The third episode of Feud: Bette and Joan was the show's busiest and most rewarding yet. With the backstory of the feud now established, "Mommie Dearest" is free to get away from the expositional talking-head segments with Olivia de Havilland and Joan Blondell and ratchet up the pace on its present-day story. The result is an episode that combines thrilling character turns (Bette and Joan are actually friends for like, two and a half scenes!) with the most widely-known incidents from the Baby Jane set. Here are the episode's 11 standout moments.
1) Kiernan Shipka serving up some Betty Draper vibes
That opening shot with the cigarette! January Jones must be so proud. And because I will take any excuse to go off on a mental tangent about Mad Men, this got me thinking about the scene in Season 1 where Betty and Don are talking about Joan Crawford, and Betty's horrified by how aged she looks: "To think, one of the great beauties, and there she is so old. I'd just like to disappear at that point."
B. D. showing Joan's twin daughters how to smoke neatly sets up the core of this episode, which focuses on these two women's parenting styles, and on their fractious relationships with daughters who would both go on to write scathing tell-alls about them.
2) "Mommie Dearest"
This episode takes its title from the infamous memoir by Joan Crawford's eldest daughter Christina, in which she described the years of abuse she suffered from her mother. But that book won't be published for another fifteen years in Feud's timeline, and in the context of the episode, the phrase "mommie dearest" is innocuous and even touching.
Christina, now a young actress herself, has a play opening on Broadway, and when Mamacita suggests sending a card, Joan dismisses the idea. She never got any cards or flowers from her own mother, she says, and that "made me tough, gave me ambition." If Christina gets good reviews, then maybe she'll consider sending her flowers. But the steely front is an act, and once the girls are out of the room, she writes Christina a sweet message and signs off "mommie dearest."
3) Pauline's peerless snark
"He is all yours. Well. Half yours." Alison Wright's delivery is everything.
4) Parenting advice
When Joan informs Bette about the cigarette incident with B. D., Bette responds by unexpectedly asking Joan for parenting advice. Her girls are like well-trained Pomeranians, in contrast to B. D., so what's her secret? Jessica Lange has a great beat here where she makes it clear that Joan's not entirely sure if Bette's messing with her, but she's so flattered to be asked that she kind of goes with it, and explains her "strict disciplinarian" approach.
My favorite thing about this scene, though, is Bette casually calling Joan "Crawfish."
5) Bette and Joan's dinner
Full disclosure: I have seen the first five episodes of Feud and this dinner between Bette and Joan is my favorite scene out of all of them, hands down. It's such a rich, emotionally compelling conversation between two women who could so clearly use one another in their corner. Though there's a brief moment of tension over B. D. being cast as the neighbor girl in Baby Jane, the pair are soon swapping childhood stories, which leads into Bette's barely-disguised distress as Joan nonchalantly describes how her stepfather took her virginity at 11. "You were just a child," she says, sounding genuinely shaken. "Your mother should have kicked him out."
Fittingly for an episode all about the mother-daughter dynamic, Bette and Joan discuss their own mothers—Joan's "didn't care whether I lived or died," whereas Bette was close to her mother right up until her recent death, and considers her "my only true female friend." In my notes at this point, I wrote: "UGH JUST BE FRIENDS, GUYS" alongside three :( faces, because sometimes I just have a lot of feelings.
6) Susan Sarandon's impeccable reaction faces
They're always great, but in particular during the "B. D. Is A Terrible Actress" montage. As it turns out, B. D. is a terrible actress, and Bette's mounting horror makes for some truly glorious reactions like this one. Diplomacy is not Bette's strong suit, but she really tries to spare her daughter's feelings, assuring a worried B. D., "You'll get better."
She does not get better, but the whole fiasco does lead into a surprisingly touching mother-daughter bonding moment—surprising in light of their brutal fight last week—where B. D. tearfully apologizes for not being a better actress, and Bette very sweetly tries to emphasize the positives: "You spoke clearly, you hit your marks, you didn't look into the lens…" "You make it look so easy," BD says. "I hope I didn't ruin it." So sweet. So sad, in light of what's to come.
7) The Oscar war begins
Having bonded with Bette, Joan gets cold feet about slamming her in Hedda's column, and Hedda is not on board for their truce at all. To put the cat among the pigeons again, Hedda runs a story claiming that Bette will be submitted in the Supporting Actress Oscar category for Baby Jane, with the Lead Actress campaign reserved for Joan. Bette's predictably furious, and the renewed feud lays the groundwork for several of the most widely-recounted incidents on the Baby Jane set: Joan making herself as heavy as possible when Bette has to drag her around, Bette kicking Joan in the head, and so on.
8) Mamacita's deadpan wisdom
Mamacita is secretly the hero of this show. She and Pauline just need to join forces and run this mess of a town. The whole extended scene in which Joan throws a self-pity party about her lot in life—no husband, ailing career, children flying the nest—is punctuated just so by Mamacita's stoical, no-nonsense responses: "I'll embrace the change of things to come, and really learn how to enjoy me." "Okay. Goodnight."
But the best Joan-Mamacita exchange came during the beach scene: "It's warm, Mamacita, I'm going to need my water standing by." "Which water?" Iconic. It's probably safe to assume Joan has a vodka and witch hazel refrigerator in her trailer, just like in her bathroom at home.
9) Victor Buono's fanboy moment
"It's like mommy just gave me a new pony!" Bette bonding with Victor seems rushed to me, and her bailing him out of jail felt like one plot line too many for an already packed episode, but his sheer delight at winning her over is fun.
10) Bette shuts down Hedda
Having figured out how to manipulate Joan, Hedda tries to play both sides this week, going to Bette's house to needle her about the "rumors" that Joan is upstaging her in Baby Jane. And Bette is just having none. of. it. She dismisses Hedda in her characteristically dry fashion—"Word on the street is, Crawford's walking away with the picture" "Is that what the streetwalkers are saying?"—before calling her out for having essentially built a career out of blind items and takedown pieces.
"You've been circling this project like a vulture from the start. It's women like you who've nurtured venom and resentment for years, who make it such a battle for the rest of us who are actually putting our asses on the line and risking something." PREACH.
11) The beach sequence
The filming of Baby Jane's iconic beachside finale plays out with a True Detective-style unreliable narration used to ironic effect. In Joan's version of events, everybody around her was a nightmare to work with and she was the only one bringing a modicum of professionalism to the set—but in reality, we see her repeatedly delaying filming with long breaks back in her trailer. During these breaks she obsessively tries to make herself look younger, deploying enormous fake boobs and some kind of manual face-lift situation which I still don't fully understand.
"Every time she comes back from her dressing room, she's lost five more years," Pauline mutters to Aldrich. The end result is that the scene looks ridiculous, with Joan—whose character Blanche is now supposed to be dying – looking younger and healthier than she has throughout the rest of the film. It's not a generous scene to Joan, her obsession with looks above all else taken to its most hyperbolic extreme, and in the end Jack Warner insists on the scene being re-shot on a sound stage.
And so the episode wraps up on Baby Jane's extremely apropos final scene, in which Blanche confesses a shocking truth about their past, and Jane says sadly "All this time, we could have been friends."
