Betty is none too impressed watching the latest Player photo shoot: Player-type models dressed as lawyers and a judge shooting sexy jurisprudence and abdominal muscles all over the place. She mentions to Daniel that perhaps this is a diversion from her suggestion that Player show women in "a more professional light." I like Player as a Mode for Daniel's less amazing qualities and I'm bummed that we're ending that period, but I have no idea where this whole Editor-In-Chief shuffle is headed, besides Christina's uterus, so I'm not worried about it.
However, what I am worried about is Betty's brain, because so far she has made two suggestions: cancerous lesbians on motorcycles and successful women lawyers. I mean, if it's your job wouldn't you pick up an issue or two and discern why those are stupid ideas? The beauty of the "natch" thing last year, rewriting Betty's earnestness in pseudo-hip lingo of the young people, was that it wasn't necessary. This is like doing that same story, only Betty is incapable of understanding her magazine or its readership. ...Which thing was her triumph at the end of last week: understanding that men are deeply stupid, and will pay money for the opportunity to look at stupid things plus boobs. "Does it always have to be women in bras?" she asks, as a case-in-point, but like: yeah. Yeah, it does. Daniel tells the models amicably to lose their neon pink bras, and they all throw them in Betty's face. But like, what happens when Betty starts working for Equestrian Monthly? Bitching constantly about all the horses on every page?
Really, Daniel just doesn't want Betty to see what he's surreptitiously working on, which is marking up the galley of Wilhelmina's first issue of Mode. I love that Daniel is so ADD that his only refuge from doing his new job is doing his old job. Betty screams, vindicated, that she knew he secretly wished he were still at Mode, and he says he was just suspicious about what Wili's up to. "You know what she's up to! Firing! Scheming! Kicking puppies!" Daniel swears he's happy to be out of that atmosphere, but that doesn't stop Betty from being ebullient about his backsliding into gayness.
Betty brings the book straight to Alexis and shows her all of Daniel's really good notes, and Alexis is unreceptive on many levels of course, but mostly just says it's because Daniel's critical on account of jealousy. Betty swears that it's because he loves Mode and is good at Mode and takes Mode seriously, and Alexis is finally like, "I can't have this conversation with you without acknowledging my serious compromises and betrayals, so: thanks for your loyalty to us all, but Daniel simply doesn't work at Mode anymore." Which is valid. Of course Betty slumps off, and of course Alexis immediately is impressed by Daniel's notes on the book. Wouldn't it be weird if Alexis suddenly switched allegiances back to her family? It's always such a shock when she does that in every other episode.
Coach Tony and Hilda are eating hotdogs and walking like the cheating scum that they are. "What's more romantic than lunch on foot with a view of Riker's Island?" Hilda jokes, but like: ANYTHING. Tony asks her out on a "real" date, explaining that his wife is going to be out of town, which of course irritates and insults Hilda. God love her, but the girl's appetite for delusion rivals anyone's. It's her least attractive trait, and sometimes -- ghost of Santos, anyone? -- frankly creepy. Like it's so gross of Tony to mention the fact that the logistical hump that is his wife will be absenting herself from their gross threesome for a second. She makes him promise that they have a real future together, thus rendering said promise null and void, so he gives it, swearing that she's not the "other" woman, she's the "only" woman. And the whole thing, while believable, is so yucky that the only feeling I can muster up is sadness that Cibrian's never going to be a regular because: how on earth do you come back from that? You don't.
Alexis meets with Wili and proceeds to bring up each one of Daniel's notes; reserving particular scorn for the cover image: an unrecognizable and "arty" image of Angelina Jolie in a block of ice. Wilhelmina, amateur graphologist, immediately discerns that the notes in question -- bearing "the rounded o's of a stunted adolescent" and "the stiff t's of someone who's clearly overcompensating" -- are from Daniel. "J'accuse!" shouts Mark, in case you forgot he exists. Alexis admits that they're from Daniel, but presses forward about how Wili's premiere issue needs all the help it can get. Wili laughs at Alexis's mention of the Woman On The Street feature: "We shouldn't be taking pictures of them, we should be throwing rocks at them!" That's probably the best part of the episode. Alexis once again cautions her to check out the notes, but Wili's one step ahead and realizes this is all Betty Suarez's fault. Whether by dim kindness or serious machination, Betty's taken step one for getting Daniel back into Mode. She sends Mark to knock a burrito out of Betty's hand and summon her to a lunch meeting.
At lunch, Wili immediately plays the usual minority card in a seriously dorky way, about how they're just "two women of color out for a fancy lunch on the town. Isn't this fun, girlfriend? And that blouse is heaven! Where did you get it? I love it!" Betty sighs and Wili admits that it's "hideous, like driving through Ohio." Wili is on tonight! She asks Betty for help with some bullshitty eponymous filing confusion, and Betty says she'll ask for time off from Player to come help her, because Betty rules. Wilhelmina's sights for Betty are set a little higher: return to Mode as assistant to the Editor In Chief. Which admittedly is a six-word résumé that would do anything for you. Betty points out that she would never leave Daniel, and that Wilhelmina is an untrustable psychotic, and Wili cheers both her "loyalty" and her "suspicion," saying that Betty would never have to do anything wrong, ugly or morally suspect: "That's what Mark is for!" she says brightly, and tells her to think before throwing away her future at Player.
Back in Queens, the family is no more interested in Betty's drama than normal. Justin swans around in a pink tank mangling sports metaphors; Hilda just wants her to get a Player cover signed by sports figures for some Coach Tony-related auction. Betty says she felt like she was cheating just by talking to Wili, and Hilda immediately goes on a whole meltdown about how it's not cheating to explore options, and shuts herself down pretty quick: "I ... just care about you!" I'm tired of cartoon Hilda and I wish real Hilda would come back; she was with her babydaddy for about five seconds and it's time to get a new, healthy hobby. Betty resolves to talk to Daniel immediately, because especially at Mode, secrets tend to go bad. Of course, Wili is right this second blowing Daniel's mind with the hints about Betty possibly deserting him.
Daniel freaks out on Betty about how she's stepping out on him, and she's forced to admit that working for Player isn't exactly her dream job. Please, it's not even a job she can comprehend! She admits she's not happy, and he swears he is, but her suspicion -- and wonderfully intimate, loving dubiousness about it -- cause him to go insane on her because she's right. She begs him to stop shouting and be reasonable, and he tells her very reasonably that she is a poopoo head and that he's taking his ball and going home and she go play with Wilhelmina for all he cares. Betty heads to Wili's office and asks if the offer's still open, sadly; Wili smiles horrifyingly in response.
Betty and Christina walk somewhere so that Betty can bitch about how Daniel's ambition and fight are gone, and very-compromised Christina tells her that she can't change Daniel, and needs to watch herself. There is a reference to Wili as the Wicked Witch of the East Side, which is passably funny but pretty much a home run for old Christina. She counsels Betty that only Betty knows what she's capable of, and frankly is selfish and honest enough to admit she just likes having a friend at Mode. Mark and Wilhelmina watch them embrace, and Mark rejoices about being in charge of Betty. Wili tells him not to be too hard on her because the point isn't to drive her out, just keep her in a holding pattern and away from Daniel's ass and her constant saving of it.
Mark offers Betty a mimosa at Cold New Mode, immediately admits this was a lie, and then says if she doesn't fuck up he won't have to beat her with a bag of oranges. He punctuates this whole round of abuse with a constant nose-tapping that would cause yours truly to punch him in the dick. Christina warns Betty not to eat or drink anything he gives her, which is awesome because of the whole Underworld aspect of life without Daniel in Wili's thrall -- how maybe you can check out any time but you can never leave -- but also the whole idea of people at a magazine slipping each other pomegranate mickies, which Mark underlines with more tapping: "You're on Team Slater now! No drugging of you!"
