Masters Of Sex Starts Mounting Its Legal Defense

Bill takes a break from getting beaten down by the consequences of his various idiocies to meet with his criminal lawyer about the pandering charge the clinic has to defend. But outside Bill's purview, that lawyer is making new friends, and one of his associates is reconnecting with an old one, though maybe not the way said associate would have hoped.

Who had the best week? Let's count the characters from mellow to miserable.

1. Sammy Davis Jr.

   We open with Bill and Virginia guesting on Hef's swingin' variety show Playboy After Dark (a real thing that really happened on TV, though if Masters and Johnson were ever on it, Google's not saying so). Bill is typically awkward and weird, and less willing to play along with Hef's implication that Virginia and Bill are a couple than Virginia is, cheerily saying she supposes Bill is her "whorrrkh husband" because Lizzy Caplan is still putting half the effort that goes into this performance into her pronunciation of that work.

   Anyway! Their segment segues into a number from Sammy Davis Jr.

   

   Sammy is played by the great Andre Royo. Sammy's fine.

2. Art

   Other than continuing to hide the fact of his marriage to Nancy (which we'll get to), Art's week is taken up with a new research initiative Virginia's undertaking. A young female fan of Human Sexual Response comes to the office to ask Virginia about multiorgasmic women, asking if there are resources at the clinic to teach her how to learn that skill herself -- because if there were, all her rowdy friends are coming over tonight. (I'm paraphrasing.) At first, Virginia defaults to the current situation -- treating patients who have sexual problems, rather than helping otherwise sexually well-adjusted people to develop their skills -- but Art encourages her to consider a potential new area of study/revenue stream. Virginia is in the midst of vigorously pursuing her research (picking up unsuspecting dudes in a bar, boning them, and making herself the test subject for multiplying her orgasmic experience) when Art, off a tip on Betty, finds her and gets into a mild altercation with Virginia's latest trick research assistant. When Art and Nancy's secret is revealed (WHICH WE'LL GET TO), Virginia is able to use Art's secret against him on her own behalf: she won't fire him if he won't tell anyone about her apparent indiscretion -- which wasn't even that, because, she says, she and her husband have an arrangement. Art gets it: "In the interest of never lying again, I'll tell you I'm also in an open marriage. So I judge no one, ever when it comes to these things." If Art is just dangling himself in front of Virginia as a potential future sex partner to make himself indispensable to her in yet another way...yeah, good call, that'll probably work.

3. Libby

   Libby gets a surprise on her way to start her first day as Herb's assistant: a foxy lawyer in the lobby coffee shop! This is Bram Keller, and after some accidentally insensitive advice about divorce lawyers -- he only knows she works for one, not that she's also employing his services herself -- he gives her his card, telling her that if she wants to get into trouble, he's staying at the Plaza Hotel. As anyone could have predicted who saw Caitlin FitzGerald and David Walton playing Diane and Sam at the end of New Girl last season...

   

   ...Libby is intrigued, and after a few drinks, she gives Bram a call at his hotel, "as a political act": "I'm in this consciousness-raising group, and, um, we decided that for a woman to call a man she doesn't know is an act of rebellion." Phone sex, it seems, ensues (if it does, it's offscreen), and I'm all for it (except that we don't see it), but I have a beef: why are we only hearing about Libby's visits to her consciousness-raising group? According to the press site, these two photos...

   

   ...are from last week's episode. Do you remember that scene? I DON'T, and I'm pissed to learn that it was shot and we didn't get to see it.

   Anyway, this seems to be going great for both parties until Bram goes looking for Libby Masters and puts it together that she and cute Elizabeth from the coffee shop are the same person...which is inconvenient, because Bram is the clinic's criminal lawyer, and he has to try to get Libby to put her divorce on hold until after the criminal trial. Not an impediment all new relationships face!

4. Betty

   Betty is alarmed when Scotty, one of Bram's associates, not only recognizes her from her last job (as a prostitute, in case you're new), and is even more anxious when he seems like he might want to take advantage of her upward mobility to start dating her for real. But when Virginia and Art need a male volunteer to work on their multiple orgasm, Betty gives Scotty the chance to be a hero; he agrees to do it if she'll watch him, and everyone's happy.

5. Nancy

   This bitch. From what she tells Art, she's got a whole strategy as to when she should tell Bill about their marriage: after she's become indispensable to him. And it looks like she's on the way there, as he asks her to come with him -- AS HIS PARTNER -- to social functions Virginia is going to be attending with her husband (...well), and also invites her, as his current partner, to join him and Virginia for their meeting with Bram. She then proceeds to talk more than either of the clinic's actual name partners (is there anything worse than the person who invites herself in on a "we" she hasn't really earned?) until she drives Virginia out of the room in annoyance -- which is bad, since Virginia might be posturing about her lack of culpability since Bill launched the surrogate program without her buy-in, but I'm not sure that will protect her from a legal perspective.

   Worse by far is Nancy's advice on a pair of new patients, the Buckseys. Fran wishes Gary were less polite with her, sexually, but when she tried to inspire him by taking him to a movie called The Defilers, he was horrified and thought there was something wrong with her. Nancy suggests that she and Bill go see it, and the scene that seems to have excited Fran involves a man aggressively overtaking a woman and spanking her naked buttocks. Bill suspects that Fran might still be experiencing trauma from childhood physical abuse, but Nancy thinks she's cracked it: "'The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.'...Madame de Staël, French philosopher." The only thing for it is to get Gary and Fran onto a clinic bed and instruct him to spank his wife. Except Fran quickly gets frustrated by how lightly Gary's striking her and almost immediately starts hectoring him that she can "barely feel" it (not a very supportive way to encourage your partner to try new things, FRAN), at which Gary flies into a rage and violently attacks her, because Fran's not the one who was abused as a child and never dealt with it; Gary is.

   This causes Nancy to slip down in Bill's estimation -- he asks Virginia to replace Nancy on the Buckseys' case, and she agrees for the patients' sake -- and she slips even further when Lester produces photographic evidence of her canoodling with Art and forces her to confess to Bill. (A conversation that occurs offscreen -- what the hell, show? Quit Downton Abbeying us!) And Bill was 100% prepared to fire both Nancy and Art before Virginia interceded on their behalves, so maybe Nancy should quit trying to replace Virginia as the clinic's alpha female.

6. Lester

   Lester gets the glory of producing the proof of Art and Nancy's true relationship, which is pretty cool. However, he happened to capture it in preparation for trying to catch Jane cheating on him, which is less cool. (If it helps, Lester, it seems like she just moved in with her gay best friend.)

7. Bill

   Bill's still generally not doing great: when he's not working, he's taking wanks down memory lane morbidly rewatching old Season 1-era film of Virginia masturbating -- apparently a reel he's squirreled away for his own personal use, because unbeknownst to him, she had the foresight to anticipate a demand for their research files as evidence in the criminal trial, and destroyed all the records of their own "experimentation" with each other. But things look up for Bill when he goes to an AA meeting and hears a share from Dan's wife Alice (which we'll get to). Spoiler alert: if Virginia's reason for pretending to be married to Dan was so that Bill would understand Virginia is no longer an option for him, she might need to put her shields up again.

8. Virginia

   Virginia's been leaving drunken messages on Dan's new-fangled answering machine all about how great things are going for her but also, in the same message, bringing up a fake study about remorse that found participants regretting impulsive decisions "within a four-week period"; she's sorry. Then Alice shows up at the clinic to tell Virginia she knows Virginia's tried to contact Dan...because Alice heard all those messages, because Alice and Dan have reconciled. WHOOPS. Alice thinks Virginia is just another one of the many poor dummies Dan has seduced, used up, and discarded. But Virginia tells Alice that, actually, what happened was that right before the wedding -- the same day, in fact -- Virginia found some dude and timed out fucking him to make sure Dan would walk in and discover them. So Dan's only back with Alice because Virginia broke his heart. "I don't know who's more deserving of pity in that story," says Alice. Seriously, though! Alice adds that she was touched by Virginia's messages; she's made a few drunk, lonely calls of her own, of course: "But. I'm sure you'll find someone." Solid neg.

   What Virginia doesn't know is that the newly sober Alice ends her day by going to a local AA meeting, which is where Bill hears about getting back together with her husband. Afterward, they go out for club soda or whatever (Bill's still claiming he's not an alcoholic, for the record), and he nosily asks her what happened with Dan and Virginia; Alice is only too happy to tell him all about it. So when he goes into Virginia's office to tell her about Art and Nancy's deception, his disapproval of their lying is also disapproval of her lying, though because he learned about it in an AA meeting, I guess he can't confront her about it? "I'm sure they had their reasons," Virginia tells Bill. "Everyone who lies has reasons," spits Bill (as if he didn't spend years lying to his wife about Virginia, but whatever). Virginia may think that she's gotten away with her Dan cover story as long as Art doesn't squeal, but you just know Bill's sitting on this fact until dropping it on her will achieve maximum devastation.