Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 73 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT One Hand Clapping
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 13 | Aired on 03.09.2014
GARBANZA, SPEAKING OF
Marilyn thinks hard about the video and the Peter problem, and decides to make one more good-faith attempt at making everything okay. The music goes from sad to suspenseful as she clik-claks down the hallway, wearing her glasses, and finds Eli alone in Peter's office. Another fake-out.
Marilyn: "Okay, what is this?"
Eli: "Nothing! Peter just asked me to take this meeting."
Marilyn: "You're doing it again, you little shit. You have no idea what these little goat rodeo scenes are doing to me, or who else is now in play, and you..."
Eli: "A scheduling conflict is not a conspiracy!"
Marilyn: "Three conflicts in a row sure as fuck is, though."
Eli: "Uh, he's the Governor of Illinois, lady. Know your role."
Marilyn, verbatim: "You have a great talent for turning friends into enemies."
He tortures her for a while more, with that pinched little bitchy smile he puts on when he's being particularly awful, and finally she bounces. It stops being about them fighting over Peter's favor and then it stops being about them fighting at all. You can only dance around the thing so long before the thing is all anybody can see. She heads straight to Dubeck, in his little van, and hands over a USB with the ballot-box video.
Dubeck: "Thank you, Marilyn. This is the first step toward clean government!"
Marilyn: "Not even I really believe you at this point, you gross bastard, but this is the only even nominally ethical option I have left."
At some point in the last five minutes, I don't know if I made this clear, but Marilyn Garbanza got: Very awesome. The Wendy Scott-Carr trick is looking like you are being perfect and even thinking you're being perfect, which is what reminded me of her so much with Marilyn: It's a lot easier to believe than the fact that she really is just trying to do the right thing. This whole episode is just people convinced the left hand is moving so the right hand can do something, and they totally miss what the left hand was doing in the first place.
All of the cloud of semiotics and inferences and dangers and suspicions and ironies crowding her, this whole time, was really just another Caitlin D'Arcy trick: You see what you want to see, and that goes double when you can't believe somebody is just getting on with it. You were so afraid she was going to fuck Peter -- so blind to the possibility that anybody (other than Natalie Flores) could possibly stay pure -- that you forced her to fuck Peter. Good job.
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