Mad Men S2E13: Meditations on an Emergency

Before we get to our review, we have two words for you:

Told ya.

Told ya she was pregnant.
Told ya there was something between Pete and Peggy.
Told ya that toddler wasn't Peggy's.

Forgive us, darlings but we're so pleased we got it right that we have to indulge ourselves a little. Having said that, we were blown away at the directions the show took last night. If we didn't know better, we'd swear this was the series finale and not the season finale. That's how good a job they did wrapping up several plot lines.

For a show that suffers the common complaint that "nothing happens," last night did an astonishingly good job of proving that complaint wrong. It's extremely rare to see that level of character development on a television show. Don, Betty, Peggy, and Pete all made major leaps forward. It's as if they all came out of a painful adolescence and emerged as adults.

"We don't know what's really going on. You know that." Don says that to Roger and he's talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the impending apocalypse that spurs every character's actions in this episode but what he's really talking about is secrets. If there's one theme this show returns to again and again, it's the power of secrets. Last night's episode demonstrated there's as much power in the withholding as there is in the revealing.

Pete had an opportunity to finally get what he wanted - to be named head of accounts - but he knew it was going to come at a price that would more than likely hurt Don. At any other time, he probably would have held on to his little secret about Duck's coming rise to power but lucky for Don, he chose that exact time to finally give Pete the other thing he wanted: praise from the great Don Draper. That praise and the discussion with the other boys in the office about loyalty forced him to grow up a little and he marched into Don's office (looking suddenly like a man for the first time) and warned him about what was coming. "I figured, if I were you," something we have no doubt Pete dreams about all the time, "I'd want to know." The end result might be that Pete doesn't get his dream promotion yet, but he seemed satisfied that he did the right thing.

Back at the Campbells' fabulous apartment (seriously, we want that place) the marriage seems to be crumbling even further. Trudy's once again running off to be with Mommy and Daddy in the face of nuclear armageddon and she tells Pete if he loved her, he'd come too. He agrees - and then doesn't go with her. Ouch.

Don finally gives up his secret. Well, one of them, anyway. He admits to Betty that he cheated but Betty has a secret of her own and she's not ready to reveal it. In fact, she seems to be looking for ways to make it go away. She couldn't get her doctor to agree to terminate it and she probably rode that horse for all it was worth to force a miscarriage, but no such luck for Betts. We applaud the show for pointing out that pre-Roe, women "of means" had the option of terminating their pregnancies without resorting to the back alleys that women of lesser means were forced to use. Had she pushed the issue, Betty probably could have gotten her doctor to agree to it and besides, as the long-missing Francine (in that FABULOUS beauty salon) told her, there was a doctor in Albany that would have done it for her. Betty didn't push the issue because Betty isn't capable of taking matters into her own hands. When she's in that bar and that gorgeous man asked her what she was doing there, she answered, "I'm waiting." That's all that Betty seems to be able to do. Even when she indicates that she's willing to sleep with the guy, she slowly glides along the wall with a quiet "I'm married," as if that would be enough to stop what was clearly going to happen. Still, she seemed to enjoy her sleazy little romp on the bar manager's couch and we couldn't help noticing the parallels to the pregnant Peggy sleeping with Pete on his office couch.

Speaking of that office couch, Peggy found herself sitting on it once again only this time, the fireworks were of a different sort. "I had your baby and I gave it away." We gasped out loud and covered our mouths in shock. We had no idea that was going to happen and once again kudos must be paid to the writers for managing to shock us again and again.

You thought we were crazy when we said there was something between the two of them but we were only half-right. We thought they were going to wind up together but Peggy put the kibosh on that for good. On the one hand, we understand why she told Pete. Father Gill pushed her hard to make a confession to save herself from eternal damnation and she did, on her own terms. She unloaded the secret that would have crushed her if she kept it much longer. On the other hand, she did so in a way that we can't help thinking was a bit cruel. Pete's declaration of love was the most human, most honest thing he's ever done. It was pure and it was from the heart, which made her confession to him all the more heartbreaking. Kudos to them both for acting the hell out of that scene. Pete's one tear appearing just as Peggy put her hand on his shoulder and left him was completely devastating.

Why did Peggy say no to such a heartfelt declaration of love? Because as she put it, she wants "other things." Which isn't to say she doesn't want love, but her speech about giving something up and realizing she can't ever get it back wasn't about the baby. It was about herself. Trying to make a go with Pete now would have been a step backwards for her and had almost no chance of being successful because of the baggage she bore from their earlier tryst. It was an incredibly grown up thing for her to realize. In a way, both of them grew up at that moment on that couch. Later that night, Peggy says her prayers and with a smile on her face, settles in for a night's sleep. She's completely unburdened and ready for what comes next. Pete, on the other hand, seems destroyed as he sits in his office alone with his rifle. Once again, we have no idea where they're going to go after that.

After Don's beautiful heartfelt letter to Betty, she accepted him back home and sat him down because she needed to talk to him. She starts off, "I..." and we think for a split second that she's going to finish that sentence with "...slept with someone else," but she falters and decides to withhold the one secret that would have closed the door on her marriage forever and instead tell him the secret that would open it up for good. "I'm pregnant."

With those two words, armageddon is averted and the season ends on a hopeful note but with enough loose ends - What about JOAN?! Will she go through with her wedding? Will Roger go through with his? Is Duck going to go off the deep end? Does Don even work at Sterling Cooper anymore? - to keep us salivating during the LONG wait for season 3.

God, we love this show.


[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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Mad Men S2E12: The Mountain King

"People don't change," says Dick Whitman (for that was Dick and not the wholly created Don Draper we saw throughout the entire episode) and the rest of the episode goes about both proving and disproving it in various ways. Dick Whitman tried to change himself into an entirely different person and now he's paying the price of his decade-long lie; Joan is trying to change herself from a woman in charge of every aspect of her life into a subservient plaything and she paid a HUGE price; Bert Cooper is being forced to change from master of his universe to irrelevant footnote and Peggy Olson, god bless her, the character who has changed the most since the beginning of the series, leans back in the deskchair of her new office, takes a sip of J&B from her own bar, and looks at what she has wrought with tremendous satisfaction.

We finally get almost all the blanks filled in on Don's life as he visits the mysterious blonde woman who confronted him in that car dealership with "You're not Don Draper" almost a decade ago. She'd know better than anyone since the real Don Draper was her husband. Through a couple of flashbacks we meet her, Anna, and we kind of love her a bit. She's warm and genuine and deeply concerned for Dick's well-being. She's everything that every other woman in Don's life is not and tellingly, they have absolutely no sexual relationship at all. She's more of an older sister who loves him very much. Although we don't think it's a coincidence that she could easily be passed off as Betty's older sister. Nor do we think it's a coincidence that Dick is seen fixing one of Anna's chairs in light of Betty's scary breakdown when she realized Don didn't fix the dining room chair before the dinner party that destroyed their marriage. Layers upon layers with this show.

And a big shoutout to Jon Hamm for busting out the acting chops this episode. When Dick is with Anna he's not Don Draper at all. His voice, facial expressions and mannerisms are totally different and even though he's in turmoil, he seems more relaxed in his skin than at any other time in the series. Still, we're worried about him. He doesn't even introduce himself as "Don" anymore and he tells those car mechanics that he's looking for work. Is that last scene a baptism or a suicide attempt? We're really hoping it's the former because it's looking more and more like back in Ossining, Betty might be pregnant.

And geez, if Dick/Don ever does decide to return home, he's in for a rude awakening because the partners all voted yes on the merger without his input. Sure, it'll land him a nice chunk of change, but he may no longer be the Big Man at Sterling Cooper and we can't imagine how he's going to deal with that. The long shot of poor old Bert looking irrelevant as the partners file out of the conference room was awfully sad but as an aside, how hilarious is it that his sister is named Alice Cooper? There was a lot of heartbreak and sadness in this episode but little things like that - and Alice's biting line about Roger having more than one child - just goes to show how damn good those writers are.

As for the heartbreak, it's killing us but it looks like this season, without our even noticing it before it was too late, is partially about the downfall of Joan Holloway. Once the Queen Bee of Sterling Cooper, her arc gets sadder and sadder as the old ways fall away and she realizes she doesn't have the tools to deal with the new way. We're torn over which was the sadder scene: her rape by her fiance on the floor of Don's office or the forced manner in which she attempts to build up her would-be husband's career in the face of Peggy literally closing her brand new office door in her face. Joan once felt that Peggy was a fool to try and make her way in "their" world, but Peggy is undeniably happy and Joan is looking at a lifetime of misery ahead of her and no good way out of it. Just writing about Joan is making us depressed right now. Joan, leave that asshole! He can't even handle you being on top during sex, for god's sake!

In other Sterling Cooper news, Pete's still a douchebag but we couldn't help cheering for him a little bit. Yes, he treats Trudy like shit once again - and we cheered a little when she, in a voice shaking with rage, screamed "You don't talk to me like that!" - but we sympathize a little. He's being pulled in every direction. His own mother threatened to disown him if he attempted an adoption and his father-in-law threatened to pull the Clearasil account if he didn't go through with an adoption. He's almost completely lacking in charm or sympathy but we don't blame him for being mad at Trudy and we silently cheered him on when he basically told his father-in-law to go fuck himself. Also, we absolutely love when he uses anachronisms like "Hell's bells, Trudy!" Hilarious. He deserves an Emmy nod just for being able to say lines like that with a straight face.

Speaking of Pete, do you all still think we're crazy for thinking he and Peggy are going to wind up together? She's the only person he even attempts to confide in and she is completely comfortable around him in a way that she isn't with anyone else in the office. When Pete asked how she managed to swing Freddy Rumsen's old office and without missing a beat she calmly shoots back "I'm sleeping with Don. It's all working out really well," we had to laugh. She would never in a million years make a joke like that with anyone else in the office and it's notable that Pete immediately recognized it as a joke. Had she said something like that to Ken or Paul or Harry, they would have believed her.

Back in Ossining, Betty's a nasty hardcore bitch. One thing we love, they have her treating her children in ways that are shocking to us but very true to the period. We would consider pulling a child's hair and locking them in the closet to be abuse in this day and age but it really wasn't all that unusual back then. At least she made up for it later by sitting Sally down and telling her as much of the truth as she could handle about her father's absence. Still, we did kind of love Sarah Beth calling her a "horrible woman," because let's face it, she is one. Is she pregnant? Well, why else would they have a "Mommy, you're bleeding!" scene? There's no dramatic reason for Betty having a heavy period, nor does it make sense for her to have a miscarriage at this point in the drama. Besides, it's the only reason we can think of for her to take Don back, assuming he ever comes back.

