Masters Of Sex Ends Its First Season Still In The Excitement Phase

Masters Of Sex has spent its first season paired with Showtime's other big drama hit, Homeland, and I wonder if the whiplash caused by downshifting from a bombastic spy show where people are under constant threat of getting arrested or killed to a quiet period piece about relationships caused the show's potential audience not to get on board. Doesn't it feel like no one has been talking about Masters Of Sex? The show that's got it all?! Okay, maybe (unlike Homeland) it doesn't have people trying to blow each other up. But it does have people trying to blow each other. (...Sorry. I HAD TO.)

As I wrote about the season's penultimate episode, heading into the finale, our contentious protagonists, Bill and Virginia, were on another break, and for a pretty good reason: he had tried to give her cash for all the fornicating they did in the study, and she decided she couldn't continue working with someone who didn't realize why she would find that insulting. She had replaced the functions Bill used to perform with two people: Lillian, with whom Virginia could experience professional fulfillment; and Ethan, to service her sexually.

Here's where I would love to know whether the show's producers felt hemmed in having to tell these characters' true stories, because coming into the season finale, it kind of seems like Virginia is better off where she is now. Though the whole point of the series is that Bill's study will improve people's lives in ways that even he can't possibly fathom as he starts, Lillian's pap smear project has the potential to save women's lives; in addition to that, Lillian has lower status at the hospital than Bill and thus is both more in need of Virginia's gifts and more receptive to her advice, unlike Bill, who we've seen grudgingly accept it, but not before arrogantly behaving as though he doesn't actually need it. And as for Ethan: as long as you ignore the incident where he physically struck her in the series premiere — and if Virginia has, I guess we also have to — he's not just excited to be with her and her children but available to both. We keep seeing Virginia looking wistful for her old life, and job, but to this viewer, at least, that seems like what's required so that the Masters Of Sex story lines up with the Masters & Johnson story, not because the Bill we've come to know seems so irresistible.

To be fair to Bill, shit's not really going his way in the finale. It's time to present the findings of his study to his colleagues — a talk that is apparently the hottest ticket at the University — and the audience is receptive as long as he's talking about the male sexual experience (particularly the part where he tells all the guys in the crowd with tiny penises that they shouldn't worry about it too much). But once he turns to the question of what it feels like for a girl — complete with visual aids — Bill kind of loses the crowd. Okay, he really loses the crowd, especially the Chancellor, who turns off the film of a female subject masturbating; before long, a petition is circulating to get Bill fired, all the Masterses' friends have cancelled on their celebratory dinner, and a bunch of male faculty are spreading the rumour that the self-pleasuring lady is Virginia — which it is, not that anyone present apart from Bill would have any way of knowing that. The next day, Bill is fired (and Scully spared the same fate only because Bill honorably pretends he did the study behind his mentor's back), his work trapped in his former office behind a lock that's already been changed. Two days ago, Bill was pretty sure the sex study was going to vault him to international fame. Now, a man who, as far as we've seen, has never really experienced any professional setbacks has lost everything. Oh: and the wife he's fallen out of love with (if he ever loved her, which: who knows) just had their baby. Awesome.

So at the end of this eventful day, as Virginia reads the study Bill has co-credited her on and, in the back of her mind, ponders whether she's going to accept Ethan's marriage proposal and move with him to Los Angeles for his new job at UCLA, Bill pays a visit to her home, for the first time ever, and tells her that he can't live without her. And because it's a true story, we know that — in the fullness of time, at least — she will agree to be his partner, professionally and otherwise. I love the show and am excited for its second season, so what I'm most worried about is how its producers are going to show how Bill earns Virginia. So far, he's been kind of an asshole — not just to her, but to his wife, whom he doesn't respect enough to be honest with her or treat her as anything like his equal. A man this rigid, bossy, unforgiving, and cold doesn't deserve a woman as spectacular as Virginia, so I have to assume that coming to this turning point in his life has not just shaken him enough to make him able to express his true feelings for Virginia, but that it will be what finally causes him to grow up and be a better person. When the series started, Virginia was in a vulnerable position, and gained some stature from her work with Bill, but other appealing options have certainly presented themselves to her since then; for her to choose to return to Bill will require some explanation for the viewer.

And on the relationship undercard: Margaret and Scully. I dare you to think of another TV character who has gone through more upheaval than Margaret Scully has this season, and don't even try with anyone from The Walking Dead because I can imagine that there have been moments when she's wished a monster would just eat her brain and end her torment. As we rejoin them in the finale, the Scullys are still living with one another, even though all their cards are on the table: she knows he's gay; he knows that she slept with another man. She's trying to figure out how they can proceed from here, and whether they will do so together, but she's still (understandably) angry that he'd known he was gay since before they met, and that his fear and denial robbed her of thirty years of her life. But even as she doesn't want things to continue as they have been, she's also horrified by the options available to Barton to "treat" his "condition," including ECT and aversion therapy via electric shocks applied directly to his genitals. This being the 1950s, Margaret stops short of encouraging Barton to accept himself and live as a gay man — this is a man who's not even in a position to start over in a new job when he thinks (rightly) that he's about to be fired, so starting over in a new sexual identity is not an option anyone even bothers to suggest — but it does seem like she loves Barton enough to muster empathy for him, whereas he is so overwhelmed with self-hatred that he'll try any cure, no matter how sketchy or terrifying. As we leave him, he's resolved to undergo ECT behind Margaret's back — the dubious decision of a tragically desperate man.

As much as I've been riveted by Virginia's adventures through female professional achievement in an even-more-male-dominated era, Margaret's evolution has been the greatest revelation on this show and one of the most fascinating stories in all of TV this year. So Showtime needs to hurry up and bring us more — and maybe scheduled sometime other than right after The Jazz And Terrorism No-Fun Hour.