Welcome to my viewing diary for Mad Men
. Most days (except Saturday) I am offering a short review of another episode until concluding the first season. Later seasons will be covered at another time. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.
Story (aired on October 11, 2007/written by Lisa Albert & Andre & Maria Jacquemetton; directed by Alan Taylor): Sterling Cooper nervously celebrates the tally of votes across the United States, hoping their client Richard Nixon will become the next president. When he doesn't, they don't seem very disappointed - they have other matters on their minds. An office party becomes a predictably frisky affair as the horny trio of young admen pursue different women: Ken assaults Allison (Alexa Alemanni), tackling her and exposing her underwear to the rest of the party to loud guffaws. The married Harry timidly kisses Pete's grouchy-turned-plaintive Hildy (Julie McNiven), removing his glasses when they retreat into an office and waking up half-naked with her the following morning. Paul, emboldened (after initial embarrassment) by the cheeky performance of a script he'd hidden in his drawer, and looking for all the world like a dashing young Orson Welles (a comparison he himself proudly notes), hits on Joan with the implication that they've been down this road before. She'll dance with him but stops there because, it seems, he has "a big mouth."
Peggy and Pete neither join the office merriment nor renew their own much-beleaguered romance. Neither one is in the mood for love. Peggy, continuing to consolidate her undesired reputation as office stick-in-the-mud, goes home early and then lodges a complaint with the building when she returns the next day to find her wallet emptied, her locker trashed, and her trash can full of puke. She's next seen crying in Don's office; her complaint resulted in the dismissal of cleaning staff rather than the reprimand of the white-collar (not to mention white, period) office workers who were actually responsible for this mess. Pete, meanwhile, broods in his own home, leafing through a shoebox full of Dick Whitman snapshots and mementos (Adam's suicide gift) and finally deciding to blackmail Don the next day. And so it is done. The hidden secret first teased in episode three is exposed: the worst person in the world to know the true identity of Don Draper not only holds this information but is ready to use it, hoping he'll get a promotion - a recognition of power in lieu of the respect he really desires.
As a too-close-to-call Election Night stretches into the morning and finally the following night before the Vice President concedes to Senator John F. Kennedy, Don has a meltdown. He flees to Rachel, ready to drop everything - his job, his wife, even his children. "I'll provide for them," he mumbles, proving how little he actually cars about his socially-approved role as Sturdy Patriarch - or for that matter, the emotional well-being of his children themselves. Rachel is disgusted by Don's pathetic desperation, by his callow indifference for his family, and perhaps most of all by her epiphany: he's just using her as an escape vessel. "You don't want to run away with
me," she realizes. "You just want to run away." Finally Don returns to Sterling Cooper and plays his last card: walking the plank side by side with Pete, seeing who backs off first, and when neither does, taking the plunge and hoping Bert the Shark bites the other one. Sure enough, the old man chooses Don. "Who cares?" he repeats to a crestfallen Pete, later advising Don (with duly-noted double implications), "Fire him if you want. But I'd keep an eye on him. One never knows how loyalty is born."
Finally, in flashback, we witness the origin story of the Don Draper we've known for a dozen episodes. The twentysomething grunt is as hesitant, abashed, and uncertain as the "Don" we saw in Rachel's office; indeed, we begin to realize that Don Draper has become Dick Whitman again in the present, at least for the moment: a complete physical transformation to suit the personal one. The real Don Draper was an officer, alone with Dick in an isolated corner of Korea, blown up by an accidental explosion. On, seemingly, a whim, Dick switched dog tags with the corpse, and becomes Don Draper...in name, anyway. He's still uncomfortable in the new skin in the last scene of the flashback sequence, peering from a train window at his hometown as only little Adam catches the big brother's eye and calls after him down the track, a voice that will haunt - and threaten - Don a decade later.
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