The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 5, Episode 3

Written May 3 2023

Episode 3, “Typos and Torsos”

In this episode, Abe accidentally puts a typo in his work and it really bugs him. He ends up sharing with Ethan a graphic story about a plane crash that dismembered a lot of people and Ethan is scared to death. In 1984, Midge visits her son, Ethan, who is all grown up now, in Israel, where he is working on a kibbutz, or a communal settlement in Israel. He is working in the fields with everyone else, when suddenly he hears and sees a helicopter descend down into the fields, and his mother, Midge, gets out of the helicopter and surprises him with an unexpected visit. He seems embarrassed but glad to catch up with her. She catches up with him and he tells her he is training to become a rabbi, but is also getting married and he introduces her to his fiance, Chava, who joined the Israeli army and went to school in America, but doesn’t like Midge much and seems stuck up to Midge. Midge leaves and before leaving, she tells Ethan that she wishes he told her that he was getting married. He apologizes for not telling her earlier. It’s really hard for Midge to see her kids grow up so soon, and it was hard for me, too, because in previous seasons I just saw Ethan and Esther as little kids who had these loving but also crazy parents. But the final season was a reminder that change is the only constant in life, and no matter how successful our careers and lives are, we will have to face getting older and then dying.

The episode flashes back to 1961, and Midge and Joel are setting up Ethan’s sleeping area outside in the hallway because his therapist told them he needed a designated area to sleep outside of his room, so the two of them set up specific markers to designate Ethan’s sleeping area. Early in the episode, Gordon meets in the writer’s room and gives everyone feedback about the jokes they wrote for him to deliver on the show based on whether people thought they were funny. After watching this episode, I have so much more respect for writers in the writer’s room because in recent news this has become more evident because late night TV shows are going dark because the writers for these shows are going on strike for better pay. I really didn’t pay much attention to this at first. In 2007-2008 (more specifically, from November 5, 2007 to February 12, 2008), thousands of film and television screenwriters of writers’ labor unions went on strike. My older sister, who was really into journalism at the time, was reading the news and talking about it, and how this was going to have a huge impact on film and television production. The recent strike is the first in fifteen years, according to AP News, and this strike happened because many film and TV writers failed to reach a new contract with the trade association representing Hollywood studios and production companies. The union wants higher minimum pay, more writers per show and shorter exclusive contracts, and streaming has made it hard for these demands to get met because there is so much content that the writers have to produce and they are not being fairly compensated for it.

Another part that made me reflect was when Joel tells Midge that he thinks therapy is weak, but then she sees her mother, Rose, freaking out over hearing a clatter when there wasn’t any noise and Abe is losing it because an article he published has a typo in it, and it’s driving him over the edge, and even though Midge tells him to calm down he refuses to forgive himself. Rose is also on edge because the matchmakers burned down her tea room and she asks Susie if she can get a gun to protect her from the matchmakers. Honestly, I’m glad Ethan is seeing a therapist and I am also glad Esther saw a therapist later on in life, even though therapy isn’t easy and it’s tough bringing up trauma and childhood memories that weren’t all that great. Midge is also experiencing many ups and downs at work. It’s great because when she is working in the writer’s room, one of the men asks her for her jokes to submit for the show, and she is surprised because up until then they ignored her or told her she wasn’t supposed to write new material in between the show. But the fact that they let her share what she wrote is a big step. The team types it up and asks Gordon for his approval. Gordon looks it over and approves, and Midge is surprised that her joke is actually going to make it into the show.

