Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Team Unpacks First Three Episodes of Season 5

[The following story includes major spoilers for the first three episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season five.]

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel kicked off its final season with a new career opportunity for Midge, trouble ahead for the comedy’s core duo and an emotional farewell.

Season five opens with a shot of now-Ph.D candidate Esther Maisel (Alexandra Socha) in therapy in 1981, discussing her complicated relationship with her mother, who’s at this point in time a successful comedienne. In between bursts about how the world doesn’t revolve around Midge, Esther works on a molecular kinetic sequence to figure out how to use DNA mutations to change the trajectory of disease.

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Rachel Brosnahan feels like the two women being at odds makes sense. “Midge has chosen a somewhat selfish profession,” Brosnahan tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I think it’s inevitable that kids grow up to hate their parents to some degree. We only see them for a brief time, so maybe there’s still hope as we move forward that Esther and Midge may grow closer, but Esther was a weird kid, in fairness.”

The actress, who plays the show’s title character, jokes that mothers and daughters often can’t get through an entire lifetime without needing a little bit of therapy at some point.

Twenty years earlier, Alex Borstein‘s Susie Meyerson is startled awake when Rose Weissman (Marin Hinkle) gives her a call and tells her that Midge is incredibly ill after getting stuck in a snowstorm, which audiences saw at the end of season four. Despite the fact that making sick house calls doesn’t exactly fall into the purview of a talent manager, Susie treks over to the Weissmans to check on her No. 1.

“Midge is the GOAT. Midge is the original. They came to find each other,” Borstein tells THR. “It was a happy accident that we found each other, and Susie’s seen a lot of people come through the Gaslight. She’s seen a lot of acts. She’s studied comedy her whole life. And when she saw this, she knew like, ‘That’s a rare diamond … and I gotta do this.’ So, I think it was it’s more than just getting a client work or getting a percentage, it was about realizing her own dream through this person, with this person.”

Below, THR breaks down some of the major moments in the first three episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season five, with insight from the Brosnahan, Borstein, Michael Zegen, Luke Kirby and co-showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino.

Mei’s Decision

In season four, audiences learned that Stephanie Hsu’s Mei Lin was pregnant with Joel’s baby. Early in season five’s first episode, “Go Forward,” Joel (Zegen) tells his parents that he and Mei are going to get married and have a baby. Shortly after sharing the happy news with his family, Joel goes home and is surprised to see Mei standing in his living room. She reveals she’s moving to Chicago for her medical residency, calls off the wedding and tells Joel they’re no longer having a baby, hinting at the fact that she had an abortion.

“Mei always represented to us sort of weirdly like the generation right after Midge, like that generation of going into the ‘60s, of girls starting to step back — with the advent of the pill — step back a little bit and started to think a little bit more big picture rather than the immediacy of like, husband, children, this is the road, a little bit [more] like what could the road be?” Sherman-Palladino tells THR.

The creator explains that Midge was a trailblazer for her generation, who sort of stumbled into her ambition, whereas Mei planned for it.

“We wanted her to be a very smart, sharp and ambitious girl who wants to be a doctor at a time where there simply were not women doctors,” she continues. “She also represented the kind of woman that Joel would want to be with. In spite of the fact that they did not work out, Joel was attracted to Midge, partially because of that ambition and that focus that was there that neither one of them even could like put a finger on.”

Zegen, on the other hand, feels like Mei’s decision to choose herself in these ways was important for Joel’s journey. “I think it was another instance where he was kind of getting into the same patterns that he started in where he’s kind of stuck in a situation, and he has to find his way out,” the actor tells THR. “This happened, it had nothing to do with him, but I think it was important to kind of end that.”

Lenny and Midge Say Goodbye

Toward the end of episode one, Midge runs into Lenny Bruce (Kirby) at the airport, and he tells her he’s heading out west for a bit. The two often banter and crack jokes in their conversations, but on the red carpet flooring of JFK’s TWA, something’s different. Their conversation seems more reserved and heavy. When Lenny apologizes for never calling her after their romantic moment at the end of season four, Midge shuts him down. “Oh no, we don’t do that.” Brosnahan chalks up their awkward conversation to embarrassment.

“I think Midge is so embarrassed at the end of season four, when her hero and also someone that she views as her fairy godfather of comedy, this guy who uses his voice in ways that she admires and aspires to be, basically, has called her so hard on her shit and told her that she’s taking the wrong approach,” Brosnahan says. “It’s one of the only times in the series that we see Midge humbled like that.”

The actress explains it’s her understanding the two haven’t seen each other since those fateful moments in the very blue room, and it very quickly dawns on Midge that he’s going away.

