Peggy Olson – Page 2 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Mad Men: Season 6, Episode 12–The Quality of Mercy

“You’re a monster.”

Not long ago, my friend Chris Hart posited that, insofar as it has one, Don Draper has become the ‘villain’ of Mad Men. Rarely has that seemed so true as this week. Lost in his constant existential turmoil, Don has always been self-centred, so intent on his own bitter self-discovery that those around him always take second place. This week, though, Don’s actions towards those around him seemed like they could have been motivated by nothing more than pure malice.

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Mad Men: Season 6, Episode 11–Favors

“Not all surprises are bad.”

Oh really, Roger Sterling? Not all surprises are bad? In the real world maybe, but this is Mad Men, where everything that happens to everyone is bad. If you really think some surprises here are good, just ask Don Draper. Or Sally Draper. Or, for that matter, Pete Campbell.

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Mad Men: Season 6, Episode 9–The Better Half

“We’re both two halves of the same person. We want the same things.”

“The Better Half” – a self-deprecating phrase often used by husbands in the 60s to describe their wives. Ironic, really, considering the second place wives always took to the ‘Master of the House’. Here, it meant that and more in a thoughtful, incisive episode of Mad Men that examined the characters’ relationships with their families and their partners, and asked, just who is the ‘better half’?

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Mad Men: Season 6, Episode 5–The Flood

“This is an opportunity. The heavens are telling us to change.”

Usually, in Mad Men, history just rumbles along in the background, its social mores informing our characters’ motivations, its events occasionally prompting semi-important plotlines. Every so often, though, history leaps up and slaps the narrative across the face. Seasons 1-3 were like that; 1 building to Kennedy’s Presidential victory, 2 climaxing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and 3 ending with the shock of JFK’s assassination. Last week, I wondered whether this season might be building up to climax with the assassination of his brother Bobby. Instead, it took me by surprise with a Big Historical Event right in the middle of the run – the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King.

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Mad Men: Season 6, Episode 4–To Have and To Hold

“If you don’t like what they’re saying – change the conversation.”

This was the first episode of Mad Men this season in which Matt Weiner had no writing credit – and it showed, in a definite change of tone from his usual portent-laden melancholia. Instead, it came off more like the soap opera it basically is, beneath the existential trappings. Appropriate, given that one of the major subplots involved Megan’s work on the fictional soap opera which gave the episode its title.

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Mad Men: Season 6, Episodes 1 & 2 – The Doorway

“Midway through life’s journey, I went astray on a straight road – and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.”

It’s time to rejoin the existential angst of the unhappy folk at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, as Mad Men returns for its sixth, apparently penultimate season. After the tumultuous events of last year – Joan whoring herself to a sweaty exec for a partnership, Peggy heading off to a rival agency, and Lane Pryce hanging himself in his office – our heroes are unhappy. For this show, this is not unusual.

The season premiere, appropriately enough, was all about death. We opened with a POV shot of some unknown person being resuscitated from a heart attack. Oh no! Is it Don? Roger? Bert, even?

Since Matthew Weiner’s script immediately cut straight to a Hawaiian beach, that was a mystery to be eked out for a short while. It lent a hallucinatory air to the proceedings, as I began to wonder whether Don and Megan’s idyllic holiday was actually one of the dream sequences the show occasionally does; it’s often so thickly portentous even when it isn’t a dream, it can be hard to tell. Let’s face it, Mad Men is so heavy with portents, the folk from Frank Herbert’s Dune look uncomplicated by comparison.

Don Draper must be the only person whose choice of beach reading is Dante’s Inferno, another portent that made me wonder if this was a near-death experience. But no, as we began seeing things from Megan’s perspective too, that clearly wasn’t the case. Nevertheless, the Drapers’ vacation had a surreal quality to it.

Don, unable to sleep, met a drunken soldier at the hotel bar. As they chatted about their respective combat experiences, Don found himself agreeing to be best man for the clearly doomed PFC Dinkins at his wedding the next morning, before heading back to Vietnam. The whole sequence had such a dreamlike quality, it was hard to tell if it was imaginary until Megan found her husband giving away a bride on the beach the next morning, taking a snapshot of the occasion.

Mention of Vietnam got me wondering exactly when the new season was set. Mad Men never does anything as easy as telling the viewer; you have to work it out from hints in the dialogue, the fashions, the cars etc. Last year, the elapsed time between seasons was easy to work out from Joan’s pregnancy. This year, there was no such easy clue, but the Christmas trees, and the repeated references to Dr Christiaan Barnard’s first heart transplant, gave it away – we were in December 1967.

So, the characters have just been through the Summer of Love, though in typical Mad Men fashion, it’s a very cold winter when we catch up with them. Don, increasingly out of touch with the young, was dismissive of the trivialisation of the word ‘love’, being used to pepper conversations and ad campaigns – “Why are we contributing to the trivialization of the word? It doesn’t belong in the kitchen. We’re wearing it out.”

In keeping with the times, absolutely everyone’s now smoking weed – the creative team at SCDP even sparking up in the office, to very little reaction from Don (“I smell creativity”). Vietnam would now be in full swing, and the horror of the combat starting to come through to the American public – as Peggy discovered to her annoyance.

