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In the wake of last week's qualified success with the doctors' wives -- and armed with Virginia's information on Bill's sweetheart deal with the University -- Lillian DePaul decides to come at the Chancellor even harder than before. He points out that she has only been able to keep sixteen patients since she makes everybody uncomfortable -- either with her gender or her personality -- and thus will never be a "rainmaker."
While DePaul tries to start shit during Bill's Friday Presentation in order to create buzz, the only forward movement she's actually presented with -- Virginia's idea to create forum for Women's Health and/or be a part of the Sanger cause, this "Pill" everybody's so chatty about -- she greets with doubt and a return to single-focus form. I can't see Gini sticking around for that, if she's unwilling to leave this legacy with anywhere to go: Especially when that place is the future Virginia's so reliably prescient about.
Virginia's other suitor, Ethan Haas, takes the weekend to visit UCLA in the hopes of getting a job offer he can leverage for something close to home. But he falls in love with the scenery, and the "game-changing" opportunity UCLA offers, and eventually asks her to marry him over the phone. The "whatever life you want" concept comes up again, which he thinks is a clutch play every time. And it is, unless that "life" he keeps making her think about doesn't necessarily include him.
The presentation itself goes as you'd think: They love the martinis Libby and Jane hand them, they love the talk about small dicks and other male myths, but once discussion -- and the video component -- turn to the female orgasm and Gini's masturbation video, everybody riots and revolts! ("There are women in the room, Bill!") Nobody is coming to their celebratory dinner! Nobody is returning his calls! No way do ladies masturbate, or have thoughts, or orgasms that don't come from our magical dicks! Gross me out!
Margaret finally confronts her husband about the gay stuff, deciding that being kept in the dark is what's really bugging her: If she turned out to be a secret Martian, she wonderfully explains, she'd want him to at least ask about life on Mars. Scully assures her he's working on a solution to his "problem," but when she does some investigating of her own she realizes that it's a horrible, barbaric, disgusting idea and maybe they should just rethink their marriage and sex lives instead of torturing his actual body. He agrees to follow her wishes on this front, but the stresses are just too great on him and for a while it seems like he's fairly suicidal.
After the prudish Chancellor from last week calls Scully and Masters in for a reaming, Masters pulls his greatest move of all time, turning on Scully in the meeting and making out like all of this was done behind his back. Not only does it reverse the sin of blackmail that started their whole feud, but also saves Scully's career (and possibly his life). After Scully fires him, they meet back up for a drink and Barton tells him drunkenly about the electroshock therapy... And that he's still going to do it, in secret.
As Libby's going into labor with her son -- and delivering in a black hospital in 1957, which isn't exactly played for laughs but beautifully complicates the narrative, since cell phones haven't been invented yet -- Jane falls for Lester Lind and hands off a copy of the study to Virginia. She learns that her name's been on it the whole time, and suddenly her easiest choices turn into the hardest ones.
Does she turn Lillian into her new Masters, firmly shepherding her into excellence? Does she take up Ethan's offer to bloom, and possibly become her own Lillian or Bill? Or does she put the team she chose ahead of those attractive -- and acceptable -- options, and dive into the most anguished and complicated possible future any of them can imagine? (Spoiler alert! These things already happened!)
The backdrop of Project Manhigh (which would make Baby Masters's birthday 20 August), a ballooning precursor to the space race and Henry Johnson's favorite goddamn thing in the universe, puts a nice spin on the events there: Gini starts out resenting Major Simons for getting all the acclaim of the race to space, pointing out to her son that plenty of people got him there, but then reading the study -- with her name on it -- as he makes it safely back to Earth, somewhat pacified.
Of course, right on cue, Bill appears at her door with his own protestations of love. Or at least need. Either way, like his hero Barton Scully, he seems to be done worrying about the various factors contributing to his paralysis, and more than willing to electrocute the entire apparatus in order to get things moving again. And as seems to be their deal, Virginia's coming right back to the center from the other end, realizing I think that she can't be happy with any choice she didn't entirely supply for herself. (And given the show's emphasis on her invisibility lately, and that last chivalrous move with the front-page attribution, that choice now seems clear.)
What will happen ? I don't know. They open Reproductive Biology Research Foundation (later the Masters & Johnson Institute) in like 1964 I think, so that could be what season is about. And certainly the bigger the time-jumps the more we'll get to know other people in their orbit, which the show does every bit as brilliantly as the central conflict. (Margaret and Barton Scully, Betty DiMello, Dale, Lillian DePaul; even all the cringy-comedic-depressing Austin/Jane/Lester stuff was fairly integral, looking back, to the show's overall tone.) At the least we're promised this complicated, confusing pair will continue to be really good at a lot of things and incredibly bad at others, for as long as the story goes. I hope it goes forever.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Faced with a second pregnancy and slowly coming to grips with the messier aspects of his work, Bill decided on the nuclear option, paying Virginia for her services and sending her straight into the ad hoc offices of Dr. Lillian DePaul. Margaret Scully, through some intrepid research into her husband's confusing sexual narrative, finally figured out he was gay. We've finally arrived at Bill's big Friday presentation, with which he believes he'll shock the world into being less weird about sex. A thing he believes because he is silly.
18 AUGUST 1957, ST LOUIS
Ethan is going to visit LA, in the hopes of garnering a job offer. Virginia's convinced that this is something he'll use for later leverage, because she isn't really considering the fact that he has no other ties to St. Louis and assumes, possibly for no good reason, that she would be just as willing to pick up sticks and go with him.
Tessa: "Anaheim, that's where Disneyland is. Are you going to be the doctor of Disneyland?"
Henry: "Don't act like you know Disneyland, Tessa."
Tessa: "I do know! Pinocchio lives there. And fairies fly through the air."
Virginia and Ethan name the other hospitals that would be impressed by a UCLA offer, and Ethan explains right angles to Henry, impressing Tessa no end.
Ethan: "I am not the smartest person in the world, no. That would be your mother. However, I might be the luckiest, seeing as how I get to tuck you in before my trip."
Tessa: "Who tucks you in?"
He throws Gini the cutest look over the girl's shoulder, and later on they do it. In the morning, it's a big day for everybody. It's Friday.
19 AUGUST 1957, ST LOUIS
Virginia: "Tessie, grab your red coat from under the bed and let's go."
Tessa fixes her doll with a hairy eyeball, and grouchily complains that the red coat needs a better hiding place. I can't remember anything else Tessa has really done, because stand around while Henry was being horrible, so it's particularly fun to see her being weird on her own in the kitchen, just chattin' with dolls and planning ill futures for her wear apparel.
In the living room, Henry is all about Manhigh II, a pre-rocket space-race experiment in which Major David Simons, within an aluminum capsule, rose higher into the sky than anyone ever had in the history of people. Henry is enamored of this, of course, because he is to space what his mother is to sex: A pioneer, eyes caught and commanded by possibility. Today something theoretical becomes concrete: "He's going into space for real, Mom!"
They refer to it jokingly as the "high point" of Simons's career. It will turn out well for him; turns out he can breathe, he can return safely to Earth. Land, softly. Big day.
MEANWHILE
Bill's had a brain wave: In addition to the opening patter about dick size, he'll be plying them too with martinis. "We are sophisticated people of the world, not just Midwestern rubes," he'll be saying. "We're continental, not provincial. Let's not be childish." It's a masterstroke -- or it would be, if he were half as savvy about the institutionalized sexism surrounding women's bodies as he is about the magic.
Bill's up front practicing -- "All male subjects expressed concern about a possible link between excessive masturbation and mental illness" -- which sends Lester Lind into a kind of freefall from which Bill must eventually rescue him.
Lester: "Excessive. What is that, statistically?"
Bill: "Lester, you're fine."
Lester: "How do you know that, though?"
Bill, verbatim: "I'm a doctor, I can spot a statistically average masturbator from a mile away."
It is a rare sort of person that, when you imagine them masturbating it's not even that troubling, it's just kind of darling. Do you know what I mean? How sweet, Lester Lind masturbating. Go for it, buddy. Way less awkward than say, watching him sing karaoke.
"...All males defined 'excessive masturbation' to be a frequency more than they, in fact, indulged -- it would seem, as a means of justifying their current habit..."
MARGARET
Interrupts her husband, dressing for presentations, with a newspaper and a serious expression. He laughs quietly, eyes crinkling: "Uh oh. Last time you came in here with a headline, the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor..."
Basically. Charles Albert Rutledge, a Vernon office clerk, has been given a life sentence for "detestable and abominable perversions" by no less an august body than the Missouri Supreme Court. "Normally I would never notice this story," she says, "But today I thought, My God. That could be my husband." How could she save him from this?
He doesn't want to talk about it, because he thinks they'll talk and talk and talk about it. He doesn't understand there's a way we could all get out alive; it is 1957 and neither of them can imagine that much grace in the world.
"If you had just discovered, after 30 years, that I was a Martian... The least I could do is explain to you life on Mars."
Even though Bill explained it all to him, mid-blackmail: That hating yourself this much is pathological, that while there might be a "cure" it's also part and parcel of the horror that is our cockeyed, taboo, fearful obsession with sex: For the men, he said, who live in the shadows.
Margaret: "Dale was your lover?"
Barton: "He was paid. A wall is put in place."
Margaret: "Is that always the case? Did anybody slip past? Did you ever love one of them?"
Barton: "James Davenport. The summer before college."
Margaret: "You fell in love with another boy when you were 18? Before we met?"
Barton: "Human intimacy is a moving target, Margaret."
Margaret: "Not especially, not when it's this. You already knew what you preferred, before I forced you to love me, to marry me. You already knew these things."
"I was ten when you were 18. Everything was ahead. You cannot give me back those years. I could've done something else, I could've been with someone else. Why wasn't that my choice, whether I wanted to spend my life with a queer? Those were the only years I had. You thief!"
He promises her he's going to fix it. He can be better.
DEPAUL
Lillian: "I credit you with our success in Tennessee..."
Virginia: "But think bigger. We could start a similar outreach here. Get all the female employees at the hospital to start a forum on women's health."
Lillian: "Maternity has already agreed to institute pap smears..."
Virginia: "But it doesn't always have to be about pap smears... This doctor in Houston developed this film that can detect breast cancers, like an x-ray..."
Lillian: "Robert Egan's had great success detecting cancers in a breast after mastectomy. No success at all with breasts still attached to a woman."
"My point is, there's a lot you want to accomplish, Lillian, and I want to help you. There are many other health issues..."
Lillian: "Bill Masters is serving up martinis and penises later. And I realized you're right. Stop complaining about Bill, start emulating him. I am going to Bill Masters the Chancellor to within an inch of his life."
Virginia: "That's some advanced jelly. You are not ready for that jelly. The Chancellor certainly isn't. But if you're going to try again with him, do it now before he loses his shit all over Bill."
