Hendricks bans Masters from using black participants in his study, but Masters contacts a journalist to aid his efforts. Meanwhile, Johnson is forced to accept DePaul's choice to end her chemotherapy treatments; Gene learns the truth about Betty and Helen's relationship; and Libby fires Coral after discovering she lied about Robert being her lover.

"Blackbird" takes us to the midpoint of season 2, and it's the first time I've felt any genuine concern about the direction Michelle Ashford and company chose for this season...

As we got to the end of "Blackbird," I mainly felt like the first half of the season has been shuffling the characters around the chess board, just killing time until the real work can resume...

Filling time feels like much less of a sin, though, compared to whatever on Earth it is that the writers are doing with Libby. She wasn't my favorite part of the show last year, but that was simply because her circumstance — as the kind stay-at-home wife oblivious to her husband's adulterous ways — made her scenes less inherently compelling than what was happening with Bill and Virginia, or the Scullys, or any of the other characters. Now, though, an effort to flesh her out has instead turned her into an utter trainwreck. It doesn't really matter whether she's acting out due to post-partum depression, due to frustration that fatherhood hasn't magically turned Bill into an entirely new man, due to resentment that so much of what comes with great difficulty to her comes so easily to Coral, or (as is suggested here) due to a repressed attraction to Coral's brother (not boyfriend) Robert. She has become a crazy person, and maybe that makes her a better match with Bill and his own obsessions, but she's consistently awful without any redemptive moments, as if the deck somehow needs to be stacked more in favor of the other woman in Bill's life. And where I rarely love Betty stories on "Mad Men," that show has at least put a lot of time into explaining exactly who she is and how she become this person, whereas Libby turned from pleasant blank to racist nutbar overnight.