Welcome to my viewing diary for Mad Men
. Every Monday I will review another episode of seasons four, five, and six. Both parts of season seven will be covered in the summer of 2022 (now updated to winter 2021-22). I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.
Story (aired on April 22, 2012/written by Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner; directed by Scott Hornbacher): Peggy spends the day alone, embracing a hedonistic and contemplative escape, before returning to the lover she fought that morning. Roger spends the night with his wife, in their greatest moment of bonding, before peacefully ending the marriage. Don tries to spend the afternoon and evening with Megan, a spontaneous ice cream excursion that sours and curdles, before he loses her - permanently, he fears - only for them to wind up back in one another's arms, sadder and a little more broken than before. Despite their echoes, these three tales of restless, terrifying possibility barely intersect (save for a handful of moments that literally repeat themselves from different points of view). They are told in isolation, one after the other, in an anthologized form that heightens their comparative qualities: tales of the lonely self smashing against the walls of thwarted communion.
Peggy and Abe bicker because she's more concerned with her upcoming Heinz pitch than fooling around (in all senses) with the more carefree bohemian whose sense of masculinity seems threatened by her responsibilities. If she's too much the man of the house for Abe, she's still far too much the little lady for Raymond, who brushes off her more toned-down "baked beans at campfire" concept and recoils when she finally pushes back against his perpetual naysaying (at Raymond's behest, Pete quickly informs her she's off the campaign). Belatedly taking Abe's suggestion to play hookey, but doing so alone, Peggy dips into a dark theater for The Naked Prey, an unexpected joint, and an even more unexpected opportunity to give a stranger a hand job. Returning to the office mostly to take a long nap in Don's office, she runs into Michael's father, or "father." It turns out Morris adopted the boy, born in a concentration camp, from a European orphanage in the late forties although Michael swears he actually comes from Mars and that his home planet has offered only one simple communique: "Stay where you are." Compelled both by the new co-worker's displacement and the all-too-real roots of that displacement, Peggy calls Abe and asks him to come over.
While this is unfolding, Roger launches an odyssey of his own. He won't roam on foot like Peggy nor by car like Don (who steals Roger's initial idea of a roadtrip to take Megan on a "fact-finding" trip to Howard Johnson's), yet he'll end up further afield than both of them. Jane's intellectual social circle - including her psychiatrist Catherine Orcutt (Bess Armstrong) - are taken with the latest bourgeois fad: retreating to the living room of their well-kept penthouse apartment, writing their names, addresses, and cause for concern on slips of paper as a "just in case" failsafe, and then gently laying a sugar cube on their tongue and letting it dissolve. That's right, the mid-sixties are shading into the late sixties as LSD grows in popularity, not just at the still-mostly-hidden heart of the youth counterculture but among the curious minds of the postwar generation searching for meaning in their middle age. Roger is nonchalant ("How long does it last?"), neither resistant nor excited, but the trip has a profound effect. Rather than swirling colors and psychedelic music - aside from the Beach Boys' "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" gradually drowned out by a big band ballad more appropriate for his own youth - Roger is subjected to come-to-life advertising motifs, strange behaviors of tobacco and alcohol (or at least their packaging), and even a vision of Don standing in for guide Sandy Orcutt (Tony Pasqualini). Roger and Jane dance, bathe, and lie together on the floor, eventually acknowledging the unspoken fact that their marriage is over. Roger continues to readily embrace this insight the next morning, while Jane more reluctantly accepts its truth. At work, Roger promises a baffled Don that it's going to be a beautiful day: his bored, shallow, restlessly desperate outlook has dissolved along with that sugar cube.
The sober Don is actually the character most likely to be experiencing a severe hangover, his impromptu excursion with Megan transformed into a full-blown marital crisis. Aside from her wounded reaction to his underwhelming birthday (a sorrow that revolved around what she wanted from him), Megan's frustrations haven't been given much voice. Now her despair at this lack of autonomy finally spills over. Sarcastically spooning orange desserts and shouting that he's allowed to structure his life around work while she isn't, she castigates him for dragging her away from the teamwork at the office. Poor Megan has always served the role of appendage to Don, and sharing a workplace has only compounded the domestic hierarchy rather than alleviating it. Fed up by his criticisms of her French exchanges with her mother (the only times she's allowed privacy in his presence), she snaps, "Why don't you call your mother?!" This is, of course, the worst thing she could say to Dick Whitman, and Don drives away in a fury, leaving her yelling in the parking lot. When he returns a few minutes later, she's gone and the rest of his night is spent trying to make sense of a vanishing that feels as existential as it does literal. Last seen leaving the restaurant with a group of young men, she hasn't called anyone else, doesn't answer the phone, and never shows up at the location again. Unsurprisingly, she got a ride to the bus station and took a long overnight voyage back home, but we sense the issue was never really where she went, but the fact that she went, period. For the first time she passed out of Don's control.
The two reconcile after a frantic confrontation, Don chasing Megan through their rooms, but at the office Bert is exasperated with flaky employees of any flavor. Delivering an old-fashioned brassiere ad with a red-inked "Re-do" scrawled across it (I haven't checked, but I suspect it is one of Don's earliest submissions to the agency when he was hoping to break out of being a clothing salesman), the oldest member of SCDP scolds Don for being a dilettente. When Don tells him to mind his own business, the man who owned the preceding agency as far back as the Roaring Twenties tells his employee-turned-partner "This is my business." Playtime appears to be over, and not a moment too soon for Don; he needs the work to distract him from what was supposed to be a pleasure.
My Response:
