‘Vladimir’ Episode 5 Recap: The Mad Professor

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. The one statute considered by the Trump Administration to be unbreakable, Murphy’s Law is a formidable mechanism when it kicks in. Sometimes, it can seem like everything you do falls victim to this pessimistic dictum. Ideally, you’re aware enough of the situation to do what you can to change course. 

And then there’s the narrator of Vladimir. Reading through my notes on this episode is like reading a laundry list of bad decisions and interpersonal disasters. Some of these are no fault of her own; others are entirely her fault. Does she notice any of it until it’s too late? Not while visions of Vladimir dance through her head.

For one thing, her recent malfeasance keeps coming back to bite her the way the deer she let into her husband John’s poor innocent garden bit into his lettuce. David, her department chair and former lover, figures out that she stole the scholarship file almost instantly. She can’t return it when he asks for it back, for the simple reason that she and Cynthia lit it on fire. Not even telling David he broke her heart and inspiring him to wax poetic about magic moments during their three-year affair — the last one she had under the terms of her and John’s open-marriage agreement — can get him to budge about it.

The only way around it is for the professor to persuade the former student in question, Lila, that she’s contrite. So she invites the woman over to her house, where she proceeds to offer the most cringeworthy non-apology apology imaginable. Things go so poorly that Sid, our heroine’s daughter and legal advisor, ends the meeting by proclaiming what a cunt she is. Sid is saying this about herself complimentarily, not about Lila derogatorily. (It’s a complicated word.) It’s clear from her fury about the underlying allegation that the apple doesn’t fall far from the philandering trees.

Speaking of students whom the professor has let down, Edwina, the unfortunate kid who needs a letter of recommendation for a prestigious program, never gets what she’s looking for…from the narrator, anyway. After she realizes she’s screwed the poor girl by missing the deadline, she tracks her down to apologize, only to discover that Edwina got Vladimir’s wife Cynthia to write the letter instead. I can’t imagine this will help our heroine’s sense of competition with the wife of the man she wants to fuck.

What’s up with that man, anyway? Vladimir remains hard for the narrator to read. His constant stream of little comments indicating his and Cynthia’s unhappiness with one another are unmissable, but then he goes and “undercuts” the vibe, to use Sid’s memorable term, with inscrutable emojis. But he’s so much on the professor’s mind that she imagines him masturbating while she’s mid-lecture about Edith Wharton. As usual, her push them out of their comfort zone read of the material, which emphasizes its erotic undercurrent, upsets some of her (frankly) nerdier students.

When they catch up after her lecture — a lecture Vlad himself spices up by chiming in with sexy answers to her questions for the class — the professor finally has a chance to make a one-on-one date, I’m sorry appointment, with Vladimir. (Her obnoxious coworker Flo is always cockblocking her during committee meetings.) Oh, the day he wants to meet is the day of John’s disciplinary hearing? Eh, no big deal!

Meanwhile, John is running around making things worse for her. He grabs the narrator’s ass in full view of her disapproving students and has an enormously (if obliviously) inappropriate conversation with an old colleague about the erect penis of Tess of the D’Urbervilles author Thomas Hardy (don’t ask). Since people around campus know they’re still a couple, his transgressions are her transgressions. Yet he’s still the man to whom she turns when she needs splinters pulled out of her ass. Marriage, am I right?

So in the end, David and Flo (his wife, I think?) are left with no choice: They ask the narrator to step down from her teaching duties. A rapidfire montage of all her and John’s dumbass dealings follows, concluded by the whole episode’s punchline: She thinks over all those moments, then simply asks the people firing her “Why?” Is it not obvious??

It’s fascinating and funny to watch sex, not even the reality of it but the imagined promise of it, turn the narrator into the proverbial Absent-Minded Professor. She’s a fine educator by all accounts, and a fine writer too. But she neglects her duties, her students, her own standards, and basic professional due diligence in her pursuit of falling into Vladimir’s loving, muscle-corded arms. 

And let’s say you sympathize with her as both a sexual being as an educator of students who are, ultimately, sexual beings themselves. Maybe you’re thinking “How dare they make an example of this woman for saying the embraces in Edith Wharton novels are a metaphor for the female anatomy or whatever? They are! Grow up!” Maybe you’re think it’s like the misleadingly edited takedown in Tàr, in other words, a work that looms large over this one despite its much different, more dour tone. 

But it’s about more than that, isn’t it? Her egregious apology to Lila, her neglect of a student she’s advising, her theft of a scholarship file — there’s no possible pedagogical or sociopolitical justification for any of that. And her continued support of John neglects the fact that conduct may be legal and even fully consensual, but still sleazy and stupid and unbecoming of an educator. Ironically, understanding this requires the kind of nuance she asks of the students she wants to forgive her. 

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.