[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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Mad Men S2E11: The Jet Set

Don Draper's a self-absorbed piece of shit, but damn, does he look good when he's being one.

We're nearing the end of the season with only two more episodes to go so it's plot, plot, plot from here on out it looks like. For the first time this season, an episode picks up exactly where the last one left off and Don and Pete check in to their hotel in sunny '60s California. Cranky because the airline lost his luggage, Don sternly reminds Pete that they're here to work and not so subtly threatens to fire him if he tries to slack off. You're an asshole, Don.

Don's the quintessential ad man, so not only does he respond well to a good presentation, he'll even change the course of his life over one. Last season, he was so affected by his masterful slideshow presentation for Kodak that he ran home with the intent of saving his marriage. This episode, the threat of impending annihilation outlined in the mirror-image slideshow presented at the convention caused him to run in the opposite direction: as far away from his life and his marriage as he could get. He's in hobo mode again and he's toying with the idea of just running away and starting a new life, the very plan that caused the wise Rachel Mencken to recoil in horror last season. "What kind of man are you?" she asked then. Well, now we know.

Don catches the eye of a group of self-described "nomads;" bored, amoral aristocrats straight out of a Fellini or Antonioni movie. Specifically, he catches the eye of the not-so-subtly named Joy. Just like with Bobbie Barrett, he didn't pursue her; he just stood there looking incredible and let her pursue him. Despite his penchant for reinvention, Don's a shockingly passive person in his personal life. Almost immediately after admonishing Pete for not focussing on the task at hand hypocrite Don, without any luggage or ties to his old life, is hopping in Joy's car and off to Palm Springs, where he meets up with the rest of her bored, nomadic clan. Upon arriving at the jaw-droppingly fabulous house they're all staying in, Don passes out. The in-story reason given for this is "heat exhaustion," although we can't help but notice that his fainting spell occurred right after one of these nomads gave him a drink. The meta version is a little harder to parse. Rather than overexamine it, we're going with the "down the rabbit hole" take, especially since Jane made an Alice in Wonderland reference earlier in the episode when she was in bed with Roger. Don wakes up from his little poolside tumble and he's in a whole new world where he can be and do whatever he wants.

Glamorous as this crowd was, we thought they were all a bunch of major league assholes and Don's time with them bored us just as much as any Fellini film has. That was probably intentional. All those scenes positively dripped with ennui. Don fit right in, beautiful and bored as he is.

Meanwhile, back at the office, Peggy makes a move on Not-American Smith and positions herself for an invite to a Bob Dylan concert with him. It's interesting to note that Peggy is apparently in charge of the creative meeting regarding the Right Guard account. Every single guy in that meeting deferred to her and even went so far as to ask her permission for a lunch break. We'd love to cheer Peggy's newfound status but we can't help thinking it's kind of unbelievable. But we'll get to that in a bit.

Duck is angling for a partnership but Roger comes right out and tells him it's not likely to happen since his work at the firm hasn't exactly set the world on fire. In response, Duck meets with his former London employer to ask for his job back. Mark Moses is doing some great work with Duck's hidden alcohol problem. We could feel him wanting desperately to take that drink in front of him and when he did, the change was notable but so, so subtle. His belly full of liquid courage, Duck's entire demeanor changes but only if you're looking really hard. He pulls out the stops and puts a wild idea on the table: have his former employer buy a controlling interest in his current one and turn over practically all of Sterling Cooper to his control. It's a bold move and we were surprised to see that both Roger and Cooper were open to it when he proposed it to them. Of course he was full of the same fire that got him through that lunch meeting, since he apparently needed a Lifesaver to cover up his booze breath. If Don doesn't get his head out of his ass soon, he could be coming back to a Sterling Cooper very different from the one he left. His marriage is in shambles and it looks like his career is coming dangerously close to joining it on the junk heap.

The SC crowd of cool kids make fun of Peggy and Kurt when they find out their plans for the evening. Kurt shuts them all up with the even-we-didn't-suspect-this revelation that he's gay. We have to say, the SC crowd's reaction to this was laugh out loud funny, with the exception being Sal, of course. We said it before and we'll say it again, only a gay actor could have pulled off the range of subtle facial expressions that play across Sal's face when he hears the news. He is shocked, embarassed, and heartbroken all at the same time.

But here's the thing: this show's underlying theme is social change and they've done a masterful job of weaving women's rights, civil rights and gay rights into the tapestry. The problem is, we think they're kind of dropping the ball on this a little bit because we're not finding the reactions of the characters entirely believable. It's great that Peggy's in charge but we find it hard to believe that all those men, whom the show has gone to great lengths to portray as completely chauvinist, are so ready to accept her in that role. It's great that Paul Kinsey is brave enough to enter a mixed-race relationship, but there has been virtually no backlash or demonstrations of racism on the part of anyone in the office. Now we have a man not only declaring himself a homosexual but going further to point out that he has "sex with the men," and aside from some toothlessly crude comments about "perverts" and "queers" and not wanting to work with or share a bathroom with one, for the most part everyone shrugs and treats it as just another bit of office gossip. We realize that big time Manhattan ad agencies could be fairly liberal about the personal lives of their employees, but this kind of strains belief for us. And we say this as people who came out on their jobs (including one ad agency job) over 30 years later and received cruder responses than that. They did such a good job in season 1 of showing how far women have come since the feminist movement and how hard it was for them in those pre-feminism days but lately it seems like the writers are squeamish about going just as far on other social fronts.

Still, whatever reservations we have about that practically evaporated during the scene in Peggy's apartment with Kurt. Peggy voiced the lament of all fag hags everywhere: "Why do I keep going for the wrong boys?" and like a good fruitfly, sat down and let her gay give her a makeover. We laughed out loud and cried out "THAT'S what she needs! A GAY!" We would love to see a friendship develop between these two characters because they were totally adorable together. "I fix you." Too cute.

Back in L.A., Pete's struggling in the wake of Don's abandonment but seems to be getting a handle on things. We had to roll our eyes earlier when he introduced himself as Pete Dyckman Campbell to the Viscount. He's such a poser. On the other hand, we were kind of hoping he'd kick a little ass in L.A. and come back the hero just so he could rat out Don for being such a jerk.

In Palm Springs, Don is in the pool with Joy, looking magnificent since that's apparently all that he's capable of anymore. Some other unexplained bored aristocrat shows up with his two children and Don can't take his eyes off the boy his own son's age. Then he spends a long time looking at the crack in his glass and we're wondering if this is going to shock him out of his funk and straight back to Ossining to beg for forgiveness. Of course not. This is Don we're talking about. This is also Mad Men we're talking about so once again, they drop a tantalizingly small amount of information at us that has us salivating for more: Don calls someone and says simply "It's Dick Whitman," words we NEVER thought this character would utter. He arranges a meeting with this unseen person and, in true Don Draper fashion, rips out the last page of the book Joy's reading to scribble the address. He uses people and takes whatever he can get from them before moving on.

Back in Ossining, that suitcase that Betty dreamed about last week becomes real as the airline drops it off on the front steps of her house and we once again end an episode muttering the words "Man, we can never figure out where this show is going." Thank God for that.


[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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Mad Men S2E10: The Inheritance

Well. That was a weird one.

We always watch each episode twice before writing a review. Quite often, upon the first viewing we come away thinking "What a weird episode. Nothing happened." Upon the second viewing, we tend to pick up on the nuances and we almost always conclude that the episode was as good or better than any of the rest of them. Unfortunately, we've sat through this episode twice now and we have to say, while there were some great scenes and certain story arcs seemed to have progressed some, the episode as a whole was incredibly disjointed. It was all over the place, frankly. In retrospect, it seems like this was the episode where they needed to advance certain plots and get certain characters from Point A to Point B but without all the cleverness or thematic unity in which the show usually indulges.

That's not to say it was a bad episode; just that it wasn't among our favorites. Besides, even if it was bad, a bad episode of Mad Men is better than 90% of what's on television anyway, so we'll gladly take it. The title of the episode was "The Inheritance," and while you could argue that it referred to Pete's lack of one, in a more general sense it referred to how a person is shaped by their family and how it's practically impossible to escape the influence one's family has on a person.

Betty gets news that her father has had a stroke and the first thing she does is call Don in his hotel room. Don, not being completely an asshole, immediately offers to drive her down to Philadelphia. She demurs and they decide to leave the next morning. One look at the Main Line home in which Betty grew up tells you an awful lot about her. Money. Big time old WASP money and the emotional repression that goes with it. Betty is appalled that her childhood home is being run by his father's brassy new wife and that everything isn't exactly like she left it. We get to meet her brother, who is, unsurprisingly, about as warm and mature as Betty is and who is also practically her spitting image. Great bit of casting. Betty's father looks shockingly like John McCain and we had the hardest time focusing on his scenes because we kept expecting him to open his arms wide and address everyone in the drawing room as "My friends." Still, his scenes were a little disturbing. Normal one minute and succumbing to dementia the next. The scene where he gropes Betty confusing her for his dead wife was sad and disturbing but we couldn't help cheering the crazy old guy on when he tore into Don for being such a closed book.

Meanwhile, Betty's concerned that she might not get every little material thing to which she thinks she's entitled. When she finds out that her sister-in-law absconded with some hideous ceramic piece that belonged to her mother she cries out "Do I have to go around putting my name on everything I want?" Hey Betty, your father's crazy and your husband's an asshole. Focus. Betty being the immature little princess she is, she instead sleeps with Don on the floor of her childhood bedroom and then throws him back out when they return home. "We were just pretending," she says to Don, and that pretty much sums up her whole marriage.

Pete Campbell comes from an equally wealthy (if not more so) and equally emotionally repressed family. We see Pete and Trudy (in an utterly ridiculous peignoir) once again discussing their fertility issues with Trudy bringing up the possibility of adoption. Pete reacts angrily to her but seems to consider the idea when she says "We're not related but you love me." If the scene with Pete's brother where they both joke about killing their mother to get their inheritance doesn't drive home his cold feelings toward his family, then the later scene with his mother does a fine job of that. Pete hates his birth mother in the same manner that Betty hates her stepmother. The crucial difference is Pete as much as comes right out and says it to her face. We kind of admired him for that and we can see why he was so reluctant to talk to Trudy about having children. He wasn't interested because his own family is so fucked up but now he seems to be coming around to the idea that adopting might be a good way to break the curse of the Campbell family bloodline, inheritance or no.

