Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 44 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT The House Around The Door
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.06.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Second episodes are tricky so the main question up first is: Is it awesome? Yes, in fact it is awesome.
Ginny imagines various scenarios in which she might reply to Masters's disastrous offer at the end of the pilot: In some, she's firmly negative; in others, only slightly less so. But by the time she gets to work, it doesn’t matter anyway: The study has been canceled, after somebody -- Ethan? -- told Scully about phase two, where the people are actually fucking. Masters is beyond nasty as he blames her for this, for sleeping with Ethan in the first place and basically for everything bad that has ever happened. Then her kid, an adorable comics nerd and natural actor, gets suspended from school for spitting.
At a loss, Masters moves the study to Betty's brothel, who strikes several hard bargains because she is awesome. Part of the deal is that she be hired on as a hospital receptionist, which is only part of her life-overhaul: She wants to get pregnant by the Pretzel King of the Midwest, who fancies her, and is willing to leave both her lover Helen and her job behind to get there. Masters doesn't want to reverse her tubal ligation, and (during several days in which he dicks around about rehiring her) he sends Ginny to talk her out of it, but a talk about a woman's right to choose -- free of both the rhetoric and the helpful vocabulary we use today; it's suddenly a completely different and fresh topic -- puts Ginny on Betty's side.
Dr. Langham and Jane (Anonymous and Anonymous, collectively Anonymous) discuss doing the study on their own terms, but Jane points out that without the imprimatur of "Science" hanging over their affair, it just becomes an affair. They are both pretty great, especially working -- like they all are -- without any kind of net at all.
The hookers at the cathouse are pretty great; one of them thinks she has a brain tumor which turns out to just be astigmatism and another one is just crazy looking and funny. They find Masters a good deal less charming than Betty and Ginny do, so you get this neat dynamic of our ladies each trying to explain to them how Masters's creepiness is actually okay.
Less okay is Ethan Haas's burgeoning creepiness, which seems to have no limit, as well as being completely understandable. He keeps trying to find girls he can bone, and then introduce to oral sex, but it comes off as such a forced, self-centered fetish that most of the girls abandon on impact. The ones that don't freak him out so much by not being Ginny Jonhson that he makes them feel twice as awkward. He wraps up an episode of sorta heartbreaking sexual obsession and sadsack bullshit by stalking Ginny to her house -- but on the positive tip, he wasn't the one that blabbed to Scully about phase two. (We still don't know who did that.)
Forcing Ginny to interview her replacement candidates works for longer than it should, but eventually she's had enough and she decides to finesse her way back into the job she is already doing. Masters, shut down more than ever after a series of Libby's fantastic attempts to force his various issues (including sweetly masturbating in front of him, getting him out of jail after a whorehouse raid and finally demanding that he get Ethan back as her fertility doctor), can only think about her joining him in the study -- but Ginny finally gets him to take her back, in a way he pretends is provisional but which they both know has already become an essential part of his study, his work and pretty much his entire life.
Back home, all the trouble with the kids comes to a head after a secretarial candidate that Ginny had poached for her new nanny gets talked into reading the final issue of Ginny's son's favorite comic book with him: A treat he saved for days to share with his mother before eventually giving up. A sort of dorky comic-book collage effect combines Masters & Johnson's two unsatisfying home lives -- and archetypal journeys into the unknown -- as Ginny finishes the episode by reading the comic book all by herself. It is pretty great.
Next Week: Libby's still barren and it's still not her fault, but now Ethan's got quadruplets to be excited about, which I guess might leave her in the lurch. The brothel environment proves unhelpful, so the team needs to find a way back into the hospital. And Ginny meets a female OB who does not understand the concept of sistas before mistas, which honestly is probably the best thing for her: You can't breathe the rarified air of future free America forever, and sooner or later you need to see what conscious contribution to your own oppression actually looks like... And how much sense it tends to make.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Bill Masters has decided that science needs him, specifically lady science, and has formed a small army of ladies to help him help science. One of them is Ginny Johnson, who is so awesome that she has caused both Bill and his young protégé Ethan Haas to go a certain kind of crazy. His boss is very freaked out by the science, but that's mostly because of his own stuff he's dealing with (or not dealing with); the science also involves torturing Bill's wife Libby. Last week, with victory in his grip so to speak, Bill asked Ginny to join him in the science, which was weird for everybody.
CREDITS
The second episode is always fun because you get to see the credits. In this case, fucking equals the universe: Volcanos, Dick & Jane etiquette diagrams, champagne going just everywhere, and the occasional ECG lead. Trains going into tunnels and so forth.
DAY ONE OF HAVING IT ALL
Ginny: "So far, so good. Children, please eat your food and stop being annoying. Mommy has to practice ways this shit could go."
Ginny: "Frankly, on reflection I find your request unreasonable and kind of freaky."
Bill: (Perturbed silence, psychotically clicking his pen over and over.)
In the kitchen, Henry is too busy reading the titular comic, Race To Space, to bother actually eating. Henry is very into this comic, as we'll see; so is the episode.
Henry: "Captain Kai is moving #1 Prisoner Topknot to the spacepad.."
Ginny: "Good for him, eat your breakfast."
Ginny: "Here are all the reasons I am pleased to be involved in science, followed up by reasons that your request is freaky..."
Masters: "Yes or no, Virginia. I am very busy, and scary like an authority figure."
Henry: "Oh man, Mom! Sergeant Baldwin Black has forbidden Prisoner Topknot to enter the Iron Chamber..."
Ginny: "I hear you. Please get on the bus and..."
Henry: "It's why they go to the space rail, to cool down. Then the find the boy Joey, a stowaway..."
Ginny: "You gotta quit with this."
Henry: "No, I'm the boy Joey. I'm the stowaway."
Ginny: "No, I'm the boy Joey. Keep it moving, please."
She barely gets them aboard, Henry with a hundred comics in his arms.
Henry: "It's amazing because Captain Kai gives the boy Joey a real stun gun..."