Written by Michelle Ashford
Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on Showtime
Part of the fun of watching a first-time showrunner flex their muscles is to see just what narrative strategies they’re prepared to deploy in service of a story. With “Race to Space,” Masers of Sex expands its stylistic/narrative catalog a bit, allowing in daydreams, allegory, and montage, while it hones in on Virginia and her reaction to Dr. Masters’s request that they themselves engage in sex. It’s not all effective, but the willingness to toy around with different storytelling modes bodes well for the series’s future.
As the daydreams make clear, Virginia has been left in a tight spot: refuse Masters, and she may find herself out of a job, and, more worryingly, removed from the research she finds so fascinating; acquiesce, and there’s no telling what would follow. For such a forward-thinking woman, this dilemma, created as it is by a fairly standard deployment of male power and privilege, is doubly difficult. As it turns out, when Virginia is just about to discuss the proposition with Dr. Masters in earnest, he interrupts to inform her that the study is cancelled due to external pressures, which he blames on Virgnia’s sleeping with Dr. Haas, and that she’s due to be terminated from the hospital staff entirely.
With the study seemingly sidelined, Dr. Masters turns his attention to his poor wife Libby and her difficulties conceiving, taking over from Dr. Haas and acting as her doctor. “I want you on your back for sixteen hours this time,” he says, before a sickening pat on Libby’s hospital bed. The Libby/Dr. Masters corner of the show is the hardest to watch, but it’s the most instructive in terms of delineating his worst tendencies: any fool with eyes could see that his wife is uncomfortable with his approach, but Dr. Masters, brilliant as he is, remains doggedly single-minded in his approach, motivated by his stubborn insistence on his own rightness. It’s even more galling because Dr. Haas – though he’s an abusive would-be spouse, as we saw last week – has him dead to rights when he tells him it’s his ethical responsibility to inform Libby of his low sperm count. Dr. Masters, in other words, is somewhat addicted to his own power, much to the detriment of the men and women in his life.
In the midst of all this unpleasantness, Annaleigh Ashford’s Betty is an even more welcome presence than she was in the pilot. She doesn’t work with Dr. Masters in an official capacity, so she has no difficulty setting the terms of their unconventional arrangement, as well as confronting him with his own limitations as a man of science. As it turns out, Betty, too, wants a child; Dr. Masters bristles at the idea – she’s a lesbian prostitute, after all! – but she matches Dr. Masters for stubbornness. Despite his “man of science” chatter, Dr. Masters can’t help but judge Betty, proving that even a (for his time, very) liberal conscience can be remarkably limited.
The notion of fantasy and daydream is extended, intriguingly, to Dr. Haas, whose obsession with Virginia hasn’t subsided despite his despicable behavior and her clear rebuff. Masters of Sez has an appropriately demanding sense of viewer identification and sympathy; despite Ethan’s behavior, he’s still an important member of the ensemble, and one whose desires and fears are being examined along with everyone else’s. We also spend a little more time with Dr. Langham and Jane (Heléne Yorke), who were paired off in the study last week. As it turns out, Dr. Langham has grown rather fond of Jane, and isn’t too pleased to discover that the study has gone off-site to Betty’s whorehouse. This culminates in the episode\s best scene, in which Drs. Haas and Langham join Jane for lunch, both seething with bitterness, while Jane deploys a well-chosen quote from Simone de Beauvoir’s landmark tome The Second Sex:
“One day it will be possible for a woman to love from her strength, and not her weakness; not to escape from herself, but to find herself; not out of resignation, but to affirm herself. Only then will love become for her as it is for the man: the source of life, and not a mortal danger.”
The beauty of dropping that quote into the episode (besides Dr. Langham’s perfect reaction: “What?”) is that the hopeful path de Beauvoir lays out is one that would benefit all of the characters on the show, not just the women. Dr. Masters, in particular, is paralyzed by his excess of privilege and power. Yet Langham and Haas can’t even wrap their brains around the notion, let alone endorse it.
The downside to “The Space Race” and its stylistic flourishes comes in its final moments, which feature Virginia reading from her son’a adorably nerdy comic books. The parallels between the lost space explorer and Dr. Masters are helpfully underlined for us, which feels particularly clumsy given how graceful most of the rest of the episode is. With that caveat aside, “The Space Race” shows Masters of Sex still in very good form, and poised to do even greater things once all of the kinks are straightened out.