Masters Of Sex Gives Bill Another Chance To Be A Good Father, Which He Fumbles

Pheromones!

Dan "Flavours & Fragrances" Logan and Virginia are going to see their research into what smells make their test subjects hot take a very dramatic turn thanks to new findings in Nature about pheromones, which allow gypsy moths secrete and which allow a male to detect a potential mate from thirty miles away! Could humans also be subject to pheromonal attraction? Can sexual attraction, in fact, be bottled after all?

Pheromones.
They're not something that you smell.
They're something that you sense.
(Though if you could smell them, they'd smell real funky.)

This Smells Funny

Speaking of being able to sense pheromonal activity from far away (like, around the corner and down the hall in a medical office suite), Bill suddenly looks up from his work with a start and goes to sit, like a creep, outside the lab where F&F and Virginia have moved on from the day's tests to the dinner invitation she blurted "a few weeks ago" Virginia denies that she's been dodging F&F's attempts to take her up on it; if she really hasn't been trying to wriggle out of it, says F&F, she should have dinner with him tonight. Virginia...dodges: "I have no idea why I asked you out that night, but it was wrong." She tries to placate him with an offer of coffee in the lobby, along with a discussion of how they're going to procure some pheromones, but F&F's not having it: "You're a woman who deserves more than coffee in some lobby. You deserve-- Well, something we might call a proper courtship." It seems like Bill is just watching through the glass and not also listening to their conversation, which is a shame, because a lot of his life's problems would be solved if he could talk to people like this -- you know: kindly, and like he's not looking through them.

Pigskin Pals!

Bill is so distressed by the sight of Virginia flirting with another man that he has to go run off his frustration with Paul, who I guess he is friends with now? As Bill finally slows to a walk, Paul comments that he's running like a maniac; Bill accidentally reveals his true feelings as he says "Sometimes people seem to-- Just be slipping away," but since he means Virginia and that's too real, he has to cover and act like he means Johnny. Bill just asked Johnny to a Cardinals-Bears game that morning and Johnny blew him off. As coincidence would have it, one of Paul's old Nebraska friends, Al Neely, needs some help in his marriage to Isabella Ricci. (Apparently neither of these people is real, which is weird because I would have sworn I'd heard that name belong to some kind of athlete before.) Bill tells Paul he should have Al call the office...and then asks if Paul needs an assistant coach. Paul, hilariously: "You?" "Why not," babbles Bill. "Why not try. If you don't try, nothing happens. Or things happen that you don't want to happen." And hey, speaking of "things you don't want to happen" -- like your son being more interested in books than he is in roughhousing, or in girls -- Johnny could try out for the team!

Beauty And The Bruiser

Publish Or Hair-ish

Situation: Tessa submitted an essay to the magazine Teen Society, and can't wait to tell all the important people in her life about it!

What makes it awkward? The first person she runs into is Edna, and since Virginia's at work and Edna has had to suspend her project of mashing Virginia and Bill together on hold for a few hours (after having tried to give them some privacy after dinner at Virginia's the night before on the flimsy pretext of taking Lisa -- a newborn baby -- for ice cream), Edna turns her sights on Tessa. Getting an essay in a national magazine is cool or whatever, but did Tessa notice the ad on the facing page? Tessa could get that hairstyle!!! "A girl can always do things to make herself more attractive to the boys!" Tessa diplomatically says she doesn't think this hairstyle suits her. "Don't be like your mother, always fighting me at every turn," coaxes Edna. "Maybe she has a good reason to fight," says Tessa, not unkindly. "Yes, of course," says Edna coldly. "She's poisoned you against me." Edna thinks Virginia opposes her because Edna's taken on the tough job of telling Virginia what she doesn't want to hear. Tessa squeezes Edna's hand, saying she didn't mean to hurt her feelings. "Look, honey, your essay is very impressive, but think of your mother as a cautionary tale," says Edna. "She's written a whole book, and look at her life! It's a mess!...Just don't follow in her footsteps, all right? You focus on what really matters!"

How is order restored? Tessa folds under pressure. Maaaaaaaakeover!

