'Smash' Season 1, Episode 10 Recap - 'Understudy'

It was an evening of people acting like assholes on "Smash." Let's run down the line of Smasholes, shall we?

When the big movie star Rebecca Duvall (no relation to Robert, we learn) fails to show up for the read-through, Derek promotes Karen to understudy for Rebecca as Marilyn. This is partly because he clearly has a thing for her (asshole) and because apparently even he can't give Ivy a job after her Heaven on Earth debacle (really?). He proceeds to yell at Karen about blocking (asshole, though Karen's kind of an asshole for not writing down her blocking), but then has some kind of crazy spirit-journey hallucination that Karen is Marilyn, and he starts being nice.

Julia and Tom celebrating their writing anniversary by going to a high school production of the first musical they wrote together, then when Tom tries to present Julia with a gift, she runs crying out of the theater (asshole). She couldn't have just stuck it out and gotten a little teary-eyed? Tom is plenty forgiving when he finds out about Frank and everything.

Tom, meanwhile, is kinda treating his Republican boyfriend like crap by being overtly flirty with Sam all the time (asshole). Lawyer-boy finally gets the hint and confronts Tom about it. Tom also gets some time in the spotlight by also filling in for a missing actor during rehearsal. Big Tom episode.

Eileen's investors are a bunch of assholes who can't seem to deal with the fact that Rebecca is caught up in Cuba, so they threaten to drop their money out. Eileen gets back at them by finding a new investor through Nick the Handsome Bartender: he happens to know a rock star by the name of Randy Cobra who has tons of money and wants to throw it at something. Money problem solved. Then Eileen burns the other investors' contracts in a bucket at the bar. Kinda asshole-ish. Oh, and Eileen makes out with Nick.

Ivy was being an asshole in her own way, pretending to be nice to Karen and the rest in order to earn her way back into the production, because apparently she needs to prove herself to these people. Had she been truly awful to everyone, this might make sense. But she was too sympathetic earlier for us to think she deserves this.

Asshole of the Week (besides Ellis, who always sucks) is Dev, who first yells at Karen for continuing to work on the play after she admits that Derek sexually harassed her, and then later punches Derek for little to no reason on the street. This whole Dev thing has been incredibly slow-moving, which is too bad because it might have created some real conflict for Karen, which she has been seriously lacking. Instead, we've just gotten some vague stuff about the job Dev was supposed to get but didn't... but why do we care? He seems to be doing fine for himself anyway.

Rebecca finally shows up, and she's played by Uma Thurman of all people, because when you think Marilyn, you think Uma Thurman. Then again, the point might be that she isn't right for this role, so who knows? After all, at some point the star of "Bombshell" has to be Karen or Ivy.