“I think they both realize that whatever was going on with their relationship, their friendship, some chapter is closing, and that’s really sad for her and for him too, I think,” she says. “That scene is so beautifully written and so surprising to come so early in the season.”

Kirby, on the other hand, thinks the weight of their conversation comes more from everything Lenny was going through at the time — historically and in the show.

“His life has gotten subsumed under litigation,” Kirby tells THR. “I think that what we’re sort of playing with in that scene is that he’s just sort of beginning to feel a little more worn out than he already felt. … I think now, partly because of what Lenny went through in his relationship with divorce but also just what happened to him in terms of the courts, his life really did get bogged down by kind of heavy stuff.”

Midge Becomes a Writer on ‘The Gordon Ford Show’

Elsewhere in the episode, Susie does everything she can to try to get Mike Carr (Jason Ralph), the talent booker for The Gordon Ford Show, to put Midge on the show as a comedian. She storms onto set while a show is being filmed. She follows Mike and his kids to a Christmas Tree Farm. And when neither of those things works, she goes around him, directly to Gordon Ford (Reid Scott) and convinces him to put Midge on his writing staff, after he tells her Midge isn’t the right comic for his audience.

Borstein explains the extreme lengths Susie goes to for Midge is more than just simply trying to get her client’s career off the ground.

“It’s sink or swim for Susie. She doesn’t have a family unit at home,” she says. “There’s no Abe. There’s no Papa. There’s no mother. There’s no one that’s going to be a safety net or anyone to fall back on. So, for her, Midge’s success is her success. They’re really the same person as far as Susie sees it in that way. If she doesn’t eat, I don’t eat, and she believes in her.”

The Emmy nominee also shares that she feels like the back and forth that she and Mike find themselves in is something Susie enjoys.

“I think that banter was like the old Saturday morning cartoons of the Wolf and the Chicken Hawk showing up and clocking in on the time clock, and they’re perfectly friendly,” Borstein says. “Then as soon as the whistle blows, they start chasing each other and barking, and then at the end of the day, they clock out and shake hands, and I think it was a sport of sorts for her and Mike Carr.”

Midge and Susie’s Falling Out

In the first few minutes of episode two, “It’s a Man, Man, Man, Man World,” a flash forward shows Midge sitting down with 60 Minutes’ Mike Wallace and discussing several of her career successes: 18 consecutive sold-out nights at the Copacabana, an infamous show at Carnegie Hall, performing alongside Bob Hope at USO Shows and more. Wallace then transitions into pointing out Midge’s four marriages and multiple relationships with men, before zeroing in on the one relationship that lasted longer than all of them: her 25-year friendship with Susie, which at this moment in time is over.

“What happened, Mike, is that two people in show business tried to have a friendship,” Midge tells the correspondent.

More details aren’t provided about their falling out, but Borstein and Brosnahan think it makes sense.

“It’s really fun to see these two people who you know are deeply in love with each other on a level, seeing them go out and fight and have trouble. It’s reassuring in a way,” Borstein says. Brosnahan echoes that sentiment, adding, “It feels very real that even the greatest love stories have really high highs and really low lows, and it was so surprising to us when we read it, and five seasons into a series to still be able to be surprised when you’re a part of it, feels exciting, and so I can only imagine how exciting it may feel for the audiences at home.”

The “Handsome Man” Returns

Milo Ventimiglia made a guest appearance in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel‘s fourth season as a man Midge runs into every day in the park for some time before going home with him, only to be surprised when his alleged wife comes home while she’s lying in his bed naked.

In season five’s second episode, Midge heads to 30 Rock for her first day as a writer on The Gordon Ford Show and runs into Ventimiglia’s Handsome Man, whose name audiences learn is actually Silvio. He chases her through subway cars, up and down subway stations and out onto the street, before she finally lets him get a word in. He explains that the woman who walked in on them was his wife, but they were separated, and she was only stopping by to drop off the dog. He apologized, and they agreed to maybe see each other in the park again one day.

Brosnahan says it was fun to film with Ventimiglia again, but she wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to come back this season because he’s booked and busy in Los Angeles. (Ventimiglia currently stars in ABC’s The Company You Keep.)

“I could never have seen that as the reunion,” she says, laughing. “But it was so much fun to shoot all that stuff down in the subway on this old gorgeous train. I mean, it was madness. It was also 1,000 degrees down there in all these wool coats, but the trains were so gorgeous. I can’t believe that the city of New York let us do that. The kind of sliding-door comedy between all those train cars was a blast. And Milo is so good. He’s a consummate professional. It’s also fun to be able to work with someone who grew up in the Sherman-Palladino universe.”

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