“The Panic in Central Park” is what I believe is the greatest episode of television.
This episode comes from the series Girls on HBO Max, created by and starring Lena Dunham. For background, this show follows around four post-grad women in their 20s who are trying to “become.” But they all want to skip the work that is necessary to actually “become.” The show follows each of them. However, this one episode in particular follows only one of them, Marnie.
Before this episode, we have seen Marnie on her journey of “becoming,” and she simply continues to fail. In the earlier seasons of this show, we see her in a relationship with a man named Charlie. She met Charlie in college and continued to date him post-grad as well.
However, Charlie made her feel suffocated. Their relationship becomes very complicated, and in the end he essentially disappears, and she has no idea where he went. In the beginning of season five, Marnie married her music duo partner, Desi. She wants to succeed at being his wife, but problems come at the beginning of their marriage, which causes her to become unhappy.
This episode begins with Marnie going out on a walk after she and Desi get into a fight. While on this walk, she goes by a group of men, and in the group is Charlie. However, he looks different than the last time the audience saw him. He gained weight and now has an accent. He is not the Charlie who Marnie was dating at the beginning of the show.
Throughout the episode, they experience this magical day people dream about when it comes to running into their ex. They go to a party, they go to a fancy dinner, dance together, share laughs, and even make a plan to run away together and start a new life when the sun comes up tomorrow.
Marnie feels nostalgia and comfort throughout her time with Charlie. However, neither Marnie nor Charlie is the person they once were. They both have gone through experiences over the last few years. When they wake up together, Marnie discovers that Charlie has a pretty bad heroin problem. She ends up leaving, going back home to Desi, and telling him that she wants a divorce.
This episode explores two really important themes. The first one, of course, is the “What If?” that a majority of people go through after a breakup. Wondering what it would be like if you saw that person one more time- what would happen? And although Marnie and Charlie believed they could simply pick up where they left off, they could not. Both of them are at two very different places in their life. Marnie is a failing wife and singer, while Charlie is a drug dealer with a possible heroin problem.
The second theme is losing yourself. At the end of this episode, we see Marnie completely and utterly lost in her own life. She has failed at every single thing she has done with her life, and now she realizes that she is failing in her marriage with Desi. The idea of being someone’s wife did not save her like she thought it would. She ends up admitting that she was scared to give up on another dream but is asking for this divorce. Because the one thing Marnie hasn’t forgotten is all her failures.
This episode, to me, could simply be watched as a short film because of how it stands alone from the rest of the series. I wholeheartedly mean it when I say I think about this episode at least twice a week, if not every day.