Daniel has a short meeting with his teenage attorney, who says suddenly DJ's French grandparents are claiming custody. Daniel's all, "But he IS home!" and things of this nature, and she cautions him that custody battles often turn ugly. (Here's a tip: only when the kid's not the point to begin with.) She points out that DJ's thirteen (I thought he was like five, I can never tell) and capable of forming an opinion about these things. Daniel is sad and wanders into a conference room to have some lonely feelings, all of which land squarely on a coffee mug of Betty's which was just sitting around with her face on it so he could find it and have feelings.
Mark coaches Betty about basic shit she already knows, going into a meeting with a crazy makeup lady. He applies some makeup to her face but of course it has no effect on her extreme ugliness. Crazy takes Wilhelmina's coffee out of Betty's hands immediately, causing attitude toward Betty from Wili and more sad faces from Betty. The woman checks out Betty's hideous face and asks if she uses her crazy makeup, and Betty -- because, again, she has become retarded -- says no. Mark jumps in all about how he sure does, and would rather plotz than go a night without her wonderful creams and unguents. Betty says she can't afford the crazy makeup, and the lady mentions they're debuting a budget line. Betty says they should advertise this in Mode, and the lady laughs, so then ...
Betty has to sit in a fashion magazine's conference room full of adults and explain the basics of aspiration. In a fashion magazine. To a makeup executive. At the most basic level. Because nobody has ever thought about the fact that poor people buy magazines about rich people stuff they will never afford. So maybe Betty's okay, I guess, because in the country of the blind, the brace-faced woman is king, but like: how did luxury magazines every spring into existence without your knowledge? Wili's like, "Isn't that fucking interesting because we just found a way to sell your new line." That "new way of selling" is called ADVERTISING. So of the people in the magazine industry that have ever read a magazine, you've got Betty at Player wondering why all the boobs, and Wilhelmina shocked that poor people read Mode, and crazy makeup lady being shocked by the genius idea of selling makeup in a fashion magazine. Which is why she was there in the first place. No wonder they're all always in trouble.
My favorite thing about this show has always been Betty's awesomeness, which this scene would have you believe it is about. Except, you know, usually it involves Betty actually being awesome instead of Betty saying basic shit everybody knows and then the people are somehow stupid for today only and find it brilliant. Coming out of the meeting, Betty can't believe her luck! Thank God everybody got stupid for five seconds so her obvious idea, which by the way would never actually play because it betrays the entire idea of aspirational branding to begin with, was met with amazed approval. Upside, she slaps Mark on the shoulder with excitement, which shocks him. He tells her Wili was not fucking smiling at her brilliant ass, but in fact just "showing her teeth." Wili summons her to the office, showing an admittedly fucked-up amount of teeth; Betty clutches terrified at Mark's arm and he slaps her away.
Betty tries to apologize for speaking out of turn, but Wili ignores her and immediately sends her on the Miranda Priestly/Till We Have Faces jaunt, up to and including one of Catherine the Great's wedding tiaras in lieu of the new Harry Potter for the twins, since her only baby is growing in a costumer's pickled womb and will be too evil to like anything good. Betty asks a bunch of questions and Wili refuses to answer them, blah blah, sort these seeds and grab some fleece, it took three years for this Devil to Wear Prada, and apparently thirty minutes to resolve it. Which, again, bums me out, because wouldn't you like to see Wilhelmina play vengeful Aphrodite a while longer? She's earned it.
DJ and Daniel play catch in the park and do a lot of Dora Exploring, including an awesome conversation about how DJ can't go to a hooker until he's older; Daniel stutters for awhile before bringing up grandmère and grandpère. DJ says he does love them, and would like to visit them, but this isn't definitive enough an answer to the question Daniel still hasn't summoned the nuts to actually ask, plus he's not sure if it wouldn't be easier if DJ left, etc. DJ waits for the grilling to resume, then asks if he's done talking. Daniel takes the out.