BIG DAY
Bill stares at himself in the mirror and feels weird feelings. He's neither a grower nor a shower, when it comes to things like this: Not a teacher but a surgeon. People don't like him. They respect him and they marvel at him, but they don't care for him. Public speaking is well-known as the greatest phobia of the modern age, and that goes for people who are people, all the time, every day. When I try to imagine what a crowd of people looks like to him, little Bill on a stage -- winking cervices a story high, contracting behind him in Technicolor slow-mo -- it's impossible: Wolves. A million smiles and frowns and tiny movements, boredom and cleared throats, knowing glances... A million wolves, all of them brilliant in their own right, but none of them necessarily capable of understanding his majesty.
Barton: "The Provost at Webster called me directly, to ask if he can come."
Masters: "You better have said yes. Outside interest only helps our cause."
Barton: "Cause."
Masters: "Crusade. Barton, about our wrecked relationship..."
Barton: "Yeah, sorry I'm gay and you blackmailed me about it. My bad."
Masters: "No, I have recently come to understand that I am alone in the world. Libby loves me so much it hurts, and this baby's going to end up... And the only person who ever loved me properly, besides you, is gone."
Barton: "You want me to be the new, new old Gini Johnson."
Masters: "What I want is for you to hold my hand up there. I want to give my presentation from inside your coat with you where nobody can see me. But those things being relatively unworkable, yes. Come to the thing. Be a part of my life."
ELLENBERG
Is the quack who will be electrocuting Barton Scully, in a misguided attempt to take away his existence and turn him into someone new. We still sometimes get confused about this, even in 2013: The idea that gay people are just straight people who do this one weird thing. That don't exist independently of a few sexual acts, all of which are also regularly performed by straight people. That don't really exist at all.
Margaret: "I mean, it's not all about me. But the part that is about me, I am really feeling intensely today. Now, my husband told me you had an agreement to... I just want to know what is going to happen. I'm afraid I need full disclosure from now on."
Ellenberg: "I have no problem being honest with you about it, because I am a monster. What we're going to do is electrocute his brain."
Margaret: "My friend Joan's mother has had that. There are consequences..."
Ellenberg: "Yeah, such as your husband not wanting to fuck men anymore. And memory loss, also."
Margaret: "Body count?"
Ellenberg: "Four in every hundred thousand! A small price to pay for fixing something that doesn't need fixing. It's 1957, Margaret. This is as good as medical science is going to get."
The thing that Bill is always reaching for is this: It's right here in front of you. How can you take a situation, a circumstance, a universal truth that contains no hatred -- that contains nothing but love, that is a half-step from divinity itself -- and somehow impute hatred, pain, revulsion into it? How does this happen? How do we pass this down, parents to children? How can that be justified? How does that last more than a single generation?
Margaret: "Is that for sure? Are there alternatives?"
Ellenberg: "It actually gets grislier. You heard about the barfing thing, right? Okay or then also we can electrocute your dick, instead of your brain. Or just wherever it will hurt most. There's psychotropic drugs, chemical castration..."
But my husband is wonderful. Haven't you met him? He has the saddest, kindest eyes. He is forgiving and compassionate, and so thoughtful. He's done nothing to deserve torture; he has earned himself no enemies.
MASTERS
Jane: "You're going to be real shitty about this, which is why it took me ten minutes to get up the nerve, but you need to go invite Virginia Masters to this thing. You have to understand that."
Masters: "SHUT UP, JANE. GO EAT A DICK, JANE."
Jane: "Yep, there it is. But nonetheless, you need to sack up right now and go tell her."
It's double-cute: First he grunts angrily to himself in the office, knowing she's right, and then he runs out into the hallway -- the bravest Billy yet -- and of course, runs right into her.
FINALLY
Gini: "I was coming to say good luck."
Bill: "I was coming to... Wait, you were coming to me?"
Gini: "Not if you say it like that. I was headed generally toward you. Like as the crow flies."
Bill: "Well, if you end up in the presentation that would be fine."
Gini: "I think we're..."
Libby: "--Gini! Hi!"
She hugs her, so pregnant, and the moment drops, shatters.
Libby: "Get this, we're totally serving martinis. To make it like a sexy free-for-all."
Virginia: "That's genius, actually. Sets the right tone."
Libby: "That is word for word what Bill said."
Virginia: "Yeah, I hate that we're still telepathic like this."
Libby: "But you're coming, of course."
Bill: "You have to! I mean, whatever. I mean, don't bother. Or please come. Or..."
Libby: "After all your efforts..."
Virginia: "I just wanted to um, wish you both the best. On the presentation, and the baby... And being married to each other. And faithful. Sexually. I just wanted to say, good job."
The funniest thing real-life Virginia says about Libby is how nice it would have been to team up against Bill, sometimes, but that Libby was never quite sophisticated enough to get onboard with something like that. It sounds like an insult, but I don't really think it is.
CHANCELLOR
Lillian hounds Fitzhugh again, this time demanding Bill's sweetheart deal where he keeps 30 percent, plowing it back into his secret sorceries, not that she seems to ever listen when they point out that part. Or maybe she doesn't care, because she would do the same thing: Take that money, put it back in pap smears.
Fitzhugh: "Over the years, he's brought literally thousands of patients through our doors. You have no patients..."
Lillian: "That's a gross exaggeration! My numbers grow every day."
Fitzhugh: "Even fully tumescent, you have a grand total of sixteen patients. And you know why? Because you are unlikeable. You are intense and rude and..."
Lillian: "So's Bill!"
Fitzhugh: "Yeah, but he's a man. He doesn't have to be likeable. You do. It sucks, but it's also real life. Do you want to succeed in the real world, or fail in the fake one so you can then feel justified in your defeat? Because the first one involves sucking it the fuck up, and the latter makes you an asshole. The choice seems clear."
