In the previous episode, we got a glimpse of what the Remens’ lives are like in the aftermath of losing their fortune; in “One Wedding and a Sex Pest,” we get to see the social circles to which their money admitted them. The dynamics set up by the wedding of one Georgia-Peach, a distant cousin of the late Queen, to Oriel — who expresses his joy at seeing his old schoolmate Felix by planting a kiss square on his lips, the same way Polly did with Jess when they first met — will ring familiar to anyone who has read a Jane Austen novel or two. The grip of the English customs and rules that dictated manners in a place like Hertfordshire, where Pride and Prejudice is set, has loosened since the early nineteenth century, but they haven’t, apparently, completely gone away.

In fact, as Felix and Jess move through the wedding, I kept remembering the Bingley sisters: it’s as if the people there were specifically trying to wedge distance between Felix and Jess. When Felix pleads with Jess to follow “the custom of our country,” if only for one night, and she asks if he’s “Edith fucking Wharton,” I remembered Undine Spragg, too: so certain of what she wants until the second she has it. Polly is at the wedding, as is Auggie (wearing yellow Crocs), and Linnea (still pissed), and another French ex-lover by the name of Wheezy, along with seemingly every woman Felix has ever had a romantic attachment to. Before they walk in late to the ceremony, Felix is nervous to be among such distinguished company. “Apart from Auggie and Polly, these aren’t really my people,” he tells Jess, breathing hard. “I’m not saying we can’t be ourselves, I’m just saying like … sort of, not our full selves.”

It’s a request not unlike what Jess herself asked of Felix when they went to dinner at Jonno’s; the fact that she can’t see that is frustrating, but things are also slightly different when, walking through the cobblestoned streets of Notting Hill, Felix knew exactly what to expect. Jess is parachuted into a world of strange rules and connections, where it’s normal to casually chat with a rapist, normal to keep cocaine in your wedding dress, normal to get into a fist-fight on the dance floor, and normal — welcome, even — to sing a song titled “I’m Horny” in lieu of giving a toast. All of these things are seemingly accepted, but Jess’s eccentricity — her metallic blue dress and her earnestness — are, as the title would have it, too much. 

That’s what Jess reads into it, anyway; Georgia-Peach’s sister Sylvia-Violet is inclined to believe Jess is “very fun.” Having surpassed the events of Donkeyfest, which led her to retreat into an explosive bomb of insecurity, Jess is once again succumbing to jealousy. It’s made worse by the fact that all of these distantly-aristocratic people might as well be speaking Greek; she can’t find a way to land amongst their ranks. For Jess, who is constantly performing her own uniqueness, it’s hard to just sit back and blend in. That’s precisely what it would take for her to be a suitable companion, to borrow Austen’s language, to Felix on a night like this; and she just can’t do it.

That may be because she has a sturdy sense of principle; it may be because she’s self-centered, but it most obviously has to do with surviving a 7-year relationship with Zev, who derived all of his power from diminishing her to bits and demanding that she be someone she was not. That’s probably also why, throughout the wedding, she can’t stop imagining Zev’s presence, on the church pews, the party’s corners, its dancefloors, or even having sex in the bathroom. When we open on “One Wedding and a Sex Pest,” we see the man himself talk through the dysfunction of his relationship with Jess in therapy. He tells the therapist about his overbearing Jewish mother, Sharon — the opposite, we might point out, of Felix’s mom Aiko, whose negligence we saw in the previous episode — and how her suffocating love primed him to be attracted to women who need a kind of love that is so strong, so overwhelming, that it kills its object.

But if Jess is needy, Felix is no saint, either. It tells us something about his usual demeanor that the party is littered with women who have been, at one point or the other, abandoned by him. One of them tells him that she married the therapist she started seeing once Felix stopped calling her back, a sting made worse by the fact that he was otherwise “sweet, romantic, and amusing.” “Good luck to whoever you came here with,” she tells him. This is how Nice Guy Syndrome becomes lethal: expectations are set sky-high, only to be disappointed.

