One of the first texts that was crammed down my throat in grad school was Thomas Kuhn's THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS. (Really, that should have been a tip-off that I was making a huge mistake with my life.) I thought about Kuhn a lot this evening—about the argument he makes that scientific progress isn't,…

Certain people should be immortal, and it's always a gut-check when they're not.

Ethan's "love" for Gini—if we can call it that—has always been the creepy kind favored by people with borderline personality disorder, to wit: He loves her, not for who she is, but for who he thinks she should be, because he loves her: "She makes me feel funny in my pants and all flippity-flop in my heart, therefore…

Which is complicated by the fact that we are dealing with two people who actually existed and had those names. Which suggests that either A. the producers/writers of the show are allowing those names to influence their creative characterization of Bill and Virginia, or B. the real-life figures had their real-life…

My sense of it is that while, sure, he'll go ahead and *collect* the information—he indicated that this was an area he'd been interested in pursuing at any rate—he won't use it in the presentation, because, as "she" rightly notes, the men he was hoping to enrapture with his good news would immediately turn it into bad…

Nope. Well, not to my knowledge. People have secrets, and Tarkovsky AD may be one of them…(Begins glancing at friends, family, and coworkers with suspicion.)

So if last week was about Lies, and the week before about Feelings, I'd say this one was about Something Missing. As in, What happens when the Thing/Person/Feeling that's *supposed* to be there, isn't?

Thank you. Unfortunately, no—no blog, no newsletter. Although I've given some thought to starting up the latter, under the title "What's All This Crap I've Been Hearing About Tolerance?"

Your point about how Virginia reads Bill's treatment of her—how it would strike her to her core because she would read it as a sign that he never valued her contributions and all he ever wanted to do was fuck her—is so achingly empathetic that I'm actually judging myself a little for not having seen that. Well…

Again, excellent points—in many ways, Masters' lie to Libby (which you sense started out, early on, as one of those small lies we tell as a way to fudge the truth to preserve our ego—"Bill, is something wrong with me?" "Well…that's a possibility." "What could it be?" "Well…there are a lot of reasons why you might have…

Thank you for this. I'm always happy to be corrected when I am wrong.

Mr. Dyess-Nugent was, indeed, asleep at the switch—AVC Reviewers really need to start their reviews with a disclaimer:

I don't often find myself at odds with Mr. VanDerWerff (hell, last week I was accused of being him), but for as much as I agree with him about certain things—though, really, agreeing that Allison Janney's performance tonight was just every-single-synonym-of-good isn't surprising, inasmuch as it is an absolute fact—I…

True, although in fairness, the same could be said of a used condom stuffed with cotton balls and a sharpie-drawn face on the reservoir tip.

Tonight's show was a poor execution of a really astute observation in the Nick-Jess dynamic: namely (as others have mentioned) that Nick is a man-child. He's got his reasons for being one—terrible father, and people who've had to be adults way too early tend to regress when they're finally on their own ("I put in my…

Deeply flattered, but no. Also, I think you just insulted Mr. VDW.

Jess Day pokes her head in: "Heyyyy! Couldn't help overhear—totally wasn't eavesdropping—I know it *seemed* like I was, but—see, in Oregon, we call it 'quiet caring'—anyway—couldn't help noticing that you *said* that you were going to keep pretending differently to yourself, but then you *didn't* keep pretending…

Agreed. (See my reply to @InternalParadox's comment for a lengthier statement of agreement.)

Absolutely. Narcisse was, in so many ways, an authentically great man. Only someone who's great is capable of tragedy—the higher your stature, the greater the fall. (Of course, the greater the man, the more toxic his sins, and Narcisse proves that adage as well.)

That's a very good point, and I think that the show has given occasional nods to exactly what you suggest: that knowledge can't just be intuitive—there has to be some kind of objectivity to it for it to be put to productive use. I mean, without objectivity, there's no medicine.