This post contains discussion of plot points from the Girls episode ”Goodbye Tour.”
Before Sunday’s penultimate half-hour of Girls, it seemed that Shoshanna had gotten the short end of the narrative stick this final season, relegated to secondary character status while the other titular women got major storylines. But in tonight’s episode she shares big news: She’s engaged. All this time she has been falling in love with a man named Byron, who she met at a Sprinkles vending machine, and keeping that off-screen was the point, showrunners Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner told The A.V. Club. “She’s a series regular,” Dunham said. “We didn’t just make a mistake and not write scenes for Shoshanna. There was a plan.”
Shoshanna indeed has purposely cut Hannah out of her life, and started to isolate herself from Marnie and Jessa as well. This isn’t exactly unwarranted—Hannah, after all, did not tell her one-time pal about her pregnancy. “We thought the funniest idea in the world—and the best way to show that Hannah was estranged from her—was that she didn’t even know she was engaged,” Konner explained. “Not only was she not invited to the engagement party, she didn’t even know this guy existed. Like, that was our way of showing as far apart as you can get from a friend.”
Dunham added: “There is nothing worse than literally realizing someone has blocked you—I’m not going to say it’s happened to me recently and I’m not going to say it hasn’t—on all formats so you have absolutely no way to find out about their life except for basically hunting them down in the most humiliating way possible.”
During an impromptu bathroom conversation, Shoshanna explains why she believes the foursome should stop trying to make their friendship work in a measured monologue that implies breaking these ties is clearly something she’s thought about. “I have come to realize how exhausting and narcissistic and ultimately boring this whole dynamic is, and I finally feel brave enough to create some distance for myself,” she says. It’s a brutal and not entirely inaccurate assessment. “Shoshanna’s been living her life, girl,” Konner said. “Living her truth. She’s sick of these people.”