Until Gordon makes a mistake when sharing the joke, that is. While delivering the joke, he purposefully botches the pronunciation of the punchline. Midge lets out an audible “Are you fucking kidding me?!?” groan and everyone hears her, including Gordon. She later confronts Gordon while he is talking with someone and interrupts their conversation to apologize to Gordon. Because he is busy talking, he reluctantly forgives her but then she tells him he should apologize for telling her joke wrong, but he insists he changed it on purpose. They end up getting in a huge heated argument with each other and it makes the newspaper headlines. Susie calls Midge with the news and Midge finds out she is about to be fired. When she comes in the next day, everyone in the writer’s room is staring at her silently because of what she did, and she brings a shoebox because she doesn’t have a lot of stuff she brought with her to the office. I kind of made me think of “Game Over,” an episode on the show Broad City. In the episode Ilana Wexler gets fired from her day job at Deals Deals Deals for tweeting a graphic bestiality video just days after the investor, Elizabeth (Vanessa Williams) promotes Ilana to run Deals Deals Deals’ Twitter account because of her expertise in Internet memes. She brings a large box to put her stuff in when she gets fired. But it turns out that unlike Ilana, Midge gets to stay at her job and is in fact not getting fired. It reminded me of when I was at my first office job and honestly I was cocky and thought I knew everything, and two years into the job I made a huge mistake that nearly cost the company and almost got me terminated. I didn’t get fired but it taught me a lesson, that I needed to ask for help whenever I didn’t know what to do on an assignment and to always take responsibility for my actions.

Meanwhile, Shirley, Joel’s mother and Midge’s mother-in-law, comes to Joel’s club unannounced. She drinks a lot, she chats up the guests and dotes on Joel, handing out expired crackers to people to cure them of their hangovers. Shirley doesn’t want to go home to Moishe, her husband and Midge’s father-in-law, or stay in the house with him since they are getting a divorce and neither of them is getting along with the other, so she pretty much hangs out at his club. She almost gets in a fight with Mrs. Moskowitz after insulting her. Mrs. Moskowitz has gradually shown how tough she is throughout the show, because honestly at the beginning I thought she was just this sweet little lady with a smile but it turns out that she is no nonsense and even wielded a baseball bat for people who weren’t allowed to come into the club but who tried to anyway. Shirley and Moishe still don’t know that Mei left Joel, and that there is no longer going to be a baby because Mei got an abortion and she also left for Chicago to follow her dreams of becoming a doctor. This blows over one night when Midge checks on Joel at the club and decides to do some stand up after Moishe insults Joel’s band and they walk off the stage, fed up with Moishe’s heckling. However, Midge doesn’t get off scot-free from their heckling, either. Whenever Midge tries to speak, Shirley and Moishe consistently heckle her from the audience and fight with one another, so she ends up having to cut her act short as they kept heckling her. When Midge is in the ladies’ room, Shirley approaches her and asks her if she knows what the deal is with Mei because Joel hasn’t followed up with them about the baby and Mei and him getting married (he announced this to them in episode 1 of this season). Midge knows Shirley will freak out if she tells her that Mei got an abortion and moved to Chicago, so she lies and tells Shirley that Mei moved to China. She tells Joel that she lied but he tells her he will tell them. When Ethan is still sleeping in the hallway, Abe decides to tell him to go back to his bed and debunks what the therapist told Ethan. He tells Ethan this horrifying story about a plane crash that killed many people and includes very vivid and graphic details about the crash, and at the end he tells Ethan that everyone is going to die someday, including him, and that he has to accept that fear is a part of his life and that he has to live with it. Honestly this sat with me because for a long time I have dealt with anxiety and depression, and I often thought about life and death a lot as I got older. Death is still an uncomfortable topic for me but I have realized that it is an inherent part of life rather than a transcendent state divorced from reality. Learning about life and death from a Buddhist perspective actually forced me to appreciate my life even more, because I had wanted to kill myself many times but after reading about what happens after death, I realized it was a better idea to just navigate through the good times and the bad times and to create meaning from them rather than just decide in the here and now that my life was meaningless. One of my close friends passed away early this month, and as difficult as it was to watch her nearing the end of her life, I had to accept that it was a reality and that the process of grief was going to be very difficult. I am very waterworks when someone close to me dies, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, which took many people’s lives, I tried to desensitize myself by reading statistics but at the end I had to understand the very traumatic scale of COVID-19 and how it impacted how I viewed life and death. Ethan ends up sleeping in his own room but has terrible nightmares after what Abe told him. At the end of the episode, they play the song “Mr. Big Stuff” by Jean Knight, which is one of my favorite songs.