“When the train is pulling out of the station…” – Masters Of Sex Recap

Masters of Sex Season 3, Episode 11
“Party Of Four” 
Posted by Sage

Plotting every move, anticipating every counter move…there’s a far easier way to get what you want.

Dan Logan has always had Bill Masters’ number. Virginia thinks she know Bill better than anyone, but she fails to realize that – excepting Johnny perhaps – she is the person who Bill most fears seeing his true self. Every machination – every move in the chess game – is designed to prevent her from knowing the weakness that he finds so disgusting. He masks his real weakness (his love for her, and his helplessness in the face of it) with a false one, to tug at her sympathies. Bill exerts so much energy to keep Virginia in the dark that he has none left to hold the curtain closed to everyone else. Dan gets Bill – REALLY gets him – simply because Bill isn’t trying to sleep with him.

This was a devastating episode of Masters for every single character (besides Tessa, who’s having great fun at boarding school thanks to#SendTessaToBoardingSchool2K15), and that just feels right for the eve of a dramatic finale. We catch up with Bill and Virginia after their pitch meeting with their publisher for their second book. (“To Human Sexual Inadequacy!”) And though we didn’t see Bill “hijack” the meeting like Virginia says he did, we know how this refrain goes. The last episode went black on the most desperate version of Bill that we’ve seen. He’s truly lost it now; and anyone who’s spent three seasons with Bill Masters had to know that those unanswered phone calls to Gini’s home would lead to the kind of Hail Mary play that he thinks are an even swap for years of honesty and human decency. His master plan this time is to confront Virginia with Dan’s wife at an 8-course “celebratory” dinner in New York. Lord knows what exactly Bill thought this would accomplish. Did he think she’d come running into his arms at the sight of her? Virginia knows very well that Dan has a wife, as she tells her partner after they both stop pretending that her and Dan’s affair is anything but an open secret. If any moral oppositions she had to sleeping with married men outweighed desire and connection, then she wouldn’t have been with Bill for nigh ten years. Strategy and cluelessness meet in that man; and his attempts to play dumb for all but that 2-minute stand-off with Dan at the end of the episode made me want to punch him in his smug little face. (ILU Michael Sheen!)

Judy Greer made her Masters debut this week as Alice Logan, and sister-girl is a broken spirit. Dan told Virginia earlier this season that he and his wife have “an understanding.” That’s an overstatement; he has affairs and does not deny them. Alice has no choice but to accept having a husband that cheats on her; she drinks, a lot, and if a strong, perceptive woman like Libby Masters has trouble walking away from her distracted and philandering husband, then poor drunk Alice doesn’t have a prayer. She’s become a bit of a monster in the process of watching her husband fall out of love with her. ( “You always like the ones that need fixing. Tell me, how is this one broken?”) But it offended me that Bill tries to align himself with her at the dinner table, as if he has the same right to indignation and bad behavior as the wronged woman. (“I’d like a glass of white wine, Dan. Do you have an objection to that?”) GINI IS NOT YOUR WIFE, BILL. She doesn’t owe him anything, but the whole dinner feels like he’s come to collect.

Back in St. Louis, Paul and Libby are trying to dial down the shine of their honeymoon phase, at least in front of the kids. The purpose of the “Johnny hates his dad” storyline – you know, the one that we write off in a bullet point at the end of every recap – finally made itself known this week. A detective shows up the Masters home while Bill is away and Paul is fixing the pipes (ALL the pipes. Heyooooo.) and he’s not there to discuss Bill’s slip with the double agent Bible thumping surrogate. (That’s going to come down hard on him in the finale, isn’t it?) Instead, the detective wants to talk with Johnny and he forces Libby to pull her child out of bed. Turns out that one of the girls who was at the lunch table when Johnny embarrassed Dennis with lies about his “broken penis” told her parents about the outburst, and now the entire school district wants to know what Bill is telling their children about their private parts and why. The interview scene was beautifully written; the bit where Johnny mirrored his mother’s words and speech pattern after the detective warned her to keep quiet spoke to how alien and uncomfortable conversations like this are for kids, how they intuitively seek direction from adults on how to behave, and how easily a poorly chosen word or an awkward speech pattern can be interpreted as something much larger and more devious. (Also, I die at the proud look Libby bestows on her son when he gives the cop the kid-friendly answer to the “what does your father do?” question, something that was obviously discussed and practiced.)

Was it wrong, what Bill did? I don’t know. The intent was to be helpful; if it hadn’t been, Johnny wouldn’t have been so hurt by it. But Bill is used to speaking so frankly in the walls of his clinic, in the world of academia, and in his publications, that he takes it for granted that his credentials will always keep him safe. Paul has heard the worst of Bill from Libby as they plan her extrication from the marriage; her “what if he doesn’t care?” fear is shattering. But she knows him, and please note that she’s started to call him “my husband” again, instead of just “Bill.” She is steadfast in her belief that he would never hurt a child. And I’ll take it to a darker place, because hey, everyone’s lives are falling apart anyway: Libby knows that the kind of abuse that the families of Johnny’s classmates are accusing Bill of requires the abuser to establish trust, fear, and twisted loyalty; Bill could never get close enough to a child to do that.