They head off to the presentation, Lillian thinking about how to garner attention for things while Bill prepares to garner attention for things. The blind leading the blind, honestly.
Austin drops by Jane's desk for a moment's reminiscence -- "Strange to think it started with us!" -- and when he asks, respectfully enough, that she reconsider adultery with him, she just smiles. He will never change.
There is a thing all through here, a thing that counts in the season's last few minutes but doesn't really make sense on the way there: That thanks to various background complications, Virginia doesn't actually see the study itself -- and nobody thinks to mention the surprise about it -- until tomorrow night. It's jerry-rigged to be this big moment, but ends up being more trouble than it's worth. But honestly I can't think of a better way to accomplish it either -- given Manhigh, and everybody else's stories falling together as necessary, and needing to end up with Bill and Barton together while it's happening, and the constant pathetic-fallacy raining, etc. -- so whatever.
Bill starts out very well, earning hoots and hollers with a Mencken quote before alluding directly to the open secret of his strange night-time experiments, how they'd all spy and speculate about Room Five, and they all giggle, and it's going great.
"I am opening the door of Exam Room 5, and I'm eager to share with you my groundbreaking discoveries. What happens to the body during sex? The one thing you can't do is take people's word for it."
186 volunteers, 458 "individual acts of sex." "But if you want to know what we learned..."
Jane welcomes Virginia to the presentation, where she sits with Libby -- his three gals, his three Virginias, new and old and new-old -- and DePaul speaks up, birdlike and stiff as ever: "Who's we, Dr. Masters?"
She's resentful of the credit he's getting for Virginia's work, but not for any nice reasons: It's because Virginia is her property, and therefore an insult to her is an insult to Lillian. They're both doctors, both tiny Gods, and they shouldn't be mistreating each other's people. But also, too, she would twit him about anything right now. It just happened to be Virginia. Which means she hasn't see the study yet either, which is plotwise why they haven't passed them out yet, but makes sense either way: Drink your martinis and watch the pretty pictures and listen to Dr. Masters's melodic megalomania.
Once more for the season, he enumerates the four stages of sexual response -- the things every single one of on this planet, for the whole of its history, have experienced -- and goes into the dick myths. Showers and growers: As expected, they love the shit out of that! The thing about not having sex before the Big Game: Myth! Dick size obsession as a function of misunderstanding how a vagina works: Busted!
The martinis have them, now; they twerk in the aisles, flopping their tiny majestic penises around in a giggling orgy of professionalism. That's when he fucks it.
"And so, let's move on to the girls. This is the vaginal canal during sexual stimulation..."
Jane: "Wow. Big projection. So much Ulysses. So much my vagina."
Virginia: "Nobody knows it's you. That's the point, is that nobody's seen in there until today."
William: "...Until now, no one knew these contractions existed. And yet here they are. And we can measure them. But that's not the whole story when it comes to the female orgasm..."
It cuts to the Virginia footage, the masturbation pornography, that he keeps describing in an unbroken scientific reverie, but the temperature -- the pressure, the humidity -- in the room changes immediately. All they can think about is the woman. Not her myotonic contractions, the vasocongestion of her flushed skin, the nipples, the perspiration, hyperventilation: None of these things are happening, in front of them. They murmur and shuffle around, at just the moment he's taking flight and can't see them anymore.
"...Physiological reactions are uniform and consistent. Which brings us to the heart of the study and the most radical discovery of all -- when it comes to sex, women have capabilities vastly superior to men. They can achieve multiple orgasms, they're orgasmic after menopause, and the sexual satisfaction they can achieve on their own is equal to, and sometimes even greater, than the satisfaction they achieve with men..."
I hate that this is the thing that ends it. It's not even funny, it's just dumb -- dumb enough to be true -- and so as the Chancellor beats it across the room to turn off Lester's projector, and the mad rioting scramble for the doors sobers everybody up, all you think about is this dumb thing about women not needing, or being better than, men. Until this, which while it's topical for 2013 still pretty much sums up the whole motherfucker:
Dr. Ingram: "There are women in the room, Bill!"
Dr. Masters: "There were women in the study, Chuck."
And meanwhile, Virginia -- having looked at herself through Bill's eyes, for the first time; having seen what these men see when she's enchanting them -- hides herself away in an elevator, begging it to hurry.
It wasn't a landscape. The camera traveled that woman's body like a married lover.
POST-MORTEM
Masters: "Pssh, they'll settle down. Remember what a drama queen you were at first?"
Scully: "No, I mean you have really fucked me. I was your best friend for twenty years, and you walked me into that room with those people, and you fucked us. And it's maddening because you're on the spectrum and you don't even understand how serious this shit is. Which normally is fine, because I love you, but right now I feel like I took crazy pills."
Masters: "If I am guilty of anything, it's believing too much, in their potential to grasp my wonder."
Scully: "Yeah, well you definitely overestimated that motherfucker. You're right about that."
"Now is not the time to give in to small minds. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna publish this as a paper in the Obstetrics & Gynecology Journal. Makes more sense to go through established channels anyway..."
Barton: "Knowing you it'll probably be scratch 'n sniff, or something weird like that. Do you not understand that those were the 'established channels'? Because I know that you do. You've been talking of nothing else for the last two episodes."
Masters: "You never support me! You always cut and run, coward! You're metaphorically making me masturbate for you while you vomit."
Barton: "Don't be a dick, you little dick. I have overextended onto so many limbs it's like Separate Peace over here, no homo, and you're still demanding... What? Not even concretes at this point. Just straight up feeding your insane ego and your delusions that you have not destroyed all of us."
Masters: "Yeah but you're still gonna back me up, right?"