In keeping with what I’d expected at the end of last year, we spent a deal of time here catching up with Peggy and how she was doing at rival firm Cutler, Gleason and Chaough. Not unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of Don Draper in her work style – she’s confident and thoroughly in charge of her rather timid creative team. She’s also now living with longtime boyfriend Abe, and walking all over him too, which he seems perfectly content with; he too seems permanently stoned.

Still, Peggy obviously misses the SCDP crew; working all night at the office, she spends ages on the phone to old buddy Stan. So it was that Stan happened to overhear everything that passed between her and her boss – Don’s old rival – Ted Chaough. Trouble a-brewing?

Roger, meanwhile, appeared to have got his acid-fuelled serenity out of his system and was spending time with a therapist. John Slattery was as wryly amusing as ever; he manages to keep Roger deep enough to avoid him being just a comical buffoon. We saw both sides in these two episodes, as he too got to reflect on death, in this case his mother’s.

This was announced to him by his tearful secretary Caroline, who he awkwardly comforted while balancing two glasses of gin. The comedy was heightened even more at a supremely awkward wake. In Mad Men, no social occasion ever goes well, and this was no exception. Having to deal with fawning elderly relatives, two ex-wives and his grasping daughter, it was a relief for Roger when the unexpectedly sloshed Don turned up, staggered about a bit and vomited into the umbrella stand, mercifully cutting short his wheelchair-bound aunt’s saccharine eulogy.

It felt strangely out of character (presumably intentionally) for Don to be so out of control on booze. Yes, he’s had his problems there before, but he seemed to get over them. This time, there was little forewarning; after Megan (now a minor soap opera star) left for some filming, he was seen silently sipping whisky while the maid vacuumed. Next minute he was turning up at Roger’s, barely able to stand up.

Don being Don, he was lost in introspection half the time, staring at things with a troubled expression in that way he has. In one of the show’s examples of portentous symbolism, he’d discovered that, while in Hawaii, he’d accidentally switched his Zippo lighter with that of Private Dinkins, and he can’t get rid of it. He tried throwing it in the trash, only for Megan to hand it back to him after the maid found it. Later, he asked his secretary Dawn to get the Army to return it to Dinkins; given this opener’s obsession with death, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that the young man is already on his way home in a body bag.

Don seems obsessed with death. Perhaps he’s still haunted by guilt over Lane’s suicide, which itself reawakened his guilt over his brother’s. We discovered fairly early on (in a joltingly timeslipped sequence) that the victim of the heart attack seen at the outset was the seemingly insignificant doorman at Don’s apartment, Jonesy. As the drunken Don was manhandled home by Pete and Ken, he stopped to slurringly and insistently press Jonesy for details of what he’d seen when he ‘died’ – as it turned out, the old standby of ‘a white light’.

Perhaps this was what inspired Don to come up with an ill-advised pitch to the Sheraton honchos, showing an abandoned set of clothes on a Hawaiian beach. He thought it was an image of freedom; to everyone else, it suggested suicide. An interesting juxtaposition of ideas, if a little obvious by this show’s standards.

Betty at least didn’t seem morbidly obsessed with death, as we caught up with her and Sally watching Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. But she too was acting very oddly. With Sally’s friend Sandy staying over for Christmas, she was obviously none too keen on husband Henry apparently perving at her – but it was a bit out of the blue when she acidly suggested that he should rape her. And that she should watch. Joke it may have been, but this is not the prim Betty we remember – is middle age taking a toll on her sexual tastes along with her waistline?

Taking her unusual behaviour further, she seemed to be forging a maternal bond with Sandy in the way she never has with Sally. Tracking the errant teenager to a filthy commune in Greenwich Village, she then took on the role of den mother to the straggly hippy boys trying ineptly to cook goulash while stoned. She didn’t find Sandy, though – and what was the heavily telegraphed significance of her ripping her coat?

And while Roger may have taken the death of his mother with a sanguine, almost exasperated air, death came back to hit him hard as he was handed the cleaning tools of his just-deceased shoeshine guy – and collapsed in a weeping heap. Of course, this would usually just be a delayed reaction to the death that really should affect him; but it would be quite in keeping for Roger Sterling to be more attached to his shoeshine boy than his mother.

Not many clues here about where the season’s going to go. Everything seems pretty stable at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (nice that they kept Lane’s name on the ticket). Don’s full of introspective angst and middle-aged obsolescence, but when isn’t he? Black secretary Dawn is still the sole representative of non-white ethnicities in the office. And Peggy seems to be doing just fine at Cutler, Gleason and Chaough, despite the unfortunate problem with the Koss headphones account.

Yes, on the surface, everything seemed fine. But then, in this show, that’s often the way. This episode had a doom-laden, ominous tone deriving from nothing out of the ordinary at all; Dinkins’ lighter, Don’s rearranged office and so forth. And the noticeable fixation with death – and what happens after – may be some tonal indicator of what’s to come. For now though, while this was a good season opener and certainly very watchable, it lacked the compelling tone of last year. A low key start, even for a show this low key – let’s see where it goes from here.

Historical events

As mentioned above, the first successful heart transplant – achieved by Dr Christiaan Barnard on 3 December 1967 – got a lot of shout outs. It was also perfectly accurate that Phyllis Diller was fronting the Tonight Show at that point – Matthew Weiner pointed out that Johnny Carson routinely took the holidays off. Not sure who the comedian guest was that made the unfortunate gag about GIs having necklaces made from human ears, but that certainly did become a scandal at about this point.

