Smash: “There are a lot of people who should be stopped from writing musicals.”

Okay, so this episode was maybe not quite as Smashtastic! as the pilot, but it was a solid episode coming off of it.  By the end of the episode the main plot had been advanced, we added more depth to some of the characters, and we got some more songs to add to our Smash playlists, for those of you playing along at home.  That’s not so bad for a second episode, right?

Main plot:

We cold-open on Karen singing Blondie’s “Call Me” in a small bar/lounge setting, with Dev, Julia and Tom amongst the audience members.  Despite Katherine McPhee singing the hell out of that song (seriously, WHO won that season of Idol?!), it is in fact a fake out:  Karen is actually at work, daydreaming about the callback she’s anxiously awaiting when she should be pouring coffee.  Oops.  Good thing the other waitress covered for her.  Bet she cadges the tip from that table, though.

Ivy is also anxiously awaiting a callback, but she’s a least able to feign being a little more zen about it.  Her friends, fellow dancers in Heaven on Earth, try to cheer her up, saying that the part is obviously hers.

Tom would wholeheartedly like to agree, but both Julia and Director D-bag are leaning more toward Karen, with Eileen waffling, and it’s terribly up in the air between the two girls, demonstrated beautifully by Julia imagining the opening number “Let Me Be Your Star” that bounces back and forth between the two potential leads.  Since they can’t agree to agree yet, they decide to hold a “workshop,” which basically amounts to some choreography rehearsal for Karen and some scene work for Ivy, who already showed them that she has the moves by performing the baseball number.  They also decide they need to know more about Karen, so Eileen calls her connection with the CIA.  You know, as one does.

Karen struggles some to learn the choreography — perhaps helped, perhaps not — by Ivy’s friend, who answered the call for session dancers so he could get the low-down on Ivy’s competition.  While Karen is rehearsing, Ivy is reading everything she can get her hands on about Marilyn, and watching all of the movies several times through.  Catching her with one of the tomes (was that a real book?  It was HUGE!  Bigger than Marilyn’s boobs!), Director D-bag dubs Ivy a ‘perfectionist.’  And in a move that earns his nickname all over again, he pulls Ivy in to the rehearsal room so she can meet Karen and engage in some vintage Mean Girl behavior with her.  Ivy:  ”Oh, I love your scarf.” Karen:  ”Thanks. My mom gave it to me.”  Ivy:  ”Oh, that’s so cute.”  You get the idea.

Unlike with Karen, who had someone else reading with her, Ivy gets to do “scene work” with Director D-bag all by her lonesome, just the two of them.  There’s actually kind of a nice moment where Ivy breaks character and talks some more about Marilyn, how she lived in fear of “going crazy” like her mother did, before going back to the script:  ”I want to be loved.  A sex object is just a thing.  Who’d want to be a thing?”  Director D-bag seems to actually see Ivy for the first time, and see what Tom was talking about when he said she was Marilyn, and I start to think that maybe I was a little hasty in sticking him with the Director D-bag nickname.   Aaaaaand then he takes advantage of this moment of unguarded vulnerability and takes Ivy off to his place for sweaty sheet-time.  Classy, dude.  Real classy.

In the end, the brain trust decides, though her audition was maybe a little too perfect, (*snerk* That’s what HE said!), to give the part of Marilyn to Ivy.  She celebrates by going out to a little club with Tom and her friends from the Heaven on Earth production, where she takes the stage to sing “Thank God Even Crazy Dreams Come True” in a scene that very nicely bookends the cold open.  The difference, of course, being that this is actually happening for Ivy.

In other plotlines:

1.  Frank is disheartened when the adoption agency tells them that a conservative estimate of the wait time for a child is 2 years, and tells Julia that they should just forget about it, prompting a hissy from their son, Leo, who has been asking for a little brother or sister since he was a kid.  And, I mean, I get younger kids asking for a sibling, but a 16-ish year-old boy?  That seems really unrealistic to me.  Boys that age generally want to believe that they don’t even HAVE families, they were just hatched spontaneously from an egg or some shit.  The scene between him and Julia played really false to me.  Anyway, one of the exercises that the adoption agency asks for is a letter from the potential adoptive parents to the birth mother, which Julia at first scoffs at, saying that the mother will never see it because she will have just abandoned the baby on the street somewhere in Beijing, but she has a change of heart and continues with the exercise even after Frank has decided he’s out and that he wants to go back to work teaching science.  She reads the letter out loud at what appears to be a support group for the potential adopters, and Frank arrives just in time to hear it, so I guess the boring-ass adoption plotline is still a go.  Yeehaw.

2.  Dev has set up a dinner with one of the deputy mayors, who is considering Dev for a promotion.  Karen is supposed to meet him at the restaurant after rehearsal, but Director D-bag sees her texting on her phone and calls her back into the room to runs scenes some more.  Because he’s a dick like that.  Karen is flustered and too intimidated by him to stop and call or text Dev back to say she is in fact NOT on her way after all, so by the time she gets to the restaurant everyone else has left and Dev is p-i-s-s-e-d.  Which, valid.

3.  Eileen and Director D-bag run into Jerry at a restaurant, where he a) introduces Eileen to his latest blond bimbo; b) invites himself to sit down at her table while Director D-bag takes a call; and c) rushes to assure her that Marilyn: The Musical will never make money, and she never had a head for the business, she was just a romantic about theater as art, etc.  Eileen thanks him for his input tosses her drink in his face and leaves the restaurant in a huff.

4.  Director D-bag informs Julia that Jerry has picked up the option on My Fair Lady and plans to go ahead with it.  Director D-bag has already devoted three years of his life to the production, so he “of course” tells Jerry to… take a hike.  Psych!  ”I’m into Marilyn,” he explains.  Actually, I think you were into the girl who will be playing Marilyn.  And…  I don’t know, you guys.  I mean, Derek certainly plays as a Class A Douchebag, and Tom has told us loud and clear that he IS in fact a Class A Douchebag, but in just two episodes the show has made me think there’s more to him than that.  It’s not all about the bottom line, I don’t even think it’s all about the “glory” of a Broadway smash.  He… cares.  I don’t know that he necessarily cares about Ivy or about Karen per se, but there’s something.  Maybe it’s just my inevitable attraction to men who are assholes (Not including my husband.  He’s wonderful and not at all an asshole.  Take note, ladies:  Lust over fictional asshole characters.  Marry men who are wonderful and not assholes.), and I’m not yet willing to lift the Director D-bag designation, but I’m hereby reserving the right to consider lifting it at some point in the future, if he eats all of his vegetables and doesn’t turn out to be just playing Eileen and stops, you know, sexually harassing the talent.

5.  Ellis is already puffing himself up and viewing Marilyn: The Musical as his idea, a notion that Julia disabuses him of with a quickness.  Still, between him constantly asserting himself into work sessions, eavesdropping at doors, and trying to take credit for things, I smell trouble brewing in that corner.  Tom needs to stop thinking with his little head and put Ellis in his place.

So that’s it for this week.  What did you all think?  Were you disappointed that they chose Ivy over Karen?  Are you wondering where this is going now that they’ve answered the Big Question in the second episode?  Discuss!