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rachelkaser · 3 years

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Stay Golden Sunday: That Was No Lady

Dorothy dates a married man and struggles with her conscience. Blanche tries to sell Rose her car.

Picture It...

Blanche interrupts Rose and Sophia’s game of Trivial Pursuit to say she’s buying a new car. She can afford it if she can sell her old car -- and, as Sophia points out, Rose needs a car. Blanche is initially resistant, as she doesn’t like the idea of selling to a friend. But she does come around to the idea and offers it to Rose. Rose initially says the car isn’t her type, but Blanche offers to let her have it on a trial basis for two weeks, and Rose accepts.

ROSE: What the heck? You only live once. Might as well be daring! SOPHIA: Rose, it’s a used car. It’s not a seat on a space shuttle.

Dorothy, meanwhile, enters and effuses about her date with a gym teacher named Glen O’Brien. She’s very excited, though she doesn’t know him very well. Rose relates how she was hit with love at first sight for her future husband Charlie, when they were 7 and 8, respectively. He had a small insurance stand, and Rose bought a policy for her wagon. When it was promptly demolished by hogs offended by the smoked ham she was hauling, Charlie paid for a new one out of pocket. The other three Girls can only look on in bafflement.

Weeks later, Dorothy is with Glen in a hotel room. She’s floating on air with happiness, and Glen professes his love for her. Everything seems to be great -- maybe too great. Dorothy asks him to go away to the Bahamas, and Glen says he can’t do it. His whole demeanor changes, worrying Dorothy. He finally confesses the truth: He’s married. Dorothy is shocked and horrified, accusing Glen of lying to her. He tries to justify why he’s still married, but Dorothy doesn’t listen and storms out.

BLANCHE: Oh Rose, wake up and smell the coffee. An auto mechanic is the last person to take a car to. They only make money if they tell you there’s something wrong with it. ROSE: Oh that’s a good point! SOPHIA: . . . Boy I wish I had a car to sell.

Later, Rose complains to Blanche that her car is making funny noises, which Sophia says sounds like a bad sign. However, Blanche talks Rose out of going to a mechanic. Sophia is amazed at Rose’s naivete, and leaves the room. The phone rings, and Rose initially thinks it’s Glen and harshly tells him off -- but it turns out to be an official from the school district, offering Dorothy a teaching job.

Dorothy isn’t ready to go back to work, as she misses Glen. Rose and Blanche play angel and devil on her shoulders, respectively: Rose thinks she needs to stay away from Glen, as he’s married. Blanche, meanwhile, thinks Dorothy should seize happiness with him, even if it’s not in the most moral of ways. The phone rings again, and this time it is apparently Glen. Dorothy turns him down, to Rose’s approval. Rose and Blanche go into the kitchen, and Dorothy immediately calls Glen and asks to meet him.

ROSE: A motel, Dorothy? A cheap, tawdry, bare-bulb den of iniquity? DOROTHY: We didn’t drive to Sodom and Gomorrah, Rose.

Dorothy returns from her date in the middle of the night and instantly gets defensive when she encounters Rose. She confirms to a judgmental Rose that she and Glen went to a motel. Blanche finds them both in the kitchen, and they continue to argue about the morality of what Dorothy’s doing. Rose is still harsh in her judgement, and Dorothy says at least Blanche can relate. But Blanche can’t: She’s never been with a married man. Sophia enters, having overheard, and firmly tells Dorothy she should have more respect for herself than to be a side piece.

Later, Sophia is rocking out on the lanai to a censored song. Rose comes running in, frantic. Blanche also enters and confesses the truth about the car: It’s a piece of junk, and she was hoping to pawn it off on Rose for full price to pay for her new car. Rose says it doesn’t matter now: The car’s been stolen. When Sophia points out the insurance will reimburse Blanche the full price for the stolen car, Blanche is ecstatic. Dorothy enters and Sophia chastises her again. Dorothy begs her mother to leave her alone, as she’s happy, but Sophia doubts that, especially as Glen isn’t going to leave his wife.