Barton: "Oh, most assuredly so. Fuck 'em."
Masters: "Indeed. Fuck them indeed."
What it feels like is: It feels good. In a world where you can't possibly continue living, you have two choices. One is to change shape, which has a variable rate of success but always includes the destruction of the self as it stands. The other is to blow everything up, set it all on fire, rip it up to shreds. Fusion and fission, we'd say in the nuclear age.
And what's interesting about these two men is that one of them is hampered by thinking so unrealistically big, and the other one is being destroyed by his lack of blue-sky imagination: One imagines a world in which everything is finally okay, which is never going to happen, and the other one is getting suicidal because he can't get out of the nightmare that nothing is okay.
FALLOUT
Jane: "Well, Ethel in Accounting took two copies, she is a dirty bird. But nobody else grabbed one. And this shit is nice, they are leatherbound."
Libby: "Do you think there's a chance Bill is somewhere around, acting normal?"
Jane: "I think if he keeps his clothes on and doesn't get into any campus fountains, we'll consider it a mental health success?"
Phone: "Hello? This is Everybody. We were just calling to cancel on your dinner party and also our friendships with you and pretty much your entire existence. You can just put a thick red line through that, if you don't mind."
Libby: "I just married a doctor, a weird doctor. That's all I did to anybody."
Lester: "My auteur signatures were all over that footage! I will be known as a pornographer of the inside of you! What were we thinking?"
Jane: "We thought we were Winter. We thought it was science, but maybe it was porn. Also, who was that masturbating lady?"
Lester: "I dunno. I didn't film that. Not that it matters."
Jane: "Dr. Masters will defend you..."
Lester: "Dr. Masters has his hands full. Of chaos."
Jane: "...Then I'll defend you. I thought it showed a brilliant directorial hand, that footage of the inside of my vagina, and I won't have people criticizing it. Least of all its artistry. Let them come, Lester. I will fell them all for you."
Masters, wild-eyed, lopes up like a pack of hungry wolves, begging for his "wheeldex" so he can, presumably, alienate everyone in the world that couldn't make it.
Libby: "Hey, Everybody called. Our dinner party is going to be underattended."
Masters: "Good. Fuck 'em. They don't deserve dinner."
Jane: "I think it was male insecurity. I think that's what it was."
Masters: "Oh, you THINK? You think you've cracked that sticky situation, huh? Might have something to do with male insecurity, she says. Call the fucking local news."
Jane: "It's completely up to me how hysterical I think you are. And if you get hysterical enough, it's part of my job as your secretary to slap you. Think hard about what you say ."
"People didn't want to hear about the Theory of Natural Selection, either. They wanted to believe that God created the world in seven days, not that man evolved from apes. Darwin was attacked by both scientists and the church, and yet it's Darwin that survived."
Lester: "Elvis, too. They wouldn't show him on Milton Berle last year from the waist down, and now his hips are like, all you ever see."
Masters: "I don't know who you are, but you are so right about that."
One of my favorite things is when somebody's dumb uncle wanders onto your Facebook because he doesn't understand Facebook -- and because we're all entitled to his opinion regardless of where we're lucky enough to receive it -- and they start yelling about how JFK and MLK and whoever were practically Republicans, as we understand conservatism, and doesn't that just... I mean, I don't know what their point ever is, but it seems to calm them down to repeat this over and over, that progressive heroes of their day would be considered conservative today.
I mean, that's the point: That's literally what "progressive" means. These little apocalypses, these abominations that they're talking about -- Elvis, Darwin; Dale, Ellenberg; today's presentation -- I know they're more painful from one side than the other. The word "apocalypse" means unhiding, it means the revelation of what was concealed; it's an electrified door that hurts until the exact moment you walk through it. It's always going to be painful, until your eyes adjust. Until you are brave.
...On Earth he had been different. Others had not understood him. He had been lonely. But now he found himself between worlds. The earth, a tiny dot behind him. The moon, a tiny dot ahead. When he got to the moon, would it be everything he dreamed of? And would it be worth everything he had left behind?
THAT NIGHT
"The sky this far above the earth is purplish-black," Major Simons says, echoing Bill Masters talking about the orgasmic vaginal canal, "and against that is... many heavenly wonders..."
Henry is still feeling very romantic about this: How right now, 19 miles above the earth, Major Simons is in the sky, describing the world: "Beyond the haze, there are thin bands of blue etched against the night sky. They appear to be thin shells of dust that hover over the Earth like a succession of halos..."
Henry: "Major Simons is such a hero!"
Virginia: "True. He is brave, or strange enough to see brave. But you know, he's held in place by all those men down there. The cute one with the mohawk, the lady in the back..."
Henry: "They're... Helpers."
Virginia: "Helpers make great things happen. They're necessary."
Even if we don't know their names, she thinks. She wishes Henry would focus on somebody else in this story, rather than the stratonaut; anybody else. The future itself. There is a thing in her son she doesn't understand, that has to do with love of men. What Lillian thinks of as dick worship, this idea that the man in the story is the point of the story. But for Gini it's not Major Simons in a balloon: It's a balloon that happens to contain Major Simons. He's not a hero, he's a protagonist.
DINNER PARTY
Libby: "Well I, for one, am stuffed. Since we made dinner for twenty people and there's nobody here but us. Hey, just out of curiosity, who is that masturbating lady?"
Masters: "I don't see how that's relevant."
Libby: "When I watch people masturbate, I like to know a little bit about 'em."
Masters: "I feel like you're saying it was a bad idea."
Libby: "I'm saying I understand why you don't understand what was bad about it, which is why I'm a good teammate for you. Because if you had told me you were planning on doing that, I would have tricked you into not doing it."
