In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
Turns out Bill's marriage and home life are a sort of Don Draper-style long con, based on the fact that his mentor (the Beau Bridges guy, Scully) told him years ago that in order to realize his dream -- studying sex, all the time, as his job -- he needed to appear as completely normal as possible. Knowing Dr. Masters, we know what a high bar that is to set, but the flashbacks to a younger, more emotional Bill -- and the admiration and frankly adoration he's felt for Scully since like 1945 -- help offset the creepiness of what he seems to be becoming a great deal. Man he is just a fucking mess this poor guy.
Once Libby finds out the truth, from an exhausted Ginny, she's set to go completely nuts on her husband and on Dr. Haas as well... Until she learns that she's pregnant, at which point she just gives up on being mad at them for lying to her and exposing her to all these bullshit tortures. The irony, of course, being the percentage to which we now wonder whether Bill enjoyed the idea of never having children with her.
This overall theme -- the invisibility and liminality of sexual outliers, the necessity of a social performance, the fight to exist, even at the ends of the bell curve -- pervades every storyline: Bill finally confirms the existence of Betty DiMello's Pretzel King (a dear, sweet, gigantic Greg Grunberg), but only after learning during her surgery that she can't have kids with him. A quadruplets case is taken away from Ethan and given to the celebrated Masters, in order to drive up PR for the hospital. Masters is on pins and needles as to whether the study even "counts," given where it's currently taking place. Ginny comes up against brick walls with both Masters and a visiting female doctor, who seem to barely register her as a human being (even though the former, according to Betty, has already fallen in love with her).
Most intriguingly, we get an angle on just how alien Masters's approach to other people really is when Betty scares up some male masturbation subjects, and Masters notices the existence of both male prostitutes and homosexuality. He's fascinated enough to watch a couple of 'em get after it, and forms something of a bond with the most eloquent of the gorgeous trio. Once he realizes that their male subjects are three standard deviations out, demographically speaking, and thus not scientifically relevant -- and tries (meaning fails) to explain this to his young hustler friend in a way that is not completely repellent -- we learn how close to home it really hits: One of the kid's usual clients is none other than Barton Scully himself, the only man Bill Masters ever loved.
What follows is the kindest and most horrifying blackmail of the series's constant blackmails to date, as he describes (presciently) the way his work of demystifying sexuality will actually help save men like Scully in the long run: Both their lives, and from their double lives, just like the one he taught Bill Masters to live. It's super sad, Masters is capable of being grossed by himself it turns out, and worst of all it's contrasted with a heartbreaking and tender reveal of how Bill's emotional dependence on Scully -- and Scully's dependence on that, in turn -- brought Bill to Washington U in the first place.
Week: Back recruiting on campus, Ginny has to deal not only with her dumb ex-husband crashing on the couch (and wanting to earn some scientific jack-off money), but Libby trying to serve her up to the face-punching Ethan as some kind of thank-you gift for knocking her up. Meanwhile, Bill's own mother comes to visit, which based on what we know at this point all I can picture is those scary robot terrycloth and wire mothers Harry Harlow used to give monkeys autism, or whatever he was trying to do. The shit Betty Draper has nightmares about, that's what I'm picturing.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Bill was unreasonable about Gini dating Ethan, and also about his wife's uterus, and also about his hooker friend Betty's tied tubes. By the end of things the study had found a new temporary home at Betty's bordello, thanks to Gini's fast-talkin' ways, but Bill still couldn't manage to be cool about it. Gini tried to get him to open up about that time he asked to have sex with her for science, but it was too late and too weird. Bill has some problems.
Young Baby Bill: "Let's watch rabbits hump, here at the University of Rochester."
Barton Scully: "This kind of thing is why you're my favorite student."
Bill: "It is the postwar and my hair is very fluffy. One thing about rabbits doing it is, they are not remotely kidding around."
Scully: "It is pretty rapey."
Bill: "Since they are animals, it is fine."
