At this point in the season, we’ve seen Jess and Felix in individual contexts — at home, at work, among friends and family — and we’ve seen them alone together, but until now, we hadn’t seen them be a couple in front of other people. An intense, private shared world is a pillar of the kind of whirlwind romance Jess and Felix have been living; it might feel like months, but they’ve only known each other for a week. When exposed to other elements, like the compromises and modulations of “society,” as Lizzy Bennet might put it, whirlwind romances risk falling apart. Jess and Felix still have a lot to learn about the basic facts of each other’s lives: for example, where Felix went to school, or how Jess-y Jess can get when she’s nervous.

For most of “Notting Kill,” Jess is primarily worried about whether she’s missing any of Felix’s red flags. In a FaceTime with her mom, she enumerates them in spite of herself: Felix is an indie musician who sleeps in every day because a former cocaine habit permanently impacted his circadian rhythms. The episode opens with a flashback sequence in which Zev tells Jess about his Weezer-themed bar-mitzvah, a red flag, she admits to Wendy, that she missed, but her insecurity about her powers of discernment clearly runs deeper. She can see Felix’s red flags no better than she can see her own.

Some other stuff about Felix is worrying Jess: he has a tattoo on his ass that says “Poly.” When Jess asks him about it, he says he got it with his friend Polly, whose name the tattoo artist misspelled. Jess thinks it’s “super cool” that Felix has a girlfriend’s name tattooed on his ass, and even cooler that he seems not to know the difference between polyamory, polygamy, and monogamy. It’s a stretch to suggest that a man who wears lipstick and nail polish doesn’t know what polyamory is in 2025, but I’m rolling with it.

In other areas of her life, at least, Jess is “keeping it on lock,” as Kim put it. Jonno thinks she’s fitting in nicely, especially since minding the 10 red flags he raised for her himself, and invites her to come to a dinner at his house that night, hosted by his wife, Ann. Imagine my gasp of delight when — after Jess and Felix walk around Notting Hill taking photos in front of the movie’s famous blue door and other, picturesque houses — the door opened and there was Naomi freaking Watts. She runs away with the episode; wearing a bouncy bob and a billowy, enormously-sleeved white blouse with matching white pumps, she’s elegant and funny, brittle in that rich woman way but idiosyncratic enough to sell a story about a soap dish and an ancient woman in Marrakech. She and Richard E. Grant are electric together.

On the walk to Jonno’s, Felix tells Jess that there’s some darkness running through glamorous Notting Hill. He grew up around houses like these, both because his parents were affluent and because he knew people in the neighborhood, and it wasn’t pretty — but Jess is too taken with the place’s romanticism and her own nerves to really hear what he’s saying, or even ask any follow-up questions. All she can muster up is the request for him to “be normal” and lose his hat before they go in.

Kim, Boss, and Josie from work are all at Jonno’s, each going through their own thing. Lena Dunham excels at this kind of ensemble set piece, and she has lost none of her touch in making a great party scene. Each of these characters — with the exception of Josie, whose shtick is to just sort of be there — wants something specific out of this party. Kim is looking to experiment with lesbianism, with Josie (who she’s not sure is gay, a doubt Boss dismisses by pointing out that she’s “wearing two T-shirts”) or Ann’s cousin Imogen; Boss is looking to do drugs, have sex, get everyone’s attention and observe everyone; Ann wants to feel something; Jess wants to prove herself, and Felix wants it all to be over.

At dinner, Kim experiences micro-aggression before Jonno ropes her into a conversation about “butt implants.” Boss drones on about Berghain to an indifferent Felix, and Jess tells Ann about every detail of her life. It starts with her UTIs, then her PCOS, her “glottal terror” — fear of swallowing — and ends with Astrid. At first, Ann seems alarmed by Jess and her open demeanor, no matter how emphatically she might insist that Jess and Felix are “a breath of fresh air.” But the more they talk, the more Ann is charmed by Jess’s lack of guile, and ultimately, she takes her into the bathroom to do cocaine and chat. They talk about everything, including Ann’s old dog Lettuce and the “emotional affair” Jonno had with Kylie Minogue. Ann says she sees “real empathy” in Jess’s face when really, what she sees is interest: in Ann, and by proxy, in herself. It can only be advantageous for her to take an interest in her boss’s wife, regardless of how cool she is.

