How do you end a show like Girls? How do you bring six seasons of winding, patchy but undeniably groundbreaking television to a satisfying conclusion when the show itself is all about loose ends and the unsolvable messiness of life? It's a question that boils down to one thing. As Mother Superior might have sung in The Sound of Music about a problem child of times past, what do you do with a problem like Hannah Horvath?

Before we proceed any further, let's pause to respectfully acknowledge that wrapping up Girls after five years was the humane thing to do. Season six has shown signs of brilliance; the Chuck Palmer episode remains a standalone triumph and proof that Dunham can write compelling TV that resonates ickily well in our pop culture echo chamber. Yet there wasn't much left to throw at Lena Dunham's eternal child-woman Hannah, a character who often seemed poised on the brink of becoming, as she proclaimed in a giddy haze of opium tea way back in episode one, "the voice of my generation" but somehow managed to parlay it into one grubby failure after another.

Well, nothing except a baby - the kind of dramatic MacGuffin that always seems to indicate a drying-up of the creative well. When they bring in the prosthetic baby belly, you know the ship is going down. There was really no question that Hannah would lose the child, in the best soap operatic tradition (if you thought that, you never really knew the show at all) or that Dunham and collaborator Jenni Konner would indulge in that other hoary cliche of the birth in the back of a New York cab. You could rely on them for that. But the head-scratchy proposition of Hannah with a baby - the horrifying spectre of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shosh cooing over a pram - was dealt with ruthlessly. Girls really ended up being singular. Girl.

The finale turned out to be something of a coda to the previous two weeks in which the four females were rationalised down to one and a hanger-on - Hannah and best frenemy Marnie. The great divestment of major characters saw Adam head back to the arms of Jessa to play out their sex parlour games forevermore. Elijah celebrating his lead role in White Men Can't Jump, the stage musical. Shosh engaged to the clean-cut Byron, the kind of thoughtful young man who caters for unexpected guests. Jessa apologising for being Jessa. The friendships of young adulthood ended, the wound cauterised with a final dance.