Masters: "Doctors see naked bodies every day."
Libby: "Not fucking they don't. And listen, you can argue about this all day but in the real world, nobody is at this dinner party we threw. From which I deduce that you are wrong, and I am right. So the question is, Do you want to function in actual reality? Or do you want to fail in your fantasy, so you can feel justified and put-upon? Because that's a loser way to be, bro. That is a clown way to be."
Libby: "And again, I'm gonna ask who it was at the end. The docs to me said it was Virginia."
Masters: "Preposterous. Can you imagine?"
Libby: "I think you'd have to be pretty far into a fantasy that you're Winter, before that kind of thing would seem normal. You would have to move the goalposts pretty far."
Masters: "Like I'm a sexual harasser?"
"We don't have the vocab for that because it's 1957, but yes. You would have had to wear down her resistance, intuit her feelings about you and about her tenuous employment, you would have to hit every button and flip every switch inside yourself to be that aware of her. You would have been electrified, prickles running up your neck the first time you saw her, in the typing pool. You would have felt the continent shift beneath you, bringing you together. You would have to trust her enough to even bring it up. That she wouldn't say no, and that she couldn't say no. You would have to put up fences around her; throw money at it when you got scared. You would have been the definition of an abuser. And of anyone who ever loved."
SCULLY
Margaret: "So I spoke to Dr. Ellenberg today, and I think you maybe have fallen in with war criminals."
Barton: "I realize it sounded barbaric, but that's only because it is. I'm so dreadfully wrong inside, so unworthy of you, that I have to... Sometimes you have to break a bone to set it. Right?"
Margaret: "How far does this shit go?"
Barton: "No castration. Electrocuting my nuts is off the table... I mean, the future is now, Margaret. ECT's been around for twenty years, it's perfectly acceptable."
Margaret: "Joan's mother doesn't remember she has a granddaughter."
Barton: "We don't have grandkids. Thanks to fucking Ethan Haas."
"What if you forget you love to overtip everyone, everywhere we go? What if you forget how Vivian smiles when you sing 'You Are My Sunshine'? What if you forget you've never won a tennis match against me? Not once, not ever?"
Barton: "I let you win."
Margaret: "-- What if you forget that?"
Barton: "We cheated on each other, and you asked me for a divorce, and I said I would fix it, and I'm fixing it. What would you have me do? How do we stay married now that everything's on the table?"
Margaret: "I just... For all our problems, whatever the source of the last thirty years, it's a life. A good life. In the real world, not in the shadows, it was fine. Maybe not what I would have chosen, maybe parts of it hurt, but I love our life."
Barton: "I am afraid of fucking you up more. Every step, in any direction. Landmines."
Margaret: "Don't do this Ellenberg stuff. It's black magic. We can figure something else out that doesn't mean murder."
THE CAF
They're putting together a petition, over a hundred signatures, calling for Bill's resignation. It's so dumb: People signing it without knowing why, or being given an incomplete and inaccurate story. All you have to do is say a sex word and the people will scram, pausing only to sign whatever they have to, to make the thought go away.
Jane: "I wanna rip that shit out of their hands."
Virginia: "I just can't believe they think a petition would stop Bill Masters. He can't even conceptualize that, beyond it being a list of... ants. The point of a petition would be lost on him even if he weren't a force of physics stronger than any petition or social convention."
Some Doctor: "Nice vagina, Mrs. Johnson."
Jane: "I will fuck you up. Come here."
Virginia, horrified by herself from the inside out, wants more desperately than ever to grasp hold of Earth as she turns, beneath her hands.
Virginia: "Lillian! In the latest Journal Of Gynecology, there's this Pill that's been developed for irregular menstrual cycles that actually functions as birth control..."
Lillian: "Pincus and Sanger. But the FDA has only approved it for severe menstrual..."
Virginia: "Which women are now reporting, so they can get on this shit."
Lillian: "It has serious side effects."
Virginia: "Look bitch, it makes women people. That's a serious fucking side effect all right. Have you not been waiting your whole life to be a person? I know it would really help my whole thing I've got going on."
Lillian: "Don't get distracted. Come on. Pap smears. Hooray for them."
Virginia: "You really don't get how unattractive it is to me when you bring it back to that every time. If I even said one word to Bill, he'd trip out and do a half-hour on the futurism of whatever, twitches or queefs or whatever BS I brought up. He believes in the future; in sacrificing himself to it. You're just a martyr, which feels the same to you, but will never turn me on. I don't want to be your legacy, if that's how limited it is."
"It's not glamorous. It's painstaking and it's slow. I know that. But it is an honest goal. The one thing I can do that will hopefully make a difference. Why isn't that enough for you? One small step at a time, Virginia. There's nothing wrong with that."
And that's when she loses her. She doesn't even know it, but that's when. Because there is something very wrong with that. Another woman -- a Lillian, a Vivian -- would see the wisdom in it, in slow and steady, in tapping at that ceiling like a sculptor, wearing it down slower than the Grand Canyon: That is how change happens.
But you're talking to Virginia Johnson. A raging fire out of the sky; a blazing supernova. That's also how change happens.
If you want a Vivian, go get a Vivian. You'll look beautiful, in black and white.
BARTON
Masters: "What even is a petition, but a list of ants?"
Barton: "Okay, we're going to the Chancellor's office."
Masters: "To be given medals?"
Barton: "No girl, to get fired."
Masters: "Uh, that doesn't sound right. How silly!"
