I absolutely adore this episode as the origin of my single favorite Cabin Pressure line: "You know, between the dames and the horses, sometimes I don't know why I even put my hat on." Nothing will ever beat it for me.

So yeah, this episode is super funny, but I do want to talk a bit about something that's come up as my go to "look, a THEME!" here- vulnerability. Because as I was listening, trying to figure out what I was taking away from this episode besides "this is all really funny and well plotted" because at a certain point that gets old, it struck me that there are ways that both of our (absolutely brilliant) pairings this episode really strike a chord when considering the role of vulnerability- and lack of it- in relationships.

This is a bit less so in the Douglas-Arthur pairing in this episode, which is inspired (and yay, there's finally a nice airport manager!)- there are brilliant set pieces, and the premise of the bar conversation allows two very different people to kind of sort of attempt to understand each other. There's also a really nice father/son element- we already can perceive, even if it's not said outright, that Arthur doesn't have much of a father figure- his life is very dominated by Carolyn's influence, even in the majority-male flight deck, in a way that I think even tints his interactions with Mr Birling about sports (there's a tinge of eagerness for acceptance), which he's clueless about. Would Arthur know more about sports if he'd had a dad who gave a shit about him? Who knows. But this episode giving him an older man who's willing to open an as-yet-shut door into a men's world that excites him.

The men's world is, of course, the world of the pub. We've already seen a glimpse of Douglas in that milieu in Kuala Lumpur, and usually I'd say the less said about that the better, but I think there's something interesting about how mean spirited and surfacey it could be there, alongside Arthur's misunderstanding what Douglas means about "talking about their lives." He asks a question that is so unexpectedly and deeply personal that Douglas isn't even upset that he asks, he understands that this is another rule of masculine bar/pub conversation that he has to teach Arthur. On a certain level, this is fine on its own- there's a time and place for everything- but if you look at it a certain way, it can reinforce tropes about men and expressing emotions and feelings. And yet... even by following the rules of pub chat that Douglas lays out for him, and trying to fall into its ritualistic norms (like creative insults), Arthur, in part through his own open-book vulnerability, is able to bring things to a place where Douglas is pretty unselfconsciously vulnerable himself, about the place in the world where he finds himself. And by the end, he's fallen more into Arthur's more atmospheric image of two men in a bar. He's loosened up, and isn't playing by the rules anymore. It's just really nice (in addition to being hilariously funny).

The Martin and Carolyn pairing is maybe a bit less novel than the Douglas and Arthur one, but it still works really well in this discussion of vulnerability. Both of them have had pretenses/barriers they try to keep up- and both, incidentally, are related to their own interest in expressing that they are in control- but by now Martin has learned enough to have started to relax his. This actually really helps, as his actions aren't hampered by pretense or pride- he's basically able to function ALMOST competently with the cabbie as a result. But Carolyn is almost on overtime trying to keep her barriers up against vulnerability and it is clearly driving her a bit bananas, hence her complete dysfunction this episode- she has to be ironic and invulnerable about her gift to Herc, to prove that she may be seeing him but she doesn't have feelings (which will of course come to haunt her in Vaduz), and as a result loses all her judgment. And her overtime craziness is, unusually enough, what causes Martin’s misfortune, not his own incompetence! He's the functional one here, not her, because unlike her he's not filtering all his behavior through this one very constricting lens.

Once Martin is able to open her up a bit in the discussion of his salary- where she starts off in control as the boss and is forced to face the fact that Martin is loyal to her even when he shouldn't be*, which could very easily pierce the defenses of her invulnerability as she has to accept this reality- she starts to mellow out. Whereas she starts off saying that she's “not a little old lady” so she can’t do the totally reasonable thing until Martin begs, afterward she manages to chill enough that she can do the, you know, sane thing even though it dings her a bit in the self-confidence. She's not quite as in thrall to her inner barriers anymore.

I'll just end off by saying- this episode may also, in addition to my favorite line, have my favorite closing lines of any episode, with the possible exception of Zurich 2. Though that one's mostly about the nostalgia and emotions. So maybe this is it.

Martin keeps his goose. Birling day antics occur.

Cabin 359: Storm warning

Day 6- Noodle Incident - you know those events that get mentioned but never expanded on (i.e. watering the window boxes)? Do something with one of those and/or ‘baggage’