Dedicated Followers of Fashion

As we’ve moved on from 1966, apparently the Hideous Checked Sports Coats so prominent last year are no longer In. What is In, after the Summer of Love made hippies trendy, is flamboyant facial hair. Ginsberg was sporting a fulsome moustache:

While Stan had gone the whole hog with a massive full-on beard:

Even Peggy’s beau Abe is no longer the clean-cut beatnik we remember, but has morphed into a Frank Zappa lookalike:

No wonder he seemed so stoned.

Roger, for his part, was sporting a style new to him – a none-too-subtle pastel blazer, with two rows of conspicuous buttons:

Tune in next week to see what other atrocities the looming end of the decade will force our characters to wear…

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 13–The Phantom

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 13 YET.

“It’s a great sin to take advantage of hopeless people.”

After the high drama of recent episodes – Joan’s prostitution, Peggy’s departure, Lane’s suicide – the finale to Mad Men’s fifth season felt somewhat more low key. It was a chance for the characters to take stock of where they’d been left by the tumultuous events of the year, both in their business and personal lives. It was notable that, this year more than any, there was no major historical event against which to juxtapose the characters, a sign perhaps that the drama itself is now more important than its context.

One of the things the show has often dealt with is the consequences of its characters’ actions, and this finale seemed to take most of its time in dealing with those. Mad Men’s plotlines never have what you could call conclusions, not really, but there were capstones – and consequences – to many of the subplots laid out this year.

Lane’s suicide has obviously affected everyone at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce very deeply (apart from anything else, they’re presumably going to have to rename the company). Yet, in keeping with the show’s usual dramatic subtlety, it was quite some way into the episode before anyone explicitly mentioned the matter. Initially, we got some sideways references to it: Lane’s empty chair at the partners’ meeting, Harry, Bert, and apparently others being less than keen to move into the office where this unspeakable event had happened.

Don seemed to be keeping it together, but from the very start his guilt seemed to be manifesting itself; initially as a troublesome toothache which he refused to see a dentist about, then increasingly with visions of his dead brother Adam. As noted by many Lane’s suicide (probably intentionally) mirrored Adam’s perfectly. Both hanged themselves after having been rejected by Don, and obviously Don (and the screenwriter) is acutely aware of the similarity.

In moral terms, Don’s treatment of Lane is far more defensible than his treatment of his brother, who he rejected to keep his former life as Dick Whitman a secret. As a partner in the agency who’d been found to be embezzling it and forging the accounts, Lane was clearly in an untenable positions, and Don at least did him the courtesy of allowing him to resign while keeping the embezzlement confidential (though this may have had more to do with Don worrying that a police investigation would turn up his own ongoing identity theft). Nonetheless, Don should have little to feel guilty about concerning Lane.

But that’s not how it works when somebody you’re close to kills himself, and the visions of Don’s brother may have more to do with reminding us that he really should feel responsible in that case. It’s a mark of the show’s attention to detail that they were able to hire Jay Paulson to return as Adam after having dispatched the character in the first season. He’s a distinctive enough actor for me to have recognised him immediately as the ‘phantom’ of the title when Don started seeing him out of the corner of his eye, tentatively asking, “Adam?”

These two manifestations of Don’s present and ongoing guilt finally came together as Don relented and wen to the dentist to see about his toothache. Knowledge of the show’s style meant that, as Don went under the gas and closed his eyes, then opened them again, I realised instantly that we were into one of the show’s ‘dream’ sequences. So it proved as Adam turned up, not to berate Don but offer a sad smile and another parallel to Lane: “I lost my job. Because I’m dead.” An unpleasant purple weal around his neck was proof enough of this, and Don pleaded, “Don’t go”. To which Adam’s response – “Don’t worry, I’ll hang around. Get it?” indicates that we’ll likely be seeing more of Don’s increasing burden of guilt when the show returns.

It doesn’t help that Lane’s death, along with a resurgence in business from Mohawk Airlines, has done the company pretty well financially. His life insurance payout is massive, and SCDP are the beneficiaries – shades of Death of a Salesman, which were further emphasised when Don insisted on paying $50,000 of the settlement to Lane’s widow.

The scene of Don visiting Mrs Pryce, and awkwardly trying to offer condolences only to be rejected coldly, was one of those supremely uncomfortable scenes Mad Men does so well. Embeth Davidtz as Rebecca Pryce has had almost nothing to do, acting wise, beyond a blithe ignorance of her husband’s misdeeds; now finally, she got a chance to show her acting mettle. As the only other thing I’ve ever seen her in was the 1993 Evil Dead sequel Army of Darkness, I was pleasantly surprised by how good she was here. Keeping the traditional British restraint about grief, she coldly told Don, “It was wrong of you to fill a man like that with ambition” – probably the most succinct analysis of Lane’s downfall you could get. And she outright told Don that she knew this to be just an attempt to salve his own conscience, and that as far as she was concerned, it did nothing to alleviate his guilt. Ouch.

As this is Mad Men, and everyone has to be having a horrible time, Pete Campbell was doing pretty badly too. Pete’s one of those characters that, while impossible to like, I still can’t help feeling sorry for; as mentioned several weeks ago, absolutely nothing works out for him. His tragedy is that, like Don, he seems to have everything he should want, but like Don, it’s never enough. It’s ironic that this is the one way in which Pete truly is similar to his ‘hero’ Don.

