Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 29 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT You Be Me & I'll Be You
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.20.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.We skip to the middle of Libby's pregnancy, the better to explore exactly how crazy Bill Masters is prepared to get. Sleepwalking for the first time since childhood, and anticipating both his mother's week-long visit and his own baby, the secrets spill out over the hour that accumulate, never giving precise answers to the mysteries of Bill's weirdness but adding up to a picture that's bigger than the sum of its parts.
The episode loops around, bookended with a verbal interview of a charming male subject who turns out to be one of Virginia's ex-husbands, the musician father of her two children, who uses a fake name to earn himself a place in the study and a few extra bucks. By the end, Bill is obsessed with the guy, even taping additional interviews to get a clearer picture of what it's like to be with Virginia, in bed and out of it.
Of course, we're also dealing with the continued fallout from the jilting of Ethan Haas, who is still obsessed with her, six months later. When Libby decides to hook them up -- and nobody, least of all Bill, wants to explain they already dated -- it ends in a disastrous dinner party, Ethan driving off drunkenly into the night, careening through a strange and disappointing booty-call with Barton Scully's barely-legal daughter, and then barfing on his way into the OR for an emergency drunk surgery. Sloppy!
A few encounters with a battered obstetrics patient and her young son later, Bill has decided he'll be an abusive father -- which he then proves to himself by treating Gini's own kids like shit -- but after performing an illegal tubal ligation on the woman during her caesarian, as she's asked, he decides that he's probably better off just resenting his own mother for being a bystander to the whole thing. The real twist comes when Libby, in attempting to draw the mother out, realizes that she knows exactly what he's doing and why, and has decided to let him hate her as a sort of penance. Powerful stuff.
It's nice to see the world get bigger -- with new characters filling in the blanks, of course, but also in a wonderful montage of the repetitive clinical procedures that will eventually become their seminal study -- and to see a little more light at the end of Ethan's tunnel the crazier he goes. It's nice to get a little further, too, into Bill's usually opaque head, since what we've learned amplifies so much of what he's shown us before: The estrangement from his own manhood, the bizarre twists in his relationship with Scully, his obsession with fertility and women's bodies, and of course the ambivalence surrounding Libby's pregnancy. Most of all, it was nice to see him actively question himself for once, instead of just being passively insecure like usual.
As an act break in the season, it's certainly moved things along. Time will tell whether the incipient epiphanies Bill seems to imagine Gini bestowing on him will ever actually arrive, but it's to be assumed that whatever happens instead will probably be more useful. Next week, however, a second round of daddy issues seems likely, as we settle in on the new, time-jumped status quo: Ethan with the boss's daughter (and presumably the conflict for Masters to see him in that role with Scully), Gini's ex complicating matters at home (little boys do love their fathers), and of course Libby's imminent delivery (the cobbler's children have no shoes).
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
After a long day of blackmail and voyeurism, Bill was disconcerted to find that Libby had somehow managed to get pregnant after all. Also, this universal excuse/explanation/truth:
"Why would I insult you when you're all I think about?"
WALTER MCADDY
We open on a study subject, charming if a little self-impressed, discussing his ex-wife with Dr. Masters in a private, recorded session. It's the first time we've seen Bill go deep with a subject in this way, so you could be forgiven for assuming he does this all the time, or that it's a part of whatever phase comes next. But it's a lot less complicated than that, and a lot more complicated too. Walter McAddy isn't a man so much as a costume, an office; a man anyone could pretend to be.
Walter: "I mean, it's not like we both orgasm at the same time, every time, but yeah. She doesn't have any problems with that."
Masters: "And do you have a pretty regular routine?"
Walter: "She's adventurous, she likes to switch it up. But normally it starts with cunnilingus, and a fair amount of helpful encouragement, before... Is this the kind of stuff you want to hear?"
Yes, and no. It's not a question Bill can answer.
4 DAYS AGO
In a sprightly, alternating sequence, Bill and Gini run through their spiel with a variety of subjects -- men and women, young and old, nervous and more nervous -- and then the steps of what actually happens in the study: Your name gets indexed so you're randomized, you do the sexuality interview, you get a general physical. Then the clothes come off, the electrodes go on, and the subjects are asked to...
Masters: "Begin."
And because it's Bill, because he's still a babe in the woods, even after all this: "Thank you for coming."
I didn't want to know much about their lives, going into this. I didn't want to know what would happen to them, separately or together. But I know enough now, just from random mentions and stuff. And I'm struck still by just how much of an innocent he is. I thought Ethan was the stand-in for that strange boyish thing men have about bodies -- the worship and the shame, the fear that becomes fascination that becomes study; the belief that another person's body can ever be conquered, ever bring them any kind of existential comfort -- but knowing more about Bill's life -- more, now, than the Bill on the show -- it's amazing. He's such a beast. Such an incomplete, creepy person.