Episode five takes True Detective's idea of temporal play and turns it into yet another aspect of horror that the show’s been so adept at delivering, delving into existential time-space contemplations and having its characters relive the nightmares contained in their lives.
This week, Hannah gets a new job at GQ and has to struggle between following her heart, or her dollar-less pocket. Should she give up a new job she's great at that offers lots of delicious food? Meanwhile, the awkward sex Girls is known for is back in spades.
True Detective has become like H.P. Lovecraft framed through the window of an all Bunk and McNulty version of The Wire: exploring ideas of faith, madness, brutality and obsessive self-destruction read with the cop-speak language that TV has made us experts in through decades of crime dramas and police procedurals.
This is Girls at its self-aware best. The episode starts off with the funeral of David Pressler-Goings, Hannah’s salt and peppered little publisher. It’s like Four Weddings and a Funeral! Except the closest thing we have to a young Hugh Grant is Adam, who has far too much unfortunate facial hair and far too little British come-hitherness
This week we get a clean cut A-B-C plotted episode of Community that promises to showcase the new cast’s dynamic. This is exactly what we needed after two episodes of farewells and a David Fincher parody.
This week's episode of Girls starts off with Hannah tripping and spilling the entire contents of her purse, because she’s now either Carrie Bradshaw in that one Paris episode of Sex and the City or every rom-com protagonist ever. She’s klutzy! She’s lovable! She’s Hannah Horvath! But seriously, it was great to have a unified theme for this episode just to see how each character related to the topic of death.
This week’s installment of True Detective certainly saves its two biggest developments for the end (including one heck of a cliffhanger) and does a great job of casting doubt upon Marty and Rust’s abilities to do their jobs effectively.
An episode in which we see how Community can take something as cartoonish as a 22-minute game of hot lava and craft it into a strong and emotional story about how shitty saying goodbye to a friend can be.
Girls consistently places its characters in dark and amusing situations that make us reflect on our own terrible choices and awkward experiences. At the end of the day, however, a lack of character growth and self-awareness will exhaust even the most loyal fan. To combat this, Dunham and co. have transformed several of the show's supporting characters into surrogates for the viewer who confront the main characters about their behaviour.
By the close of the second episode of HBO’s True Detective, it seems like the stinger to each installment will be to remind the audience that there’s an actual overarching case that needs to be solved and not just an almost painfully intimate portrait of two men that are slowly breaking down. Then again, “Seeing Things” tends to suggest that the very case and how it ultimately turns out will ultimately come down to the personalities of the people trying to solve it rather than the particulars.
On the last episode of Girls, our resident British-American hippie Jessa got kicked out of rehab for selfishly helping her vest friend Laura come to terms with her sexual orientation. That means this week is road trip to rehab time, starring Hannah, Shoshanna, and Adam.
The six surviving Greendale Seven and Chang all agree to submit to what Abed describes as “the pie fight of cop movies,” and we all buckle down for 22 minutes (plus commercials) of what Community does best: A bottle episode.
Thanks to its self-reflexive nature, Community has managed to return to the status quo in three episodes while still respecting the event of graduation itself, essentially saying everything that happened mattered (even the gas leak last year), but nothing ever really matters (including the gas leak).
Elena joins the Dork Shelf team and takes on the first episode of Girls season three: "Females Only."
Our Film Editor jumps over to the TV side for several weeks to start our weekly recaps of the new (and very much worth watching) HBO series True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. What went down this week and what do we think of the first episode and where it's headed? Check it out! (Warning: Spoilers)
