Monday, April 28, 2014

SEASON 7, EPISODE 3.

(Mild spoilers.) Roger's significance is outsize here. The woman who interrupts Don's meeting with Dave Wooster to give him her hotel room location only exists, I'm sure, as a narrative red herring, to set up the shock cut when the hotel room door opens and Roger's on the other side. One moment Don's about to move on -- just as Lane told his father he'd done a few seasons back -- and then boom, he's bursting in on his surrogate father and telling him, "I would never do that to you."

Some people have asked, in titles even, "Why did Don agree to return to SC&P?" One thing: Don has never worked anywhere else. Earlier this season they rubbed that in our faces: when Don said he'd almost worked at Y&R twice, Wooster pointed out that, nonetheless, he'd never actually done it. But Roger is also part of the reason. That Roger showed up late for their big meeting at the agency, apparently unclear on what he and Don had agreed on the night before, flashed me straight back to how a similar Roger brown-to-blackout first got Don in the door at the agency years earlier. Through Don's whole career Roger has been his guru as well as his partner in crime, and from the way Roger's been acting lately I'm sure he's sincere when he says he misses Don. But as I realized a year or so back when Roger was weeping over that shoe shine kit -- the sort of scene that's Screenwriting 101 for a reason -- Roger isn't even a surrogate father to Don; he's more of an aging Skimpole, and I fear Don hasn't figured that out yet.

So: Why did Don agree to return to SC&P? At the moment, it looks like he didn't have the guts to leave. ("Guts" in the broadest sense: Clearly it'll take effort and pain to make anything out of the shit-moat the partners have put him behind, but a trapped man will put up with a lot to make his prison glorious. Don tells Megan he's going to "make it right" by going back, and clearly saving their relationship isn't what he means by that.)

I wish I had a gif of Peggy and Don in this episode: "I can't say that we missed you." "Thank you, Peggy." Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm ate the worm. Take a good hard look at how far we've come from The Suitcase. Let alone from "It will shock you how much it never happened." The road to this scene is a series all by itself.

Why is Betty on Bobby's field trip the parallel stream? Because Don was an abused child and Betty is showing us how that's done in the generation that followed, among people who no longer live in whorehouses. At least that's what I got from January Jones' monolithic-minimalistic performance. Jones' vanishing voice and sour-apple-on-stupid-vanilla expressions are so epic, I'm beginning to suspect she's a drag queen.

Dawn and Shirley are turning into Solange and Claire.

UPDATE. In comments, JennOfArk says the Betty-Bobby plot
seems to build on a theme that started way back in the beginning, Betty-as-child. Remember the neighbor kid with the crush? Betty has been portrayed all along as this cossetted creature whose growth has been stunted by a life that expects nothing from her except that she look pretty.
That would explain her specific abuse, which is to treat her child as if he has adult responsibilities to her that trump her parental responsibilities to him.

I must also mention: Don going to the movies reminds me that though we see him sometimes relaxing with movies and even literature (including, preposterously, Dante), and reacting to art he doesn't like (The Beatles, Jean-Claude van Itallie), these experiences never seem to reach him or inform anything he does. His advertising copy is just good advertising copy, and that includes his open letter. What we've heard of his journal entries is pap. It's interesting that the great "creative" mind of the Mad Men universe is a perfect philistine.

14 comments:

  1. John Ness11:51 PM

    The payoff of the red herring was the loudest I'd laughed at television this year, and my discomfort as Don was humiliated in the waiting room was also unparalleled. Hell of an episode.

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  2. JennOfArk1:23 AM

    The thing that has got me from the very beginning of the series is that feeling that pervades it, for me at least, that all of the characters are reeling towards some kind of inevitable doom. That may be just because of the period and the fact that I know what's coming in the years ahead, it might be because of the intro music and graphics which give off a very strong doom vibe...I'm not sure, but that's always been my overarching impression of the show. Doom. These characters are all each marching towards it in their own way, and none of them know it.

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  3. KatharineMChapman1:28 AM

    as I realized a year or so back when Roger was weeping over that shoe shine kit -- the sort of scene that's Screenwriting 101 for a reason -- Roger isn't even a surrogate father to Don; he's more of an aging Skimpole, and I fear Don hasn't figured that out yet. http://sn.im/28ux95m

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  4. Insane Clown Wizard3:39 AM

    Almost all of the characters have become simply horrible people. (I used to love Peggy and Joan! Now I cringe every time they have lines!) Don may now be the nicest person working at SC&P. Even Sally likes him again. Dawn stands by him because he has never pulled white privilege on her (male privilege for sure, but that's the way Don rolls with all women.)

    It's become a horrible, dysfunctional place to work, where it used to be fun and exciting. Without Don the place went to shit. Everyone there who thinks they didn't miss Don is lying to themselves.

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  5. randomworker9:25 AM

    I find the commentary more exciting than the show, that I quit watching in the first season.

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  6. and none of them know it.


    Well, some of them might know it.

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  7. JennOfArk9:55 AM

    Maybe this is the point of the story arc - that going to work back in the day when it was the Boys' Club, and money and liquor flowed freely was fun, but as the times changed and the agency becomes more and more like workplaces are today....

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  8. JennOfArk10:52 AM

    RE: the Betty sub-plot. It seems to build on a theme that started way back in the beginning, Betty-as-child. Remember the neighbor kid with the crush? Betty has been portrayed all along as this cossetted creature whose growth has been stunted by a life that expects nothing from her except that she look pretty. Wasn't she having panic attacks at the beginning of the series? Those weren't dealt with by learning how to cope or with any kind of personal growth but with pills. Betty's character has been shut off from any kind of growth throughout the series, mostly because of the choices made by Betty herself.

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  9. edroso11:30 AM

    Laughed? I gasped. Either way it's a hell of a thing.

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  10. edroso11:31 AM

    Don may now be the nicest person working at SC&P.



    Suggests, doesn't it, that in the show's view nice people are just mean people who don't currently have the authority to be mean.

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  11. edroso12:16 PM

    Thanks!

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  12. Joshua Buhs2:53 PM

    It's the grace notes that still make the show worth watching, and the history upon which they are built.


    I loved Don, just before the final meeting, checking his hand to see if it was shaking, which evoked the moments before the Hershey meeting, when Ted told him to take a drink so that his hands did not shake.


    It was a nice encapsulation of the complex changes which the characters undergo.

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  13. randomworker2:59 PM

    =)

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  14. Doc Nebula9:36 AM

    To me, this episode was strangely IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE-esque... I could nearly see Henry Travers hovering over Mr. Draper's shoulder, saying "You see, Don? When a person isn't there, he leaves an awfully big hole!" The ad agency is sputtering without Don, Megan is flailing and self destructive, Roger's joie de has lost every bit of its vivre, Betty is hapless and utterly incapable of making any meaningful connections at all except with an infant... (and even there, as she very astutely observes, "it's only a matter of time")... while Don, by contrast, is on his very best behavior, trying to impress everyone with just how much they need him and just how good he can be.

    And apparently, he's right... and the agency, at least, however grudgingly, understands it. Nobody else does yet... and the interesting thing is, by the time they do, if they ever do, the old Don may be gone forever.

    Or not.

    Which uncertainty, I think, is why we watch this show.

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