This particular ex-girlfriend’s daughter, Hyacinth, is, as they speak, locking Jess in the bathroom from the outside. Jess has to climb out of a window and down a pipe, firefighter-style, in order to make it out. Jessica imagines her escape as a James Bond-like stunt, a comparison helped along by a slightly reminiscent score, down several floors of the main building; but as it turns out, she is maybe — and this is a generous estimate — two feet from the ground. Little Hyacinth gets up to other hijinks on the dancefloor, but we don’t see their outcomes; our attention is directed to Polly, who kicks Wheezy’s ass, just as she’d promised. They fight on the dancefloor, something that can’t be good for any man’s ego, no matter how sweet he is.

Earlier in the night, Polly walked around with Jess while Felix accompanied Auggie in his quest to find mushrooms. Polly told Jess that she and Wheezy used to be the bestest of friends, basically sisters; but when she went away to Marseille for just one month, Wheezy “seduced Felix.” Jess is shocked to learn that piece of intel, and she tries to roll with it, but when she starts to talk about her own ex, Polly walks away on account of being “bored and hungry.” It’s a funny scene — I love to see Adèle Exarchopoulos hit so many comedic notes — but it also reiterates the kind of volatile behavior Felix is prone to. For Wheezy’s seduction to have worked, Felix had to let himself be seduced. The revolving door of ex-girlfriends and lovers we encounter at the wedding reminded me of that scene early on in Jerry Maguire, when at his engagement party, a video shows all of Jerry’s ex-girlfriends saying how much he hates being alone.

One of Felix’s redeeming qualities is that he seems aware of all this just as much as we are. He’s nervous enough to be at a party with all of the skeletons in his closet to drink first one glass of champagne, then two, maybe three. When, having escaped from the bathroom, Jess kisses him, she notices that he tastes like wine, and he lies that he didn’t have any. Shit really hits the fan once everyone is seated and hilarious toasts abound. No one is better than Lena Dunham at writing a truly embarrassing speech, but Janicza Bravo, who plays Kim on Too Much and is a filmmaker herself, directs the scene with dynamic panache. Polly slaps Wheezy across the face, and Jess finds out that their table-mate William, Sylvia-Violet’s one-time boyfriend, has just been released from jail on sexual assault charges.

The fact that everyone acknowledges that William is a rapist but no one seems shaken by it sends Jess over the edge. It gets worse when Felix tells her she doesn’t “have to get so worked up about it” and could just “talk about it calmly.” “Don’t tell any woman to be calm with you,” Jess seethes. Her anger, while righteous, is obviously misplaced; she’s completely alienated, from her demeanor, to her jokes, to her Coke order — she asks for a “Diet Coke” when they only have “Coke Light” — and resents that Felix is acting so unlike himself. He’s putting on the act of someone who can say “old boy” and “young chap,” and he’s really selling it.

However many tiffs Felix and Jess might have had up until now, what ensues is their first fight. Jess accuses Felix of being inauthentic, while he accuses her of being self-centered. “I’m just playing a game, Jess, like a normal person, so I can be around people,” he explains. He tells her that it’s exhausting for him to talk about his feelings as much as Jess wants him to, especially when this is where he came from, especially because he’s British. But Jess can’t sympathize with the notion of compromising yourself for a set of arbitrary conventions. And I don’t think she’s wrong when she conjectures that the people he’s looking to please don’t care so much about him. And to boot, he never calls her his girlfriend!

Felix leaves Jess outside, pointing her vaguely toward the bus. She sees Zev standing there, but all he can tell her is: “Damn, you’re needy.” In therapy, Zev summarizes the trajectory of his relationships: “I swoop in, and for a moment, I’m her knight in shining armor. But little by slowly, she starts to hate me.” In that sentiment, at least, Zev and Felix could trade places. I’m very worried about Felix. We know there is no shortage of drugs and alcohol in the vicinity, that he’s pissed, left to his own devices, and already a few glasses of wine down. Whatever is about to happen can’t be good.

 Seemingly, every woman Felix has ever had a romantic attachment to is at this wedding and is trying to wedge distance between Felix and Jess.