And you all thought we were crazy when we floated the idea of an impending Pete/Peggy romance but it's hard after this episode to deny that they do have some sort of bond as well as a small amount of chemistry. His soft "Thank you" to her when she handed him a piece of cake at Harry Crane's baby shower was loaded with more feeling than Pete ever showed his wife and once again, he turned to Peggy to unload his own fears and frustrations regarding his upcoming flight to California and his hatred for his own family. She's the only person he talks to that way.

Back at the Draper family homestead, Betty gets a surprise visit from creepy neighborhood boy Glenn Bishop, who ran away from home and is hiding out in Sally Draper's playhouse. Which, when you think about it, is a bizarre callback to Betty's brother's observation that Don could afford to build a house in the backyard to keep their demented father in. Glenn, like seemingly everyone in the Mad Men universe, is unhappy at home and reveals to Betty that he came to "rescue" her. Their scene on the couch together watching cartoons and sipping Cokes while holding hands was even more disturbing than the scene where Betty's own father groped her. But to Betty's credit, she called Glenn's mother Helen to come and pick him up. The last time she saw Helen she slapped her across the face, but after taking Glenn home, Helen returns and they have a little heart to heart at the kitchen counter, puffing away on their cigarettes.

We've been dying for Helen to make a return this season because as the only divorced woman in Betty's sphere, we really wanted to see if Betty would be brave enough to admit her own marital problems to her. To our surprise, she did and what started off as a confrontation ended up as a commiseration. This, along with Betty's recognition that she needed to break Glenn's heart for his own good, could possibly mean that maybe Betty's growing the hell up finally. We'll see. These characters have a tendency to disappoint us, just like real people.

In Sterling Cooper news, Paul Kinsey is a poseur jackass. While it's certainly admirable that he's a white man getting involved in the civil rights movement in 1962, the show makes it pretty clear that he's doing it to paint a certain pleasing picture of himself. We still have problems with the black girlfriend thing. It just doesn't feel realistic to us that he would parade her around his all-white office and only get a few sideways glances. Even if we can buy that he's naive and immature about the whole thing, his girlfriend Sheila strikes us as neither and she seems perfectly blase about it when we would have to think a black woman in 1962 would be WELL aware of the price to be paid for flaunting that kind of relationship.

Joan wasn't in it enough, but she owns every damn scene she's in. When she's with Don, she's like this uber-secretary, capable of just about anything. We only got the barest hints of her feelings regarding the Roger/Jane romance. She could barely look at him when he walked into Don's office and took out her frustrations on poor Paul by humiliating in front of all his peers. To be honest, he deserved it.

In the end, Don decides to run away to California and as the plane descends (its occupants puffing away on cigarettes), the California sun rises on Don's face and we're left wondering if he'll ever come home again.

[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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Mad Men S2E9: Six Month Leave

We have to suppress our knowledge of the sometimes seismic events that occurred throughout the '60s when we watch this show because for the most part, events happen far off camera and are only obliquely referred to by the characters, more often to provide ambiance than any sort of reflection. For the most part, Mad Men looks at an era not through its major events but through the eyes of normal people reacting to the millions of minor events in their day to day lives. It is, in some sense, a more accurate take on history or at the very least, it's a take that does a good job of faking the feel of accuracy.

The common refrain about the '60s is that they "really started" when JFK was assassinated in November 1963. Unless they do something radically different between seasons 2 and 3, it looks like we're not ever going to see the events of that day from the points of view of the Mad Men characters. Supposedly there will be time shifts of up to a couple years between every season and since we're in August of '62 with 4 more episodes to go, it's looking like Season 3 will be starting at some point well after the assassination.

Why bring this up? Because last night they did use an event as a backdrop for the entire episode and it's not one we ever would have thought of: Marilyn Monroe's death. It's not that outside events are never referred to on the show, but ones to which nearly every character has some sort of reaction are rare. The only others we can think of are the crash of Flight 1 (which was really only used to tell a Pete story and then dropped) and Kennedy winning the election (which was heavily featured to drive home the point that Sterling Cooper is seriously behind the times).

There was a motif last night that was used so often and with such a heavy hand that we almost got bored with it: scenes of characters waking up. From Betty and Freddy passed out on their respective couches, to Joan in Roger's office, to Don being woken up by an angry Mona in his office, the message seems to be that everyone's waking up to something. This being Mad Men, we're not going to be told what, but it felt to us that this moment, for these people, is when The Sixties started.

Freddy woke up to a world that simply wasn't going to excuse him any longer. It's no longer the good old days of office tall tales about hard-drinking ad men doing outrageous things. It's a new era and Freddy just doesn't fit anymore.

Joan woke up to the realization that the world can treat women like her (and Marilyn) pretty damn shabbily and, judging by her scene with Roger (which, like every scene she has with Roger, crackles and spits sexual tension while slogging under the weight of an ended affair), she might still be in love with him - or coming to the realization that she actually did love him once.

Don and Betty both woke up to lives even emptier than the one they shared.