Double Foul

Big ups to the writers on this show: if I had a thousand years to think up brand-new ways for Bill Masters to be FUCKING TERRIBLE, I never would have come up with "Youth League Football Assistant Coach Disaster," but he starts crapping up his new post immediately. First of all, he doesn't care that Johnny is utterly miserable to be there. Then, when he asks why the quarterback is doing so poorly and Paul explains that it's because the regular quarterback -- who's there, and is good -- has a bad attitude and has been benched for showing up late to practice, Bill puts the kid in the game! Paul tries to countermand the order, telling Bill, "The kid's gotta learn," but Bill wheedles, "Can we figure out some other kind of punishment that doesn't embarrass the whole team by losing?" If a GOOD coach were present, he'd probably be like

but PAUL AGREES and sends in the good quarterback!

AND IT'S FUCKING DENNIS!

GOOD LUCK IN LIFE, JOHNNY MASTERS!

Bitter Moms

While their sons battle it out on the gridiron, moms take their more complicated feelings to the stands, where they compare notes on how hard their husbands ignore them and get day drunk off thermoses full of martinis.

Main Cast: Libby Masters; Eunice.

New Characters To Be Added: Dennis's generally absentee mother Sheila, who usually only spends a couple of minutes in the stands before slithering under them to hook up with whatever dad she can cull from the herd; Liz, mother of twin boys and ten times as resentful as anyone else.

Sample Episode Plot: Eunice arrives at a game trying to tamp down her rage about her husband having forgotten their anniversary; Libby busts out a joint she got from one of the younger and hipper CORE volunteers.

Hard Tackle

Remember in the last episode Bill was all, "You can't let bullies get away with it!" but only actually "taught a lesson" to a barely teenaged child and caved when it came to being tough with adults? Well, now he's scared of kids, too.

Libby's Home Away From Home

Having found a mysterious key (on a tag so gigantic I was sure it was going to end up being for a hotel room), Libby peaces out of Johnny's football game after he gets tackled and heads off to the furnished apartment Joy had arranged for herself before her catastrophic brain aneurysm. Turns out it's...everything she's ever wanted! She immediately draws herself a bath, and is relaxing in it when the building super, Vincent, shows up to turn the gas off because he thought no one would be moving in. Libby says she just took a while moving in, but now she's here! She introduces herself as Joy, and it's a good thing too, not just because this will allow her to use the apartment as her own but because Mrs. Libby Masters would NEVER let a tradesperson see her in a towel!

A Thin (Yard) Line Between Love And Hate

Alert Type: Doomed Marriage Alert.

Issue: Isabella has used Al's request that she join him for the opening of a gorilla exhibit at the local zoo as leverage to get him in to talk to Virginia and Bill about sexual issues in their marriage.

Complicating Factors: There's really just one issue: Al cheats on Isabella constantly, with the result that she's not that excited about boning him anymore. (She's also crazy, but arguably that issue is an offshoot from the main one.)

Resolution: They dick around for a while -- almost literally in Isabella's case, as Bill watches her use Ulysses to get herself off in fifty-four seconds -- before Bill and Virginia sit down both Isabella and Al to review the questionnaires they filled out. Specifically, Virginia wants to talk about the answer Al gave to the question of what first attracted him to Isabella: "She was twenty feet tall." He saw her in a movie and was excited about the idea that all the other guys there could only dream of being with Isabella, but that he really could be. And then he was. And then after that, he wasn't that interested in her anymore.

Spoiler: Not really a spoiler so much as speculation: I wonder if their empathy for Isabella is going to seem like a distant memory whenever Virginia and Bill finally get called out on their having made a similar victim of a certain LIBBY MASTERS.

How Many Pheromones Are In Territorial Piss?

Who called the meeting? Virginia and F&F already had a meeting on the books, and since Bill is insecure about his relationship with Virginia, particularly relative to her growing connection to F&F, he's decided to crash it.

What's it about? They've put Lester in a plastic suit and on a stationary bike so they can collect his sweat for pheromone-testing purposes.

How'd it go? Bill, predictably, spends the scene trying to undermine F&F by shitting on the very premise of their experimentation: while F&F drops phrases like "Better loving through chemistry," Bill says the whole enterprise is more like a trick: "You're trying to manipulate a person into feeling a sexual attraction for someone whom they might not, in actual fact, be attracted to at all." F&F says that another way of looking at it is that he's developing a product customers want. Bill doubts customers want to be duped into falling in love. Virginia, the object both men are trying to claim by pissing all over her, tries to mediate between them by gently suggesting, "What we all want is to uncover the essential link between scent and human sexual response," but Bill (also predictably) just digs his heels in by drawing a line of demarcation between his work with Virginia as being about scientific exploration, and not F&F's grubby commerce. F&F amiably says he's trying to "give nature a little boost." "Nature doesn't need a little boost," snits Bill. "She can always be improved upon," says F&F. "Well, she's done just fine for millennia without the, uh, interference of salesmen," says Bill, a MEDICAL DOCTOR in the TWENTIETH CENTURY, like a GODDAMN IDIOT. "She came up with polio and science didn't have a problem interfering with that," F&F observes. Ultimately, Bill can't really do anything to stop the work his investor wants to do, and ends up feeling more impotent than ever. So in my estimation, this meeting goes great. Shut up, Bill, everyone sees through you.

Book-Blocked

Bill, who's decided that the reason his grip on Virginia seems to be loosening is that they haven't banged since her parents have descended upon her, has had a great idea: he's booked them a room at their good old fuckpad, the Chancery Park Plaza Hotel in Alton, Illinois, under their old aliases: Dr. and Mrs. Holden. There's just one problem: now they're famous! The front desk clerk (who, according to IMDb, was also in the Season 2 premiere, so presumably he would have served them in their Holden days but doesn't remember them from then) immediately clocks Bill from the photo on the back cover of the copy of HSR his wife brought home ("Just having it in the house has put some real pizzazz into things!"); he's also already spotted Virginia having a martini in the lobby while she waits for Bill and comped her drink. Soooooo...they're not going to be able to check in and screw.

Were They Ever So Young/Horny?

Virginia and (probably mostly) Bill are so determined not to let their sex date go to waste just because they couldn't find a sex venue that they've ended up in the bedroom lab at the office. Bill tries to get things moving with a compliment, telling Virginia how "pleasant and inviting" she's made it, but she hasn't forgotten it's still a lab, pointing out that it's "a far cry from silk sheets and room service." Bill counters by saying the only other place they could Do Sex tonight is his car, but while Virginia's not into that idea, she's not really into this one either, morosely saying that it's "another version of the Wash U lab where we first had sex," echoing F&F as she mopes that what they had was "hardly a proper courtship." Bill claims they did so have a courtship, but Virginia disagrees: "We had a negotiation." Then they hooked themselves up to wires and talked through the physiological processes that were going on while they Did It. "Nature was not why we got together, Bill," she sighs. "Work was." "Well, I can assure you that nature played a part," says Bill, ignoring her mood and going in for a kiss because the plan is to shore up relations with Virginia and shore them up he will! But Virginia heads off the kiss by launching into a reverie where she asks if he ever wonders what would have happened if they'd met in a more conventional way -- if they'd both been guests at a dinner party, catching each other's eyes at opposite ends of the table and barely able to keep up with the conversation because they were so attracted to each other. "That's a schoolgirl fantasy," says Bill, dismissing her. COOL ATTITUDE, BILL. Do you REALLY wonder why she might be more interested in the guy who listens to her and makes her feel special?!

Virginia vs. Edna

Virginia gets home from her sex appointment with Bill to get an eyeful of Tessa's new look.

Tessa is annoyed about it in a low-key way, bitching about how sick the hairspray reek is making her, but when Virginia tells her she should just go rinse it out, Tessa says it seemed important to Edna...which is when Edna herself enters, passive-aggressing about the long hours (I get it) Bill has Virginia keeping! Virginia hustles her into the kitchen, which I guess she thinks is soundproof, to tear a strip off her: "How dare you give Tessa that preposterous hairdo?" As Tessa listens on the other side of the door, talk of how wrong it is for Edna to tell Tessa how she should look, naturally, segues to Virginia bringing up old business about her own pageant career. Virginia claims, again, that she hated the pageants, and Edna says it's fine if that's how Virginia "choose[s] to remember" them, but that Tessa needs to have a relationship with Edna: "That's why I'm here, honey! I'm here to take care of you, and Tessa, and Lisa--" "You don't take care of me!" shrieks Virginia. "You belittle me! And you criticize me!" "Whether you like it or not, I am your mother, and Tessa is our chance to finally get this right!" Edna shoots back. "Don't you bring Tessa into this," warns Virginia. Edna says she can't mean that. "I have never meant anything more," Virginia assures her. Edna, sensing she's losing, turns away from Virginia and starts (passive-aggressively) tidying the kitchen, but this doesn't stop Virginia, who tells Edna's back, "Don't you know that all I ever wanted was your approval? For you to just be proud of me, with no strings attached! But you can't do it! Can you! That's fine. Because it's too late for us. But I will not let you take my daughter and twist her into some version of herself that she will come to loathe." Edna turns back and, in her iciest tone, asks, "Ohhhhh, I make you feel horrible? Isn't that a little bit like blaming the messenger, hmm? I can love you, Virginia, and I can still tell you the truth. Why is it you can't hear it."

