend. Hopefully, this isn&amp;#039;t the last time we see Jessa receive a wake-up call, no matter how unwelcome \u2014 and maybe it won&amp;#039;t be the last time Jessa sees rehab, either. Jessa is rescued from rehab, but in a more characteristically haphazard way. Hanna proclaims, &amp;quot;This road trip is so unremarkable!&amp;quot; about an hour into the drive to fetch Jessa, and she&amp;#039;s not wrong. For a character who should&amp;#039;ve thrown &amp;quot;DGAF&amp;quot; across her knuckles into the collection of tattoos she acquired between this season and last, Jessa does a great job of doing little more than whine at rehab \u2014 so why didn&amp;#039;t she cut out and get her friends involved in some sort of grand escape? It would&amp;#039;ve been slapstick as hell. Marnie gets an OkCupid account. You&amp;#039;re really going to tell me that a woman who sobbed over the fact that she and her beloved weren&amp;#039;t going to make grilled pizza for dinner wouldn&amp;#039;t run to OkCupid the second she got dumped? Creating an OkCupid account is one of the most entertaining, ill-advised things one can do after someone rips their heart out of their chest Temple of Doom-style, and that&amp;#039;s exactly what Marnie should&amp;#039;ve done the second Charlie walked out of her life, if only because it&amp;#039;d be so painfully realistic! It&amp;#039;d also be enough fodder for its own episode, because who wouldn&amp;#039;t want to see Marnie get dragged to Barcade for four consecutive first dates in a row?  Natalia actually is pregnant and Adam has to deal with the shitty consequences: Actually, wait, nope. The first five minutes of the season premiere were flawless courtesy of the blistering performances delivered by Appleby and her brunch companion, Angie, played by Amy Schumer.  Which Girls plotlines would you salvage from Lena Dunham&amp;#039;s trash can? Leave us your thoughts in the comments. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a26825/girls-season-3-recap-episodes-1-and-2/>