The only one not shown waking up is the one who's already wide awake: Peggy. We've been saying for a while that if we had to guess at the characters' ultimate fates, our guess would be that Peggy will eventually wind up with Pete. We don't know if that's going to be the case, but there does seem to be some sort of relationship building between them, above and beyond their previous clandestine one. Pete seems to respect Peggy on some level and their youth and the weight of the roles they play sometimes force them into these strange little alliances. We can't picture Peggy storming into anyone's office to tell them off the way she did Pete and not only was she completely comfortable doing so - in fact, it felt like one of the few times she ever let her mask slip - but Pete wasn't even remotely angry or put out about it. Pete won't even let his own wife mouth off to him but his first response to Peggy's rage was to ask for a chance to explain himself.

It's notable that Pete and Peggy were the only ones to have any sort of real reaction to Freddy's indiscretion. Everyone else was either laughing it off or trying to explain it away, but Pete reacted with extreme revulsion and Peggy reacted with a tenseness that makes us think she's not gotten this far in life without knowing at least a couple drunks along the way. She is appalled but immediately wants to fix and forget. Her reward for being the only prudent and empathetic person in the firm is a promotion so big that it left our heads spinning. Taking over the Senior Copywriter's accounts is a HUGE leapfrog for Peggy and we hope two things: 1) that the men in the office don't give her TOO much shit for it and 2) that she'll get a big enough raise and take Joan and Bobbie's advice and get herself a new damn wardrobe.

Another aspect of the episode that makes us think that this one was overtly "about" the era: suddenly the silent black people in the background are speaking up and they have stories and inner lives of their own. The Drapers' maid offered some damn good advice for Betty ("Splash some cold water on your face and go outside. You'll see that everything is right where you left it.") but it was the elevator man's poignant statement about hiding in plain sight - something he does every single day to earn a living - and how it couldn't help Marilyn that spoke to the changes that are just around the corner. That, and Roger's bemused announcement that another agency had hired a "colored kid."

As for the Draper marriage, from where we're sitting, this one looks dead in the water. We can't imagine that's where the writers are going with this because without her marriage to Don, Betty would drift too far away from the Sterling Cooper universe to still remain in the show and we just don't see that happening. Betty's deteriorating even further and when she's not dazedly wandering around in a housecoat with a glass of wine, she's setting her friend up to do the thing she herself doesn't have the nerve to (and for the crime of having a seemingly happy marriage). Still, she doesn't seem inclined to invite him back and he came right out and admitted to Roger that he's not sure he even wants to. Of course Roger being the needy, immature man that he is, he took Don's statement in the worst possible way. The Sterling marriage always served as a prediction of where the Draper marriage is heading but in another huge leapfrog move, Roger chucked it all and went for Joan II, Jane. We didn't see that one coming at all and we can't WAIT to see Joan's reaction.


[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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Mad Men S2E8: A Night to Remember

Much like at a CYO dance, the ladies were the ones who drove the action this episode. Betty did something she never though she'd do, Joan lost something she never thought she'd want, and Peggy faced something she never wanted to face again. In a delicious turnaround from the normal Mad Men story, the women drove the action and the men took a back seat.

In the aftermath of Jimmy Barrett's malicious bomb drop of last episode, Betty is clearly destroyed. Ever the perfect wife of her social milieu - in fact, as Don inadvertently proved to her, typical of it - Betty once again tamped down her feelings and devoted all her emotional energy to doing what she does best: keeping up appearances. The Drapers have an important dinner party to plan and Betty is consumed by it, to the point of destroying her own furniture for the crime of being less than perfect. Her face as she slowly breaks her dining room chair into kindling is flat and dead. Even in her rage, she is perfectly composed. The only being that sees her sweat is her beloved horse. That doesn't mean her own children are unaware of her emotional state. In fact, they're far more attuned to her rage than Don is and the fear on their faces as it manifests in such a creepy fashion is heartbreaking. The Draper family seems irrevocably broken and we can't help thinking that everyone involved would be better off if they just all went their separate ways.

Meanwhile, it's become increasingly obvious why Harry's wife had to push him so hard to go after his promotion several episodes back: because he's not too ambitious and seemingly not too bright. His brand new television department makes its first major mistake and he immediately whines that he can't keep up with the demands of the job. Instead of giving him his asked-for new hire, Roger suggests he pulls from the secretarial pool to get the grunt work done. Enter Joan Holloway.

We really need to stop trying to anticipate the potential future directions of characters and plotlines on this show because they consistently pull the rug out from under us. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Joan made such an issue earlier in the season of her complete non-interest in furthering herself or attempting to enter "their world," (the male world). At the time, we thought it was a way to draw a clear distinction between her and the so-hungry-she-can-taste-it Peggy, but instead, it was a way of setting up this new development. She starts off by rolling up her sleeves and helping Harry with his work load only to find that she really enjoys the work and not only that, she's good at it.

We finally meet her doctor fiance and - what a shock - he's a total jerk. He's clearly uncomfortable with the idea of his blowup doll of a wife displaying any brains or ambition and with visible irritation tells her that her job is to walk around and look pretty and her future consists of nothing more than sitting on the couch and eating bon-bons. In typical Joan fashion, she indulges his frustration while blithely going back to her newfound interest.

Peggy finds herself at the mercy of the good Father Gill, who with every good intention to guide what he sees as a lost sheep back to his flock, ropes her into doing pro bono advertising work for the upcoming CYO dance. Peggy's discomfort with the priest is palpable, likely because she senses not only his intentions, but also his knowledge of the past she very much wants to forget. Don told her in that psych ward that it would shock her how much she'd be able to bury her past but he didn't tell her there would be people in her life desperate to remind her of it. We wanted to hate him for being so pushy with her, but he's really only doing what he sees as his job and frankly, Peggy needs someone to shove her into dealing with it, even if we don't think the church is the way to do it. She's obviously modeled herself on Don Draper, whether she realizes it or not, and Don's life built on lies is clearly nothing to work towards.

