The best moments of Girls, in my opinion, and the ones I find it easiest to write about, are the ones that touch on nearly universal truths. "The Return" greatly shifts focus, plopping Hannah down in Michigan with her parents to celebrate their anniversary and contemplate her next move. She is faced with a multitude of options now, and has to mull over one of the most difficult questions almost all young adults face: What will be "home?"
Most of us have the home of the past – the people we grew up with, the people who raised us, and maybe even the exact place where we lived our early years. Some of us have the places where we first became adults – the college town, the nearby city we escaped to when we finally got a license, the groups of friends who finally understand us. Others have the home of their dreams – the place that houses all the jobs and opportunities they want, the weather they want to experience every day, great restaurants where they want to eat and landmarks they want to drive by. The end of our educational years drops us right in the middle of a quandary: not just what do I want to be, but where do I want to be?
At first, Hannah is exasperated with the quality of life, or lack of quality, in her Michigan hometown. Her parents want her to watch Netflix, go to dinner with them, eat the leftovers in the fridge, run their errands, and maybe stay and get a job at the local university. Her old high school friends (or really, just one friend, who looks remarkably like Zooey Deschanel as a blonde sorority wannabe) are working thankless jobs and having delusional dreams. Hannah is disenchanted, but the irony here is that it's only Hannah's locale – NYC – that makes her life any more glamorous or substantial in her own eyes. She has the same shitty jobs and the same lofty dreams, dreams of a writer's life, which she thinks are reasonable, but even her parents think might be a little unattainable. She remains removed from the whole scene even as she prepares for a date with an old classmate who now runs the pharmacy -"You are from New York, therefore you are just naturally interesting. The worst stuff that you say sounds better than the best stuff that other people say," she tells herself in the mirror. It's not true, of course, and the episode does a great job of showing just how unremarkable Hannah is. Sure, she's an outsider, and it's clear she always probably has been, but how is she better or worse than any of the other outsiders at every high school, in every small town across America?
Of course, we're supposed to think, like Hannah, that New York is what makes her special. She says, towards the end of the episode, "Why doesn't everyone struggling in New York move here [Michigan] and start the revolution? It's like we're all slaves to this place that doesn't really want us." It's easy to see why she thinks this – there's a great job opening at the university, she'd have more time to write and would have to worry about money less, the rent is cheaper for nicer apartments, she went on a nice date with a guy who owns a pharmacy, and she once more sees that spark in her parents that makes her realize why she should miss them. But we know what makes the city special for her, too. More literary opportunities, more experiences to live and write about, her friends, and Adam, who calls her at the end of the episode and is, for once, charming and personable. The episode closes with him narrating to her what he sees out his window, and his descriptions of a crazy crack addict are like a siren song to Hannah, it's clear. She'll go back to the city.
But until that inevitability, it's nice to see Hannah as a more human character and less of a caricature, which she is, at times. Lena Dunham has succeeded in finding the universal themes in the small, personal truths of this episode, and it makes for the most touching, heartbreaking half-hour of the show thus far.
