Libby watches perceptively from outside the interview room as Bill and Virginia complete each other’s sentences, seeing their chemistry catch on camera. She clearly wants someone to shine the spotlight on her, and that happens to be Robert. After she invites him into her home, Libby gets the chance to explain herself. She tells Robert that she was too prim and mature as a young girl, and she vows to be more than just an ordinary woman. “Your wanting to be good makes you quiet… so quiet that you forget the sound of your own voice,” she tells Robert. “This thing that you’ve been afraid of forever… someone is seeing that you’re not invisible.”
While Robert should take Libby’s attempt to compare her struggle and feeling of invisibility to his (and the broader African-American community), what follows that terrifically performed two-person scene is one of the least convincing moments ever to happen on Masters of Sex. Libby and Robert have sex. What the scene could have used was him storming out of her home, not into her bed. The moment is entirely false. Meanwhile, despite her yearning for a bit of danger and approval, doesn’t she have two kids and a home to tend to at the time of her affair?
Even though this plot development does not work, it does help to tie together one of the central themes of the episode: one’s lack of self-confidence. Libby is not the only character to grouse about her insecurity as a youth in this episode. Flo tells Langham, after a woeful role-playing sexual experience with him, that she spent much of her life waiting for men to notice her. Flo could only imagine receiving a pleasure like Rhett Butler did, taking control over Scarlett O’Hara. In the wake of Clark Gable’s heart attack being in the news that day, Flo mentions the actor at various times during the episode, especially when thinking about the wild passion she imagines a man like Gable could offer her. (Her closing line of the episode, “It would be nice if you gave a damn,” is a clever callback to the famous line from Gone with the Wind.)
Meanwhile, Bill’s final pose, like a baby cradled in Virginia’s lap, calls back to his own anxiety related to his impotence. It is the inverse of an earlier shot from the episode, which showed their bodies pressed up against each other, vertically, as the camera tilted downward on the bed. While Masters of Sex has done a superb job exploring the supposed dysfunctions of its ensemble this season, one would have hoped the writers had not brought forward Libby’s lack of control over her marriage and sexual destiny with such unconvincing plotting. That scene mars an otherwise terrific episode of Masters of Sex, which manages to be both funny and powerful.
