Lessons in Chemistry
CH3COOH Season 1 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating «Previous Next» « Previous Episode Next Episode
Lessons in Chemistry
CH3COOH Season 1 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating «Previous Next» « Previous Episode Next EpisodeNow we’re really cooking — metaphorically and literally speaking. Sure, Elizabeth thinks Walter’s offer to host a cooking show is insane (and it definitely is; this woman has zero television experience, and I mean that as both on-air talent and an actual viewer of television), but when it becomes clear that Mad would do better at a more advanced (read: expensive) school, Elizabeth has to consider it. Selling Tupperware won’t cut it, and when Boryweitz, now the head of Hastings Lab thanks to making a name off of Elizabeth and Calvin’s work, offers her a position as a junior chemist, it is so insulting she has no other choice but to jump into TV. It certainly doesn’t hurt that when she asks Walter how much it would pay, he responds, “More than you’ve ever made.”
Supper at Six is off and running. Of course, it has a steep hill to climb to have any chance of success, especially with a station owner like Phil holding the show’s fate in his grubby, sexist hands. When he catches the initial rehearsals, he’s happy about the tight — very impractical — dress they put Elizabeth in, but he looks like he might hurl when she starts talking about the pH of chicken skin. He wants her to be suggestive and sexy, you know, what every woman wants in her cooking show. He wants her to end each show by mixing a drink for “her husband” because that’s what men deserve. Phil is such an outrageously terrible person it is hilarious to watch. It’s even more hilarious when Elizabeth pushes back. When Walter first brings Phil and his notes up, her immediate reaction is to ask herself if she actually cares what this Phil person thinks — the answer is simply, unequivocally “no.”
Thankfully, Walter doesn’t much care about Phil’s demands, either. In fact, Elizabeth seems to have found a great partner in Walter. The two bond over single parenthood as Mad and Amanda become closer friends. Walter really listens and is genuinely empathetic when he learns about Calvin, who Elizabeth describes as her soul mate. When Elizabeth tries to extend the same empathy for Walter, who explains that his wife left him and Amanda three months prior and is currently on some spiritual retreat, he stops her: “We weren’t in love; I don’t even know if she has a soul.” And it’s not just because he makes us laugh — Walter is great because he sees such goodness in Elizabeth. He tells her he thought she’d be good for this show not because of her looks or her expertise but because of the way she shows respect to everyone she talks to — she never talks down to people, and she’s able to meet them where they are “and somehow raise them up.” It’s quite lovely, especially after how we’ve seen male colleagues treat Elizabeth in the past.
When Phil raises hell about the status of Supper at Six, Walter knows the show needs some changes — but those changes have nothing to do with what Phil wants. Walter wants more of Elizabeth. He wants her to be more of herself. He certainly doesn’t want the version of her that Phil does, but he doesn’t want the unfeeling scientist Elizabeth tried to present when she does a run-through with her own script. He tells her that he wants the real her — being a scientist is just one part of who she is.
When Supper at Six has to go on two weeks ahead of schedule (again, preposterous, but sure) because the reruns of whatever show they’ve been airing have been tanking, Elizabeth really has no choice but to be herself. She stands behind the kitchen counter they’ve built for her in a dress of her choosing (the lab coat will come later) and a pencil behind her ear. She opens the show by talking about how important cooking dinner is and how precious a woman’s time is. “In my experience, people do not appreciate the sacrifice that goes into being a mother, a wife, a woman,” she says, making sure the audience knows they have her respect before making sure they know that what they’re about to make together is important and it matters.
After the show, Phil is livid about a focus group from the audience who use words like bored, punished, and saddened to describe how they felt watching the show. But that’s not the whole story of the focus group — that’s just what the men in the group said. The two women in the group, who continuously get talked over throughout, describe how they feel after watching it differently: Capable is the word one uses. And just as Phil is laying into Elizabeth about the whole “making a drink for your man at the end of his long day” thing and Elizabeth bites back with an interesting point — “Why do you assume that his day was longer than hers? Why don’t you make the fucking drink?” — the phones outside are ringing off the hook. They are all women calling in to say how much they loved the show and asking about ingredients for the next episode. In short: Supper at Six is an immediate hit.
There is one surprising person who has a problem with Elizabeth’s overnight success: Mad Zott. Poor Mad. Between transferring schools and her mother’s new job completely upending their time together, everything in Mad’s life is changing. Even when Elizabeth tries to make up for not being home as much with diner pancakes for dinner, their chat about her new school gets continually interrupted by a waitress who is a big fan — she thanks Elizabeth for her episode about “soufflés and rising to the occasion.” It’s clearly just the beginning for the Zott ladies adjusting to Elizabeth’s growing fame.
Mad does, however, find a way to use her solo time: She begins looking for more information about her dad. Spurred by that family-tree project, Mad is no longer satisfied with just knowing that her dad “was a brilliant scientist, kind, and Elizabeth’s favorite person” before Mad came along. While alone in the house, Mad goes into the office where Calvin’s things remain boxed up and untouched. She winds up finding a bunch of his demerits from back in school, and in a shuffle to get ready when her babysitter picks her up to take her along to choir practice, she stuffs a few in her pocket.
It’s a fortuitous sequence of events because while waiting for Linda to finish practice, Reverend Wakely spots Mad sitting in the pew. He strikes up a conversation with the precocious little girl and immediately takes a liking to her. He asks about the family-tree paper she has in front of her, and she tells him about her dad. “People say you can’t miss what you never had, but I think people are wrong, don’t you?” she asks him. When she shows him the demerits and declares them a dead end to knowing more about Calvin since it doesn’t say what school he went to, Wakely so badly wants to help. He notices the emblem on top of the slip is a symbol for St. Luke, so Mad’s dad must’ve gone to a school called St. Luke’s. It’s not a bull’s-eye, but it does narrow things down a little. The next time he runs into Mad, he reveals that he’s been looking into it for her. He has a list of all the St. Luke’s across the country he could find in the phone book — well, all of them save for a few he left for his “new favorite detective” to look into. The hunt for Calvin Evans’s story is very much on.
Lab Notes
• The Sloanes don’t get much screen time in this episode, but it is nice to see that the Zotts and Sloanes eat dinner together all the time and feel almost like family at this point. Harriet has indeed become a full-fledged lawyer, and Charlie is still working night shifts at the hospital — something that seems to be a slowly growing source of tension.
• When Elizabeth goes to Hastings Lab for a reference (when she’s considering a position at a different facility), she goes believing that Donatti is still in charge. Boryweitz informs her that the board gave him Donatti’s job, hoping for some “new blood” at Hastings. That can’t be it, can it? Donatti, a fraud who’s now been on the cover of Scientific America, deserves a bigger, much more public comeuppance.
• When Mad’s teacher notes that Mad’s been complaining about the lack of Norman Mailer available at school, Elizabeth’s response is: “Well, she is interested in misanthropic characters.”
• I know I’m the target audience, but Walter’s little speech about television almost brought me to tears! “You know what I love about TV? Everything. It has the power to transport. And entertain. It can make you feel a part of something.” Keep going, Walter! TV rules!
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