Even the music plays homage to Devil as Betty complains about Wili paying her back for the "save" with crazy makeup lady with yet more bullshit. Christina says the worst thing she might do is beat Betty with a car antenna, which she's always thought was an urban legend anyway, and then avoids answering the phone because her horrible drug-addicted Stuart is on the line with his stupid cancer. (Love the actor, hate the character, hate the storyline.) She shows Betty his very nasty comb full of hair, and Betty wigs, because it's gross but it doesn't mean he's on drugs, and get that out of her face. Christina says she's sending it to a lab to prove his drug use, and they talk about how Betty can't let Wili down or get fired, because... What purpose does Christina serve? She's nice to look at. I hate this story. I wish she would miscarry or something. Not die, necessarily, but just become something more interesting than some poor man's Fairy Godmother with evil spawn inside her. Doesn't it feel like she's been pregnant since you were a little kid?
Betty heads to the museum and stares at the ugly crown and gets shit on three times, fairytale/myth style, as far as the possibility of her renting it for the night of Wili's debut issue party. Some lady starts crying randomly, but she's the third one, so you have to be nice to her. Lovely Amanda and Mark discuss how lucky he is to have "such feminine fingers," perfect for injecting Wili's Botox, and when Betty shows up from her short mythic journey, Mark calls her "Betty the Mediocre." They laugh about all the hoops she had to jump through, and then she produces the tiara -- the third guardian just got dumped because she gained weight, and needed a friendly, ugly shoulder to cry on. "You got it by being nice to someone?" asks Mark, because the only fairytale he knows is... Too easy.
Betty says they have to give the museum a full page month, and the two bodyguards of the tiara have to remain within twenty feet the whole time Wili's got it. Wilhelmina, impressed, bestows on Betty the honor of injecting a needle of botulism into her face. Lucky! At the chaise, Betty wonders aloud what we've all been asking, which is: wouldn't a better person for this duty be a doctor? "Or at least a nurse practitioner?" I don't know why, but that cracked me up. Wili admits, hilariously and graphically, that her face is so numb she wouldn't know it if Betty "hit bone." Hello to the imagery. Right before she sticks it in, Wili stops her and says this is all proof that Betty is the power behind Daniel Meade, aka Cupid, and that's why she wanted her. So the tiara thing was a test? "Because I thought that was a punishment for speaking up in your meeting." No, in fact, Wili was impressed and thought Betty was The One. "Like Lord Of The Rings?" Betty asks. Oh, Betty. Henry's dorky ass is on the other side of the country.
Wili explains that the only person to actually accomplish retrieval of the crown was herself, when she was Fey's assistant. Of course, she sucked cock for it instead of giving hugs, but the important thing was that she accomplished the impossible. "I am going to groom you. And Lord knows you need some grooming." Wili pronounces Betty her protégé, and says she'll be replacing Mark as lead for the launch party. "After this, you can write your own ticket. Who knows? Maybe you'll be the Wilhelmina Slater." Betty is, to say the least, less than excited about that.
Mark's doing deep breathing exercises when Betty approaches him, and his face is pure evil as he swears he would rather "eat butter" than willingly aid her in any way. Betty protests that she hasn't even asked him to do anything, but he says even the idea of her ordering him around is against nature. She starts to tell him he's being ridiculous, and he throws a hand in her face: "SORCERESS!" Whining that she's taken "everything that matters," he shrinks back horrified when she touches his arm sympathetically. "I have less than twenty-seven hours for this launch, and there's no way I do this without you." She asks him to help her find a "lifesized, anatomically correct black vodka ice sculpture" and he immediately runs off to Amanda to bitch. "...Waddles back in here like a helpless brown Weeble, and while I'm not looking plunging my world into darkness!" Amanda gathers him to her bosom and sings a little song: "Hush little homo, don't you cry, Mandy's gonna steal you a Prada tie..." He nestles in her arms and tells her not to touch his hair, petulantly: "It's how I like it."
Tony shows up, throwing them both into a total tizz with his hotness, and both Mark and Amanda crawl all over each other claiming to be Betty Suarez. He's confused and impatient, and asks them to just page her and stop being total weirdos. Neither of those things are ever going to happen. He's very adorable and nice even as they crawl all over him and touch his muscles and are totally scary; Betty finally comes out with the signed Player issue. Mark pretends to be totally fascinated and, game, Tony asks if he saw that particular Superbowl. "If I say yes, will you take your shirt off?" Cliff shows up and he and Tony have a cute-off. Cliff wins by the precise amount of: infinity.
Betty gasps when she turns around to find Amanda pretty much sharing her space, and Amanda says she needs the info on Coach Tony ... Whose phone she totally pickpocketed! Awesome. "I was in a trance, I barely remember what happened!" She admits to having her "tingle" "dulled" by the pictures of Tony kissing some slutty stewardess. Betty's awesome: "My sister is not a stewardess," she automatically says, letting the "slutty" part slide, until she sees the slut in question, and it's not Hilda after all.
Betty immediately calls Hilda to her apartment for dinner, and has the obligatory phone call about the debut party that's just long enough for Hilda to bitch about being ignored. "I heard Tony was sexually harassed by your coworkers," she laughs, and Betty admits that it happens a lot at Mode. Hell, it's gotta happen to Tony five or six times a day either way. Betty reluctantly hands over the phone, calling attention to the stewardess pictures in her sad way. To Hilda's credit, she comes clean about Tony's wife immediately, feeling gross about it. Betty does not react well, but still reacts more kindly and sympathetically than Hilda would if their positions were reversed, which they never would be. Hilda admits she feels gross about it, but can't leave him, because she's in love with him. Also, he is Eddie Cibrian. Listen, if somebody could get shot in the face over Joey Buttafuoco?
First day of school, and Daniel's all full of advice, from the commonplace ("listen to your teacher") to the Meade specific (Ethical Slut rules), as though they'll never see each other again. He really sells the whole anxious-dad thing, to the point where DJ defuses him by remarking that his French is, quest ce que c'est, "sucky." Claire watches Daniel fuss and be all in love, and tells him he's a natural father. Daniel worries that he's being selfish, wanting to keep the kid, and Claire reminds him that loving the grandparents doesn't mean he won't want to stay in America, but that she's not going to tell Daniel what to do. Daniel admits that his problem -- and it's the same problem as always, so props to him for noticing -- is that he's afraid to ask the question because of the answer he might get. Claire just picks at his lint and smiles.
Betty sends somebody down to an Italian restaurant in the building, yelling that she doesn't care if the girl has to buy every pizza in the place, they need somewhere to store it until the party. She lectures Amanda and Mark to "stop poofing around," because Wili is going to freak out, and they suck helium, chipmunking at her about how "Why don't you fucking tell me how Wilhelmina gets," and it's hilarious. New duty for Betty, on top of everything: to shred about a hundred pounds of old mail into confetti. Mark looks, by the way, totally beautiful in his monochromatic outfit and long silk scarf, as does Amanda. I like the New Mode style if only because everybody looks so good in the cold. He notes that loyalty is neither Wili's thing nor is it Betty's, and in fact he's noting all kinds of similarities: "Is that why you dumped Daniel the second he got in the way of your career? That's exactly what Wilhelmina would have done."
Betty steps out of the elevator on her way to do whatever, and starts hallucinating. As we often do at work. The quotes comparing Betty and Wili from everybody in all the scenes so far kind of overlap crazily and she suddenly imagines herself as a total Slater 2.0, down to the gown and necklace and hair. It's freaky. She demands "carrot shavings" because she's "feeling snacky," and then yells at some randoms, "Look at me when I'm Yelling at you! ...Don't look at me!" She tells a guy with jacked-up teeth to get his teeth fixed, some other girl to stop eating a donut, and a third to lose ten pounds. Then she fires all of them. Daniel comes in looking homeless and trying to remind her of how much they love each other, and she has him taken out by security. Then she kicks a puppy, then wakes up screaming ("Not the puppy!") at her desk. That ... could have been easily fifty times better. Whatever. She picks up some mail to shred it, and freaks out because they're all addressed to Daniel and contain something surprising.