Winner: Draw. Two C- mothers; no winners.

Libby vs. Paul

Libby comes home from her latest afternoon of Joy Edley cosplay to find Paul in her living room, icing Johnny's ankle. Naturally she starts freaking the fuck out; when Johnny proudly tells her he got two tackles, she ignores him and lays into Paul instead, demanding to know where Bill was when this happened. Paul, kind of testily, says that Bill blew off the team today, so he was "coaching alone," which just makes Libby more hysterical that no one was watching when Johnny hurt himself. Paul tries to explain that football is a contact sport, and has Johnny get up and walk to show her he's fine; he limps a tiny bit, but in Paul's defense, it doesn't really look that serious, and based on his experience, Paul would probably know if it were. Libby insists that Johnny needs to go to a doctor, but Paul thinks that's silly: "He doesn't need a doctor. He just needs to walk it off, and tomorrow morning, he'll be fine." (Speaking as someone who fell a half-hour into her first-ever roller derby practice, waited three weeks to get a doctor to look at her sore elbow, and learned she might have actually broken a tiny but apparently important bone in it...Libby, you're insured. Just go to a doctor.) Libby declares an end to football; when Johnny says he still wants to play, Libby ignores him some more.

Paul suggests that Johnny go clean himself up and excuse the grownups, and when he's gone, Paul tries to tell Libby about parenting: "You can't smother a boy like that. And I'm sure Bill would agree." Libby is aghast that Paul and Bill might be in league together, against her, as Paul goes on: it's good for Johnny to discover he can hurt himself and live, he says; it's not good for him to have his mommy yank him out of the game, "depriving him of the chance to work through the pain, to learn how to be a man, instead-- instead of you mollycoddling him." "OH," gasps Libby sarcastically. "You don't believe in mollycoddling....Is my mollycoddling you the exception?" Libby snaps. Paul genuinely doesn't know what she means, and though I think at first she's just going to talk about how she's been taking over duties in Joy's care that Paul should be doing himself, she goes for it: "I'm talking about your wife. How she was drowning. How suffocated she felt by your life together -- how unhappy she was....Joy had an apartment. She was one foot out the door. As far as she was concerned, your marriage was over. There. No more mollycoddling. For anyone." Paul:

Libby instantly regrets having gone so far.

Paul stalks past her to the door, and though she lamely tries to call after him to come back, he...obviously doesn't. I guess he needed to hear some of that, but still: yikes.

Winner: Libby, but she can't really feel great about it.

Going Down? (On Me?)

Bill is so excited about dismissing Al and Isabella as patients that when he and Virginia get into the elevator to leave for the day, he pulls the emergency stop and stops just short of waggling his eyebrows at her.

Virginia:

She can't believe he's actually horny after watching a marriage shatter in front of them, and Bill immediately downshifts from lust to irritation: "None of this would be an issue if you would just ask your parents to leave." Virginia wearily says she did, and that they're leaving tomorrow. Bill then brings up their mild spat the other day, about how things started between them, and tells her, "It wasn't just work." His recollection is that they had "intoxicating" conversations from the very first time she walked into his office; he even remembers the very first time he saw her, through the glass enclosing the secretarial pool at the hospital: "Granted, we were surrounded by patients and secretaries, and the hospital loudspeaker squawking down the hall, but just to dismiss that as only work? Well, that's a fairy tale, too. We would've found each other at that party. We would've stayed by each other's side. We would've found a way to see each other again." "Maybe we would have," says Virginia in a conciliatory way. "But then again, we'll never know." She lets go his hand and starts the elevator again. Two things, Bill. First, maybe your romantic declarations would be more effective if they weren't on a two-day drip. Second, YOU'RE NOT THE ONLY PEOPLE IN THE BUILDING WHO MIGHT WANT TO USE THE ELEVATOR.

Libby's in the lobby of "her" apartment building when Vincent comes down and warns her, "Your husband is waiting in your apartment." After a beat, she goes upstairs, where she sees Paul at the table in the kitchen, looking despondent...until he glances up, notices Libby in the doorway, and his face snaps into an expression of pure loathing. Libby's like, WELL THAT'S MY CUE, and hustles out of there as gracefully as possible under the circumstances.

Bill is yelling at a football game on TV when the doorbell rings: it's Dennis! Which is crazy, because even though kids had a lot more freedom of movement in the late '60s compared to the veal y'all parents are raising these days, it's...after 9 PM! Dennis wanted to make sure Bill's failing to show up for football earlier didn't mean Bill had quit the team! Bill actually uses physical affection -- in the form of a hand on Dennis's arm -- to assure him that he'll be back! He asks where Dennis's mother is, and Dennis darkly says she's "out." Bill asks if she's working. "Just...out." Bill then invites Dennis in to watch the game! And I guess Dennis is really hard up for a male presence in his life, because he accepts! "And you can give me my football," he adds. Way to hold his feet to the fire, Double D!

F&F is poring over the positive results of their pheromone research -- even though the ladies who smell Lester's funky sweat all say it's unpleasant, their involuntary physical reactions prove otherwise -- when Virginia wanders in. He offers her his flask, expressing excitement about the progress they've made; she's more reticent, but lets him get expansive in his toast: "To the love potion inside sweat that makes poets write, artists paint, and turns a walk in the dark into a moonlight stroll." He ends by asking if she's feeling "the zing of [her] heartstrings," and Virginia says she isn't, though she adds that she's not wired up to the monitoring equipment, so maybe she is and just doesn't know it. F&F curiously asks, "You never wired yourselves up, you and Bill?" I'm pretty sure it's no accident that he doesn't get specific about whether he means the two of them together, the two of them separately, or the two of them with other partners, but regardless, Virginia curtly denies that they did. F&F then starts musing about whether people, in fact, don't respond to pheromones the way gypsy moths do, from miles away: "Maybe people need to be inches away from each other." As they start dancing, to silence, F&F quietly asks whether Virginia's feeling a physiological response yet; she says she isn't, and he says he's not either, but then again, that's just on the surface: they don't know what's happening in their "nether regions." Virginia chuckles at that turn of phrase. He corrects himself: "Your pudenda." "No," she chuckles, "that's too technical." F&F comments that it's good to hear Virginia laugh...and then resumes checking on how her parts are responding. Nothing yet -- or so she says!

Now Bill is showing Dennis his football cards, and finally gets the reaction he had obviously wanted from Paul! Dennis says he has half a collection from 1964: "Things get lost a lot at my house." So Dennis is Nelson Muntz: got it. Bill tells Dennis to challenge him on card trivia, and covers his eyes while Dennis chooses a card at random...

...while Johnny watches from behind a ledge. BETRAYAL!

In what I guess is F&F's hotel room, Virginia gets undressed! F&F seems like he is very good at sex!

Virginia comes home to find the TV on and no one watching. She's sifting through the mail when Tessa comes out of the kitchen, seeming friendlier to Virginia than we've seen her this whole season. Her hair is back to normal, but it took four shampoos and some mayonnaise to get there. She's brought out the magazine with her essay in it, and is trying to keep her excitement in check as she prepares to tell Virginia all about it, but then Virginia turns around...

...and Tessa decides she's not actually that interested in sharing a nice moment with her after all. She tersely says she'll show Virginia tomorrow.

But she probably won't.

And then Bill is following up on a referral he's gotten via Al, but it's kind of an unusual case! An extremely fake-looking Jim Henson gorilla at the zoo is just not into sex anymore! As Bill gazes at him through the bars of his enclosure, this fucking guy in a gorilla suit looks at Bill, AND AUDIBLY SIGHS. AS DO I.

And then just in case you were worried that might be the least subtle thing that could happen in this episode, a goddamn gypsy moth lands on a fence railing. YEP, I THINK I GOT IT.