Barton: "You're a liability. You're double-dealing now, talking about how you want to be incendiary and then whining that you're being treated like you're dangerous. You made Fitzhugh look like a stupid creep yesterday, and that means blood."
Masters: "But I am so wonderful! Explain it again, I'm lost."
"What's worse than being humiliated is being terrified, and you did both. You managed to do both, without even trying to do either. Heads must roll, and they'll be ours. I love you so much, Bill. I have gone to bat for you for twenty years. I have been jealous of your gifts, and the freedom that your limitations gives you. If I were as clueless and single-minded as you, I might be married to James Davenport."
There's something dark in his eyes, in the rain: This idea that Bill will land on his feet, and that's all that matters to him; this idea that crowds out any complaints or worries about what the Provost will do, when he is fired too. What Bill doesn't know -- might be incapable of getting, actually -- is how much of a rehearsal and a rehash this is for the Scully marriage, or divorce. These two relationships, chaste, that define his life; these two loves that have to end, before everyone drowns. These, his two great loves, that must be saved at any cost.
I said aloud, "He's going to end up dead at the end of this." I wasn't right, but I wasn't wrong either.
THE OFFER
Virginia takes Ethan's call, out in the typing pool; he's just driven from his UCLA interview to the beach, deep breaths before he dialed.
Ethan: "Guess what I'm looking at."
Virginia: "Mickey Mouse."
Ethan: "I never did find his star on Hollywood Boulevard, although I did see Capitol Records' new building. There's a light on top that blinks out H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in Morse code..."
Virginia: "You're looking at the Pacific, and I'm watching Stella transcribe dictation. So I guess you win."
Ethan: "I do more than that. I got an offer."
Virginia: "Great! Now we can really stick it to the other guys."
Ethan: "Thing is, it's a game-changing offer."
He proposes marriage, then. It's nice in one way, because of the way Vivian's mercenary efficiency destroyed the original proposal, and now he's reprioritized and no longer all about drama and performance. "I love you, from day one, and I love your kids, and I want them and you with me, wherever I go." She doesn't say no, just that Stella shouldn't be a part of the discussion. If he were thinking clearly he'd remember that she's only funny when she's hiding something. If he were thinking clearly he'd be on a plane by now, instead of doing everything he can to set her free.
"Whatever kind of life you want for yourself," he repeats again, his favorite litany. The thing he thinks she wants to hear, the solution to her need for freedom. What he'll never understand -- what man could? -- is that a life given to her still wouldn't be hers. That what he's saying isn't romantic to her: On the level that she's hearing it, it sounds like a threat. No matter how much pasture you give 'em, they're still behind a fence. Even a pasture of infinite dimension, even if you never saw the fence at all.
HEADS
Chancellor: "Whatever it was, pornography maybe even, it wasn't science. Whatever it was, it violated this hospital and this university. And it violated my trust. I held the two of you in the highest esteem... I mean, this is really it. I try to think about this and understand it and my brain just clicks off. You did this at work."
Masters: "You were happy enough when those same rooms and equipment generated huge revenues, monies that bolstered your position with the board. Didn't hurt you at bonus time, either, I'm sure..."
Chancellor: "I gave you a special deal..."
Masters: "And I gave you a world-class Obstetrics department."
Chancellor: "You were given too much rope by a man far too weak to stop you."
Bill realizes Barton was right: They're both about to get fired. And then a most curious thing happens.
Masters: "God damn it, Scully. If you'd supported me from the beginning, this wouldn't have happened."
Chancellor: "Wait, what?"
Masters: "You puny ants. I had to hide the study from Scully because he is every bit as small-minded as you are. And now I am burned by you. You two, you team of two, you pair of bastards."
The Chancellor is satisfied, and gives Scully a very dramatic opening to fire Bill as recompense for his bamboozlement and whatever, and Scully -- those heartbreaking eyes of his -- readies himself to take a stand, which is when the truly amazing degree to which Bill is growing today, the rate, the clip, becomes apparent: He steps into Scully's head, not just to understand and manipulate and run complex equations, but to see just how deep that love goes, in him.
He takes the nonverbal empathy that has turned him into Bill Masters -- this inability to verbalize what he understands about the body, and vice versa -- and steps right in, knowing how far Scully's willing to take it. "I will continue my study at this hospital," he grumbles, sounding crazier than ever, "No matter what you say today. No matter what you do."
Realizing he's stuck, and Bill's taking the same track as Margaret -- putting himself at the mercy of the situation, so that Scully doesn't have to hurt any more -- Scully gracefully bails, pivots, and sets him free: "You won't, Bill. You're fired."
As this is happening, Libby's at home meeting with a woman from the Urban League, donating to their charity, when she goes into labor.
Scully and Masters, outside the Chancellor's building, have a crazy moment about what just happened, and Scully laughs: "What a thing," he says. To see Bill Masters not only using his knowledge of people and of his own limitations to force the issue in his favor, but also the self-sacrifice: He threatened you once, in the most loving way imaginable, and now he saves you, seeming angrier and more alien than ever before.
MASTERS
A short discussion in the wreckage of the office -- "Fired? That's like firing God," Lester shivers -- leads Jane to a sudden thaw:
"I showed myself. My insides, my vaginal walls. And those doctors thought it was dirty, or that something went horribly wrong... It's as if I brought down the entire kingdom."
She's always played at least partially for laughs, because she's a funny actress, but I don't find Jane particularly funny. Just wonderful. Lester tries to explain to her about the beauty of her insides, and her outsides, and the perfection of her body; he tries to sanctify this for her. To give her something back they didn't know they were taking, when the riots started.