Scully: "Is it like this with monkeys? I couldn't watch this with monkeys."
Bill: "That makes me give a speech."
"Humans have taken the basic impulse for sex and turned it into some ... unrecognizable ordeal! Romance, chivalry, codes of etiquette! Which necktie should I be wearing? Should I say goodnight at the curb, or walk her to the door?"
Well, but the reason for that is that it keeps everybody honest, or else it would be like the rabbits: A violently necessary imperative, performed efficiently. The rabbit may not be wondering what necktie to wear to dinner, that's true. He also slaps her around first, and grips her while he's doing it so she can't get away. We treat sexual etiquette like a cage that keeps women oppressed, and that is true; it's also a cage that keeps us all safe. You do not want to return to a state of nature.
And you couldn't, even if you wanted to: The economy between men and women, developed and refined over thousands and thousands of years, and mostly shameful for all of that time, is the foundation of all other aspects of civilization. It's only robots like Bill -- or college kids behind computer screens -- who think bodies, and fucking, and gender, are a gross injustice at worst and at best, merely helpful suggestions. The rest of us actually have to live here.
Bill: "What if we could just cut through the maze to the essentials? What if we could understand the basic physiology underneath all that nonsense?"
Scully: "So I take it things are going poorly with Caroline?"
Bill: "The mysteries of human sexuality are such that she went back to Tennessee."
Scully: "Did you know that nobody ever studied sex before?"
Bill: "I'm like George Mallory, I do it because it is there. Dimly, off in the distance, and I'm going to need oxygen, but it's there."
Scully: "Mount Everest doesn't ejaculate, Bill."
Bill: "That's just one of the many things my research will help us determine."
"The real truth is, I don't know anything about sex. And you don't either. But wouldn't you like to know? I mean wouldn't everyone like to know some answers? Wouldn't we all be so much better off if we could shine a light into the darkness?"
SEGUE
In 1958, Bill directs a lamp up Mae Whitman's skirt and they talk about family planning.
Beth: "I'm Beth, I'm getting married soon! I worry about my weight. #Justgirlythings."
Bill: "I don't understand that, and I won't respond to it."
Beth: "Well, when we get married, we're going to be doing it."
Bill: "It is a thing about marriage."
Beth: "I have three semesters left at Maryville and a husband named Willard who is not leaning in."
Bill: "Ah. Family planning began with the ancient Inuit, who would throw unwanted babies into the Arctic Sea..."
Beth: "I don't... Is this a joke? Are you joking?"
Bill: "Fast-forward, now we have modern birth control. Do you know this is?"
He unrolls a condom onto a fake dick, and she blanches. She did not.
Bill: "Or there are a wide variety of like, creams and jellies..."
Beth: "Like marmalade?"
Bill: "Are you retarded?"
Beth: "No, just in over my head. Can a sister get a diaphragm in here or what?"
Bill: "There we go. A little rubber bowler hat. Perfectly fitted to your specific cervix."
Beth: "What is a cervix?"
Bill: "Get out of my office."
LATER
Gini: "I'm still hypercompetent and vastly overqualified for like any job on Earth. I replaced one of our hookers with another hooker, so tonight's schedule is just chock full of hookers..."
Bill: "I'm still dismissive and remote because everything is weird. I hope your feelings are hurt. Anyway, go to the Laundry Department and pick up a lab coat for Dr. DePaul."
Gini: "Whatever that means, I will do it. I feel like in the long run you are going to pay for this bullshit."
Betty: "Speaking of your mind-blowing self-absorption, my tubes are still tied."
Bill: "I know, and I still feel like that's about me. I already gave you a job here."
Betty: "I know but I also want to have babies with the Pretzel King."
Bill: "Another thing that falls under my jurisdiction is whether or not the Pretzel King even exists."
Betty: "That doesn't sound right to me."
Bill: "Well, if you made him up then you really shouldn't be in charge of your uterus."
