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Tonight, Swingtown left Funky Town in favor of Existential Town. All just a train ride away from Chicago, which is convenient. When you are searching for your authentic self, you don't want to leave your time zone if it all possible.
Which means Tom is out of luck, because he's off to Japan again. Trina is in the airport lounge to see him off when they run into her high school sweetheart, Luke. It seems to make Tom nervous when Trina suggests that her former lover keep her company while her husband is away. Which makes me wonder about exactly what their rules are, because apparently married neighbors are OK and single ex's who live a few states away are not. I just need some more parameters, here.
Bruce decides to help Susan find her authentic self by telling her that he got her a position on the ladies auxiliary organization that his boss's wife runs. Which means that he is actually helping himself find his next promotion. It's a ploy that Susan sees through right away. However, because she is far less progressive then her night of Quaalude driven kink would imply, she concedes to take part in planning the yearly gala for the children's hospital. She also decides to ask Janet to go with her to the planning luncheon at the local country club. How much pain can one person endure? Let's find out!
Janet gets right to work at finding her inner snob, telling Roger that the ladies who lunch are exactly the kind of people they should be friends with. And then she immediately presses him to find his inner salesman with a fatter paycheck, by telling him he needs to ask his boss for a raise. He agrees and also gives her extra money to buy a new dress for the gala. At the luncheon, Bruce's boss's wife, Rita, spills her Bloody Mary on her new white suit and Janet swoops in to the rescue with her amazing artificial sweetener fix. She wins accolades and a personal invitation to the gala from the grateful Rita. Susan is less then impressed with how the ladies are more into their lunch than actually working with the sick kids they raise money for. Still, it's a fair sight nicer than what their husbands are raising money for. Namely, a betting pool on who will nail the new floor runner, Melinda, first.
Throughout the course of the evening, we see Trina and Luke travel down memory lane with Tom calling more often then usual to check up on them. Susan invites Tom, Trina and Luke to the gala. I had hoped that there might be some juicy side story about Tom & Trina running into some socialite whose marriage they ruined, but alas, Sex and the City already did that story line with Samantha. Instead, we get Roger plucking up his courage (or his fear of Janet) to ask for a raise. This goes the opposite of 'well'. His dread cancels out his individuation, as Janet meets his train with a rental tuxedo for him and he tells her his boss agreed that he deserved a raise. Which is not an absolute lie, because he did agree. Right before he fired him.
We also get to see Janet with a slightly better hairstyle, the men is some slightly awful looking tuxedos, and Bruce kiss Rita's ass to a mortifying degree. Rita and her ladies invite Susan and Janet to join their club, which delights Janet. But Susan barely waits for the invitation to settle before trying to find a way to back out, leading Bruce to drag her away and beg her not to turn them down. She tells him that their organization isn't for her and he reveals the essence of his existence by passively-aggressively asking what happened to being open to all options. Susan tries to hold on to her own self determinism in the face of her husbands bad faith. I try to hold onto my dinner while learning that Trina was a debutante, who danced with Luke at her coming out cotillion.
Susan retreats to the bathroom, where she runs into Miranda. Miranda asks which trader she is married to, and compliments Bruce, calling him 'one of the good ones'. She also reveals that she is the most self actualized person in the episode, because she is aware of what the men she works with think of her, yet she uses it to her advantage without feeling inauthentic (ie. cheap) because she knows who she is. Bruce knows who she is too and he scolds Susan when he sees her conversing with "a lowly runner" after insulting Rita. He also reveals the bet that the other men have, which doesn't improve Susan's opinion of him. Miranda comes out on top, making a deal with one of the men to tell people she slept with him so they can split the pot.
Janet decides to live in the moment at the gala and drops $100 at the auction on a dinner for two at the country club she is so desperate to join. Which means that Roger has to entreat Susan to try and get the check back, since he was fired and they cannot afford it. Roger is not suffering from two much angst over the matter, as he admits that he hated his job and is glad to be free of scaring people for a living. Susan does get the check back, but also buys them the diner herself, letting Janet live in her dream world a little longer.
Speaking of dreamworlds. Luke comes on to Trina at the gala, saying that Tom doesn't have to know. She tells him that yes, he does and Tom comes up just in time to utter the second worst line of the night: "We're a package deal". Luke decides it's not a bad deal and goes back to their place. However, just as we are getting hot camera angles of several pairs of feet on the edge of a bed (gosh, whatever are they implying?) Tom excuses himself. Trina searches him out not long after to find out what is wrong. Which is when Tom utters the absolute worst line of the night: "He gets a part of you I can never have. He gets your childhood". He manages to say it in such a way as to make it indescribably creepy.
In the same vein. Laurie's teacher announces that their final will be an oral exam where they will have to define and describe existentialism and striving for their authentic desires by using examples from their own lives. Laurie defines, but gives no examples, despite how he pushes her. Because he's an idiot, apparently. She later confronts him about how she couldn't tell the class what her authentic self wanted, because it was him. He points out that he's no longer her teacher and they make out. Also creepy.