The Draper dinner party goes off beautifully on the surface. The house looks beautiful, the children are dutifully entertaining, and the host and hostess look like walking advertisements themselves. The guests, insofar as they're capable, are charmed. The role of the Sterlings as the inevitable future of the Drapers is once again reinforced when Mona tells Betty to enjoy it while she can and laughs bitterly and knowingly at Betty's furious "What an interesting experiment." We have no doubt that Mona has had a lifetime of experience being nothing more than a servant to her husband's ambitions and recognizes in Betty a time when she allowed such things to bother her.

Betty confronts Don for humiliating her at dinner but of course what she's complaining about isn't really what she's complaining about, as is so often the case. We thought this was going to be another of those confrontations that would be nothing but subtext, but she yanked the narrative into the direction she wanted it to go and did something so anathema to her that it was kind of shocking. She went straight for the jugular and told Don that she knew about him and Bobbie. She finally said what she meant. It was a wonderful and riveting thing to see, especially her wrinkled-nose distaste that he would cheat on her with someone "so old." How perfectly Betty. And what does Don do? Like the sociopath he is, he looked her right in the eyes and lied to her. Again and again.

But Don is reading off an old script and this one isn't going to blow over by acting earnest and hoping for it to go away. Betty spends the entire next day disheveled and drunk in her party dress, rifling through Don's suits and desk drawers, ostensibly to look for evidence of the affair, but it shifts into a semi-desperate attempt to find out anything about this lying enigma she's been spending her life with. Once again, kudos to actress January Jones who made Betty's slide into despair heart-wrenching to watch. "How could you this to me?" she says to Don, looking like an exiled princess in the middle of their bed, her makeup smeared and her dirty dress surrounding her. "I would never do this to you." Although we don't really believe that with all the extramarital flirting she's been doing lately. Still Don lies to her and to our surprise, she still wouldn't even entertain the idea that he might be telling the truth. As pathetic as she looked, she still displayed a spine we didn't think she had.

She gives him one more chance to come clean and fix the situation when in the middle of the night, totally stripped bare of her normal perfect wife trappings, she confronts him a final time. And while we believe him when he says he loves the kids and doesn't want to "lose all this ("this" being the perfectly constructed life he spent his entire life coveting),"we don't quite believe him when he tells her he loves her. After all, he continues to lie to her face. Still, despite the perfectly composed face, we can see the fear in his eyes.

The ability of the writers to wring tension out of emotional drama astounds us. We didn't realize we were doing it, but we were holding our breath through the various scenes of Betty's emotional breakdown. When we see her kneel in front of a broken wine glass, her wrists out, or opening an oven door, we can't help but fear that she's going to attempt to kill herself. Of course, they surprised us by having Betty once again do something we never thought we'd see her do. She coldly calls Don and tells him not to come home, she doesn't want to see him. So great was the tension that the four of us who watched it last night broke into spontaneous applause at her actions. When was the last time a television show made you applaud?

Meanwhile, Peggy is struggling with Father Gill and the CYO ladies. She's annoyed that she's been dragged into doing something she doesn't want to do and frustrated that she's not even being allowed to do it the way she thinks it should be done. Again, we wanted to hate Father Gill for being so pushy, but he's only doing what his job dictates. He picks away at Peggy's scabs and she doesn't like it one bit. In perfect Peggy style, she simply does not respond to things that she doesn't want to face and stares at him wide-eyed, then looks away. We see her later, stripped bare just like Betty, staring ahead in the bathtub when suddenly she covers her face with her hands. The good father got to her and it remains to be seen where she's going to go from here.

Back at Sterling Cooper, Joan fulfills her newfound duties so well and the clients are so happy with her work, that Roger comes around to the idea of hiring someone to do it full time. Of course, this being 1962, no one even entertains the idea of Joan actually moving up to fill the position. Peggy Olsen lucked into a couple benefactors in Don and Freddy Rumsen, but Joan has no one on her side to plead her case. Up till now, she hasn't displayed a shred of ambition and even though most of the men in the office are intimidated by her intelligence, the packaging is just too distracting for any of them, least of all Roger, to see her as a worthy contributer in "their world." Christina Hendricks knocks it out of the park with her acting in the scene when she finds out she's been replaced. It's not just that you can see her hide the disappointment in her face; she's also hiding her own surprise that she's disappointed at all. And in one of those perfect, real life bits of writing that this show does so well, we see her at home that night, wincing and rubbing the grooves her space age bra have cut into her shoulders. The weight of being Joan Holloway is literally cutting her down.

A recurring motif in this show is one where people are constantly shown putting on or taking off their armor. From Pete adjusting his tie and cufflinks approvingly in front of a mirror, to the female characters getting in or out of their restrictive undergarments, everyone goes through life hemmed in by their roles and how they manifest in their clothing. To Joan's painful undergarment moment and what that says about her we can add Father Gill's lengthy disrobing of his vestments. Once again another character is stripped bare and he sits on his bed in his undershirt with his guitar and for the first time truly comes to life in front of our eyes as he passionately sings a Peter, Paul and Mary tune. The scene shifts and the music almost seamlessly goes from Father Gill's warbling to the actual Peter, Paul and Mary recording as we see Don sitting in the breakroom, his life broken as he drinks a Heineken. He made the Heineken people happy with his pitch, but inadvertently started the ball rolling on the destruction of his marriage in doing so.


