What does Hannah Horvath, the "voice of a generation," have to say in the final episode of HBO's Girls, which aired Sunday night? Some of what you'd expect. (Stop here if you don't want spoilers.) The show's end introduces us to her newborn, Grover, who she's struggling to breastfeed and to whom she lobs some classic Hannah lines ("You think you're the first man who's rejected this? Well, think again!"). And yet what it gave us was, in the eyes of critics, somewhat unexpected. Some takes:
- The final scene—a literal manifestation of the episode's title, "Latching"—"may or may not be the closing statement you wanted from Girls," writes James Poniewozik for the New York Times. But he for one seems pleased: with the episode's humor, with Lena Dunham's "remarkable" growth as an actor, with the pacing with which the series wrapped up loose ends. "Hannah has become an author, become a teacher, become a parent. But she also—like all of us—will never stop becoming. ... You triumph and screw up, you succeed and backslide. You walk on, pantless and unbowed," he writes.
- An odd closing statement it was, notes Willa Paskin at Slate, calling it "a just-okay episode lacking all the typical trappings of a finale." But that's OK. The last scene for her was "a baby step forward. It's a testament to all the (better) episodes of this excellent, trying, fascinating show that in the next episode, which we’ll never get to see, we still know exactly what happens: Hannah inevitably takes a step back."