Justin's wearing a different tank and super skinny jeans, and takes issue with Hilda's date outfit, which contains both leopard and zebra print. After all, he says, "They fight each other in the wild!" Ignacio tells her she deserves a nice date with a nice hot guy, and she attempts to hope good things for herself while still feeling super gross. I've always found the best way to clear your conscience is to not do awful nasty things, like, you tell the guy to leave his wife or else, and then they leave their wife or they don't, but either way you're not part of something gross and it's not your problem -- and most importantly, you're not being a total cliché, which honestly is probably most of why I'm icked out by this: how old do you have to be before you realize that things are clichés because people are stupid, and you are stupid for doing the clichéd thing, and you can't laugh your way out of that? If you don't want to be "that girl," stop doing the thing that makes you that girl, because you automatically are. No matter how special you think you are or how you've argued your way out of it inside your own head, if you do the clichéd thing you are the cliché, and you need to get real. Sometimes it really is that simple.
Betty tosses a big bag of fan mail onto Daniel's desk and tells him he's wasting both time and talent at Player. Mode is the flagship of his family's company, and he was good at it. In fact, there is tons of mail supporting that very concept: the bags are full of fan mail and letters to the editor about how great Daniel's Mode was. Apparently Wili was having them hidden, including positive letters about Daniel's June cover ("a pimple on the butt of fashion," Wili apparently called it, even though she would never say anything like that and nobody actually would say that) and the whole Normal Woman segment that Normal Women love so much when they're not getting rocks thrown at them for being Normal.
Betty tells him to show Alexis the letters, and Daniel says she doesn't even care about him. Betty can't deny that, but they both know she cares about Mode. Daniel finally breaks down and explains his behavior: he really appreciates Betty's nagging, and of course he yearns to be back at Mode, which is why he screamed at her, because she reminds him of how great it was at Mode every day she's around. But at the end of the day Wili won, and he lost, and it's over. "Anything you truly want has to be worth fighting for," Betty platitudes with tears in her eyes, and he hopefully starts reading those damn letters in order to turn his excitement back on. That's what I would do.
Christina yells at Stuart about the lab results, which included oxy and heroin; she compares him to the "spawn" of Rush Limbaugh and Amy Winehouse, had they ever "fornicated." That's so weird it's not even gross to think about. Stuart, of course, is incensed that she tested him for drugs, and she threatens to call INS, and he doesn't believe her, but she tells him she will, and he pushes over a mannequin and leaves all scary.
Man, I'm glad that mannequin isn't carrying a stupid frozen-sperm baby of evil. A fall like that could really complicate things.
DJ plays one of those rockin' music video games the kids are into these days while Daniel reads his fan mail, and finally Daniel has read enough positive letters that he gets just enough self-esteem back to pop the question to DJ about staying in America. DJ thinks about it for like two seconds and says of course he would rather stay in America, where there are vastly fewer French people than in France itself. Daniel picks up a Guitar Hero guitar, having settled it.
The reasons that The Devil Wears Prada is awesome are many: Anne Hathaway is good for looking at, and both leads are great actors, and the "cerulean blue" speech is the most concise explanation of the connection between commerce and art I've ever heard. But the reason, I think, that it will live forever is that it tells a very awesome, very old and necessary story, and it does it very well. Psyche falls in love with Eros in a classic Beauty & The Beast story where she can't look at his face because he's a God and that's way heavy. Aphrodite steps in to say that she can't be with him until she does these tasks, and each of these tasks -- although very feminine in connotation -- forces Psyche across the line from emotion to logic: separating seeds, cleaning up messes, stealing golden wool, going to the underworld for Persephone's cold cream, etc. The story's undervalued because women's experience is undervalued, and you need look no further than this show's success -- which will always be partial at best precisely because of the high feminine/gay/fashion/camp/soap element present -- to know that this is still an issue.