Bill: "I simply refuse to be drawn into your peculiar fantasy life..."
Betty: "Argh! Coming from the superfreak that likes wiring up hookers to electric dildos like some kind of Cronenberg porno."
Bill: "Uh, that is for science."
Betty: "Sure it is, bitch. Now you best operate, or I will blow your life one thousand miles into the air like Wile E. Coyote, who was just recently invented."
Chuck Jones invented him from a description in Mark Twain's Roughing It, the Coyote as a "long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton... A living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry."
BORDELLO
Gini sets up a deli-style number system so the ladies can come into a room off the parlor one at a time and masturbate. A john (desperate and degenerate, a sorry-looking sweaty skeleton) remarks without prelude that Virginia probably tastes "just like orange sherbet." Of the many alarming things you might hear at work, if your job was hooking hookers up to wires and making them masturbate, it's also quite evocative. Something of a poet, I suppose.
First up is Maureen, the super-crazy awesome one, who tells them to count the rings on her hoo-ha since she doesn't remember how old she is. We run into a lot of problems with the standard questionnaire, but at no point does Bill think about changing the questions to suit reality at all.
Bill: "Are you sexually active?"
Maureen: "Is this dude okay?"
Gini: "They're just dumb questions, sorry."
Maureen: "I am sexually active. you're going to ask if I'm married?"
Bill: "Whoa! That is totally the question."
Maureen: "Twist, I am totally married."
Bill: "This is really a fruitful exercise, I had no idea."
Maureen: "Yeah, my husband's a Rockefeller. I only come here for the coffee."
Gini: "His brain doesn't work like that. You need to tell him you're kidding or he'll write it down."
A hooker named Dottie gets five dates a day, on a great day, so that's her frequency of coitus, but first we have to explain what coitus means, and so on. When Maureen eventually gets ahold of Ulysses, I imagined there would be a sound like Excalibur being pulled from the Stone.
A hooker named Ginger gets on all fours and requests that Dr. Masters -- who puts on gloves for this part -- spank the hell out of her so she can have an orgasm:
Ginger: "Tell the doc I'm not made of glass, willya?"
Gini: "Uh, Ginger is not made of glass. Also, this is just about as good as life gets."
Masters: "Uh, why does this work for you?"
Ginger: "By the time the Nineties roll around you'd get pilloried for just asking that question because everybody will have a kink that they buy off the shelf and everybody will think sex is this thing that comes in different flavors and shades every single year like clockwork. Dan Savage will have arrived to inform you that any discussion of sexual historicity or psychology is implicitly shameful and damaging, and therefore offensive, because personal fetishes just come to you from the heavens, wrapped in a blanket, by a feminist stork, so it's not okay to ask. But since it's 1958, I can tell you the honest truth that it is because I am fucked up about sex. Look around you, sir. Look where you are. We have not been treated well on our way to this house."
04:22 LATER
Maureen has an orgasm as big as a Walmart, with bells and whistles and fireworks and moments of suspense, and a chick on a swing like at a steakhouse, and a marching band led by three spangled drum majors who are also having orgasms.
Maureen: "That was some very good orgasming I just did, you guys."
Gini: "Uh, the needle never moved, though."
Bill: "We just sat through almost five minutes of you faking an orgasm?"
Maureen: "Job hazard. Maybe I do not understand what it is you're trying to do. But either way, Momma gets paid."
HOSPITAL
Ethan spots a giantly pregnant lady in the hallway, and then he spots her going down. I will tell you right now that this lady is pregnant with quadruplets. Can you imagine? Quadruplets in 1958. That is crazy. That's like instant fame.
Bill shows up with that Dr. DePaul in tow, and it turns out she's a lady, named Lillian, who is just kind of sucky to be honest. Things you can tell just by looking at her. But also, worth noting that Gini loses any shot at bonding with this monster the second she walks in, because Gini takes a moment to engage the fact that DePaul is a doctor even though she is a woman.
