1x08 Thank You and Good Night

[7.7/10] “Thank You and Goodnight” nicely brings the first season of the show full circle. I think I was expecting something with a little more finality to it. In truth, this feels more like a mid-season finale than a season finale, but that’s alright! What we do get is quite good.

If the first episode of the series was about the path Midge took from housewife living what she imagined to be a perfect life until she was thrust into something different by circumstance, this e episode is about Midge having adapted to that life and grown as a person during her time apart with her husband, given the chance to return to that life.

We obviously don’t want that. Joel seems to mean well, but he plainly doesn’t understand what he did wrong, why things were bad, or why Midge didn’t want him back. He says that he’s going to get a promotion that will provide for them financially, which never seemed to be the issue Midge was concerned about. He says he’s going to become a great comedian, like Midge always wanted, despite that never seeming to be something she wanted to happen. To the contrary, their whole big fight included the reveal that she thought it was just a lark they did as a couple. He doesn’t understand that he hurt her through his disloyalty, through not appreciating what they had, not to mention schtupping his secretary.

Jole’s still looking at this situation through his father’s eyes, thinking that he wasn’t enough of a conqueror, and if he can just do that, he’ll be back in his wife’s good graces. Little does he realize that the deeper roots are that he didn’t appreciate Midge as a conqueror, didn’t fully understand or foster her capabilities, especially not in the way that Susie and, to a lesser extent, Abe do.

To the point, the most disheartening parts of this episode come when it seems like Midge is being squeezed back into her old life. WHen she and Joel wake up together in the morning, he says to her, “did you always look like this in the morning?” a reminder of the absurd beauty routine she felt compelled to complete surreptitiously to meet 1950s housewife standards. When she and Joel seem on the verge of reconciling, she’s back to measuring her ankles in a leotard, jamming herself into those old roles once more. It’s sad to see.

At some level, you understand it. Joel is the mother of her children. They’d been married for four years and together presumably much longer than that. She misses him. She built a life with him. It's hard being alone (tougher yet, alone with your parents), no matter how much personal growth and fulfillment and independence Midge has discovered once she and her husband separated.

Still, the reconciliation leads to several nice scenes. I’m a particular fan of Midge breaking the news to her father. Tony Shaloub reacts brilliantly, with geshrais and anger and demands and recriminations about how his daughter ruined everything but, eventually, sad-sack acceptance. The scene with Midge and Rose is very good too, with Rose feeling put out and alienated, but receiving reassurances that she’s still Midge’s mother and offering some motherly advice in the process.

But the real star of the episode is Susie. I love the way she works around the blackballing, calling in a favor from Lenny Bruce to gin up a crowd and a performance so big and so great that not even the club owner can ignore what Midge’s continued performance would do for the joint. Even better is the way she tells off Joel, recognizing him (not entirely without self interest) as an anchor around Midge’s leg, weighing her down and keeping her from bigger and better things. Her kiss-off is superb.

You even feel for Joel a little (not much, just a tad) when he realizes that he’s been living in a fantasy world. He thought he could just flip a switch, follow his own path, and get his old life back. Instead, as Abe suggests, reconciliation means accepting that things have changed and he seems incapable of that. He hears Midge talking about him on the local record store’s dub and falls apart. He quits his job. He listens bitterly to his wife muse about their reunion on stage. And even when he’s lost everything, he’s forced to admit to the drunken heckler he pummels that she’s good.

And she is! Amy Sherman-Palladinos saved the best performance for last. You can see what a great performer Midge has become over the course of all of this. She has crack comic timing. She knows how to spin the events of Penny storming into her place of business and her husband coming back by for clean underwear and a roll in the way into comic gold. She handles a heckler with expertise and doesn’t miss a beat.In short, she kills. Put under the pressure to deliver the best show of her life for Susie, she knocks it out of the park, finally done trying on different lives on for size and accepting that she has arrived. Mrs. Maisel has arrived.

That’s a good place to end the season, even if the show still leaves a lot of balls in the air for season2 to pick up. In my heart of hearts, I think I might have wished for something a little more definitive, to make this first batch of episodes feel more like a complete unit, even if there’s more places to go in the next batch. But this is, true to Midge’s set, still a lot of quality material that brings much of the show’s interests back to where they started, but in a way that shows how much things have changed. On to season 2!

EDIT: A couple of things I didn’t mention that have stuck with me since I watched the episode.

First, I really loved Abe’s speech about marriage meaning that people change. Him talking about how different Rose was when they were younger, and how much he still loves her, but that part of that love is accepting those changes. It’s a warning, in the vague way that Abe makes warnings, that Midge has changed and that Joel really loves her, he’s going to need to accept that. It’s very sweet in its way.

The echo of it is the exchange between Midge and Joel about her bra. Her confession that she unhooked all but one of the latches for him is funny in its way, but also indicative of all the hidden work she did to make his life easier, the invisible labor to make him feel like he was the projection of 1950s masculinity and domestic bliss they wanted to maintain. He asks about the red marks on her back, and she admits that she powdered them before to hide the redness. It's all part and parcel with the way that Midge wasn’t able to be herself, to be at ease, under the mutual expectations of their marriage, and how any reconciliation would need to acknowledge those changes.

Joel seems to want things to go back to how they were, only with him truly assuming the role of manly success and provider rather than pretending to play the part. Little does he realize that it would mean an entirely different call sheet this time around. We’ll see how it goes.

Hell yeah. There's something so interesting about how this season wraps up, how it seems to inject a bit of chaos. I like knowing there's a good sense of where these characters are in relationship to where they were, but it's also nice to have a bit of a question as to what happens next. Although to be frank, I'm surprised I'm even typing this. I'm usually not a big fan of endings that leave the door open so heavily--particularly not on an opening season when during production there probably wasn't a guarantee of a second season. But I guess I like it here because what this season brought to the table was so confident. This is one of the stronger opening seasons I've seen in awhile. And yeah, there are a couple of stumbles along the way. Some of the filmmaking feels like it lends itself to melodrama. There are shots that linger on characters while they "make decisions" in a way I found a bit on the nose in the length of time they lingered, or even the freeze frame the season goes out on felt a little cheesy. But that's all very nit-picky and shallow. Obviously none of those moments ruined anything for me and, really, who am I to point out filmmaking fault in something I binged so quickly. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is like lightning in a bottle, a stellar piece of period formalism with a feminist strike more refreshing and authentic than anything else I've seen this side of Booksmart.