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 June 10, 2012/written by Jonathan Igla and Matthew Weiner; directed by Matthew Weiner): The partners at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce - well, the surviving partners - are going up, up, up. Joan shows them around the new office space where there will be stairs to a lower level and windows opening up on magnificent views, equal between them as Pete makes sure to tell Don. This moment of Manhattan-striding triumph, haunting in its visual emptiness, is as close as "The Phantom" comes to catching its quarry by the tail. Well, at least until the ending when Megan finally gets a part and Don, it seems, is all too willingly prey for a nimble pair of blonde and brunette hunters. Almost until that final juncture, Don is dogged by a brutal toothache. He soaks cotton in whiskey, ices his cheek, and steadfastly refuses to see a dentist. Who he does see, repeatedly (eventually even in the dentist's office when he finally agrees to go), is Adam Whitman, his long-dead brother floating around the office as if he's a ghostly freelancer, the rope burn still notable around his neck after six and a half years. "I'll hang around for a while," the vision ghoulishly jokes when a drugged-up Don, woozy in the dentist's chair, pleads for him not to leave. When Don emerges from his fog, a bloody, mangled tooth lies before him and he's told that he could've lost his whole jaw if he'd let it fester. But Don does not seem relieved.
Pete also comes face-to-face with tragedy, of a more desperate, lingering nature as he helplessly watches his beloved Beth seesaw in front of him. During their long-awaited rendezvous at a hotel, she is wise beyond reach, swimming in a deep sorrow that she knows he can't comprehend even if he can temporarily soothe it. When Pete sees her again in a hospital the next day, after she's consented to shock treatment that puts her in "a gray fog" that lasts for months, he is now the wise one, telling her the story of his "friend" whom he meant to visit (she doesn't recognize him, so he needs to cover for his visit), who had an affair to escape the loneliness of his married life. She follows the tale with a childlike incredulity before Pete says goodbye for good. Later he attacks her callous husband on the train and then is kicked off the transport himself; Pete - who can never be too noble, even accidentally - begins arrogantly berating the conductor as well and gets a punch in the nose not much less deserved that the one he gave Howard. Trudy, in an episode full of giving people what they want but not necessarily what they need, agrees to help Pete find an apartment in the city to save him from these dangerous commutes (she thinks he's gotten in a car accident on his way back from the station). She's currently obsessed with building a swimming pool in the backyard; its "permanence" spooks Pete, but will he actually be around to share it (as he is in the designer's sketch)?
In the Draper marriage, this dynamic is reversed. After her (supposed) friend Emily (Emily Foxler) asks Megan to help her audition for a Butler shoe commercial that Don is involved with - the theme is "beauty and the beast" (remember that pitch?) - Megan decides to ask him for help herself. "You want to be somebody's discovery," Don tells her, "not somebody's wife." But all Megan wants to be at this point is somebody, period. When Don finds her drunk and weepy after another dark day, he fights with her visiting mother (who just returned from a tryst with Roger and declined his invitation to share an LSD trip). Marie believes that her daughter suffers from the artist's temperament without actually being an artist. As she brusquely informs Megan, "Not every girl can be a ballerina." One of the season's themes has been a menacing, lingering air of violence - "the beast" so to speak. (As Weiner himself has noted, the rogue's gallery of snipers and serial killers, the constant presence of riots and warfare, all pave the way for Lane's suicide.) But another theme, the correspondent if also troubling "beauty," has been the necessity of illusion, of nursing another's or even one's own dream even if this entails a lie (as it did for Harry and Paul).
Don receives mixed messages from the universe about whether or not generosity pays off. When he honorably delivers $50,000 of the insurance money - the exact amount that Lane put into the company - to the angry Rebecca, she is disgusted by the gesture. But when he runs into Peggy in a movie theater, he's pleased to see that she is thriving now on her own, spreading her wings away from him thanks to his very mentorship. These positive and negative experiences do share something in common; both imply that Don can become a destructive force when he tries to determine what's best for others. So he does as Megan wants; she gets the part, embraces him thankfully on set, and then sends him pacing uneasily into the darkness of the soundstage, the aggressively prowling beat of the James Bond theme "You Only Live Twice" propelling him forward until he ends up, almost magically, sitting inside a bar as if awaiting his own casting call. Sure enough, a woman approaches him on behalf of a friend across the way. "She's wondering," the very 1967-looking lady asks, "Are you alone?"
The perfect question is followed by the perfect response, as Don cocks his head with a roguish gleam in his eye that we haven't seen for a while. We realize, with a sinking feeling, that the more poetic, existential (and thus more safely ambiguous) answer - "Aren't we all?" - would carry less doom than the simpler, more final punctuation to the season which we don't hear but can easily imagine: "Yes."
My Response:
