Story (aired on May 19, 2013/written by Jason Grote and Matthew Weiner; directed by Michael Uppendahl): "The Crash" depicts an office racing through a work weekend while cranked up on speed, producing illegible gibberish despite grasping for elusive epiphanies and foolhardy connections. The episode itself, however, pulls off exactly what the agency fails to achieve, resulting in one of the best episodes of the entire series. Dozens of elements coalesce and reinforce one another in dazzling, disturbing, and deeply insightful fashion while other moments stand out simply as brilliant audiovisual flourishes, like Ken breaking into a hysterical tap dance routine punctuated with a singsong "It's my job!" as he describes the clients' abuse of him, Michael and Peggy quoting Lewis Carroll while characters weave around the partitions behind them, or Stan nonchalantly taking a penknife to the arm as Michael broadly misses the picture of an apple over his head. That last scrape is far from the episode's only close call.
Driving all of this mayhem are four present-day events and one dimly understood distant memory. First, Frank Gleason has passed away, with only Ted grieving the loss enough to avoid the weekend festivities. Second, buckling under the pressure to perform for Chevy, the creatives (and a few other lucky participants) are injected with a potent serum by Dr. Shelly Hecht (Rick Zieff) ostensibly to provoke an onrush of inspiration. Third, Sylvia catches Don lingering outside her door and attempts to warn him off although especially in his narcotized state he's only further encouraged to pursue his redemption. Fourth, Sally babysits her siblings in the Draper apartment, leading to a long, strange sequence in which a would-be robber (Davenia McFadden) regales the suspicious teen with a ludicrous yarn about being Don's childhood nanny, back for a visit. And finally, during his Depression-era days in New Jersey, young Dick Whitman is nursed back from fever and chest cold by Amy Swenson, the beauty marked prostitute who caught his eye when his stepmother brought him to live in this house of ill repute, a few flashbacks earlier.
That sickbed memory is the key to everything else; or at least that's what Don thinks, and Mad Men's writer are eager to prove him right. Abandoning the Chevy mission to focus on crafting the perfect profession of love for Sylvia, Don obsessively hunts down an oatmeal print ad from the fifties. When he finally digs it up, we see that the beautiful, adoring mother feeding her gap-toothed son is wearing a head-covering similar to Miss Swenson's, a perverse, even perverted underpinning to the innocent image, considering what the amateur nurse actually did to Dick when he recovered. "I took that boy's cherry," she boasts when the pimp kicks her out, leading to Dick's beating by his furious stepmother. "Because you know what he needs," the advertisement coos a mere dozen years after its traumatic inspiration. Thus a young adolescent's sordid loss of virginity is converted into a portrait of blissful domesticity for the purpose of selling a commodity. Dick-turned-Don has forever after conflated Miss Swenson's soothing care and molestation, because the only real mothering he ever experienced was at the hands of the woman who immediately thereafter deflowered him.
Signposts Oedipal and otherwise turn up all over the episode, culminating in Don's memorable, double/triple/quadruple-charged kiss-off to Ted: "Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse." Sylvia's beauty mark and head covering are the same as Miss Swenson's; Ken informs Don that it was his mother who taught him to dance and then immediately corrects himself - "No, my first girlfriend"; Bobby incorrectly tells Don that the thief said she was his mom; a photo of an infant on Miss Swenson's mirror ("Is that you?" "No.") suggests her own familial issues; and Don is propositioned in his office by the stethoscope-wielding Wendy Gleason (Alex Nikolas), straight from her father's funeral, in another blurring of the line between seduction and medicine (although this time the age gap, if not quite the power dynamic, is reversed). Don, caught across all these currents, is swept back to his building in one last ill-fated attempt to woo Sylvia, only to discover a police officer, his ex- and current wife, his ex's new husband, and his three children waiting in his own apartment - a motley family informing him that his home has been trespassed by another imposter. There's nothing left for Don to do at this point except pass out cold on the floor, the crash he never realized he needed.
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