Actually, if you consider Barton's reaction to Bill—the "Don't Tell Me How To Live My Life" brush-off he gave Bill could be seen as part of the reason why this Masters would say "Well, if people like Barton are homosexual and don't want to be homosexual, maybe I should come up with a way for them not to be…

Exactly. However the scene was played by the actor, there's no way anyone who has seen more that one episode of scripted television couldn't spot the familiar trope of "Wife just about to leave her physically imposing husband suddenly rushed to the hospital." I mean, come on. I'm pretty sure Norman Lear featured that…

Freud slipped so seamlessly from the realm of Medicine into the realm of Critical Theory that one half-suspects the devious Viennese sonofabitch self-designed his ideology with that backup in mind. "Oh, I'm not a scientist—I'm a philosopher. Please continue to read my books." And we do.

So what happens when sex becomes a commodity—when it leaves the private world and enters the Marketplace? That's arguably the inevitable result of scientific discovery in this country. Insight leads to the lab, where experiment codifies the insight into knowledge, and from there, it goes straight out to the…

That's a good point. And of course, the whole first season was about getting Libby pregnant (though never through sex, of course—the ol' capping technique got a callback in tonight's episode!) Just goes to show I shouldn't write these things so late.

It was needed elsewhere.

If you're proposing a crossover of Masters of Sex with The Americans, said crossover to include full-on, full-frontal-depiction of partner swapping, then—

It seems reductive to point this out, but fuck it: The primary function of mammalian sex is to create pregnancy.*

I think that the episode is almost comical on a meta-level—no, really, wait, don't leave, I actually have a point!—that is to say: Look, are we the viewers ever going to really give two shits about anyone who isn't part of the work of Masters and Johnson? We love us some Betty and Lester, to be sure, but only because…

Well, if we adopt the Edisonian bromide of the relative percentiles of
Inspiration and Perspiration, then Bill most certainly is a genius. But let's not do that, lest the ghost of Tesla plague us in our dreams.

Oh, all right:

The Nightcomers is the canary in the coalmine for Brando's descent into madness. (Quick hat-tip to the Great Gazoo theory.)

Nah.

To be filed under "Writing that makes us wonder if the editor of The AV Club was in the office that day":

Love or hate Marlo, he was the inevitable evolutionary end-result of the game. Someone who wants to win the game for what it can bring him is always going to lose to someone who just wants to win the game, who is always going to lose to someone for whom there is no game—there's just what he does because of what he is.

First: Fuckity fuck fuck shit and goddamnit.

Eh, burnout, mostly.

I had never wept before at the death of Tiny Tim, until this movie.

A One Word Review, From Someone Who Watched And Enjoyed Broadchurch And Believed The Producers Who Swore They'd Go In A Different Direction:

No, no—you didn't do a shitty thing at all! I really was just mocking Sorkin, and the too-easy way in which he can take any subject and use it as a path to slagging off digital culture. (Although the fact that my intention—crystal clear to me—did not read as such, could, I suppose, be construed as proof that he's…