Which sucks so hard, because you know and I know that if he'd prepared her for it, she would have been overjoyed to meet a lady doctor who is a lady doctor, since that's what she's pretending to be and because a rising tide lifts all boats, but because Bill, like, doesn't see gender -- but really because he is withholding shit at random at this point, to keep control of the chaos that Gini produces in him by controlling her in whatever petty way he can -- it takes Gini a sec, and a second's all it takes for Lillian DePaul to file her under "Basic Bitches."
LIBBY
Ethan and Libby are preparing for her "capping," which is tomorrow, which is bleak because Libby's pregnancy situation is always bleak; she'd prefer to discuss the quads. The interesting part of that is, apparently Ethan was the first person to tell the lady that she was having quadruplets. How did that go? "Oh that makes sense that it was four babies. I just thought it was an insurance salesman, or a bison, possibly a mid-priced hatchback, but this makes a lot more sense."
Libby: "You know what this reminds me of? Other famous multiple births."
Ethan: "I'm not familiar with those even though it is my job."
Libby: "The doctor who successfully delivers these quads is going to be so famous. I hope it's somebody super dreamy and eligible like yourself."
Ethan: "In fact, let me get way ahead of the game and alert the press to my dreaminess and future fame."
SO THEN
Masters: "I'ma let you finish, but..."
Scully: "Are you trying to be famous about all these babies?"
Both: "Yeah! There's no such thing as bad publicity!"
Scully: "There certainly is. Stillbirth. Perinatal mortality. You guys, it's 1958."
Masters: "I can do it, though. I am unstoppable."
Ethan: "Actually, stop cockblocking me. Look, it's time for me to be a grownup man-doctor and not have to be a protégé all the time. I want to be on staff when my fellowship ends in six months, and this is how that happens."
Scully: "Okay, but only if Bill is still there to take all the credit."
Ethan: "Surely that is not how it will go down."
TOURGUIDE VIRGINIA
Gini: "The cafeteria is where there is food. The East Wing is over there, heading in an easterly direction... Psychiatry, osteopaths, phlebotomy..."
DePaul: "A term for venipuncture."
Gini: "You are a creep and a half, my friend. Listen, you may have noticed it's 1958 and there aren't any female gynos because that would involve educating them..."
DePaul: "Yeah, it's a real drag."
Gini: "Well, if you ever need anything. I basically have Bill Masters tied around my pinkie finger. Both because he is a helpless infant in the real world, and also because he is in love with me and nobody knows it, so if you need me to work the system..."
DePaul: "You're a secretary. What I need is a coffee and a little less jibber-jabber."
BORDELLO
Gini: "I've redesigned the questionnaire so it makes sense."
Bill: "Typical."
Gini: "To be thoughtful and show forethought and initiative and make your life easy?"
Bill: "To take liberties and do things without asking."
Gini: "Fuck off, Bill. Good Lord you are nuts."
They interview a 19-year-old we haven't seen before, who basically explains to them that she was victimized by a family member from a very young age, and it is grim as hell, and now she lives in a whorehouse so maybe show a little compassion, but mostly Bill is just amazed that they have lives or pasts or histories, and it's horrible and sad and embarrassing for everybody except the young lady, who tells them the story defiantly, like she's daring them to say something, and that's how she gets to own the story of herself.
LATER
Bill: "Man, all these hookers got like a million medical problems. And venereal diseases. Have you ever heard of salpingitis? Let's say that word a hundred times. Also pelvic inflammatory disease, lots of that in there. Kind of a select group."
Gini: "Plus no fellas. How hard could it be to get some of those?"
Bill: "Clients are a non-starter, I already tried."
Gini: "When has a nonstarter ever stopped us?"
Bill: (Mean look, because he is not done being insufferable.)
Gini: "You. Ever stopped you."
