Welcome to my viewing diary for Mad Men
. Every Monday I will review another episode of the series. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers. UPDATE: I now plan to continue this viewing diary through the series finale on the same schedule, continuing with the season seven premiere next Monday. Initialy I planned to wait until summer 2022 to resume.
Story (aired on June 23, 2013/written by Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner; directed by Matthew Weiner): "Going down?" the man from Dancer Fitzgerald asks, with just the faintest smirk. The answer is the same in most of the episode's storylines, but let's start with the good news. Roger's daughter disinvites him from Thanksgiving after he declines to further invest in her husband's enterprise ("What do I have to do to get on the list of girls you give money to?" she sneers). That itself isn't the good news, of course, but it does open the opportunity for Joan to provide a minor redemption. Roger's secretary Caroline nudges her in the right direction (she'd have him over to her house but "Ralph stopped drinking and you know Little Ralphie's spastic" she tells Joan by way of explanation). And so finally Mr. Sterling gets to brighten the Harris doorway, even if he has to share this space with Bob cheerfully carving the turkey. "What's he doing here?" he snipes, to which Joan responds, "I'm letting you back into Kevin's life. Not mine." But that's enough for now: Roger finally finds another door he's happy to open.
Bob being Bob, he's also intertwined with less happy - which isn't to say unhumorous - material. What is the status of Pete's plan to neutralize the Benson threat, handle his mother's demented romance, and lock himself down as Chevy's man at Sterling Cooper & Partners? "Not great, Bob!!!" Pete's victory parade into Detroit turns into a roundtrip route when Bob manipulates him into driving a stick shift backwards through the showroom. "I like a man with gasoline in his veins," one of the reps tells Pete, and that's that. Meanwhile Mrs. Campbell's whirlwind romance ends with a plunge off a cruise ship and Manolo on the lam in Central America; faced with the costs of a manhunt for their not-exactly-beloved parent's potential killer, Pete and Bud let it - and her - rest. And, somehow - I checked over the episode a second time and still couldn't figure out where it happened - Pete is headed for California. Sunkist wants a man on the spot and Pete, it seems, will be part of the team. (Or is he merely taking a temporary trip out west to help open the new outpost? It wasn't entirely clear to me.)
Who is going to lead that team? Right away, Don receives an unusual request from an atypically suited-up Stan who wants to "turn a desk into a business," comparing the West Coast to the advertising frontier. When Don says, "That's not how I see it," Stan pushes back: "That's not how you see me. But I'm going to change that." It's a good pitch, so good in fact that Don steals it for himself, much like Megan once took her friend's idea about asking Don for a spot in an SCDP commercial. He obviously needs a fresh start. Going on a bender after a particularly acerbic phone call with Sally, who's already been suspended from Miss Porter's for drinking, Don gets into a bar fight with a minister (spurring a flashback to Mack kicking a similar proselytizer out of the bordello, which we see in wide shot looming over its circa 1938 street corner). After waking up in the drunk tank, Don dumps all his liquor out in front of his wife and races through all the rationales for re-locating to Los Angeles: his career, her career, a change of scenery, finally hitting upon the most important: "We were happy there once. We could be happy again." Megan breaks into sobs and says yes, just as she did when he proposed.
Of course, a major wrinkle arises; how could it not? After Peggy shows off her figure for Ted before a big date with someone else, he materializes in front of her apartment door later that evening, just as Pete did so long ago. The two finally make love, and although Ted wants to spend the night - "No more sneaking around" - Peggy encourages him to go home and break it off with his wife more gradually. So Ted returns to Nan and immediately, predictably, loses his resolve. The next day he pleads with Don to send him to California so that he can save his family ("three thousand miles between me and her or my life is over"). Yet again, Don has to tell Ted he can't help him. Yet again, he has impeccable excuses. But this time something cracks. Don is excited to learn early on in "In Care Of" that Hershey is putting out feelers among the top thirty agencies, willing to advertise for the first time in its storied history. He delivers a flawless pitch, rhapsodizing about how his beloved father would take him to the corner store to buy a Hershey bar after he mowed the lawn, how the taste of chocolate merged with his dad ruffling his hair, how just the sight of the beautiful simple wrapper conveyed a feeling of love.
That last part, and only that last part, is true. That's no surprise; the surprise is in what Don does next. Before the meeting, a frustrated Ted told him to take a drink because you can't just quit cold turkey: "My dad was...well, never mind." Now, as the Hershey reps bask in the warm glow of Don's own fatherly tale, the storyteller glimpses his hand shaking beneath the table. That tremor might as well be an earthquake. And so begins his testimonial:
I was an orphan. I grew up in Pennsylvania in a whorehouse. I read about Milton Hershey and his school in Coronet magazine or some other crap the girls left by the toilet. And I read that some orphans had a different life there. I could picture it. I dreamt of it. Of being wanted. Because the woman who was forced to raise me would look at me every day like she hoped I would disappear. Closest I got to feeling wanted was from a girl who made me go through her john's pockets while they screwed. If I collected more than a dollar, she'd buy me a Hershey bar. And I would eat it alone in my room with great ceremony, feeling like a normal kid. It said "sweet" on the package. It was the only sweet thing in my life.
With that, Don detonates fifteen years of hard, desperate work to sell that dream to others while the lie gnawed away inside of him. Ted is going to California after all. Peggy is alone again. Megan is walking out the door, perhaps for good. And Don is, well, going down.
After a meeting that plays more like an execution than a consultation, the partners (save Ted) unanimously punish Don for his recent erratic behavior - the Hershey meeting most egregiously, although in retrospect his bizarre, unprofessional actions towards clients and colleagues have presented for a problem for a while. On the other hand, the firm only exists in the first place because of Don's ingenuity, both in its foundation and the recent merger, but no one - not even Roger - blinks when Bert tells Don that he's no longer welcome, at least for the next few months, and they won't even give him a return date. On the way out Don runs into Duck and Lou Avery (Allan Harvey), his replacement. For six seasons Don's silhouetted figure has fallen to the floor of Madison Avenue and now, symbolically at least, that descent begins even if it's an elevator rather than a window ledge which sends him plummeting.
But the episode doesn't end there, concluding instead with one of the most oddly hopeful final scenes Mad Men has offered since Don and Betty were tentatively reunited amidst the Cuban Missile Crisis resolution. After picking up his kids, Don makes a stop in a run-down New Jersey neighborhood. Standing in front of an initially unseen site, craning their necks, the children are told that this rundown Victorian, now surrounded by litter and brick blocks of public housing, is where their father grew up. As Judy Collins croons "Both Sides Now," father and daughter exchange a glance that comes the closest to what Don has been seeking all year, usually unwilling to give what he needed in order to get it: an understanding.
My Response:
