Masters of Sex - Recap: It Almost Looks Like Love

"Fight" is almost deceptive in its simplicity: Bill (Michael Sheen) and Virginia (Lizzy Caplan) go to a hotel and play house, acting out a fantasy of domesticity to cover what they're really up to. That's the episode. Just that one sentence. Yet it's everything going on underneath that sentence that forms the basis of the episode, as there are not only philosophical questions of masculinity and identity on the table, but also issues of a more ambiguous sort, such as what it means to even be one's own person, or how one knows when enough is enough. Yes, Bill and Virginia are living a pretend life in that hotel, but they use that fantasy as a respite from their regular lives; the drama, then, comes from their discovery that the fantasy is every bit as fraught with complication as those regular lives, only with an extra added layer of muddled identity on top of it all.

Credit: Showtime

For an hour, we remain almost exclusively in that ritzy hotel room in Alton, as Bill and Virginia work through what, exactly, is going on between them, and who they are to one another. Because, let's face it, neither knows all that much about the other, and the only way they can reach at that intimacy is to couch it in metaphor: as Bill and Virginia talk about their respective, made-up backstories as Francis and Lydia Holden, the lines between which persona is fake and which is the real become blurred. It doesn't take long to recognize that when Bill talks about his abusive father, he's not talking about Francis Holden Sr. By that same token, when Virginia recounts the army captain who broke her heart, it was Virginia's heart that was broken, not Lydia Holden's. Throughout the hour, the story features a boxing match that serves as a metaphor for this relationship, a battle that is basically an unspoken conversation between two people reaching desperately for a kind of understanding. As Virginia describes, "It almost looks like love, doesn't it? The way they reach for each other and hold on." That's boxing, but that's also love, and personhood, and identity. We find something to grab onto (an identity, a feeling, another person) and hold on for dear life.

Credit: Showtime

When Bill delivers a child with ambiguous genitalia, the disgusted father, Mr. Bombeck (Josh Randall), demands that the penis be removed and converted into a vagina, reasoning that the child is "better a tomboy than a sissy." But Bill is every bit as disgusted with Mr. Bombeck's limited view of masculinity, since the child is chromosomally a boy, and changing his gender simply because it would be easier to do is the same thing as changing a person's identity out of fear of difference. Bill chews Mr. Bombeck out for measuring masculinity in terms of things like sexual performance, and resents that the man is such a bully to his wife. Yet Bill is powerless to do much more than recommend a course of treatment, making a call to a surgeon who specializes in pediatric endocrinology to look into the case. That sense of powerlessness is rare in Bill, so he seeks to reclaim his own sense of agency in his life -- first, by forcefully taking Virginia from behind in the bathroom at the hotel, and later, by playing a fairly messed up game of shadowboxing in which Bill luxuriates in how much control he has over the situation. He even admits later that the power dynamics were all out of whack, although he does nothing to curb his overt grabs for power, even going as far as to try and force Virginia to beg him to make her "feel good." In a wonderful moment, Virginia obstinately refuses, saying she's perfectly capable of making herself feel good. She masturbates in front of him, as if to illustrate that his power over her has limits, if it even has reach (to borrow a boxing term) at all.

But Bill still views his attempts at reclaiming power through the lens of his own fractured childhood, recalling how his father broke his nose for reasons he can't even remember: Bill theorizes that maybe he slammed the screen door, or went for a second helping before his father did, or "maybe it was Wednesday." Either way, he can't remember, yet the fight -- which resulted in Bill being sent to boarding school to fend for himself for the rest of his adolescence -- resulted in him becoming the man we know, as he picked up boxing, defended himself from freshman hazing, and became entirely self-reliant. Bill even prides himself on having never asked for his father's mercy, saying he took his beating "like a man." Virginia thinks this is ludicrous, arguing that it should be okay for a man to say "enough's enough!" without being seen as a "loser". And she's right. It should be okay for a man to tap out, to not always have such a stiff upper lip. But that's not always the case, and in arguing that it isn't, Bill is indirectly endorsing Mr. Bombeck's narrow view of masculinity.

Credit: Showtime

Of course, Virginia is at a crossroads herself, seeking to make sense out of her relationship with Bill, which is largely defined by their connection through "the work" (i.e., the sex study). Although she gives in to Bill's animalistic sexual impulse early on, she later chooses to pleasure herself rather than beg for sex like Bill demands. Similarly, she establishes that there were other men before Bill, with the story of the army captain serving as a particular point of interest. In recalling how the captain left her for a fiance he mentioned only once in the year they were together -- leading Virginia to believe that the fiance was simply a cover to keep away the busybodies looking for husbands -- she describes a hypothetical in which two people are looking out over a hill. The woman says she'd love to have this view every morning for the rest of her life, and the man responds by saying that the only thing he'd love more is for this view to be the second thing he sees each morning, after her. In the hypothetical scenario, Virginia says, "Aren't the two of you imagining the same future? Where is there room for a fiance in that house? Well, it turns out she's downstairs making oatmeal, waiting for him to wash you off his skin." The lesson Virginia takes away from all of this is that while it's a perfectly acceptable biological urge to have sex, "Keep your heart locked away some place safe, like a bank vault."

This all dovetails into the conclusion, as Bill and Virginia go their separate ways to their separate homes, neither husband and wife, nor necessarily anything more than two colleagues in a sex study who just so happen to also be subjects. Yet they're both affected by their time together in ways both big and small. When Bill discovers that Mr. Bombeck is getting some general surgeon with insufficient experience to turn his son into a girl, he rushes to the hospital to try and talk Bombeck out of it. In these moments, as Bill pleads with Mr. Bombeck to let the child be, it reads as a conversation Bill is having with his own father. "I'm begging you! Let him be what he is! A boy," Bill says, fighting back tears. But Bombeck only notes that it's already done, and that the surgeon is finishing up. Every bit as quickly as Bill reclaimed his power in the hotel with Virginia, he's reclaimed his powerlessness here, with Bombeck. Similarly, Virginia's curiosity about her standing with Bill translates to her curiosity about boxing, that peculiar sport that "almost looks like love." She stops in the hotel lounge where men of all sorts are gathered around the television set to watch the outcome. When a stranger approaches (played by an unrecognizable Barry Watson of 7th Heaven fame) to ask why she's so interested, Virginia echoes a sentiment she attributed to her fairy tale-loving daughter: "I want to see how it ends." And this is why she sticks with Bill, because it's the not knowing that drives their relationship. You can know a person, but few periods in a relationship are as exciting, or as daunting, as that period before you know as much as you can.

Credit: Showtime

"Fight" is a brilliant episode of television, and it has me wondering why more people don't watch Masters of Sex, honestly. Masters of Sex has all the qualities I loved in early Mad Men. It's got deceptively deep characters, a vivid sense of place and setting, and a literary sensibility that results in more careful, patiently structured plotting. Plus, you don't have to talk people into the room like you would with other prestige shows, where you have friends asking, "But when does it get good though?" Yes, it welcomes deep reading, but it doesn't shut out the less critical viewer either. This was the crown jewel of the series so far, in my opinion, and it's rewarding because mine is only one of a litany of possible readings that could be formed from watching this episode. There's so much going on beneath the surface that I don't think there's just one way to read this episode, and that's a rare, wonderful quality that is an attribute of great television. And Masters of Sex is unquestionably great television.