In the aftermath of the horrible dinner, where their table was invaded by a nervous, determined, yet ultimately dissolute David Addison, the ‘happy’ couple, Sam and Maddie, wake up together the next day.
“You okay?” Sam says, groggy.
“
Everything’s going to be okay,” Maddie responds.
Off by only the first word, then.
Maddie heads to the office. There it seems Bert Viola’s surveillance assignment netted the photos they need to complete the McLafferty/Johnson case. The other man of the hour is not as obliging.
Maddie asks what David really had in mind with his uninvited appearance at the restaurant the previous day. Also, how he recovered, since he demolished the better part of a vineyard in one sitting.
“Nothing a liver transplant wouldn’t fix,” David scoffs at the one problem, then moves from suppression to flat-out lie. “Ah, yes, it’s about time we see that Herbert Viola is promoted to full-fledged Blue Moon flatfoot. He’s been doing the work of
three short men in this office.” Sure. Uh-huh.
That’s the
real reason David broke into a personal get-together, blushed like a sunrise, and when unable to complete his announcement, drank himself into oblivion. Maddie doesn’t buy it for a second.
There’s no budging Dave for now, so the day carries on. Maddie goes back to her office, ignoring a call from client Elaine Johnson, and ironically a chance to tell her about the success of their photography efforts. You know something’s up when the normally workaholic Maddie, who so often defended the agency from rough waters where clients and money were hard to come by, just blandly pays no heed to a chance to celebrate an actual victory.
If everyone had such a good time, Maddie wonders to herself, why did it look terrible? Why is David kidding and Maddie feeling so wrong? Why did all involved, she, Mr. Addison and Sam, all try to bluff their way through that night and then even
bother to lie about it starting first thing the next morning—when they were all there, and they knew precisely what happened? Just what is going on?
Secretary Agnes Dipesto stops by.
David had earlier claimed to have a new girlfriend, Monique, and plans with her later that evening. Or should I say, someone else did the claiming for him—there is no such person as that woman. Agnes pretended to be the one on the other end of the line, so Addison could hide the fact he has no one in his life. (Maddie, in a very strange turn of events, is now out-socializing David. This would be odd even if we didn’t have to consider David is covering up something important: all his plans to get Maddie’s attention have backfired and are now hurting
him.)
“There’s no Monique.
I’m Monique,” Agnes confesses. “Is there really a Sam?”
“Yes, there’s really a Sam.”
“Is he really terrific?”
“Truth is, Miss Dipesto, they’re
both really terrific.”
Huh? Agnes had only asked about one man, but Maddie delivered the truth about two, and put them on the same level, no less. It’s a revelation, and oddly enough it seems to register more with Agnes than her supervisor.
The work must go on. They meet with client Elaine Johnson to show her the photos from the spying efforts. Although these do prove Mr. McLafferty and his wife are, let’s say, not much at odds anymore, Elaine says only hearing their voices will show if any actual love is back. Spending the night in bed may not mean a thing.
A theory that might not fly with the people she is addressing…
Nevertheless, Johnson asks that the detectives get audio recordings of the next meeting of the couple.
Once they leave the client and get back out on the road, Dave pleads he’ll have to call it off with ‘Monique’ and offers to do the work alone, but Maddie cleverly boxes him out by insisting on coming along. She pretends she doesn’t want to mess up another dinner with Sam by having David traipse in with some weird problem—better to keep an eye on the situation (and all the people in it) under her own lights.
Note the ever-increasing layers of deception.
Everyone is dishonest in this one, from David, to Maddie, to the cheating lovers, to the nice lady who answers the office phone.
This is also Maddie’s answer to David’s intrusion on the dinner. She is starting to figure out just what it all really means, and will not miss a chance to spring the same trap on him.
“I like Sam,” David offers, but Maddie is not exactly mollified.
“Who
cares who you and Sam like?” she snaps back.
“Well, for what it’s worth…” David begins.
“
It’s worth nothing!” Maddie thunders.
This feeling of being cornered as the two men fight over her, leaving herself almost an afterthought, will reverberate for Maddie from then on. Since her failed venture into freedom in “Blonde on Blonde,” she was embarrassed into silence, and reverted to her normal ‘work hard/keep your private life off limits’ personality.
Back to the Blue Moon office, where they are greeted by none other than Sam himself. It’s not so clear why he is here this time, as he and Maddie have nothing on the schedule and it’s not the dinner hour. Perhaps that’s just the point: he wants to catch her off guard, so she doesn’t have time to arrange anything with David. (He’s a little too late for
that…)
Agnes, for one, could care less. She gazes at Crawford as if he just made the sun rise. David spots the man and reacts with the same striking combination of pretend smile and cautious glare as Sam did toward him when he showed up at the table. The men shake hands, but the scene once again has the taut atmosphere of a face-off between gunslingers at high noon.
David mentions the scrap at the gas station, where Sam had to assist him in a battle with the huge lug who drove into Sam’s car. Or did David help Sam? From what they say here, David
apparently did better in the fight—“I’m surprised you were able to see anything, much less land a punch,” Crawford says.
“Yeah, well, I did manage to get in a few,” Addison laughs.
Sam kids about the
awful bruise that takes up almost half his face. David’s face, meanwhile, looks polished as could be after such an event. Not only are there no new wounds you can tell, but one can hardly even still trace the remains of the scrape he got in the garbage bin jump two nights previous.
David, drunk out of his mind and facing a man nearly twice his size, was able to do better in a hand-to-hand duel than the nearly sober and supposedly smarter Crawford.
Pause to reflect.
The phone rings. Agnes has forgotten that it exists. As she might as well have toward poor Bert: her boyfriend rescues the phone call and recites an anodyne message while glaring down the offending interloper. Viola then wanders off. (That was a moment in which he did something strange, but at least direct, in order to ward off the man who might steal his lady friend; someone else in the office could learn from him, perhaps…)
David is here beginning to be torn between his obvious desire to see Sam wiped off the face of the planet, and the dawning realization that if Maddie makes the wrong decision, it might be time for David to get out of the way. A terrible pain, to be sure, that he conceals in typical fashion for him by laughing about it and then denying it exists.
Maddie—hello, anybody remember her?—pipes up with her cheerful commentary, “I had a nice time too.”
And nobody cares. The conversation comes to a screeching halt.
The three dawdle lamely, until finally they break off so Sam and Maddie can walk to Ms. Hayes’ office.
Once the door is safely shut behind them, Sam and Maddie kiss. He invites her out for another evening together, but she pleads work. Foiled again.
This is another side of the suspicion in bloom—David had tried to get Maddie to go on yesterday’s stakeout and then to dinner with him, instead of Sam; when that failed, David lied about Monique; Maddie appointed herself David’s second in order to keep him from covering for that lie; and here Sam is obviously trying to not just enjoy his time with Maddie, but fish out exactly how serious she is toward spending time with David. Although it’s in the context of something necessary for her job, he can’t shake her out of it, and that clearly bothers him far more than missing a sunset.
Despite the frequent complaints from David that Maddie treats him like a heel because she doesn’t want to look like a weak boss (some of which may be true), it’s interesting to see the relationship from a third party’s point of view. David doesn’t think Maddie treats him with enough friendship or mercy. To Sam, it looks like there’s entirely too much coziness going on already.
How did Sam and Maddie fall so far, so fast? What happened to the sense of pleasant surprise and good luck that night when Maddie supposedly picked up his message?
“This is a place where most people prefer to keep their private life…
private,” Sam chuckles, meaning the office, only it’s not just a punchline. It’s a warning too. He smiles and pops up and down on his feet—a gesture we will see repeated not too long after this, for different reasons but with the same odd combined happy/nervous effect.
It’s almost as if they’re strangers again.
How are they going to get the contentment back?
Maddie pretends it was never gone in the first place. What’s to worry?
Sam doesn’t press for details, but we can guess he knows the honeymoon is over before it began.
Back to work.
David worries if Maddie is really all right with going to do the spying project that night. Maddie bluffs her way through it this time. They get everything set in the observation van across from the McLafferty residence.
So they watch until Mrs. McLafferty arrives and, sobbing loudly, begins typing. Now that’s odd. Why would a person whose marriage was supposedly in rebound need to pop some paper in the machine to set down her thoughts?
Wait a minute. If the
mistress in the case is so open as to go get help to make sure she can keep up the affair, is there really a rebound going on? Or is the whole thing a fraud?
The answer, for shame, is the latter—and that’s not a novel the woman of the house is starting on the ol’ Selectric either. It’s a note. Uh-huh,
that kind.
The detectives rush for the front door, but are too late. A gunshot rings out. David pulls up a little ahead of Maddie and warns her not to go on. “
No,” he urges, “
don’t look.”
Alan is at the house and wonders how he’s going to tell the children. His two sons are at the grandmother’s place because “Rita has her art class.”
Wait a minute. Have you ever heard of kids having to go to all the trouble of
staying at someone else’s home just because of an
art class?No, the reason you keep kids separate from one of the parents is because you are anticipating a divorce.
…Or worse.
“I don’t deserve anyone’s kindness. I don’t know what happened…
today.” Note how the last word in that sentence sounds tacked on. The preceding lines add up to a definite
Crime and Punishment moment for him. He also rambles on about prior affairs and the likelihood his wife had sussed these out as well.
This is a huge hole in Alan’s story. However, grief and shock are so thick in the air that no one has time to question this right now.
