Today I finished Season Four, Disc Two. SPOILERS AHEAD.

* Heh, every time I start one of these posts there’s a moment of trepidation. There’s always so much to talk about!

* So, the supporting-cast bloodbath I worried about last time around wasn’t quite as bad as I feared. Ken Cosgrove appears to be returning, which actually solves a bit of a mystery for me — though I don’t know who played who, I did figure out that three of the names in the opening credits track to Ken, Paul, and Harry, and for those first few episodes I couldn’t figure out why two of those three actors were still listed even though Harry was the only character at the agency. I must say that he appears to have weathered his abandonment by Roger, Bert, Lane, Don, Peggy, Joan, and Pete a lot better than I would have. This goes double since he had recently been promoted over Pete when the exodus went down, so he had to have taken his exclusion as a commentary on his character or loyalty rather than a matter of dollars and cents. I’ll be interested to see if his ability to take a bite out of the shit sandwich Pete made a point of serving him upon his return to the fold means he can actually swallow the whole thing.

* Also returning, if only for a while: Allison the secretary. Her ill-fated dalliance with Don was an instructive storyline for two reasons. First, holy moses was it sexy. Their breathy, clothes-on quickie was all about desire and arousal in the moment, the simple physical acts necessary for the act of fucking, and the smiling newfound intimacy of two acquaintances after the fact, that sense of a shared knowledge, of pleasure experienced together. I’m really having a hard time thinking of a show that’s been this thoughtful and thorough in exploring what makes sex sexy.

* Second, it was our clearest demonstration to date of the negative potential of Draper Unbound. It’s not that Don’s cruel, per se. I mean, he can be — the way he mocked poor alcoholic Duck Phillips and that simultaneously hapless and overbearing cousin who interviewed for the copywriting gig in the award-show episode is proof enough of that. But he’s not a sociopath. When his bad behavior is brought to his attention, his remorse is real. The point is that it has to be brought to his attention. He’s clueless on his own! So in a moment of drunken lust he has sex with his secretary. Then, because he is aware on a conceptual level that that is a thing that can cause problems and is probably a Bad Idea, he cuts off any kind of collegial relationship with her whatsoever. But he never makes an effort to think ahead of the problem, to try to ease her out of the idea of a potential ongoing relationship with him, to make her feel comfortable working for him again (let alone to not have sex with her in the first place). Even when her misery becomes too obvious to ignore, he still whiffs on obvious partial solutions like personally writing her a very nice letter of recommendation. Problems pretty much literally need to be thrown in his face for him to really understand that they’re problems at all, and that he’s responsible for them.

* So he’s stumbling from one crisis to the next now: He makes dates for when it’s his turn to have the kids, and thus Sally is left alone by the babysitter for enough time to chop off her own hair. He gets drunk off booze and his own reputation, and thus unwittingly plagiarizes some doofus’s crap copy while showing off for a client. He gets deep enough into his own drinking habit to have a full-fledged lost weekend, miss out on a scheduled visit with the kids, infuriate his increasingly unhinged ex, presumably embarrass himself in front of the award-winning advertising person he slept with earlier in the weekend, and unwittingly reveal his real name to some random waitress he took home. Draper Unbound is more like Draper Unmoored.

* Related: It takes a village to raise Don Draper. In the season premiere, I was struck by the directness with which Peggy Olson told Don that everyone at the agency just wants to please him. Besides being the outright articulation of three seasons’ worth of subtext, it also served a plot purpose in that it spoke to the more intimate, casual, and free-wheeling nature of the new agency, an agency where Don’s improvisatory genius is built right into the DNA, both in its name and partnership structure and in the fact that it was his fast thinking that made its creation possible in the first place.

But this admirable openness about the staff’s desire to live up to Don’s reputation and expectations cuts both ways. Peggy, Pete, Allison, and Joan especially are willing to work extra hard to protect Don from himself, but this can have the effect of enabling him. With their safety net in place, he has yet to learn how badly a hard fall can hurt. I’ve got a feeling we’re headed in that direction, though. Allison’s defenestration was the first taste of that, and the Clio Award weekend the second. The last thing I saw at the end of Disc Two was Roger staring resentfully at Don as he traipsed down the hall, award in hand, then flashing back to the day Don first showed up for work after Roger (maaayyyybeeee) hired him during a liquid breakfast paid for by Don himself. If that’s any indication of what’s to come, those two brushes with disaster won’t be the last. Compare and contrast with Season One, where as I’ve noted before, Don’s work life was pretty much peachy. You’ve come a long way, baby.

* The show is going about the business of showing us Don’s vulnerable underbelly in some fairly non-obvious ways. Frankly I don’t even know if this is intentional, but I never find Don more pathetic than when he flashes that heavy-lidded half-smile at some woman when he’s on the make. In those moments, where he really opens up the charm firehose and drunkenly leans in to try and plant one on the girl Roger and Jane set him up with, or Anna’s collegiate niece, or Allison, or whoever he’s targeting, he’s revealed to be not some godlike avatar of success and confidence, but just some horny dude trying to seal the deal. It’s like seeing his hair messed up, only far more intimate.

* The show also makes its point about Don’s tumultuous life by juxtaposing his competence and incompetence in its most direct fashion yet. The buildup to the Clio Award doesn’t just feature all of the major characters explicitly expressing their anxiety and excitement, it includes the series’ single most endearing and adorable image yet: Don, Joan, and Roger sitting at the show, secretly holding hands under the table. You love these characters in that moment, because they love each other — they worked really hard on something, they want other people to like it, and they’re afraid that people won’t, and they’re clinging to each other in the face of all this. And then they win! Woo! Don is now the acknowledged master of his domain! …and then he breezes into this meeting with the Life cereal people, looking disheveled and stifling belches, comes within inches of destroying the whole relationship, embarrasses his coworkers, and only pulls the rabbit out of the hat with the help of unconscious plagiarism. From elation to “eeeeesh” in the space of two scenes. Brilliantly done.

* While we’re on the subject of excruciatingly awkward meetings, how ’bout a hand for Roger Sterling and his anticipatory reenactment of the “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers with the Honda reps? When he walked into that conference room and said he hadn’t been told about the meeting, “but then again I know how some people like surprises,” I nearly lost my shit. But beneath the black comedy, may I suggest that the show is suggesting that war can deeply screw up even a happy wanderer like Bonnie Prince Sterling?

* Let us return for a moment to the Mad Men Sexiness Highlight Reel: If it’s possible to have a full-on Tex Avery bugout over a line of dialogue, then that’s what happened to me in the flashback where Roger gives Joan a mink stole at the beginning of their hotel-room date, and she responds by telling him that every time she wears it, “I’ll think of everything that happened the night I got it.” AROOOOGAH! AROOOOGAH! There’s more delight packed into that one-line promise than in a lifetime of Christmas mornings.

* Also super-duper sexy, but problematic for that very reason? Peggy Olson’s nude-off with the obnoxious new art director. Now, I’ll admit that that kind of casual yet still very highly charged nudity is where my bread is buttered. (Boola, boola!) So it’s entirely possible that there exist dudes who would be more discomfited than aroused by that kind of situation — or if Rizzo’s eventual surrender and retreat behind the closed door of the hotel bathroom with the shower running is any indication, both discomfited and aroused, at any rate. But something about the scene didn’t ring true to me even when correcting for my own fetishes, because…well, let me put it this way. When a woman resolves to triumph in a particular battle of the sexes by taking her clothes off, that’s what we in the penis-having industry call a win-win situation. I get that Peggy’s spontaneous, confrontational nudism was a way to shut this asshole up, to make him realize that he’s not the free-thinker he imagines himself to be, and thus to gain the upper hand in their work relationship. And perhaps back then a woman taking charge of her sexuality outside the framework established by men — a woman who can “stare back,” to use Peggy’s phrase about the Playboy models Rizzo spent the evening ogling — really was the shock to the system Rizzo took it as. Certainly that’s implicit from the contrast with Hef’s fantasy factory. But for the modern viewer, and presumably for the modern writers and filmmakers too, it’s Peggy Olson-slash-Elisabeth Moss taking her clothes off on camera, and having a jolly good time doing it, too (which is admittedly very important). And as a guy, the last thing that made me was uncomfortable.

* That said, it’s been fun watching the writers and directors make the most of Peggy’s ever-growing comfort in being demonstratively herself, even if it happens where no one else can see. Between her headdesk moment when she finds out that Trudy Campbell is pregnant, and her Glenn Quagmire creeper routine when she peers over the divider to spy on Don after Allison’s blow-up, she’s an animated-gif machine. Switch on the subtitles and you can add her bit about how her boyfriend may not own her vagina, but he is renting it. And of course there’s her ability to speak truth to Draper, both positive (everyone’s there to please him) and negative (he’s got to fix his own mistake with the Life cereal situation). She’s a hoot.

* But perhaps the most revelatory character work so far this season — ironically, given her relative lack of screentime — is with Betty Draper. The big discovery here is that her problems don’t all stem from a combination of her victimization by Don and the limits placed on women by her time and place, or by her time and place as personified by her parents, i.e. a general culture-created patheticness. No, many of Betty’s problems stem from Betty herself. This person has an entitlement streak as wide as it is mean. What’s happening now is that she’s gotten everything she wanted. Now that she’s divorced, she can no longer fall back on blaming society for not allowing her to pursue what she wants in defiance of tradition. Now that she’s free from Don, she can no longer pin her problems on his philandering, secret-keeping, and emotional unavailability. Now she has the house, the money, and a doting husband — who genuinely seems like a decent dude, even! Henry repeatedly makes statements against his own interest, telling Betty that as much as she and he might hate him, Don is often right about things like the house and the kids. He talks her down off various ledges rather than reacting with Don-style rage that she’s unhappy to begin with. He seems to keep a protective eye out for the kids, especially Sally, recognizing the danger the mother-daughter relationship is in. And he seems crazy about Betty, both emotionally and physically. And guess what? The tiniest crack in the surface of this world still sends Betty into paroxysms of rage. That’s not on Don, or her dad, or her mom, or her brother, or Sally, or Henry, or society — it’s on her. And hey, good for the show for handling it this way. Making all of Betty’s problems the fault of men, or of Men, would infantilize her just as surely as those men/Men have done. (And they have, to be sure. But yeah, there’s more to it than that.)

* Finally, I just have one thing to say about Sally’s storyline: WHOA. Uh, I did not expect to see a ten-year-old girl masturbating as a major plot point on an American TV drama! Of course it was handled with the show’s charateristic intelligence, the balance between restraint and directness, the multifaceted commentary on individual characters and the characters who shaped them and the society that shaped all of them. But probably more importantly, and maybe more impressively, was that it was handled at all.

Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews

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