This week, we got a resolution – of sorts – to his attempts to have a passionate affair a la Don, with fellow commuter’s wife Beth. After seeing Beth on the train, he was powerless to resist her invitation for a meaningless shag in the same hotel where she’d stood him up. Then she revealed that this would be the last time it would happen – she was off to have her depression treated (not for the first time) with electro convulsive therapy, and experience had taught her that she would likely not even remember him afterward.

This led to a rather heartbreaking scene as Pete blagged his way in to visit her at the hospital, only to discover that she’d already had the ECT and (apparently) really had forgotten who he was. Cue a long and surprisingly moving speech from Pete as he detailed the travails of the ‘friend’ he told Beth he was there to visit – actually, of course, a summation of his own emptiness and lack of fulfilment. It was delivered brilliantly by Vincent Kartheiser, who constantly manages – for me, anyway – to keep Pete straddling the line between loathsome and sympathetic.

At least one thing seemed to work out for him, though. Ending up in a fistfight on the commuter train with Beth’s husband Howard, he unwisely baited the no-nonsense conductor who broke up the fight, receiving a black eye for his trouble. Turning up battered at home led wife Trudy (Community’s Alison Brie, who we don’t see nearly enough of) to concede that his desire to rent an apartment back in Manhattan was probably a good idea. But what’s the betting that it’s not going to make him any happier?

At least we got a welcome return for Peggy Olson. I wouldn’t expect her to have left the show for good; after all, the very first episode began with her first day at the agency, and she’s been a crucial character since. Here, we saw that life at Cutler Gleason and Chaough may not be much better for her. Ted Chaough dragooned her into taking up smoking so she can work on a prospective Philip Morris account, and it’s no surprise that she followed her old boss’s example once again when times are hard – she went to the movies.

Where, as chance would have it, she met Don himself, also taking refuge from his troubles as he recovered from his tooth extraction (it must have been terrifying for him when the dentist told him he couldn’t smoke for 24 hours). Their scene together was touching; despite Peggy having only left a couple of weeks ago, they hugged like old friends who hadn’t seen each other for ages. The real chemistry between Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss was again in evidence as both feigned happiness, avoiding the subject of their current worries. At least Don’s regret over her departure was expressed; he seemed bitter and sad but proud when he told her, “that’s what happens when you help someone. They succeed and move on.” I doubt we’ve seen the last of Peggy (she was highlighted significantly in the closing montage); but I wonder where she’ll be when the show returns. Back at SCDP, or turning into a capable rival for Don elsewhere?

Thankfully, the often-too-perfect Megan was getting a serious dose of her husband’s usual sense of angst and futility. Her acting career is noticeably failing to take off (and her mother is none too sympathetic), and like Don, she took refuge in brooding and getting drunk. Jessica Pare is a perfectly capable actress, but I can certainly understand many people’s objection that Megan has little depth as a character beyond acting as a foil for Don’s insecurities. Here, finally, that mask of wholesomeness was nicely cracked.

After one of her friends begged her for an in with Don to be cast in a new SCDP commercial, Megan basically stabbed her in the back by trying to get the gig herself. Don was initially reluctant but eventually conceded, and in one of the episode’s last scenes, we saw that Megan had got the job. Terrific, perhaps, but a total abandonment of her earlier principled stance that she wanted to succeed on her own merit. She may be finally getting work, but it’s only because of her husband rather than her ability, and she betrayed a close friend to do so. Welcome properly to the world of Mad Men characters, Megan. (And that’s before you even consider that her mother is yet again entwined in the ‘understanding’ arms of Roger Sterling!)

The ep – and the season – concluded with one of its trademark musical montages, this time set to Nancy Sinatra’s hit of that year, ‘You Only Live Twice’. As usual – a highly appropriate choice – Don manages to both recall and subvert the archetype of James Bond as he walks away from Megan’s film set into the darkness. Hanging out at a bar, he was approached by, yet again, a shyly attractive young lady. And her friend. And his unspoken answer to their question – “Are you alone?” – was the cliffhanger on which this season left him. He’s spent the year trying hard to move away from the ‘old’ Don, only to find the consequences of his actions pushing him back into that role ever more. Will he have the strength to resist?

It’s been a great season, which was a relief after having waited nearly two years to see it. Matthew Weiner has, as ever, kept the show’s slow burning moodiness and character depth, so that truly dramatic events, when they come, are all the more shocking for it. It’s sad that we won’t be seeing any more of Lane, who really came into his own this year in terms of deep plotlines both humorous and sad, and Jared Harris deserves a nod for his likeable performance over the last three seasons. And I’m glad to see that Peggy’s departure from SCDP doesn’t mean her departure from the show. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait as long for the next season as we did for this one!

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 11–The Other Woman

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 11 YET.

“Don’t fool yourself. This is some very dirty business.”

With just three episodes left this season (including this one), Mad Men continues to impress, this week presenting one of the most powerful, heartrending instalments the show’s ever done. With perhaps a tighter focus than usual, this week’s episode directly addressed one of the themes that’s been ever-present throughout the show’s run – the gender politics of its 60s setting, and in particular the thoughtless, unjust treatment of women that even good men – like Don – just don’t understand.

The script focuses almost exclusively on the travails of Joan, Peggy and even Megan to make its point. Not that the male characters are absent; indeed, they get as much screen time as the women, with some telling character points of their own. But they’re primarily there to demonstrate just what a bad lot in life women – even massively capable ones like Joan, Peggy and Megan – got in 1966.

It was an angry script by writer Semi Chellas (with the usual input from showrunner Matthew Weiner) that accomplished its aims fairly straightforwardly, but not without some real dramatic inventiveness. Ostensibly, the ‘story’ – fitting neatly into the show’s current arc – was about the progress of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s bid for the Jaguar account. But in every way, the story was used to reflect the injustice to which women were routinely subjected at the time.

The script set out its stall fairly early on, with a business dinner between Pete, Ken and Jaguar Dealers’ Association head Herb Rennet. Herb, a slimy, pudgy sort of fellow, doesn’t mince words; he’ll give them his vote, conditional on the promise of a night with the ‘stunning redhead’ who showed him around the office – Joan Harris. Initially, this looked like the sort of thing the show often does, setting up the inherent sexism of the period for being knocked down fairly quickly. We know Pete’s a spineless, unprincipled wanker, but surely even he would baulk at pimping out the formidable Joan for a fast buck?

But no, despite Ken’s immediate reaction of “no way”, Pete not only didn’t rule it out, but made a hilariously hamfisted attempt to make this indecent proposal to Joan as ‘indirectly’ as he could. At this point, the plotline was still funny enough to provoke laughter, with Pete’s clumsy attempts at obfuscation more than matched by exactly the kind of frosty looks you’d expect from Joan. But the humour rapidly began to dissipate as Pete took her at her word – “you couldn’t afford it” – and convened a partners’ meeting to discuss exactly what they could afford to offer her.

As I say, the script had stopped aiming the idea at humour, and what replaced it was outrage. To be fair, Don at least had the decency to walk straight out, saying that if this was what it took, he didn’t want the account. But none of the others had the decency to rule out the idea – not Lane,who recently tried to kiss Joan, not Roger, who’s actually fathered a child with her, not even the usually principled Bert Cooper. Dazzled by the promise of a prestigious auto account, they were all prepared to ask a woman they’d worked with and respected for many years to prostitute herself to further their business.

Lane at least did seem to demur, which almost gave him a shred of decency; but it was clear that he was terrified of offering Joan the prospective $50,000, since he’s already fraudulently obtained that on company credit to pay off his own tax debts. That plotline, clearly hanging over Lane’s head, was what encouraged him, via a conversation made almost entirely out of obfuscation, to give her the idea of asking for a partnership instead. Let’s be clear – Lane wasn’t against pimping out this woman he has feelings for. He just didn’t want it to happen if it revealed that he’s been embezzling the company. That’s far from a high-minded declaration of principle.

Even then, I couldn’t see Joan agreeing to do this. She’s been one of the most self-assured, capable, principled characters on the show since it began. Surely she wouldn’t agree to sell her body in order to further her career? And yet the script gave us a plausible scenario as to why she would give in to the idea of sleeping her way to the top. With her husband divorcing her, her baby to bring up, and now her refrigerator breaking down with no money left to fix it, she’s at her wit’s end. What’s being suggested is horrible – but pragmatically, can she afford to reject the idea? So she went to Pete, and forthrightly declared that she’d do it – in exchange for the 5% partnership, and no negotiation.

The prospect of a character you’ve come to like having to stoop to such depths was truly horrifying, but even then, I found it hard to believe she’d go through with it. When Don found out what the other partners had agreed to in his absence, he hotfooted it straight to Joan’s apartment to play Knight in Shining Armour and talk her out of it. But, as if to prove that Don’s good intentions don’t matter a jot, and that he doesn’t really understand the position Joan’s in, he was too late.

Not that this was immediately clear. At first, it seemed like he’d arrived in the nick of time, and Joan was having second thoughts. But then, Don’s pitch to the Jaguar panel – not coincidentally describing the XKE in the most misogynist terms of femininity – was cleverly intercut with the sequence of Joan having visited the loathsome Rennet the night before. It was heartbreaking to see the self-loathing on Joan’s face as she turned to allow him to undo her bra.

Even then, the intercutting of the sequence kept us guessing. Surely Joan would have second thoughts, politely tell the pudgy car dealer she couldn’t go through with it, and leave? But no, as Don came to the climax of his pitch (tellingly, it was “Jaguar – at last something beautiful you can truly own”), we realised that Joan had gone through with it after all. As she lay naked in bed with the less than attractive Rennet then turned away from him in discreet loathing, it was hard to hold back a tear. And then we went back to the scene of Don arriving at the apartment, realising then that he’d arrived after Joan had gone through with it. No wonder she was about to take a shower.

Was Joan right to do what she did, from a pragmatic viewpoint of a much overdue furtherance to her career? It’s hard to judge, given the presumably accurate portrayal of the attitudes of the time. Certainly, her expression at the partners’ meeting – when Jaguar confirmed their acceptance of the proposal – was all steely business, feeling suppressed. But her telling exchange of looks with a horrified Don showed there was more under the surface than just pragmatism and acceptance. It was a masterful performance from Christina Hendricks throughout, and given Joan’s bonding with Don last week, I wonder if the two are about to have a long, soul-searching chat again.

For all Don’s well-intentioned chivalry though, the far more lightweight (but still angry) plotline about Megan’s audition showed that he’s just as much of a sexist dinosaur as his colleagues. He may not want women to debase themselves (not that this has always bothered him), but he just doesn’t get that the women he knows might want to succeed on their own terms, without his ‘gentlemanly’ help. Certainly when Megan reveals that, should she get the role, she’ll be off touring for months on end, Don’s immediate reaction is to abandon his previous tolerance and forbid it outright. Megan’s angry assertion that he only allowed her to follow her dream because he expected her to fail looked dead on the money to me.

I’m still doubtful over Megan as an ongoing character. As commented on this blog a couple of weeks ago, she’s often seemed too perfect, lacking the flaws of the rest of the characters and acting more as a foil for Don than a person in her own right. But Semi Chellas’ script made me genuinely feel for her. First she had to endure the realisation that her husband had no confidence in her abilities (despite that he still wants her advice about the Jaguar pitch). Then, in a brief but telling scene, it became obvious that her audition callback was less about her acting ability than the shape of her rear end. And for all that Don was ready to be the Comforting Husband, you got the impression that he still didn’t understand.

But when it came to Don Just Not Getting It, this was small fry compared to the episode’s other big storyline – his treatment of Peggy. In the stress and furore of recent weeks, he’s been consistently treating her more like a doormat than a protege, and this week she’d finally had enough.

The last straw came when, having pitched a brilliant proposal to Chevalier LeBlanc perfume in Ginsberg’s absence (and after having refused to be described as his subordinate), Peggy found Don’s first reaction to be that he’d hand the idea straight to Ginsberg as soon as he was finished with Jaguar. And then, to add insult to injury, he took Peggy’s aggravation as a sign that she just wanted the account to get a free trip to Paris. Peggy, to her credit, immediately decided that she was worth more than that, and went out looking for better opportunities with the competition, where she might be recognised as worthy on her own terms.

Not surprisingly, Don’s old nemesis Ted Chaough was more than willing to make her an offer – in fact, he was prepared to exceed her original demand by $1000 a year. It’s nice to hope that he did this out of recognition of her abilities (and that probably was a factor), but given the way we’d seen women treated throughout the episode, my first thought was that he was making the offer just as a way to stick it to Don.

Peggy’s been an integral character to the show since episode one, and initially I didn’t believe she’d leave SCDP. But in a shock moment, leave she did. And as if to cement the episode’s portrayal of the well-meaning Don Just Not Getting It, his initial assumption was that she was just fishing for a raise, which he was more than prepared to give. He finally Got It when it became clear that, no matter what he offered, his former protege was off to pastures new; as he realised, and both reflected that this was really the end for them, the scene became genuinely tearjerking.

Don’s voice cracked as he refused to let go of Peggy’s hand, his face crumpling; Peggy herself had tears rolling down her otherwise controlled face. It was a hugely emotional scene, brilliantly played by both Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss. As Peggy walked out of SCDP for the last time amid furious partying, unnoticed by all (except, significantly, Joan), it became clear that she really was going. And perhaps now is the right time for that. As has recently become clear, she’s basically already become Don, albeit a female version, and the show doesn’t need two of them. Nonetheless, she’ll be missed.

An incredibly powerful episode overall, that gave Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss in particular a chance to shine, and made me mark Semi Chellas as a writer to look out for. It’s easy for a man, if he’s liberal, to intellectually grasp how badly women were treated in the 60s; it’s quite something else to make him understand it on an emotional level. By rubbing our faces in the injustice suffered by likeable characters we’d known for some time, this episode succeeded at doing just that to an extent that I don’t think even Mad Men has managed before.

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 8–Lady Lazarus

“It’s so simple when it’s someone else’s life, isn’t it?”

In a week when I’ve failed to get an interview for a job I’ve actually done before, Mad Men’s existential angst, and particularly Don Draper’s increasingly obvious obsolescence, seemed particularly redolent for me. This week’s was a somewhat lighter affair than the sturm und drang of recent episodes, with a less compressed timescale and focus; more , in fact, like the high quality soap opera it really is. But even a comparatively frothy episode like this one, written by series creator Matthew Weiner, had plenty of moments of acute and often painful character observation.

We got to see more of the Don/Megan dynamic this week, a recurring motif this season as Don looks increasingly antediluvian next to his young, with-it new wife. Trying to find some music for a Chevalier Blanc ad campaign that would satisfy the clients, Don was baffled by the trendy stylings of the Beatles: “When did music get so important?” He had, in fact, no grasp of contemporary music at all, and it’s telling that for anything ‘new’ he has a default plan – “I’ll ask Megan, she’ll know.”

But Megan, it turned out, was less than happy with her new role as cultural zeitgeist barometer for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. She may be a talented copywriter, but she doesn’t like the job. She thinks, in fact, that it’s pretty worthless in the overall scheme of things, and has been secretly going back to her original ambition – acting. This became clear after she spun two separate lies to first Peggy then Don, to cover her attendance at an audition.

The tenacious Peggy was the first to find out the truth, in a scene where Elisabeth Moss made her seem terribly fierce. Dragging the facts out of Megan in the women’s bathroom, Peggy was shocked that Mrs Draper would want to do anything else than copywriting. It’s an interesting insight into Peggy’s character, and one that came up previously in her late night chat with Dawn; having struggled so hard to get where she is, she makes the erroneous assumption that every woman wants the same thing. It’s almost a distillation of some of feminism’s more tyrannical directives, that a woman can’t be happy unless she’s struggling to be where a man is. Thankfully, I think feminism has more or less moved on from that kind of assumption these days, but then, Peggy’s in 1966.

So naturally, Peggy was furious that Megan would so carelessly toss away a career that she herself has struggled to achieve for years. It made for an uncharacteristically bitchy relationship between the two, though in truth that’s been brewing since Megan so effortlessly snagged the Heinz account. It seems, basically, to be jealousy of someone who got such an easy break into the business and then has the affront to be genuinely good at it. Can it be that Peggy too is beginning to feel the bite of younger people snapping at her heels?

If we once thought Peggy might be a bright future for the agency, Pete Campbell always looked like the promise of a dark dystopia. Thankfully, his general ineptitude made him seem less of a threat. So it proved again this week, as he embarked on what, for most characters, would be a torrid and scandalous romance with the wife of his philandering morning train buddy.

But this is Pete, and Don Draper-style affairs never work out for him unless he pays for them. Hence, after one night of torrid passion, his incessant badgering of the oddly philosophical Beth seemed to totally put her off. She didn’t want to talk to him on the phone, she was totally freaked out when he turned up at her house with her husband on a totally contrived pretext, and she failed to show up at the illicit tryst Pete organised, leaving him once again fuming at his lack of success. But as the episode ended, with the two of them leaving the station in separate cars, she drew a little heart at him in the window mist. Might he not have failed as utterly as usual? One crumb of comfort – at least he’s finally passed his driving test, though he appears not to know what a Stop sign means.

Don, meanwhile, spent the first half of the episode in blissful ignorance of his wife’s impending career crisis. When she finally told him, he spent the rest of the episode in denial about it, pretending everything was fine. And yet it clearly wasn’t; Don’s never seemed so ill at ease than when discussing Megan’s departure with Joan, who seems to be becoming the office Wise Woman (if she wasn’t already). As if his discomfiture wasn’t enough, he had the misfortune to almost stumble into a massive Existential Metaphor, as his call to the elevator resulted in the doors opening on the yawning chasm of the empty shaft. Even Don seemed to recognise the enormous significance of… whatever this represented, looking as disturbed as a character in a particularly traumatic Twilight Zone.

Don being Don, all this pent up emotion had to result in an explosion at a not entirely appropriate moment. And so it proved, as Peggy, substituting for the now-absent Megan in a pitch to Cool Whip, flubbed the crucial line that was meant to be the big ad hook, and Don blew up in her face in front of several General Foods employees. But Peggy’s going from strength to strength these days, and she gave as good as she got, telling him that it wasn’t her he was angry with (as was obvious to everyone but Don). Don, in return, told Peggy a few hard truths – Megan left not because she disliked the job but because she disliked the kind of people that did it. People like Peggy. It was a heavy scene masterfully topped off with a genuine belly laugh, as the GF employee sternly told a visibly astonished Don something I don’t think he’s ever hear before: “I’m sorry, you can’t smoke in here.”

Actually there were quite a few laughs this week, reflecting a script that was as frothy (and yet tellingly artificial) as Cool Whip. Roger, often the source of much of the show’s humour, wasn’t around much this week, but his old rivalry with Pete surfaced as he presented the younger man with a complimentary set of skis from a client. “Are they going to explode?” Pete enquired nervously, making me laugh so hard I almost spilled my tea. Still, beware Roger bearing gifts; who knows what his motive is there? Later, bugged by Don’s incessant calls to the office where she was working late, Peggy made the unfathomable decision to pretend to be a wrong number: “Pizza house!” (yelped in an unidentifiable accent).

And to top things off, after a couple of weeks’ absence, the eye-burningly hideous checked sports coats were back in evidence, courtesy of Stan and Ginsberg, who seem to have affirmed their acceptability as office wear at SCDP:

However, even they couldn’t compete with a new style of hideous sports coat, as worn by the flamingly gay member of the Chevalier Blanc group, which seemed to be made out of a deckchair:

I guess the Summer of Love is almost upon the denizens of SCDP – as was made abundantly clear by a final montage of the gang’s angst, soundtracked by the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. As with the recent use of ‘Time is on My Side’, a perfectly apposite choice, and one flecked with irony; earlier, Don had been discussing how the Beatles never allowed ads (or TV shows) to use their work. Which used to be true. And this week’s episode of the TV show Mad Men ended with a Beatles song. For an episode so heavily freighted with philosophy and symbolism, that was so meta it was perfect.

Mad Men: Season 5, Episode 7–At the Codfish Ball

SPOILER WARNING – THIS IS FROM LAST NIGHT’S US BROADCAST, AND MAJOR PLOT POINTS ARE DISCUSSED. DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN EPISODE 7 YET.

“It’s the future. That’s all I ever wanted.”

After all the detailed character studies and complex dramatic structures of the last few weeks, Mad Men was back to being a relatively straightforward (though still high class) drama this week. Probably just as well; last week’s twisty non-linear narrative was bold, but that sort of experimentation week after week would get in the way of the actual plot.

There was definitely a Big Theme this week though, as has been a trend with Mad Men episodes. This episode’s Big Theme was parents and children, or perhaps more accurately family generations, and was nicely evoked by the penultimate scene’s exquisitely framed shot of three generations of Don’s family sitting at a formal table and looking (typically for Mad Men) less than content. It was also at the core of Megan’s surprise hit idea for the new Heinz campaign – families eating beans through the ages.