On the way home, Addison waxes sympathetic toward the late woman, and Maddie is the one who expresses a token understanding of Alan’s track record of “growing apart and becoming attracted to other people.” That’s odd. Not that David would exactly gloat over a suicide, but that he feels sorry for the jilted person. Apparently he’s often been the one who gets to do the jilting. Maddie, on the other hand, usually seems to be the more traditional and romantic person who makes it look like she places a lot of stock in seriously giving your heart. Yet here she is almost ‘seeing the point’ when someone wanders off track in their marriage. That is pretty odd. This whole episode is filled with instances of people feeling out of place and trying to cover it up.
“Talk around it all you want, it’s cut-and-dried, bottom line, everyday betrayal,” David fumes.
“Since when are you so judgmental about sleeping around?” Maddie speculates.
Since two days ago. And
don’t ask him why.
Sam, meanwhile, languishes in Maddie’s house. He’s fixed a dinner, having expected her to be home by now. He stares into space and listens to wistful music. The couch looks uniquely empty.
Half. Although the excuse is legitimate—work—we know he
doesn’t like it at all that Maddie is out with someone in particular. It’s rare that we see things from his point of view. We don’t want to sympathize with Crawford, having rooted for the other two to become a couple for so long, but in this show, they have to tell every side of the story—and it
does have an impact.
Finally Ms. Hayes walks in the door. Sam gets up to greet her. We can see from the look on his face before she walked in, he was all kinds of sad and cross, but he tries to put this aside.
Maddie takes in the vista of the fancied-up living room with humbled surprise. “You made
lamb?” That’s sweet—almost
too so, as if the fellow is once again forced to outdo his absent enemy. Crawford must have been thinking that since Maddie took so long, she may have stopped for dinner, or something else.
That’s not true, but we’ve seen David be the picture of jealousy and anxiety for so long, it’s a bombshell to learn the other man is playing catch-up in just as much of a panic. Crawford comes from a different social stricture, like Maddie herself, so he tries to express the dilemma in different terms. Instead of the verbal and physical brashness of Addison, Crawford acts on his feelings by first taking Maddie out, then trying to duplicate that elegant feeling in the more attentive, individual setting of home. He also offers to run her a hot bath.
And it still may not work.
“You don’t know me as well as you think,” Hayes warns gently.
“
I know you better than you think I do,” Sam returns.
His grasp is very much slipping on the hope for a future with this woman. And he knows it. So he steps up the pace.
Sam does the bouncing-on-his-heels act again, and this time arrives at a very different statement.
“I was waiting for you to get home,” he says—note
that word—“and it didn’t make me crazy. Made me kinda happy.” Is that all? “Knowing that you’d be coming home.
Sometime.” Ha ha. Yeah, sure. “To
me.”
That’s the important part, isn’t it. “So come on. How about we make it official? Wife and wife.”
Notice the way Maddie’s face is
half in and half out of shadow. Also, the way she
frowns upon first hearing those magic words tumble from his lips.
To some women, this is the most anticipated moment of their lives.
So what’s going on
here?“What are you thinking?” Sam asks, reacting to the downright sullen look on Maddie’s face. What she says is something no would-be groom wants to hear.
“I’m thinking that my head’s going to explode.”
“C’mon, Maddie, you’ve got to help me more than that…” Sam asks, crestfallen.
“
It’s nothing. But…maybe it’s not nothing. Maybe it is
something.
I’m confused. I’m so confused. I just wish someone would tell me what to do.”
These could be the most important words she’ll say until the conclusion of the next episode. Maddie rarely brings forth her innermost feelings, and this is not only honesty, it’s a bullet train.
After spending some time—the rest of which we do not see—with Sam, Maddie heads off, in naught but gown and coat, to see about that pesky case from work.
That case is named David.
Soon as David opens the door, Maddie starts right in. “That night when you interrupted my dinner with Sam, what were you going to tell me?” She refuses to brook his hesitancy and looks on the verge of forcing a confession—before she turns around and sees what David’s place is really like.
Because that’s the best thing to call it. A ‘place.’ It is definitely a location of some sort. It has walls, a ceiling and little else.
Still, the host does all he can to make his guest feel like she is at home. Or somewhere. “I think I got some food…” He drags over a storage case and they both sit down.
Even Dave doesn’t make any effort to maintain the ‘help Viola get a license’ façade any longer. Neither, however, does he volunteer the real story. In a sweet moment, David offers, “Glad you stopped by, I’ve been meaning to have you over.” Who knows if this is true…
“David, what are we going to do?” Maddie cuts in. You get the idea she isn’t referring to the sad tale of the McLaffertys.
“I don’t know,” David says. “There’s always the bedroom—it was a joke,
bad joke,” David hastily retreats.