ROSE: Blanche? Was the gist of what you were saying before that you intended to cheat me? BLANCHE: Cheat you? Rose, you just analyze everything to death!

Dorothy is in a motel room with Glen (the same motel room from the last time we saw Glen, strangely), and tells him they need to talk. She says she doesn’t want to be the Other Woman, and Glen isn’t willing to divorce his wife, so the relationship isn’t going to work. Glen continues to try and justify staying in his marriage, but Dorothy says he’s trying to have it both ways, and that’s not fair to her. She tells him she’ll hurt after this, but it’s the right thing to do, and walks out.

Dorothy returns home and tells Sophia, asking if her mother’s still angry. Sophia says she wasn’t angry, just concerned to see Dorothy in so much distress. Blanche and Rose return, and ask if Sophia and Dorothy want to go cruising in Blanche’s brand new car. Dorothy initially says she just wants to relax after the day she’s had, and the other Girls agree. After three seconds of silence in the kitchen, Dorothy’s had enough.

DOROTHY: Boy, this is DEPRESSING. Girls, let’s go cruising. BLANCHE: Hey, I know a place where guys wrestle naked in the mud!

“Another date with Mrs. O’Brien’s husband?”

Episodes that deal with the Girls struggling over moral issues are a thorny one, because Golden Girls can -- and does -- handle such quandaries well. This episode, however, isn’t a particularly engaging one. It’s not a total letdown, as it’s saved by the B-plot and Sophia being the voice of reason for everyone involved.

The whole quandary at the heart of the episode is basically, “Dorothy sees married man, tries to make it work, and then realizes it’s not worth it.” If you want to see a nuanced take on infidelity . . . I don’t know, watch The Women, or something, because that’s not what this is. It boils down to Dorothy realizing that the arrangement is too morally wrong for her, and that’s basically it.

DOROTHY: His name is Glen O’Brien. ROSE: Where’d you meet him? SOPHIA: His name is “O’Brien.” Two-to-one, she met him at a gin mill.

Dorothy realizing that Glen’s absolute refusal to leave the wife he claims to no longer love is incredibly unfair to her is a good moment, but the process it takes to get her there is plotted strangely: She insists, right up until the final moments of the episode, that she’s not going to stop seeing Glen and that she’s comfortable with doing the “wrong” thing for the sake of her own gratification, but then switches in those final moments. Sophia keeps insisting Dorothy’s morally conflicted about it, but she denies this right up until the end. It’s not that I don’t buy Dorothy’s internal conflict -- I just would have appreciated it if she herself acknowledged it at some point before the break-up.

Rose and Blanche representing the different moral stances on the matter is also a little unusual. While Rose is coming at it from the morally correct stance, the show makes her judgmental attitude unbearably smug, possibly to make it a little more understandable when Dorothy ignores her. It’s also strange that Blanche is so insistent that Dorothy continue the affair when she later admits she’s never had one herself and didn’t think a married man would be worth the effort -- oh, and it’s also a little mean that Dorothy and Rose just assume Blanche has at some point slept with a married man.

There’s one omission that’s so glaring by its absence that I can’t help but feel a scene or line was cut somewhere: You’d think that, at some point, Sophia would call Dorothy out on the fact that, as a victim of a cheating husband herself, she should be the last person to try to justify an extramarital affair. Even just a single mention of Stan’s name would have been a very effective way of Sophia getting her point across, but it doesn’t happen, and I don’t for the life of me know why.

SOPHIA: So you started up with your married man again. DOROTHY: How did you know? SOPHIA: I’m the Amazing Kreskin. I was listening at the door. DOROTHY: Oh Ma. SOPHIA: Oh, I can’t put my ear to the door, but you can put your--DOROTHY: Ma!

It’s a shame, because the hypocrisy is what makes Dorothy the perfect protagonist of this episode. Her very first spotlight episode was her tearing into her ex-husband for his blatant infidelity, and yet she’s doing everything she can to justify being the Other Woman, trying to find a way to reconcile her morality with her emotions. It would have made the ending, in which Dorothy realizes that she wants to be better than her ex-husband, mean so much more.