Meanwhile, Felix is left to slowly lose his mind among the company. Seeking some respite from Boss’s insane ideas — like he only makes eye contact with people whom he knows he won’t fuck — Felix walks around the house and finds a framed picture that stops him on his tracks. It’s a class photo of the uniformed kind, and in it he sees … himself. It turns out that he went to boarding school with Ann and Jonno’s daughter, Viola, whom he also dated — but that information doesn’t come out until later.

For now, the party must go on. Jess panics that, having noticed that she did cocaine, Felix will act weird, but his lack of weirdness makes her think he’s even weirder. “You’re a grownup, you know what you’re doing,” he shrugs. It’s obvious that he wants to exchange one of those silent are-these-people-insane-or-what looks and dish about the dinner guests’ messed-up values, but for the first time since they met, Jess and Felix are out of sync. Jess is somewhere else entirely — she’s in Ann’s attic, and she’s partaking of the cocaine silver tray.

Jess excuses herself by saying something about how she can’t say no to her boss’s hospitality, but Felix, if judgmental, doesn’t give her a hard time. “You know where this is headed, though, right?” He warns. She wonders if he means that everyone will end up having sex, and to be fair, for a while there, I wondered the same thing; when Ann and Jess were chilling in the bathroom, I thought the episode might take a different turn. But mostly, people just dance. Kim ventures into the living room for some advice on taking the lesbian path with Imogen, who touches her “almost vagina,” though we never see whether or not Kim goes home with her. Kim had originally intended to go home with Josie, but Jonno might have ruined her chances when he “said something” about their dynamic right in front of Josie. Meanwhile, Jess and Boss bond over the contents of their bags and Felix wanders off into the kitchen to munch on the leftovers.

It’s there that Jonno is finally able to place Felix. He thought he’d recognized him earlier, right after Felix saw the photo, but Felix evaded — now, though, Jonno remembers not only that Felix dated his daughter Viola when they were in school, but that he broke her heart and dropped out only 6 months before their A-levels, the U.K.’s university admission testing system, with which I am familiar because from ages 13-17 I was a devoted watcher of a little E4 series called Skins. Felix retorts that Viola was the one who was mean to him, actually, and that he didn’t drop out — he left school because his parents ran out of money. Jonno, drunk and coked out, approaches Felix with hostility, and their confrontation ends with them rolling around on the floor in fisticuffs. It’s a great, dynamic scene between Sharpe and Grant, funny and sad in all the right spots.

When Jess and Ann walk in on them fighting, Jess freaks out — but she’s the only one who seems at all shaken. “He’s always in the prone position at the end of a party,” Ann explains about Jonno, who carries on doing lines on the coffee table. She continues to freak out outside, where Felix puts the beautiful soap dish she told him about, the one Ann got from the Moroccan woman, in her purse. Jess is in that drunken mood where you’re looking to pick a fight. “This has all been a series of red flags … I mean, when I came to find my English dream, I wanted to be in bed with Mr. Darcy or Hugh Grant from the British Jones Diaries,” she cries.

Because Felix actually really likes Jess, her trying to pick a fight only makes him laugh. He might feel judged by her “scanning” of his red flags, but he sees her red flags, too, and he doesn’t even have to look hard for them. He names them in ascending order of red-flagness: she ends every sentence in a question mark, sends crazy long texts, has randomly pretended to be sober when she’s not, talks about her ex all the time, and literally set herself on fire the first day they met. She’s too much — but it’s a good thing. “Just the right amount, then a little more,” he says, before they kiss and the camera pans 360 degrees around them.

It’s a nice moment, and it lands convincingly. Felix’s point is that being aware of someone’s “red flags” — that is, their faults — is not antithetical to loving them; in fact, the sturdier kinds of love are the ones that account for them and can love them, too. But Jess came into the living room after Jonno and Felix had already talked about Viola, so she missed that information, which makes me think that it will still cause trouble between them. In true rom-com fashion, the fact that it’s going so well between Jess and Felix is putting me on notice. We’re almost at the halfway point of the season, and everyone knows what happens halfway through a romantic comedy — the couple breaks up.

 Jess worries so much that she might be missing some of Felix’s red flags that she doesn’t notice all her own.