Review: 'Masters of Sex' Season 3, Episode 12, 'Full Ten Count': 'Masters of Sex' Surrenders Control

PREVIOUSLY: Review: ‘Masters of Sex’ Season 3, Episode 11, ‘Party of Four’: Fear and Trembling

Back in the boxing ring — a familiar metaphor for his

pugilistic relationships with the scientific establishment, midcentury mores

and the personal and professional families he’s built over the course of a

decade — Dr. Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) begins the season finale of “Masters

of Sex” bloodied and staggering. The lopsided match is only a dream, of

course, but as his father and son jeer from the front row, it’s clear that Bill’s

desperate efforts to stay in control have already started to unravel: “A

man’s got to know when he’s beat, son,” his father snipes. In a season consumed

by what we can chart and measure, contain and explain, the wonderfully chaotic “Full

Ten Count” thus focuses on what we cannot, and in doing so suggests — in

contrast to the season premiere, “Parliament

of Owls” — that people really can change, often far more than they

bargained for.

Having returned to St. Louis after last week’s disastrous

dinner, Bill and Virginia (Lizzy Caplan) face a season’s worth of drama in a

single day. With the press conference for “Human Sexual Inadequacy”

looming, the false accusation that Bill maintained an improper relationship

with Dennis Daughtry collides with another trumped up charge, this one for

“pandering and prostitution,” levied by Committee for Decency plant

Nora Everett (Emily Kinney). The construction of the episode exposes the series’

seemingly intractable problems with time — the season began by leaping

forward, screeched to a halt with the dreadful “Monkey

Business,” and here careens through plot twists from the wee hours of

the morning until nearly midnight — and yet the wildness of it is terrifically

apt. “Full Ten Count” sees “Masters of Sex” surrender

control, much like the main characters.

If it all seems a little slapdash at first, well, that’s

because it is. The writers’ attention is fitful at best, and so Tessa, Helen,

and Austin have been shuffled off entirely, their stories abandoned midstream,

only to be replaced by Barton (Beau Bridges) and Jonathan (Rob

Benedict) striking up a workplace affair; Paul, having outlived his narrative

usefulness — Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald) needs something, or someone, to do —

skips town without so much as a goodbye. The Little, Brown

representative’s brief introductions to Nora, Lester (Kevin Christy), Jane (Heléne

Yorke), and Dan Logan (Josh Charles) are, sadly, a telling glimpse of the

series’ disjointedness this season. When it comes to

“Masters of Sex,” with the exception of a few superlative entries, I

can only echo Virginia: “I just keep waiting for everything to

click into place.”

Still, as “Full Ten Count” rushes toward its

stunning conclusion, with Betty (Annaleigh Ashford) straining to hold the

clinic, the press conference and her colleagues together, it becomes a

surprisingly rich portrait of highly effective people finally admitting that

they’ll never complete life’s puzzle. In one potent scene, as Libby arrives to

bail Bill out of jail, Sheen’s frantic search for solutions, pacing and

shaking, suddenly slows. In real time, we watch him come to the realization

that his need for control is as impulsive as any addict’s relationship with

their substance of choice, and as damaging. “This happened because of

you,” Libby cries, “because you

are reckless!” He’s been so obsessed, for so long, with his own selfish

ambitions that he hasn’t even noticed the collaboration between Libby and

Virginia, much less Libby’s affair with Paul.

As Virginia prepares to elope with Dan — not before her own

hilarious knockout punch, delivered to Nora’s smug face with a box of office

materials — and the confluence of events threatens the future of the work, the

episode indeed finds nearly everyone down for the count. Libby slumps to the

bathroom floor, Johnny (Jaeden Lieberher) worries that he’s responsible for his

father’s arrest, and Betty’s managerial magic confronts an insurmountable

challenge. But in the end “Full Ten Count” settles its sights on Bill

and Virginia, the “perfect equals” who’ve been the series’ ballast

all along.

Their heartbreaking conversation in the jailhouse corridor,

and even more so the suspenseful sequence that follows, is one last attempt to

seize control over the uncontrollable, and their ultimate recognition that

they’ve failed provides a perfect coda to the season’s finest hour, “Matters

of Gravity.” “Love is not a force exerted by one body onto

another,” Bill said then. “It is the very fabric of those bodies.

Love is that which carves the lines and grooves, the curvature of our

desire.”

“If you love me like you said that you do,” Virginia

says now, as if in response, “you’ll let me go.”

First longing, then regretful, and finally resigned, the

episode’s denouement, cutting between Bill’s mad dash for the airport and

Virginia’s impending departure, uses the familiar materials of romantic

melodrama — the taxi, the tarmac, the swooning possibility of snatching

victory from the jaws of defeat — to remind us that the series is in fact

about the inability to force the

pieces to click into place. By the time Bill pays the fare and Virginia glances

at the gate one last time, “Full Ten Count” thus sees the series

return to its central subject, unmet desire, only this time the disappointment

is shaded by relief.

Maybe the messiness of “Masters of Sex” this

season, if not quite purposeful, is a function of all the loose ends we leave

hanging in life, the failures large and small we set aside for a time to go

about actually living. After a season full of frustrations, it’s fitting, I

suppose, that tonight’s closing sequence is a full-throated expression of love,

unrequited. “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out,” as the old blues standard says,

and its regretful rag is not without a certain consolation. So too for sex

researchers and drama series: Sometimes the only way forward is to clean the

slate, and to know the score.

Grade: B

READ MORE: ‘Masters of Sex’ Creator Michelle Ashford on Season 4 Plans and Beyond

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