So as Bill's prepping Betty for her surgery, he asks again for some male subjects. They talk about the irony of him blackmailing her, after their whole relationship of her blackmailing him, and she gives a secret smile and says she knows just the population for his purposes. Oh, Betty. Good luck with your tubes.
ETHAN
Is disheartened to hear that his newspaper buddy has pushed ahead with the PR blitz on the quadruplets, even going so far as to get their mom to sign off on a "Name The Babies" contest where the prize is a toaster oven. Uh, so easy. Harpo, Ringo, Gryffindor and Randy Giles. Done. I win. I win a toaster oven from 1958.
BETTY'S SITUATION
Is dire. Lots of scarring from PID, which the other doctors in the theatre can't wait to chalk up to her being a "party girl" and a "worn-out hooker," and Bill finally just tosses them all out so he can finish up alone. Meanwhile, Gini reports to Libby that his simple one-hour surgery is now going on four.
Libby: "Okay, will you hang out with me?"
Gini: "Absolutely, you're my fave. I could go steal the TV from the doctor's lounge..."
Libby: "That is exactly the kind of thing that stresses Bill out. I'd get the patented Bill Masters Glare..."
Careful, Libby. Careful making him the boring one. They make faces at each other, laughing. Libby gasps when she's laughed too hard. Talk turns to the Trinity deacon's luncheon, which Libby is not really into planning. "Some people have children, I have seating charts and a uterus incompatible with conception," she grins, but Gini's lost her appetite for it.
Out in the hallway, after he's given up, Bill finds Gene the Pretzel King, Greg Grunberg looking particularly sweet and enormous, and realizes that he is kind of a jerk to have assumed that Betty would have invented such a kind-eyed, worried man as this. He throws himself on Dr. Masters, grateful for Bill's help with Betty's "appendix," and shuffles his giant bouquet around so he can get to a spare bag of pretzels for Bill.
Gene: "I got big plans for Betty and me. Three girls, three boys. We'll probably get a dog too. Can I look in on her?"
Bill: "Sure, just let me just tell her she's barren real quick."
LATER
Bill is bitching that he abused hospital resources and wasted his time, which Gini knows is Robot for how bad he feels about failing her, so that's what she speaks to.
Bill: And all to gather skewed data, from a house full of sexual invalids..."
Gini: "That's a pretty grotesque way to say it, and anyway it doesn't matter. What matters is, you held up your end and so did Betty. We got boys you wouldn't believe!"
They are gorgeous, they look like Buzz's guys from Rebel Without A Cause, and they are also very sassy, and of course Bill has no idea what he's getting into.
Gini: "You can go ahead and leave your pants on for a second."
Carl: "Oh, did you not want me to masturbate? Boy is my face red."
Gini: "First we'll do the interview..."
Carl: "Like a date?"
Gini: "No... Um, what am I missing here?"
Carl: "The part where I'm a hustler or the part where I am gay?"
Dale: "So that one, the ECG, that draws pictures of my heartbeat?"
Bill: "It draws waveforms from which we draw conclusions about the physiology of masturbation and sex more broadly."
Dale: "How broadly? Actual sex?"
Bill: "That's the plan."
Dale: "Queer sex too?"
Bill: "Wait, are you saying dudes have sex with each other?"
Dale: "Yeah, it's awesome. You want to see?"
Bill: "I really do! I mean, like... for science."
LATER
Gini: "Did you seriously just watch Dale and Carl fuck? You are amazing."
Masters: "What is amazing is guys doing it. But anyway, we can't do this study here anymore. It's all homos and hookers and sad stories and people who will die or their tubes are all fucked up, and... I mean, we aren't doing a study on weirdos, we are doing a study for Muggles."
"They're three standard deviations from the norm. You can't deduce a model of normal physiology with outliers and misfits. We're so far from the bell curve we can't even hear it ringing."
