“Lust fades, but friendship doesn’t, if you nurture it,” Hannah says wisely in the opening scene of this week’s Girls, waltzing over to a group of young people who neither asked for nor wanted her opinion. It’s a classic Hannah move – imparting advice on a group of strangers while struggling to live that same advice herself. Throughout “Goodbye Tour”, Hannah tries to get in touch with her friends to ask them for their thoughts on a big life decision – should she leave New York to take an academic job upstate? – but no one’s answering her calls.

Later, sat on a bench with Elijah, she wonders what kept her in New York in the first place. “Hannah, you’ve made so many wonderful friendships here,” Elijah says seriously. They both burst out laughing. “That’s not a thing!” Elijah cackles.

So when Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna finally reunite for the first time this season (one of only 12 scenes the foursome have had together over the course of the whole show), it perhaps feels true when they all admit that their friendships have disintegrated. They are at Shoshanna’s engagement party – something Hannah wasn’t even invited to, since Shoshanna was offended that Hannah never told her about her pregnancy. Jessa shouldn’t really be their either. Marnie has been avoiding Hannah’s calls all day. None of them wanted to see each other, but here they are.

Shoshanna is the first to say it. “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 declares. “All of those really pretty girls out there who have, like, jobs and purses and nice personalities? Those are now my friends, not you guys. I think we should all just agree to call it.” It’s a callback to Season Three’s “Beach House”, where a drunk Shoshanna rails: “Sometimes I wonder if my social anxiety is holding me back from meeting the people who would actually be right for me, instead of a bunch of fucking whiny nothings as friends.”

The critics were immediately behind Shoshanna. “As it turns out, Shosh has been the smart, well-adjusted one all along,” wrote the A.V. Club. “Shoshanna Has Become the True Hero of Girls”, ran an NYMag headline, while the Huffington Post went with “Shoshanna, Forever The Best ‘Girls’ Character, Has Evolved To A Higher Plane”. All agreed that the girls were never proper friends: “She is certainly not wrong, and everyone else seems to realize it,” said the Vulture recap. The Ringer ran a piece called “It’s Called ‘Girls,’ Not ‘Friends’”, saying “The show’s foursome hasn’t been close for a while — and with one episode left, Girls finally acknowledged it.” Many congratulated Dunham on the realism of letting this 20-something friendship fade out.

Girls has long had an audience locked in a frustrating battle with its characters, and it’s easy to hear Hannah’s smug words at the opening of this week’s episode and roll your eyes, and to hear Shoshanna’s brutal assessment of their friendships and applaud.

But Shoshanna did have a genuine relationship with each of these women and for her to deny it in its entirety rings hollow. And while Hannah’s relationships with Jessa, Shoshanna, Ray, and others have all broken down, this series of Girls has seen Hannah nurturing friendships. She’s supported Marnie throughout her divorce and Elijah throughout his auditions for White Men Can’t Jump: The Musical. She’s had tricky conversations with both of them about her pregnancy and the future of their friendships: conversations founded on honesty and love.

It’s never the popular argument, but I can’t help but feel that it’s Hannah, not Shosh, who has a more mature grasp on the friendship dynamics at play – and the show has been building to this point all series.

In “Hostage Situation”, Hannah accompanies Marnie and Desi on a weekend trip to Poughkeepsie, so that Marnie can tell Ray – who has no idea Marnie and Desi are sleeping together again – that she just went on a fun girl’s holiday with Hannah. It is, understandably, the last thing in the world Hannah wants to do, but she does it anyway. “Hannah, if you were gonna be such a bitch, why did you even come?” Marnie asks. “Oh, I don’t know, ‘cause I was trying to protect you and your house of lies, you fucking morons,” is Hannah’s frustrated reply.

Hannah ends up protecting Marnie in an extremely literal sense. When a high Desi has a violent outburst, he grabs Marnie, and she shouts for Hannah’s help. Hannah manages to wrestle Desi from Marnie and lock him outside to sober up. The two girls sit on the floor, having a nostalgic but difficult conversation about how they ended up here. “You are so bad at knowing when people are high,” Hannah jokes. “Do you remember that time I drank sizzurp and you thought I had senioritis?” The two women laugh.

“But seriously, Marnie, it can be pretty hard to have observations about other people when you’re only thinking about yourself. I would know. And I’m not judging you, okay? I promise. I’m done with that. I’m done judging. I’m done being superior. I’m done acting like I know anything at all. None of us know fucking anything.”

Marnie agrees. “Do you promise that we’ll always be friends?” she asks.