[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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Mad Men S2E7: The Gold Violin

Don Draper is garbage.

We knew that already but it was still shocking to see it spelled out, both in Jimmy Barrett's confrontation and in the literal trail of garbage the Draper family leaves behind after enjoying an afternoon out. The message couldn't be more clear: they and their surroundings may look perfect and idyllic, but the whole thing's a mess, really.

We get another glimpse of Don's immediate post-Dick Whitman period via a flashback to his days as a car salesman in the early '50s. Jon Hamm does a terrific job of differentiating between the "Don Draper" of ten years ago and the fully realized Don Draper of now. We wondered how he could have just taken over another man's life without complications and now we see he didn't. We're dying to know how he made those complications go away.

That humble, almost-grimy flashback is in sharp contrast to the tableau of picture-perfect Don admiring a Cadillac Coupe de Ville in a spectacular 1962 showroom. As Don admired the sleek lines of the car, the clearly gay salesman was admiring Don's. The sudden remembrance of the lie his life is built on (as if he needed any reminding) causes him to reject the status car because he can't quite embrace the idea that he deserves it.

As if he could do anything to stop his upward mobility. Duck screws things up with the American Airlines pitch and Don winds up getting the major status leap by being asked to sit on the board of a new museum. "Philanthropy is the gateway to power," says Bert Cooper, the Rand disciple, and the cynicism of the remark isn't lost on Don. He may be slightly reluctant to "take his place at the table," but clearly it didn't take him long to change his mind. "Wayne, I would like to buy this car," and he proceeds to treat it with the reverence he would never accord his own family. No fooling around in the car with Betty and no Silly Putty in the car. And check those kids' hands before they get in the car. Leave a literal trail of garbage behind you, but make sure your prize possession is in perfect condition.

In other news, We finally get to see a little more of the Sal and Kitty Romano home life and honeys, speaking as a couple of gays, it is depressing. Oh, the surface (like all surfaces in the world of Mad Men) is pretty and looks perfectly coordinated - Sal and Kitty's outfits matched not only each other's, but the decor as well - but obviously (to us, anyway), the whole thing is built on a lie.

We literally groaned out loud at poor Sal's sudden crush on the newly revealed "sensitive" Ken Cosgrove, who understands a Rothko painting, makes a West Side Story reference (that causes Sal's neck to snap up so quickly, we thought he was going to launch into "America" right then and there), and sheepishly asks Sal to critique his latest story. Sal's infatuated, Ken's oblivious to it, and Kitty knows something's a little weird but she probably can't figure out what. That is NOT a good combination.

It would be easy to judge Sal or to root for him to get out and wave his rainblow flag but the fact is, in 1962 in that milieu, Sal didn't have a lot of options and the options he did have were damn scary. Kudos to Bryan Batt for his performance this week. We rarely say this sort of thing regarding gay roles or gay actors, but only a gay actor could have managed the thousand different expressions that flitted across his face this episode. Only a gay man could nail that fear and that repression.

In other news...there's a catfight in the Sterling Cooper steno pool, bitches! Joan has HAD IT with Jane from Jane Street and the sight of the formidable Miss Holloway marching across the office (while still managing a sashay) and demanding of Jane "What in God's green earth are you doing here?" after having fired her for pointing out that Joan's 11 years older than her. Is there anything more frightening - and more delicious - than the simmering Joan saying perfectly evenly to the girl who won this round, "No. There's no problem. It's perfectly clear." Oh Jane, honey. You are in for a shitload of trouble now. Roger Sterling's no fool. He's got two gorgeous women locking horns and he's managed to position himself in the middle. Make no mistake, that whole conflict is going to about Roger Sterling any minute. We thought it was notable that Joan was wearing the same dress in that scene that she wore in the hotel room scene with Roger last season. That kind of thing isn't accidental on this show.

We also saw the return of Mr. Smith and Mr. Smith, who just wanna be, man. Not-American Mr. Smith is kinda cute. Still, despite their assertions that their generation is so different from the preceding one, they still manage to write jingles about "coffee-colored girls" down in Mexico and they still manage to call Peggy "sweetheart" in front of her peers. They're not as different as they think.

And finally, that devastating final scene in the Stork Club, where Jimmy got back at Don for fucking his wife by fucking over Don's wife in return. Betty looked absolutely destroyed by Jimmy's words and again, we have to give props to January Jones for being a much better actress than she is given credit for. Jimmy sat down and with a smile on his face, tore her life apart. It says a lot about perfect little Betty Draper that the first thing she does is respond with what sounded to us like an anti-Semitic "You people" in return. But can you really blame Jimmy? Sure, what he said to Don and Betty was nasty and meant to hurt, but at least he's honest about his feelings. You can't say that about most people in the world.

So perfect Don and perfect Betty drive home in their perfect car in perfect clothes in perfect silence. Until Betty pukes all over her perfect dress and Don's perfect car. That ending? Perfect.






[Photos: Courtesy of amctv.com]


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