Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 37 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT The High Striker
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 11.10.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Virginia drags her new best buddy Ethan Haas to the car lot, because you always have to take a dude to the car lot. When he offers to cosign her loan, she realizes that being friends with him is a horrible idea, but ends up letting him do it anyway. This actually works out pretty great, as Ethan's discovery that Virginia and Bill are doing science together plus this last vestige of his Friend Zone bullshit rockets him into a whole new level of sexual maturity, buying girl-friendly bedding and even telling Vivian the sad story of his Virginia obsession.
Oh yeah, about that. Well, we knew it would be gory. So the episode starts when them having Bill Masters Zombie Sex, as expected; the first round she's 0 and 1. Second round, she's 2 and 0, which proves he's capable of improving his performance. Then Libby gets drunk on gin and just a little sloppy, grossing Bill out enough that she decides on two things: One, get Ethan to keep trying to impregnate her in secret with Bill's frozen sperm (a clever inversion of the first half of the season), and two, get Virginia to send his ass home on time.
Virginia holds out the best carrot she can -- no more science funtimes until he starts fucking his wife regularly -- and it works like a damned charm. He shows up the next morning frisky as hell and ready for session three, which ends in simultaneous orgasm and involves some face-making I didn't need personally to see. There's a power shift afterwards, where Masters is no longer the desperate one and Virginia's actually a little bummed about fixing his marriage for him, but I'm sure once the oxytocin calms down she'll get her shit together.
Oh, and their new shared secretary is Jane, which is awesome because Jane is awesome, and also because it helps Bill get over a lot of his confusion about who and what Virginia is to the office, now that's she's doing so much stuff in so many different rooms of the office. Plus, more Jane for us, which is great.
The other main story -- possibly the main story this week -- is the Scully marriage, which is a joy to watch: Barton's going to NYC for a few days, so Margaret invites Austin Langham over to play house for a couple days, and they end up engaging in some joking/not-joking role play stuff about his mommy issues that eventually sends Austin back to therapy, where he figures out some fairly gratifying things.
But first, Barton gets himself gay-bashed! And stabbed! His sweet hustler Dale rescues him, but he insists on stitching himself up. Masters runs across him in the night and does the deed for him, along with handing him a shitload of attitude and that harsh Bill Masters affection that is so hard to deal with. Then he heads home, where Margaret is watching herself fucking Austin in the mirror, and she meets him on the stairs and then -- in a sort of spasm -- tells him to hide in his room until her lover has left the building. It's sort of bad-ass but also totally awkward.
Next morning, she screams at Barton about how he should have fought for her, etc., and he promises her he's not seeing any other ladies. She does not do the math. I think maybe that kind of math had not been invented yet. Also, who cares, because it's all performative: She thinks as the wife she's supposed to act like this and regulate the behavior of the husband who's supposed to act like that, and the whole thing is just robots anyway.
You want to tell Barton it would be okay if he laid it out on the table and said, "Let's both date cute boys on the side," but she would probably find some kind of problem to have with it just because she would feel like it was required of her. Instead, he stresses about everything, and then he and Dale decide their relationship has to take place in hotels instead of alleys, so they don't keep getting stabbed, and it's sort of beautiful how much affection there is between the two men outside the box of their financial relationship, paralleling as it does both Masters/Johnson and the old Austin/Jane hypocrisy from earlier episodes. But even if the weirdness of it is too weird, it's still Dale, and he is still great.
Next Week: Zack and Miri make a porno; Virginia realizes she has to take DePaul's Anatomy class which is like this Catch-22 of needing her degree so that old bitch will respect her but needing the old bitch's respect to get her degree, etc.; Scully decides to feel even weirder about getting gay with Dale -- which is so dumb of him, because I'd imagine anybody could find a way to get gay with Dale, he's that good -- while Haas and Langham try to explain what a man is to each other but spoiler alert, it's 1957 and they have no fucking clue.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Ethan's attempts to become a human being -- by normalizing his friendship with Virginia and romance with Vivian Scully -- are proving much more successful than expected. Meanwhile, after a failure to launch and a bit of the Talking Cure, Austin rediscovered his passion in the arms of the formerly anhedonic Margaret Scully, whose husband Barton's arrangement with the charming hustler Dale gave Bill the blackmail material to pursue his goal, which is science. Specifically the science of fucking Virginia, who -- after a promotion bandaged the wounds left on her pride by Dr. DePaul -- decided to go through with it.
SCIENCE
So right away three things are happening: "Love Me Tender" is playing on the soundtrack, we're typing up Masters & Johnson's official subject cards for the vault, and we're also getting to watch them do science to each other for the first time. It's uncomfortable but not like virgins fucking is uncomfortable: More like if your dad got you a hooker for your sixteenth birthday and you were both just doing your best. Neither one of them is the hooker, you understand; they are both just out of their league.
But too, they're both wishing this weren't what it is, which is a transaction. This whole episode is full of people giving other people things to get things in return, but the things they think they're giving -- and the things they think they want to get -- are never really very close to what they are actually giving, or getting. (Ethan in particular goes into a whirlwind -- not to say downward spiral -- of giving, to the point that he pretty much loses sight of what he stands to gain in doing it, which probably makes him the winner of the episode.)
So is Virginia acceding to the study because she feels respected as a scientist? Yes, but also no: He did not buy this fuck from her, even if he kind of did. Is she doing this because she has a mysterious vibe connection with her married boss? Yeah, but still also no: Their relationship has been sex without touching the entire time, which they both like. Is she doing this to prove a point? Yes, but it's the opposite of the point the first two questions imply: She's putting her money where her mouth is, which is to say the thing Bill likes best about her is her ability to remove all outside concerns -- emotion, need, shame, further communication -- from the physical act of sex, the thing he both wants to do and can't stop himself doing.
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