But the story itself is essential, and informs a lot of later fairytales (particularly Andersen, who really just wrote a billion riffs on this story and created the best fairytales ever as a result). Really what it's about is the duty of young women to make contact with their internal masculine pieces, so that they can look at their beloved head-on, and see him as another person instead of a projection of her own stuff. Men are just people, not misplaced pieces of ourselves, because we don't misplace pieces of ourselves anywhere further than our own backyard. Miranda teaches Andy to be hard, logical and smart, which is to say she gives her options: go back to the creative writer you were meant to be, or take Miranda's path. And that's present here, at least in gesture, but only if you look at Betty and Daniel as two halves of the same person: she teaches him to see his own masculine face in the mirror of Mode, and accept that for good or ill he's good at editing women's fashion. But she couldn't accomplish any of this without the help of Mark's usual secret and undervalued wizardry, and Wilhelmina's Aphrodite machinations, which is how all myths and fairytales work: not the tools you already know you have, but the adverse circumstances and surprise potentials all around and within you. So there's that.
Anyway, it's a weecap. The party is, of course, so totally scary. You've got ice sculptures of people, and models dressed as angels, and the music is quietly going "uh!" in the background like a porno on a loop or a video of an old lady falling down. Betty notes that Wili isn't wearing Tiara the Great, and Wili's like, "I'm EIC of a fashion magazine?" Betty is unsurprised and hands over her two week's notice, because she apparently needed a whole episode to notice that Wilhelmina Slater is a bitch. Wili mourns the loss of what would never have actually been, complaining that "under those gaping pores and caveman eyebrows," she thought she detected an intelligence in Betty. Like that genius idea to sell products in the pages of a magazine? That was fucking amazing.
"You think life is all about who's right and who's wrong, but history is written by those who win, not by those who were the nicest." True, and I've always loved best about Prada the fact that Miranda had a point, and presented both paths as viable options: you swim with sharks, or you don't. But here, Wili's just ... wrong, and there's no room for the subtleties of those choices, because the world of the show -- which I love -- is all day-glo candyfloss, and wildly extreme, and you can't say that Wilhelmina's life has value, because it doesn't. She's a supervillain. It's like Cruella De Vil telling you you're being naïve: what else is she going to say? Anyway, Betty makes a classy and wonderful Betty-type exit ("Enjoy your party") but runs into Claire, who tells her to stay put, because it's about to get awesome. And at the door? Alexis and Daniel. Awesome!
Tired of standing around outside the restaurant, Hilda finally calls Tony, who answers in "I am with my wife who is standing right here" code, but it takes forever for her to figure it out, and even longer to remember that she's totally being played for a fool.
Daniel and Alexis whirl around and around Wilhelmina like scary snakes, taking potshots at her editrix style, calling it "cold" and pointing out that -- even if her "specific vision" wasn't something Alexis was going to grasp -- it was too subtle for everybody else too. Her relaunch issue is one of the lowest sellers in months, and she's getting bumped back down to Creative Director so that Daniel can come back in as EIC. Claire, Alexis and Daniel get right the fuck up in her face and it is amazing. Betty whispers to Mark that she knows he set up everything, the letters and whatnot, to get back with Wili, and he says he would never do anything against Wilhelmina's interests ... Unless they were going against his own. They both grin kind of affectionately away from each other and take sips of champagne; Betty's is white, and his is black. She's impressed with his style.
It's not Wili that owns a third of the business, but her spooky baby. Claire goes a little Clairiffic and knocks over an ice sculpture, daring Wili to threaten her children ever again: "You have no idea of the lengths I'll go to protect them."
Man, I'm glad that ice sculpture wasn't carrying a demon heir to the Meade fortune!
Daniel grabs Betty and thanks her for her faith in him; she plays it off of course because that's what friends are for. Of course, he needs to know she's coming back to him yet again, and she needles him about the raise Wili gave her. It's more like, "Look how cute" than actually cute, but then there's nothing more comforting than status quo, which is right back where we're at.
Christina waddles around in a crazy kimono with pumping music that tells you something is about to happen, and then things go slo-mo so you know something's going to happen, then the elevator won't come so she goes into the stairwell. Then a known drug-user with a criminal history of violence and mannequin- or statue-pushing shoves her down the stairs, and she lays there all crumpled and shocking. Man, I hope that drunken Scottish girl without a storyline wasn't carrying the... oh, crap.