Masters delivers a baby with ambiguous genitalia and urges the parents not to surgically assign the child a sex out of fear or convenience. Upon meeting Johnson at a hotel for a secret rendezvous, the two divide their attention between sexual roleplay and a championship boxing match, prompting Virginia to unearth Masters' troubled childhood.
"Fight" is perhaps Masters of Sex's most daring yet captivating episode yet. It takes a very confident type of show to do almost an entire episode with its two lead characters just sitting in a room and talking to each other. Masters of Sex has an impressive supporting cast but it's most powerful and dynamic relationship is that between Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson. They are electric together and can carry this type of episode with ease.It is just so fascinating watching these two intellects walk the line of what is real, what is the work and what simply is a fantasy. This is their working relationship right now. Bill is at his new hospital and Virginia is still at the old. Their time spent at the hotel is the most intimate they have ever been with each other. They are uncovering these little bits of information about the other. But both still have their fists up for protection. They are guarded but want to just let go with the other and just completely forget about their personal worlds outside the hotel. So they did buy into the idea of different identities. The aliases of Dr. and Mrs. Holden don't just extend to the hotel community. Bill and Virginia can use them to become anyone that they want. Virginia loves that kind of imagination. She doesn't want to conform to the traditional mindset. She wants to think about things in a totally different way than ever before. So, her mother is a deranged criminal whom she reads the bible to constantly. Bill, on the other hand, is a much harder shell to crack. He approaches things with a practical sense to make sure that they fly under the radar while they are at the hotel.
It's both fun and incredibly tragic watching these two in the hotel because it is difficult to know when the extravagant stories they're telling dovetail into bitter emotions of the past. Bill has had a terrible day at work. He needed to let out those frustrations on Virginia. After that, he was more than happy to just watch the boxing match and dine with his pretend wife. But the more intense the evening got the more his exterior cracked. He opened up - for it seems like the first time too - about his father and the abuse he suffered from as a child. It is a cliche for a cable show to have a brooding leading man with daddy issues. And yet, it informs us immensely about why Bill is the way that he is. He just took the beatings. Didn't put up much of a fight because he truly believed that was the greatest insult he could throw at his old man. No one was around to help him and his time at boarding school was when he truly found balance in his life.
But Virginia doesn't want to believe in that type of masculinity being the only option out there. She believes a man doesn't have to fight in order to prove his manliness. The man doesn't have to go out to work and make a living to provide for his family. She's been raising two children by herself for a long time. She doesn't want her son to grow up to be the man who disrespects or belittles women. She is successful in the workplace but she is still viewed as an outlier who doesn't deserve respect. She admires Bill because he values what she has to say - not just about the sex study but in life. She is the one who gets him to open up about his past unlike ever before.
Society is just not like that for them. As much as Bill pleads the father of the baby not to go through with the surgery to make the child a woman, he just goes ahead and does it in the middle of the night. The most tragic aspect of that whole story is that everything somehow goes well. The baby goes through torture to get to the operating room and the surgeon has to look at a book to know how to perform. And yet, she emerges perfectly fine. That only builds up the ego of this man and his preconceived notions of it being better to have a manly girl than a wimpy boy. That's so devastating and frustrating but there was nothing Bill could have done. Bill and Virginia set out to change the way people view sex but right now all they have is each other. The world around them isn't willing to change and they are barely doing anything outside of sleeping with each other. Right now, the study is not in a great place. But the two still have each other despite the many things they share at the hotel.
Some more thoughts:
- "Fight" was written by Amy Lippman and directed by Michael Apted.
- I just love how the entire guest cast for this episode is just people who haven't been on the show before. That really lends itself to being the Bill and Virginia show for a week.
- Elliott sure was fun, wasn't he? As long as they could remember his name.
- Virginia doesn't want her son to grow up to be a macho ass but her daughter is essentially the typical young girl who only thinks of princesses as damsels in distress.
- Virginia has to see the end of the fight because she needs to know how to ends. And then the results play out as the end credits roll. Wonderful.
- This easily will be a strong Emmy tape for whomever submits it as such. It seems tailor-made to make Lizzy Caplan and Michael Sheen to prevail.