In good news, B.J. and Rick were sent to summer camp, so we didn't see them or Sam at all. In bad news, Susan totally lost any sense of backbone by caving to Bruce's wishes in regards to her joining the ladies auxiliary. I refuse to go into the riveting plot line about what kind of wall paper Susan wanted, because it was slowly destroying my will to live. Do you agree?
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Susan's backbone was fortified by her decision to join the ladies' group and try to make it a more serious charity. She didn't join because of Bruce - she joined because she saw an opportunity to expand her own horizons and the fact that it might help Bruce's career was incidental.
NO I dont agree with you. Your description is broiled with your self-absorbtion. You sound like one of those "celebrity experts" on TMZ you descrption doesn't focus on charachter development. For example, your parting shot on Susan agreeing to help her husband's career. Gee...isnt that what a PARTNER should do? Marriage is a comprise. Reality is that you dont always get to focus on your individualism. And the creepy comments? Please! Are you 12? You have no business commenting on complex relationships. Find another blog like Britney Spears.
Love your recap. Love this show.
Regarding the ongoing wallpaper symbolism, how many times have you walked into an outdated home, looked at the walls and asked yourself, "What were they thinking?" Now we have some fresh insight.
Susan is consumed with thoughts about being authentic, being open-minded about change, making sacrifices for her husband (and their relationship), etc. Susan is struggling with her role as a woman of her time, and yearning to break free from convention, from everyday norms and societal pressures. In an act of reckless abandon, she tears down old wallpaper from her living room during a party she hosts, welcoming guests to express themselves though graffiti on the walls of her new home in upscale suburbia. Susan is clearly a woman who is questioning everything she has ever been taught to believe, particularly her place in society and in marriage. Her choice of wallpaper (i.e. her external environment) comes to represent her changing ideals and identity. She cannot come to terms with the structured, geometric sample wallpaper selections she carefully considers. In the end, Susan selects a light-colored feminine floral pattern with subtle watercolor accents, less rigid and less dark than perhaps what might have been chosen by her husband and daughter, each of whom are experiencing wallpaper moments of their own.
On another note, in your recap you mentioned Tom's creepy lines (e.g. "he gets your childhood"). His words do not come across as creepy to me, especially since the show has a somewhat dirty feel to it overall. Since you brought it up, however, I have to wonder if these lines do more to expose the life experience of the show's creators than the characters themselves. I imagine the writers, consultants, set designers, props departments, etc., are desperately fixated on their childhood--a whole community of fanatical anachronistic geeks, whose partners and spouses (if applicable) just don't "get" their fascination with the 1970s.
Finally, regarding your comment on Rick and B.J. (I knew a few)--these characters represent millions of forty-something men who were boys back then. Being one of them, I wince at moments in their storylines as if looking at old pictures of myself wondering "how did I ever have any friends?" No wonder the walkie-talkies remained silent as B.J. revealed to Sam her 10.0 standing as she looked at him from her second floor window, her mother laying in a heap on the floor downstairs with a lit cigarette in one hand and an open vodka bottle in the other. Ouch, that is a painful memory.
This show is AWFUL!!!
A bunch of soap opera cr*p.
B-O-R-I-N-G!!!!
This episode was the best one yet- it showed how complicated the character's choices/lifestyles can be. There was a real depth to this plot, and I hope "Swingtown" can stick around so that we can see how things pan out.
I wallowed through the first episodes and didn't bother with this one. Just thought I'd read and see if it got any better ... obviously it hasn't.
swingtown is a special show---this episode is the beginning of a new arc for the series and i can't wait to see where it's going---love roger and susan together.
Overall, this show has been pretty good, as long as they don't spend too much time on the teenagers' lame storylines. Thankfully, the kids were mostly MIA in this episode, but we were still subjected to the cliched storyline with Laurie and her teacher (Oops! I mean FORMER teacher).
I can't beleive that no one has mentioned that Luke was played by Ryan McPartlin, who also plays Captain Awesome on NBC's 'Chuck'. I laughed as I imagined how upset Ellie and Chuck would be if they found out that Awesome was involved in a threesome! However, I figure Morgan would be intrigued... ;-)
It's interesting how Tom and Trina are always saying that they don't get jealous when their spouse has relations with other people, but Tom was definitely jealous of Luke and Trina's "history". Prior to this episode, I had ***umed that Trina's family was wealthy because she and Tom live in a huge house on the lake, and I didn't figure that Tom's commercial airline pilot salary would be enough for their extravagant lifestyle. I guess Trina was the debutante bad girl decades before Paris Hilton came along! :-0
Having a sexual fling with the neighbors is one thing. Having an extended visit while the spouse is away with an old flame is another. It is a question of boundaries: emotional ones. It would be better if this show were paired with "Secret Diaries" on Showtime instead sitting here on NBC. The attempts to segregate sex from emotional connection -- and the havoc that wreaks in a person's life, or just the toll it takes on more (emotionally) intimate relationships -- are complementary themes in both. Neither is done very well, though - cable or no.
This show is great, I am actually friends with this guy, he and his wife are swingers. It's true like in the show, they are always trying to get new victims. I just talk to him over the phone.