For the record, this episode doesn’t do Dorothy any favors by the way it characterizes Glen. Maybe the actor, Alex Rocco, just lacks the necessary charisma -- when this character comes back played by Jerry Orbach in a later episode, it’s much more obvious why Dorothy is attracted to him. Or maybe it’s just a matter of time constraints: Here the character gets maybe three lines of dialogue before he confesses and starts trying to justify himself, and I don’t know if even Jerry Orbach (or any actor, for that matter) had enough charisma to make that work.

Something about the way Glen is written is just... slimy. While he professes to love Dorothy, his dialogue is just littered with manipulative bullshit. When he first tells Dorothy the truth, she immediately gets mad at him for lying to her, and he says, “I couldn’t lie to you. That’s why I told you.” Dude, you did lie to her -- you dated her for three weeks before you told her you were married! Then, when Dorothy breaks up with him, he says, “Please think about what you’re throwing away,” implicitly making her the bad guy who’s ruining the relationship, when he’s the one who’s creating the problem by trying to have his cake and eat it too.

BLANCHE: What’ll you give me for it? ROSE: Oh I couldn’t buy your car. It’s not my type. I want a car that says, “Practical.” Your car says . . . “Available.” BLANCHE: Well just take off my personalized plates.

I do like the B-plot of the episode, because it does exactly what a B-plot needs to do in a serious-ish episode like this: It adds levity and makes the final scene after the painful break-up funny, so the episode ends on a light note. I mean, there’s no rhyme or reason to Blanche saying she knows a place where men wrestle naked in the mud, but goddamn do I need that laugh by that point.

This is also one of the better episodes when it comes to balancing all four Girls evenly across both plotlines. Blanche and Rose are equally preoccupied with the B-plot, while Dorothy gets the lion’s share of the A-plot. In previous episodes, when this has been the case, Sophia’s gotten short shrift, usually consigned to a handful of lines -- though usually, they’re all the best ones.

In this episode, however, Sophia’s the connective tissue that ties the two plots together, being the rational one to point out the problems with Blanche and Rose’s car loan, and also being the voice of Dorothy’s conscience. It’s also one of the first episodes that really makes use of Sophia as an older mother/mentor figure to the other Girls.

One thing to note is how this episode has been edited strategically for copyright reasons: In both the Hulu and Amazon versions of the episode, they’ve carefully cut around Sophia rocking out on air guitar to a particular song on the lanai, probably because neither company owns the rights to the song she’s singing along to. For the record, it’s “Purple Rain,” by Prince. Here’s what the scene looks like on the DVD release:

youtube

I really wish they hadn’t cut this part out of the episode, even if I understand the underlying copyright reasons, since it’s actually very appropriate. “Purple Rain” has lyrics about not wanting to be someone’s “weekend lover” and how the singer “could never steal you from another.” I know that’s not what Prince said the song was about, but with a strictly surface listen, it sounds very apropos to the episode’s story. Also, the part where Dorothy expresses her frustration with Sophia by twisting the volume knob all the way up and blowing out Sophia’s ears is pretty hilarious, not going to lie.

By the way, there’s also a weird subtitle censor in the Hulu version of this episode. Blanche in the opening scene quotes her great-grandfather as saying two things you never sell to a friend are a car and a slave -- “because if either one of them quits working, you’ll never hear the end of it.” Hulu changes that second word to “sleigh,” which I found amusing.

Episode rating: 🍰🍰🍰 (three cheesecake slices out of five)

Favorite Part of the Episode:

BLANCHE: Oh honey, you’ve been hit by the thunderbolt. Love at first sight! It happened to me once. SOPHIA: Once? You’ve been hit by more lightning than the World Trade Center. ROSE: I was hit by the thunderbolt once. SOPHIA: Probably a direct hit to the forehead.

#blanche devereaux #rose nylund #dorothy zbornak #sophia petrillo #picture it #golden girls #stay golden #stay golden sunday #s01e14 #that was no lady

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