Family was obviously much on Don’s mind this week. Not only did he have the dubious pleasure of hosting a visit from Megan’s fractious Quebecois parents, he was also lumbered with looking after his own children after Sally accidentally caused Henry’s dragon of a mother to break her ankle. Sally being Sally, she lied about the cause, claiming it to be one of baby Gene’s toys rather than the cord of the phone she’d sneaked into her room.

Kiernan Shipka, another child actor of amazing range and ability, is a joy to watch as the increasingly unhappy Sally. That’s presumably why she’s stayed the course since the show’s beginning, while her brother Bobby has been recast three times. Conversely, it’s also why Bobby never gets any actual storylines. It was notable that, after arriving with his sister at Don’s, he seemed to just vanish – where was he while all the grown ups and Sally were at the award dinner, just sitting in the apartment alone playing with matches? I do wonder whether Matthew Weiner regrets having given Don a son as well as a daughter, since he’s turned out to be a dramatic spare part.

Sally, though, does get the meaty storylines, usually geared around her precocious desire to prematurely grow up. Isn’t that what all kids want? But Sally is from a very dysfunctional background, with her cold, often absent mother, her philandering father and her empty existence in the affluent suburbs. Small wonder that she became close friends with fellow misfit Glen (played by Matthew Weiner’s real life son Marten), who she was on the phone to when Pauline tripped over the cord. Their relationship is rather sweet, despite their burgeoning puberty. They’re clearly very close friends, but not boyfriend and girlfriend; in fact, they can discuss those relationships with each other openly.

That kind of frankness is clearly lacking from other areas of Sally’s life; not to mention all the adults in the show, who continue to lie, cheat, and be generally evasive with each other. Megan’s father, a card-carrying Marxist, doesn’t much care for Don or his business, though what father ever truly approves of the man who steals away his little girl? And her mother doesn’t get on too well with her father either. Fortunately they have the advantage of being able to lapse into French whenever they want a screaming match, or when Emile Calvet wants to insult Don. No wonder Don’s shown poring over a Berlitz ‘Learn French’ book – he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on around him.

Megan, though, turns out to be far more clued up than we – and Don – thought she was, particularly on a professional level. She comes up with a far better idea than anyone else has had for the Heinz campaign (which conveniently echoes this week’s Big Theme), and Don’s surprise, while undoubtedly complimentary, is also incredibly patronising. He employed his wife as a copywriter, and now he’s genuinely surprised that she’s talented at it?

Not only that, but she‘s got Roger Sterling-style smarts on actually hooking the clients too. Getting early warning at one of the show’s frequent expensive dinners that bean supremo Raymond is about to dump the agency, she expertly prompts a clueless Don into doing the pitch for her idea right then and there – and passing it off as his own idea to give it more traction. The girl’s a natural. Unfortunately her father is utterly contemptuous about her choice of career.

Her mother is similarly contemptuous about her father, especially after discovering his affair with a young grad student. As a result, poor old Sally gets yet another unwelcome lesson in sexuality when she stumbles over her stepmother’s mother giving the ever-charming Roger Sterling a blowjob in a back room. And just when Roger had spent the previous scenes brandishing his newfound empathy to all and sundry in the wake of his consciousness-expanding acid trip! It looks like the old Roger is still there under all the empathy. No wonder Sally looks so shell-shocked when rejoining the dining table, and no wonder her expressed opinion of the city is simply, “dirty”.

Peggy was being “dirty” too – at least in the mind of her strictly Catholic mother. After a nervous dinner with boyfriend Abe, she discovered that he wanted to move in with her – not to get married, like nice 60s folks do, but to ‘live in sin’. This didn’t sit well with Peggy’s mother. Bad enough that her good Catholic daughter has had a child out of wedlock and is dating a Jew, now she wants to have regular pre-marital sex and live under the same roof as that Jew.

This came out at another of the supremely awkward dinners that Mad Men does so well. Abe was conspicuously bending over backwards to downplay his Jewishness, even asserting that he loved glazed ham. But it wasn’t enough for Mrs Olson, who frostily declared that she was leaving, and advised Peggy that if she was lonely, she should get a cat. Chalk up another inter-generational conflict for this week’s Big Theme.

At least Peggy got to have a good heart to heart with Joan, as always the office den mother. Worried that Abe was going to break up with her, she requested a stress-relieving cigarette while unburdening herself to Joan. In fact, though, she learned more from Joan than she bargained for. It seems like Joan’s breakup with her husband isn’t common knowledge yet, and she’s plenty bitter about it: “Men don’t take the time to end things. They ignore you – until you insist on a declaration of hate.”

Presumably Joan is still depending on her own mother to look after her baby, and she’s plainly not happy. We could hope for some happiness with Roger, with whom she shares genuine chemistry; but Roger’s hardly the dependable sort, and I doubt Matthew Weiner would let his creations off so lightly. It’s one of the things the show excels at – making you care about characters, then making them suffer as much as possible.

Overall, it was a good episode, albeit one of the more obvious and conventional ones. It was notable that this was the first script this season not to bear the name of Matthew Weiner as at least a co-writer, and I think it showed. Some of the usual attention to detail seemed a little lacking – the way Bobby was treated as an afterthought, or the way the irascible and perceptive Dr Calvet was so easily taken in by Pete’s faux flattery at the dinner. But the cast made it as compelling as ever. The only major criticism I have is that this is the second week in a row without a brain-cripplingly hideous checked sport coat on display…