In her recap last week, Kim hoped that it would be Libby to end the Masters marriage, because she’s certainly earned the right to do so. Instead Bill’s actions have trapped her again; she feels solely responsible for keeping her family from imploding. Caitlin Fitzgerald is always magnificent, but especially in the scene where she explains his father’s distance to Johnny. (“I was hoping it would be better between dad and me someday.”) She does know the man she married, and part of her still feels protective of him. She’s sacrificing her own happiness to end the cycle of emotionally stunted and destructive Masters men. Paul would be lovely second act for her children, but he can’t erase the memory of Bill and he can’t undo a broken relationship. (“You know what I’m afraid of Johnny? Letting people see that I’m afraid.”) Maybe for Libby, but not for her babies. (“He is the father that they have. He is the father that Johnny needs to know loves him.”) Hopefully Pa/Paul didn’t lose Stephanie’s number.

Back at the dinner that good sense and human kindness forgot, Alice is drinking to forget that Dan used to be enchanted by her. After overhearing Virginia telling the worst bathroom attendant of the 1960s a tidbit about “the gentleman [she’s] seeing” that’s easily traceable back to Dan (“…an aversion to me wearing fragrances of kind.”), Alice adjusts her settings from “dutifully ignorant wife” to “disenchanted former romantic object.” There’s no happiness left to preserve for her and Dan, so she’ll take the satisfaction of sabotaging his most recent – and most significant affair. She goes to great lengths to sell Dan as a fraud to Virginia knowing very well that he’s absolutely serious about her. (“I’m in love with her, Alice. Now you’ve never heard me say that before.”) Yet again, a Bill Masters plan backfires. Forcing Virginia to face Alice means that Dan is forced to face her also. (“Do you want me to make a scene?” No power like the power of exploiting the fear of the “crazy bitch.”) His dirty work is done for him, and he’s forced to make a play to hold on to the woman he loves. Alice sneers to Virginia that Dan is “a true gentlemen,” like it’s an accusation. But if we had any doubts about Dan’s intentions as he’s wined and dined Virginia or even as he’s defended his affair to his wife by legitimizing those emotions, that conversation with Bill should erase them. It’s always been a pissing contest between those two, but the difference is that Dan doesn’t get down in the muck on his own initiative. But if Bill forcibly pulls him into it, he can damn sure give as good as he gets. For as brilliant as Bill is and as well as he thinks he’s played this game, he’s missing the trick. Dan isn’t. “Tell her how you feel about her…but I bet that never occurred to you, Bill. But guess what? It occurred to me…so I guess that’s checkmate.”

I’m not even sure where the real Bill ends and the Bill bullshit begins anymore. But I do know that Bill doesn’t know who he is without having Virginia in his bed, on his book covers, and in the next office over. (“It’s who we are. It’s how people think of us.”) But how much of his pro-career, pro-fame rallying comes from the heart of a man who really does find most of his fulfillment in his work and how much of it is a tactic to keep Virginia tethered to his side? And thanks, episode, for souring the purest Bill and Virginia moment we’ve had all year. Or the one I BELIEVED was most pure. “I thought you meant that,” Gini spits at Bill, referring to that gorgeous speech about womanhood and trailblazing and leaving some for yourself that he gave her when she was in labor with Lisa. “The person that argument really serves is you.” The bloom is certainly off the rose for Virginia. (No man has ever given unsolicited commentary on a woman’s relationship with her mother and lived to tell about it.) All season, she’s humored Bill though she’s rapidly lost patience with him because she feared losing her place in the study. But she could care the fuck less now. His manipulations are done in the daylight now, and she finds that the life she’s too small for is the one where she’s the crutch of a broken and brilliant man. She’s reinvented herself before, and maybe it’s time for another go.

Odds & Ends:

• Fashion moments: THE coat, Virginia’s blue and black ensemble, such a contrast to Alice’s false and floaty spring dress; and that’s basically it. I miss Betty.
• “However you want me to be, I’ll be.”
• The sassy maitre’d is all of us. We are all the sassy maitre’d.
• “It’s not on the menu but they make it when I ask.” Someone fetch the measuring stick, please.
• “I love your sense of humor, Virginia. It’s very New York. Are you Jewish?”
• “DO NOT THREATEN ME, SIR.” You woke the Mama Bear, Detective Asher.
• I thought we all agreed never to speak of Ethan Haas again. Way to break the pinky swear code, Bill.

Kim will be your recapper for the season finale this week, and I predict she’s going to have a TIME of it. Wish her luck and leave your feelings in the comments.