When Virginia interrupts, Lester scampers off -- I guess probably to go masturbate -- and once alone they commiserate. But first, there is a split-second that is so beautiful: She looks at Jane, steely as a Blitz midwife, mind blown by the apocalypse, past worry and into repair mode, a first-responder in full uniform: "Where is he."
Jane: "All of it, just... Can you imagine? Everything he and you, me and Lester..."
Gini: "Gone."
Jane: "I don't even know the protocol. Do I pack his shit up, or...?"
Gini: "He can live without anything, except his work."
Almost.
Jane remembers -- as the woman from the Urban League is driving Libby to her hospital, the black hospital -- to hand off a copy of the study to Gini: "And such good work, from such a brilliant man. Souvenir, I guess?"
Virginia's heart stops, when she looks down at the cover. We won't know why, for a while, but you can feel it: The continent's moving again, underfoot.
THE BAR
Scully: "So I'm starting electroshock."
Masters: "The fuck?"
Scully: "I told Margaret I wouldn't, but I have to do something. I've done two things right in my life: You, and my family."
Masters: "I won't deny that your sexuality is problematic, but the risk of..."
Scully: "What endeavor doesn't have risks? As we've seen. But the reward could make me a new man. Haven't we spent our whole lives believing in science?"
Masters: "If this were science, it wouldn't feel so wrong. It wouldn't have to be a secret. You wouldn't be turning off the best part of yourself. Charring it."
Scully: "I feel like the twelfth swan brother. Just this wing, where an arm should be."
Masters: "I am more than a little afraid of that, changing. If I am your success, if we are proving how much we love each other right now, then what does it say about me that you are broken? How can we be proud of me, if you're wrong inside? It doesn't make sense."
Scully: "It'll be over soon. I admit myself tomorrow, I take my treatment, I go home cured."
Masters: "Simple as that? Maybe I should do a study on that in a decade or so. Falsify some data. Act real intense about it, like to the point where it makes me look super gay."
Scully: "We can be brave tomorrow. Tonight, I'm just worried about you."
Tonight, he'll go "home," he says. He means his office, where they've already changed the locks. The security guard is sad, but kind, about escorting him out. Nobody's more surprised than Bill when he grabs a fire extinguisher, throwing it through the glass door of what I presumed to be Room Five, but seems like just any office. It's a tantrum, it doesn't have to be symbolic. Little Billy took over for a second. Or maybe Francis.
And then, too, at the black hospital, you have Libby, with her son in her arms in the storm, and not interested too much in having Bill come in, to fuss and make everything weird. Or no, that's not nice: It's just that she's happy where she is. She calls out and hears her echo. She didn't need him, she didn't even need his hospital. In the end, she made it happen on her own. Right where he always leaves her.
JOHNSON
Virginia's reading the study, as the rain comes down and Major Simons returns to Earth:
Studies In Human Sexual Response, by William H. Masters, M.D., and Virginia E. Johnson.
After all that, why would he split the hair? Was it a love letter, sent through time, or a sad lonely gesture she'll never see, or a desperate grab to get her back, or just his alien sense of justice? Has he grown, through all this love -- through Gini, and Libby, and Barton -- into something like a man?
"Welcome home! How do you feel, Major?" Good, he says. And grateful. "What did you learn up there, in space?" they ask.
"Man can go anywhere. He just has to take his own atmosphere with him."
Henry's just evoked Ethan, the atmosphere he brings with him -- excited to tell him, about the race to space, about the Major, about this new world, the succession of halos -- when there's a knock at the door. She already knows who it is, of course. The rain's been saying his name all day.
Virginia: "My name's on it."
Masters: "You earned it. Both through your work, and your... It's only you and Scully that believe."
Virginia: "And you."
Masters: "It's over. I have nothing to offer you now."
Virginia: "That's all right."
"Except, maybe, the truth. I finally realized that there is one thing I can't live without. It's you. You."
I like to think the rain stopped, just after.
I like to think that one day we'll know everything, an apocalypse to end all apocalypses. We'll stop talking about what's natural and what's man-made, about what's science and what's desire, because we'll know so much we'll see them as they connect. There will be no fear and there will be no sadness, no rage, no shame. All those vestigial, memetic, useless fears and phrases will just drop away.
"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."
At some point when I was very young I came up with an idea that I have never been able to shake. It arrived, unbidden, perhaps in a dream: That every orgasm is the same orgasm. Future Spaceman orgasm, Ancient Aztec orgasm, male and female, all of them -- us --touching for one moment a bliss that is so brief and so divine that you forget who you are. The world falls away; curls away, under a succession of halos. The Eden beauty of Jane and Austin, that first perfect night in the lab. Bill's eyes gone wide at Betty's, as Dale made love to his friend. Everyone at the same time, in the same place, for just one moment. Unafraid, unashamed, and very beautiful. An undiscovered heaven you keep finding, every time, for the rest of your life.
Is it true? I don't know how it could be, but I believe it just the same. A circuitry of holy desire -- not the only holy thing, but definitely a holy thing -- that underpins our universe, touching the surface of all time and space, touching us in little sparks, reminding us that life is divine, and very brief. Like the opening credits of this very show: A train going into a tunnel is a nuclear bomb detonating is a flower in full bloom is a finger lightly tracing a woman's skin.
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height...
And then it seems like a natural progression -- this is just between you and me, I would never say this to anybody's face because it would make them feel weird, or judged -- but it bums me out, a little bit, privately, in a place I don't really talk about very much, when I hear people use words like dirty, or naughty, when they're describing sex.
"Live in fragments no longer."
Because it's not those things. It's wonderful.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Homeland, Hostages, The Good Wife, and Masters Of Sex for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook.