IT OCCURS TO ME I SHOULD BE SPOILER TAGGING THESE

* I just finished the Matthew Weiner-scripted episode toward the back end of Season Two in which Don Draper has his Los Angeles idyl with the idle rich Eurotrash and their aptly/portentously/heavyhandedly-named scion Joy. While Don’s out there fiddling and relearning not to say no to things he wants (Joy, you are setting a bad example), Rome’s burning in the form of Duck Phillips’s attempt to cement his position, and take over Creative, by having his old British company buy out Sterling Cooper. What I love about this development is probably just long-form fiction writing 101, but here it is:

At the end of Season One, Don was faced with a choice. He could hire an outside applicant to take over his old position as he moved up to partner, with Duck the leading candidate, or he could promote Pete Campbell. Neither Don nor we in the audience wanted him to do the latter, for a number of reasons: 1) Pete was too big for his britches and didn’t seem to deserve the promotion on a professional level; 2) Pete was generally an obnoxious creep even by Sterling Coo standards and rewarding that behavior would have been unpleasant to watch; 3) Most directly, Pete attempted to secure the position through blackmail, and both on a “Crime Does Not Pay” level and in the sense that Don is a more likeable character than Pete, we wanted to see that fail. So Don hires Duck, then ends Pete’s game of chicken by deliberately crashing into him, and finally emerges victorious and more secure than ever. Hooray! In the moment, it looked like he made the right move.

And in the moment, he probably did make the right move! Promoting Pete under those circumstances would have been disastrous for Don, and probably not so hot for the company either. (Or for Pete, I suspect.) But this outcome — which Don selected and fought for, taking a risk and reaping the reward — had the unintended consequence of completely undermining his own happiness and power at the job. (At least I think it will — I haven’t seen how the deal with the Brits turns out yet, as I’m no further than the episode where it was first brought up.) What a great technique for the writers to use: They gave their character what he wanted, but instead of either a happy ending or a pat “be careful what you wish for” as a result, they use it as the seed from which something he absolutely doesn’t want will eventually grow. The Don vs. Duck line emerges not as a direct continuation of the Don vs. Pete line, but off on a tangent we couldn’t have predicted, and one we couldn’t have followed if Don and Pete hadn’t been made to collide in the first place. It’s Curt Purcell’s idea of narrative shrapnel (warning: A Song of Ice and Fire spoilers at the link) writ large. And it’s a great way for writers of serialized fiction to keep their stories going when seeming endpoints are reached.

* As if a film studies major couldn’t have enough fun making hay out of the name “Don Draper,” they went and made his real name “Dick Whitman.” Drop a “D” from the former and add an “e” to the latter and you’ve got an A in the class.

Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews

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