He asks how she was able to escape the watchful eyes of her boyfriend, Mr. Wonderful.
“You just left him there, huh?” Addison says, in a tone of both downcast surprise and some pity as well.
“He’s perfect for me.” Maddie is at sea here, and it is one of the few times up to now she gets to make clear this is just as rough for her as it is for the men. “But you and me…
you and me, we…”
Maddie breaks down crying, one of the few times she has allowed herself to do this in front of him. “I can’t believe you’re going to
sit there and let me go through this by myself.”
David throws an arm around her.
“I hate you, David Addison,” Maddie blusters.
“I know. I hate you too, Maddie Hayes. I’ve always hated you.”
When she sits back up, the next thing
happens naturally, as if it’s automatic, like they were folding into place.
They kiss.
It is gentle and utterly happy.
It can’t last.
There is still that awful ‘reality’ business which won’t go away.
All of a sudden, Maddie thinks of something odd about the crime scene. The victim’s makeup looked perfect, which would never happen if someone had really been sobbing and then shot herself.
They must go back to confront Elaine and her lover!
David agrees, though reluctantly at first. “I know,” he says, turning to the camera for a ‘fourth wall’ moment, “I thought we were heading for something big too!”
They’re off again, still in their night clothes. At the end of their trip, they find Johnson herself, who has a picture-perfect reaction to the news.
Maddie snoops around Elaine’s place, in quest of the disguise Johnson must have used in the staged scene before. She finds a very interesting guest in the clothes closet. Alan himself.
Alan jokes that he and his mistress have been found out. Nervously he blurts to the detectives, “But there’s something you’re not taking into account, which is...” He doesn’t stick around to tell them. Alan pushes a shelf onto their heads and makes a run for it.
All and sundry rush outside. Alan and Elaine take their car, while the detectives, whose normal car is blocked at the curb, must commandeer a milk delivery truck. Gentlemen, start your engines!
Our heroes edge into traffic. David cuts over to block the path of the villains. He dispatches Maddie to the back to make sure the hoodlums are not in the mood for further evasion.
“Open bomb bay doors,” Addison yells.
“Roger. Bomb bay doors open,” Maddie calls, throwing wide the metal back gates of the truck.
“Then fire at will. Or Alan. Or whoever the hell else you can hit!” Dave crows, swerving so the pursuers can’t cut around them. Maddie opens fire with bottles of milk, followed by cottage cheese. These break on impact, smearing the windshield of the car behind them so the drivers can’t see. They bump the bad guys’ car, and all are forced to stop in front of a bowling alley. Why not throw a few games? ;D
After a crazy chase and scuffle, Maddie hurls a good shot at Elaine Johnson. Nice! Spares are tough to get, you know…
David manages to clutch Alan in a flying tackle. After a brief fracas, Addison hurls McLafferty toward the pins. This is a good lane, you can tell, because the return machine works. ;D
Well done! Evil vanquished, and their averages upped, the detectives walk out. Behind them, the police clean up the scene.
It’s a relieved stroll up the block for the gumshoes. “Want to know something stupid?” Maddie laughs. “I had a good time.” If this is life with David, it might not be so bad.
Hold on. There was another man who thought it was pretty important to spend quality time with Ms. Hayes too, and look what happened to
him.
…What
did happen to him, precisely?
Maddie stops short, causing David to walk a few steps before realizing no one’s next to him anymore. “She was here just a minute ago?...” he jests, and turns around to see Hayes flinching.
“Sam?” she mutters.
“Maddie?” a bewildered Mr. Crawford asks, waking up to see the other side of the bed empty.
Night has now turned to morning, and there stands just this day to settle the most important crisis of their lives.
One will get sick of being thrown over for his rival. The other’s anger will erupt at the thought that the earnest offer of his heart is never taken seriously. The third will wonder if her life is simply a chess piece on somebody else’s board.
“
And we’re changing our ways, / taking different roads…”
The gloves are off.
This means war.
It has all the elements I love about ML. Comedy, romance, good music, etc. Hmm, denial of true feelings. "You're just jealous, jealous, jealous!" ;D
but then... 
That’s the real reason David broke into a personal get-together, blushed like a sunrise, and when unable to complete his announcement, drank himself into oblivion. Maddie doesn’t buy it for a second.
That’s not true, but we’ve seen David be the picture of jealousy and anxiety for so long, it’s a bombshell to learn the other man is playing catch-up in just as much of a panic. Crawford comes from a different social stricture, like Maddie herself, so he tries to express the dilemma in different terms. Instead of the verbal and physical brashness of Addison, Crawford acts on his feelings by first taking Maddie out, then trying to duplicate that elegant feeling in the more attentive, individual setting of home. He also offers to run her a hot bath.