“You think I’m gonna stop being your friend now?” Hannah replies. "After putting up with all this bullshit? You’ve put up with a lot of bullshit, too. And I’m gonna help you get out of this situation.”

In the same episode, while Hannah and Marnie are trying to repair Marnie’s disastrous love life, Shoshanna is at an event for women in business, looking jealously at the successful people around her, including Rachel and Zeva – two college friends who now own a very lucrative jeans business, She grows increasingly resentful of Jessa for “holding her back”.

“I made the fatal mistake of deciding to push them aside for Jessa when she came home,” she explains. “‘Cause for some reason I thought that her friends were, like, the apex of maturity, which is ridiculous, and I recognize that now. And now Rachel and Zeva own Jamba Jeans.” The climax of the episode comes when Shoshanna screams at Jessa in the street: “You ruined my relationship with Rachel and Zeva! You ruined my life! I could have been a part of Jamba Jeans! I could have gone on fancy trips and had people who cared about me!”

Ever since she insisted, “Obvi, we’re the ladies!” at the start of Season One, Shoshanna has had a definite, elaborate image of the kind of woman she wants to be, and the kind of women she wants to be surrounded by. As she herself acknowledges, turning the real human beings she meets into symbols of sophistication or “the apex of maturity” can only end in disappointment. She’s done it before with Jessa (who can forget their immortal exchange, “I’m not on Facebook,” “You are so fucking classy”) and the other girls. Hannah, Marnie and Jessa haven’t been good friends to Shosh, and she there’s certainly nothing wrong with the fact that she’s trying to find new ones. But to me, Season Six Shoshanna, with her bitterness about the “fancy trips” she could have been on with glossier friends, and her satisfied speech about friends with “jobs and purses and nice personalities”, seems to be falling into a similar pattern.

While Shoshanna has been finding new relationships, Hannah has been working on old ones. Telling Elijah about her pregnancy causes a huge row that results in Elijah telling her, “You’re gonna be a terrible mother.” In the next episode, they make up. “I don’t think you’re going to be a terrible mother,” he admits. “I guess if I’m being honest, I just I really liked it when we both didn’t have anything going on in our lives.”

“What you said really scared me,” says Hannah. “You made me feel like this baby was gonna end our friendship. I don’t want our friendship to end. I need you in my life. I need you in my child’s life.” When she tells Marnie, they argue about her decision not to tell the father, but it’s the kind of hard-truth arguing Hannah needs, not petty, selfish arguing. “On the spectrum of human beings, you basically have your shit together,” Marnie says. “I can’t believe how supportive you’re being,” Hannah says gratefully. Hannah even had some closure on her relationship with Jessa, in the seasons most heartbreaking, triumphant moment. “We were all just doing our best,” Hannah says through tears at Shoshanna’s engagement party. “Our best was awful,” Jessa sobs back.

In a now-deleted Instagram post, Lena Dunham wrote that this week’s Girls was the final one to feature Jessa and Shosh (whether she meant together or at all is unclear). Shoshanna’s made it clear that her friendship with Hannah is over. While Hannah and Jessa obviously have an awful amount of love for each other, they can’t go back to how their friendship was before the Adam betrayal. And we know that Adam and Ray have had their final scenes, as has Elijah. While Hannah might never see Adam or Ray again, the bond that Hannah and Elijah have showcased this season leaves me in now doubt that their friendship will last long beyond Girls’s final episode.

Elijah and Marnie are Hannah’s oldest friends. The very first episode of Girls opened with which two people spooning? Hannah and Marnie. (A scene that was referenced in Season Two with Hannah and, yep, Elijah). The iconic “Dancing on My Own” scene? Hannah and Marnie. (A scene that was referenced in Season Two to “I Love it” with Hannah and, yep Elijah). They’re the only two people, aside from Hannah’s parents, who got proper scenes where Hannah explained her pregnancy to them, and the only two people who Hannah has promised to remain friends with in the future.

It’s tempting to see end of a TV show like Girls in one of two ways: to do a Friends and say, we’ll be together forever, or to pull the rug out from underneath people’s expectations and declare that these people were never friends in the first place. But in this season, Lena Dunham does neither. Instead, she finds that her characters friendships evolve and disintegrate as they do in real life. And that while some friendships don’t survive, some people are simply in it for the long haul. Or, in Hannah’s words, “You think I’m gonna stop being your friend now? After putting up with all this bullshit?”

***

Now listen to a discussion of Girls on the NS pop culture podcast, SRSLY: