5x08 The Princess and the Plea

[9.0/10] The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel already answered the question in some ways. How far would Susie go for Midge? How much will she push to break through those “brick walls” (or glass ceilings)? Is it just business between them, or is there something deeper, more personal that merits going further than she would for anyone else?

The answer came, in so many ways, in “The Testi-rostial”. But it doesn’t hurt to see it again in the present. Midge and Susie have tried everything they can to get Midge booked on The Gordon Ford show. Midge nudged Danny Stevens in such a novel yet funny direction that he tried to poach her. Susie staged a coup to get Mike the producer slot. Here, Midge even pens a sketch for Princess Margaret herself that is tasteful but funny, and absolutely kills in a must-win night for the creative team. And it’s still not enough.

So she makes the titular “plea” to Susie -- use your history with Gordon Ford’s wife, Hedy to get me on the show. Midge doesn’t know what she’s asking exactly. She knows it’s an end run around the gatekeepers who would hold her back from stardom. But she doesn’t understand why this is such a big ask for Susie, and in her defense, Susie doesn’t explain and doesn’t want to explain.

In the end, though, she acquiesces. Susie goes to Hedy and asks her to convince Gordon to jettison his rule and book Midge. She talks to the person she least wants to speak to in the world, someone who hurt her, someone she absolutely does not want to owe anything to, let alone ask for a personal favor from. Hedy herself acknowledges how hard this must be for “Susan.” And by god, the last thing Susie wants is the indignity of having to brook Hedy’s suspicions that her relationship with Midge is something more than professional.

But she does it anyway, because it is more than professional, though not in the way Hedy might think. Susie loves Midge. She wants to support Midge. She wants to break down those barriers together. This is her way of expressing it, in doing something much harder than “hopping over dicks” or haranguing talent bookers. It is, more than fixing Midge’s future Hawaiian wedding, the ultimate sign that when push comes to shove, Susie would do anything for her client, or at least this client.

Because she recognized something in Midge, something that Abe is just now starting to recognize in his daughter. When he sits down to dinner with his pal Gabe, and two more men of letters, Arthur and Henry, he is morose, shaken, unengaged with the Algonquin Table banter and intellectual debate of his contemporaries. His world has been shattered by the simple realization -- he’s done it all wrong.

It’s a long, writerly scene, filled with the kind of introspective and philosophical dialogue that could be ponderous in less deft hands. But the crux of it is simple. Here are four older white men, born of the 1800s, rattled by the constant change around them, trying to make peace with it all and realizing, to their creeping horror, that they may have had the wrong view of the world, of their lives, of their children, this whole time.

It’s a bracing thought. We too live in a time of what feels like epochal change to us in the same way it feels to every generation. There is still something harrowing about Abe’s epiphany, one steadily shared by his dining companions. Here are the educated cosmopolitan men, those expected by 1960s society to not only understand how the world works but be the masters of it. It is their jobs, in the eyes of the community and social hierarchy, to be the builders and caretakers of this great civilization.

Only, to Abe’s hollowing dismay, he sees his granddaughter upsetting all of his biases and expectations and, to his credit, it rocks him. He took his son Noah to Columbia, and never considered doing the same for Miriam. He acknowledges that she bought the place that they now live, borne on the backs of her courage and determination. He recognizes a fearlessness in her that he not only didn’t nurture, but doesn’t understand where it came from. (And even in the throes of his realization, can't countenance that she may have gotten it from his Match-Making Mafia combatant of a wife.)

There is an order, a way the world is supposed to work, that has been passed down from Abe by his father and his father and his father. But not to the daughter who disrupts that and makes him understand how the entire system upon which he’s built his life, the entire dynamic and dichotomy that undergirded his worldview, can be dead wrong, and his brave, persevering daughter, who succeeded despite him not because of him, is the living proof.

In the early stretch of Mrs. Maisel, one of the breakthroughs came in Abe understanding why Midge couldn't go back to Joel. It was the beginning of Abe seeing his daughter. Truly seeing her. And now, through her daughter, he sees her ever more clearly, so clearly that, in Tony Shaloub’s best performance on the show, he’s disturbed and disquieted to think about what he missed, and how he got this whole damn thing wrong.

A visit back to her alma mater with her old college comrades sells how close Midge came to sinking into the life her father would have constructed for her. The collegiate scenes are as vivid and fun as any in the show, with witty bon mots and rapid-fire gags as fit for any table. But they’re also a reminder to Midge that, as much fun as these old friends are, as fondly as she remembers her college days, as much as her former pals admire what she’s accomplished, they’re still a part of that world and don’t quite get that stand-up is her career now, not just a detour until she returns to orbit.

That's what she says to Susie in her Grand Central plea to leverage her relationship with Hedy Ford. She accepts having been the good soldier and trusting the process, but wants to make the final push. She acknowledges that it’s a little selfish, but that she wants more. In truth, Midge is a little unfair. Because she agrees that Susie has gone to the mattresses for her time and time again, but questions how far they can go together if Susie won’t go to the absolute limit to help her succeed.

It’s a little more understandable, though, both because Midge doesn’t know the gravity of what she’s asking of Susie and because we’ve seen what happened at the Jack Paar showcase. Susie protests that if Midge does succeed, she won’t want it to be tainted by having had to call in personal favors. But Midge has tried playing fair. She’s tried working twice as hard and being twice as funny for half the money. And it still hasn’t gotten her where she wants to be on talent and hard work alone. So if the playing field is titled against her for reasons beyond her control, why not use whatever arrows are in their quiver, fair or not?

Because most of all, Midge doesn’t want this to be something she did for a few years before settling back down into the staid life her mother and father had been preparing her for all those years. The show teases some of the good times between her and Joel, and as sweet as those were, as fondly as they both look back on them before things went sour, Midge wants more than that now. And in a way her father is just now starting to understand, she has the courage of her convictions to go out and get it.

When Midge opens up a “Letter to her future self” that she wrote in college, it contains only one word -- “don’t.” Maybe we’ll get the context in a flashback in the series finale, something to put a capstone on the thematic throughline of an unexpected boost into feminist rebellion that began the series. Or maybe we won’t. But for now at least, there’s only one other place that word is used.

When Hedy compliments Midge on the sketch she wrote for Prince Margaret, Midge is deferential, accepting her role as the impetus for the idea but crediting the rest of the writing staff for making it funny. Hedy admonishes her with the same word. Don’t. Don’t eschew credit. Don’t cast aside your laurels. Take them. Take them in a world where even the people who love you, well intentioned though they may be, won’t acknowledge them otherwise.

Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t settle for less than you are. Don’t give in to the expectations to simply play the part that's expected. Don’t stop until you’ve done what you set out to do. Maybe it’s just some teenage pablum scrawled into an old coke bottle. Or maybe, somewhere deep down, Midge already knew.