Which is, in its way, pretty valid. But the difference between 1958 and now is that you can't look somebody in the eye and tell them they aren't a person. You can try -- Chik-Fil-A can try, the BSA can try -- but in the end it doesn't work. Due in large part to Masters and Johnson and the work they did, which work can't start until they have a sample, and it's true that this sample is, for the time, pretty far out. Technically not three sigma, because that would be 0.27 percent which is drastically underestimating the number of hookers and homos in the world even in 1958, but he's not conceptually wrong. It's just awkward all around.
FLASHBACK
Barton Scully: "It is some years later and you just graduated from medical school. I am something of a father figure to you, which is why we are barbecuing."
Baby Bill: "I would like to talk about the science of human sexuality. Which you probably could have guessed, due to me only talking about that, ever."
Scully: "It's time you understood that when you talk about this, you sound deranged."
Bill: "Do I? Or do I sound like the electric crackle of the future?"
Scully: "Okay here are my rules for you getting to study sex one day. First, wait twenty years until you are over forty. I know you are weird about sex and not a perv, but we can't explain that to everybody. So you have to be old."
Bill: "Done, I can wait twenty years no problem. What should I do during them?"
Scully: "Establish a practice at a world-class teaching hospital, doing something in a respectable field. Obstetrics, I'd say."
Bill: "It was that or Urology."
Scully: "You need a wife, like a Betty Draper fake wife so you look normal."
Bill: "You seem to know a lot about this."
Scully: "I have secrets obviously."
NOW
Bill: "That flashback reminds me of all the cultural capital I have been saving up for forty years while I made a whole life for myself just so I could eventually watch people masturbate and fuck each other, as my actual job."
Gini: "It's always so incredibly fucked up when you actually say things. I love it."
Bill: "Okay so I have delivered all the babies of all the rich white men in all of America. Surely that is a plus for us."
Gini: "I will call them and ask them for a favor. What will it be?"
Bill: "For them to bother my mentor, Barton Scully."
Gini: "And what will you be doing?"
Bill: "Stealing Ethan's quads."
He does, with a quickness, and then Ethan stomps around and yells at Bill and Scully for being dickheads and stealing his fame babies. He even drops an f-bomb, is how upset he is. Good thing Bill and Scully love him anyway, because he is not responding to this sleazy mistreatment with any sort of poise or aplomb at all.
You know what's interesting, though, is no matter how mad he gets -- how viciously and arbitrarily his entitlement is being denied -- he's somehow able to keep from physically assaulting them.
TYPING POOL
Bitches: "I heard she is from New York. A Cylon from New York."
Gini: "I read her CV and she is from Ithaca. Her letter of recommendation from her fellowship at Penn said that if the guy's eyes were closed he wouldn't have known she was a woman."
Bitches: "I can barely tell now!"
Gini: "That isn't even the worst thing that's happened in this conversation."
Bitches: "Right? We're so enslaved to the dominant paradigm that we think female gynecologists are gross."
Gini: "You know what is such a gross word? Amenuensis."
Bitches: "That is gross!"
Gini: "Psych, that's a word for what you are. So I guess you are gross. A gross couple of amenuenses. Peace out."
MASTERS HOUSE
Gini: "I brought you some random casserole or something since you are too barren to walk around."
Libby: "Thanks, you're a good husband."
Gini: "Your life is the worst. Can I get you anything?"
Libby: "Get me that depressing box of baby shit from the closet so I can be morose in front of you."
Gini: "What cute baby clothes! For a baby that will never exist."
Libby: "I found in Bill's desk a report on female sterility. Did you know that for my problem I am only 8 percent likely to have a baby? I'm two sigma out."
Gini: "You are zero sigma out. You can't make a baby with no sperm regardless of what your uterus is up to."
Libby: "Wait, what? This is a trick? I thought he was torturing me to like, humor me."
Gini: "No, it is his stupid dick that is the problem."
Libby: "Does Ethan also know this?"
Gini: "Basically everybody except you."
Libby: "Can you grasp how horrible that is?"
Gini: "I've never been one to abet my own lack of agency, so not really. But I do feel better, now that I've wrecked your life and marriage. Keeping this secret has been tough, not to mention betraying the sisterhood, so now I'm doing neither."
Libby: "That was pretty cold."
Gini: "Well, your husband's being a real assbag lately."
THE SHADOWS
Dale: "Hey, it's me, the super hot dude you made friends with."
Bill: "Why are you at my work? I don't come down to your whorehouse and watch you suck dicks."
Dale: "Actually that's exactly what you did. But I was coming to offer my help. You know, being a hooker is financially suspenseful. So I know a lot of dudes that you should meet, and pay them to have sex stuff go on."
Bill: "That's very considerate of you and I'm glad we bonded, and all, but..."
Dale: "Dr. Masters, when you said you wanted to study sex and you wanted me to be a part of it, I felt like a fully valid human being. It's your privilege as a straight man to think that gay dudes are just like you except for this one thing, but what that perspective does is erase my entire experience. It makes my life a vacation you can choose to visit whenever you feel like, or a safari, but it doesn't mean anything to my subjective life as a person. By treating me as science, you elevate me to basic humanity. A thing I should never have been denied in the first place, but gay men are stuck getting caught in the crossfire of your schizoid culture's worshipful degradation of the taboo commodity of female sexuality."
Bill: "...Man, I wish you hadn't said that stuff."
Dale: "So I'm suddenly no longer science? God, everybody at this college keeps fucking me."
Bill: "Like who in particular? Somebody I can blackmail?"
HOME
Libby: "Welcome home, buttface."
Bill: "Are you smoking and drinking and not calling me daddy? What's that about?"
Libby: "I want to let you twist for a while before I tell you. Suffice to say I am running this shit as of now."
Bill: "I know these treatments are difficult. But you'll be yourself in a few days, I promise. God knows we all have our cross to bear!"
Libby: "I feel like maybe you're gonna wish you were never born. Haven't made up my mind yet."
PR BLITZ
Speaking of people Bill is fucking over purely because he is a robot sent from the future to watch people masturbate, guess who is famous for delivering quadruplets? That's right, Bill Masters, obstetrics God. Poor Ethan.
Also, poor Betty, who is getting wheeled out of recovery when Ginny finds her, and they have a sad talk.
Betty: "Gene wants to name the first boy William, after the doctor. I feel crazed."
Gini: "He loves you, he'll understand..."
Betty: "Oh, he's not gonna find out. I'm prepared to keep lying about this until I die."
Gini: "What about Helen?"
Betty: "Three sigma out. Didn't you hitch your wagon to a man?"
Gini: "I'm his assistant."
Betty: "He's in love with you. Don't bullshit a bullshitter."
Gene: "Friend of yours? She never introduces me to anybody."
Betty: "This is Virginia, the doc's secretary... Sorry, assistant."
Gini: "Whatever, it's nice to meet you."
Betty: "Really she's just another hardworking girl, doing the best she can."
Gini: "You've made your point, DiMello."
ETHAN
Libby: "I am prepared to just go apeshit on you."
Ethan: "For my part, I am completely oblivious to that."
Libby: "You and my husband are a real double act, you know that?"
Ethan: "Actually I have never hated him more than I do today. But guess what? You are pregnant."
Libby: "Then I guess everything's fine!"
Ethan: "Yeah, it cheered me up too."
THAT NIGHT
Bill: "Launder these things and do all kinds of tasks and swallow your pride and tell Scully I'm on my way upstairs to blackmail him about secret things."
Gini: "Fuck off. What's going on with the study? At night you treat me like a colleague, and in the daytime you treat me like an errand girl, and I am exhausted trying to interpret your robotic glitches and weird emotional projections. Is this about sex? Is this about love? What do you see when you look at me?"
Bill: "A secretary."
Gini: "If I'm qualified to conduct scientific research when it comes to the study, how I am not qualified to be treated like a human when the sun is up?"
Bill: "At the moment, there is no study. The brothel is a disaster, I can't even cope with the existence of homosexuality on top of everything else I've got going on, and I still blame you for Scully's constant about-faces with the study. Stop acting like my twenty-year journey from rabbit procurer to masturbation watcher is equal to you being here for five minutes."
PROVOST'S OFC
Scully: "Oh my God, are you still talking about this? It has been twenty years of you talking about this."
Masters: "Think about it this way. I am the most famous celebrity of this whole place. I just saved four babies at once from the butterfingers cutie-pie downstairs..."
Scully: "Which is why you were on the case. Nobody's disputing your skill at your actual job."
Masters: "MY COVER JOB WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE MY REAL JOB."
Scully: "It just seems like you're threatening me when you talk about this PR stuff."
Masters: "Oh right, that's why I came up here. Thanks. I wanted to um, just quickly tell you about this guy I met the other day. Real awesome kid, gay hustler. Opened my eyes to some things."
Scully: "Uh, I don't need to hear this, though."
Masters: "Not that. I mean, yes that. That too, but I was talking about something else."
"The men who pay to see him, they're not convicts or reprobates. They're not degenerates. They're family men, living a double life. Suffering in the shadows. I don't believe in shadows. I believe in the light of scientific inquiry. I believe I have a responsibility to those men, whether they're salesmen or lawyers or, I don't know, like a Provost of a major university."
Scully: "Is that code? Are you totally blackmailing me by saying awesome things?"
Masters: "I also mean it. I am obsessed with this, with solving sex, because you shouldn't have to be blackmailed by people like me just because people don't get you."
Scully: "But you are still doing it, though."
Masters: "Yeah but I'm not wrong. The ends justify the means. And the means aren't that bad, I mean, you did totally explain all of this to me in 1945. I just wasn't listening because I loved you so much."
FLASHBACK
Masters: "I hate your farewell party, so I'm hiding in the kitchen."
Scully: "I know, it's going to be hard because you love me so much."
Masters: "Rochester will not be the same without you. My hair will get a lot less fluffy, for one thing."
Scully: "The U Dubs Dean said you applied for a fellowship?"
Masters: "Yeah, that's embarrassing that you know that. That you know I'd drop everything and follow you anywhere because I am so all about you."
Scully: "Well, they told me you were the most arrogant resident they ever interviewed. The phrase was smug, self-satisfied horse's ass."
Masters: "I mean, it's not wrong? That's actually pretty accurate? But jeez."
Scully: "'We'd have to build a separate wing for his ego,' they said..."
Masters: "Enough, bro! I get it!"
Cully: "So I said if he didn't take us both, he could shove it."
Masters: "Wait, what?"
Scully: "Will you come with me to St. Louis?"
Masters: "As long as I get to blackmail you for being gay in like twenty years, sure."
Barton left the kitchen, because he knew somehow that Bill couldn't stand to be looked at just then. He wept, the second Scully's back was turned, like a boy; like a sick skeleton, a living breathing allegory of Want.
HOME
After burning that relationship to the ground, Bill just wants to retreat into the serene, surreal picture of his home life, where nothing ever changes; it's a wing for his ego. But when he gets there, Libby's shining brighter than the sun. And when she puts a martini in his hand, and congratulates him, and calls him daddy once again, for a moment he doesn't want anything at all.
He is always hungry; sometimes he needs reminding. His life, until this moment, was a vacation, a safari. A still life, that never changed; this was by design. This is his reward.
WEEK
Arriving at about the midpoint of Libby's pregnancy, we find ourselves jumped to a new status quo: Bill's mother's in town opening cans of worms all over the place, Gini's charming/deadbeat ex-husband wants in on the study, and Libby tries to set Ethan up with Gini.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Good Wife, Homeland, Hostages, Ravenswood, and Masters Of Sex for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as a regular column for Tor.com, Geek Love.