Smash “Let’s Be Bad” Recap

Last week’s “Smash” was all about the show, but this week, we got into the personal. Julia’s son, Leo, got arrested and Tom had to bail him out of jail. Why? Because Julia was getting her flirt on with former fling Michael (a.k.a. Joe DiMaggio). When she finally arrived home after a diner dinner with her star, Tom insisted this be her wake-up call. Her son was arrested and she missed it because she was trying to mess around outside of her marriage. He told her to cool it. Spoiler alert: She didn’t.

Unfortunately, Julia’s life was about to go from bad to worse. Although he wasn’t technically arrested, Leo’s incident threw a wrench into Julia’s adoption process. At first she tried to do the right thing, giving Michael the cold shoulder at practice, but despite playing it cool at the workshop, Michael showed up at Julia’s apartment, and Leo invited him to stay for dinner. Apparently, Leo really liked Michael, and it was easy to see why, with Michael telling Leo all about how he used to smoke pot with his mom. Bonding!

After dinner, Michael and Juila had a heart-to-heart on the front stoop, which culminated in Julia telling him to leave, and Michael breaking out some impromptu singing. I hope that wasn’t supposed to be romantic, because from where I was sitting it was a grown man singing like he was auditioning for “Glee,” and it made me really uncomfortable. While I would have taken the tune as a cue to go back inside, it seemed to have worked on Julia, because in the next moment, they were sharing a passionate kiss. Julia really needs to learn to look around before making ill-advised choices. In this case, her husband may have been out of town, but her son was around and watching his mom from the window upstairs. We can assume Leo’s feelings on Michael have soured, but the episode ended before we found out what he planned to do about it.

For her part, Karen learned that politico boyfriend Dev’s work friend RJ is a lady, and a rather pretty lady at that. Between the Ivy drama and feeling just a wee bit threatened, Karen turned on the Marilyn, wearing a low cut red dress to his work dinner, flirting with the other guys and getting hot and heavy with Dev in the back of a (RJ paid for) limo. Karen was a good girl gone bad. What a missed opportunity for a Rihanna number.

Back in rehearsal-land, the crew was just 12 days away from their workshop debut, and they were working on a new tune, “Let’s Be Bad.” But Ivy just wasn’t getting it—it being some trilling vibrato—so Derek asked Karen to show Ivy how it’s done. Awk-ward. Karen was rightly uncomfortable, but Ivy was wrongly kind of a huge jerk about the whole thing, giving Karen a speech, huffing, “I know what I bring to the party.” Which was kind of unnecessary, as she clearly knew it was Derek that forced Karen to help. It wasn’t like Karen wanted any part of this.

But it turned out Karen didn’t need to do anything at all, because the comments and the looks from the producers were already getting in Ivy’s head. When she next performed the number in rehearsal, no one was impressed. Ivy saw the writing on the wall. But then it got interesting: She knew she had to prove herself, so for the next run-through, she brought it. We saw the song through her imagination, so it was fully staged, and it looked incredible. It may have been my favorite musical number to date. Ivy might be a big bag of worries in her relationship with Derek (drunkenly showing up to his apartment and asking him why he’s a jerk probably wasn’t the smartest move ever) but girl can seriously perform. And for now, that’s enough to keep Karen at bay. But next week may be a different story.

Source: MTV.com