* I’m kind of glad I had to spend Sunday night writing my Game of Thrones “Blackwater” review instead of watching this episode of Mad Men back-to-back with it. I think I would literally have died otherwise.

* At some point during the episode I simply wrote down the phrase “Christ, this is gross.” I can’t quite tell when in the episode this happened from where it falls in my notes. I think that’s telling.

* Before we get into everything we must get into, I’d like to point out that Mad Men continues to be one of the funniest shows on television, and this enormously upsetting and dispiriting episode was no exception. Highlights:

** Ginsberg’s mistress-inspired Jaguar tagline: “Jaguar: You’ll love it when you’re in it”
** Kenny standing and silently giving Peggy an ovation for her bacon-saving conference-call pitch brilliance
** Peggy staring at the catered lobster from outside the conference room
** Lane’s solution for everything: “I say we take our bonuses and move on!”
** Don literally throwing money in Peggy’s face
** Pete describing the commute: “It’s an epic poem for me to get home.”
** Ginsberg’s secret technique for coming up with good Jaguar copy: “I kept imagining the asshole who’s gonna want this car.”
** The “Ginsberg, you magnificent bastard” look of disbelieving awe and delight on Don’s face when Ginsberg gives him the great line he comes up with for the car (cf. Kenny’s reaction to Peggy)
** Even after she’s made the decision to leave, Peggy still drinks when she hears Joan’s been made partner

Whatever else they are, the really great shows tend to be darkly hilarious. That requires a mastery of tone that many other shows, even many good ones, don’t trust themselves to maintain — Battlestar Galactica, much as I love it, could never bring itself to have fun at the expense of any of its characters’ suffering (except Gaius Baltar’s, which is a big part of what made him the best character on that show). But you can count on Mad Men to go for a laugh even — especially — when plumbing the absolute depths of its characters’ emotions. Laughter is likely the only way any of us can feel in control when presented with life’s inevitable misery, I suppose. It’s a big joke, but we’re in on it, at least for a moment or two.

* “Do you really want help, or do you wanna yell at me?” “I don’t know yet.” I know I’m a broken record, but Don and Megan do not have a dysfunctional relationship. Look at the deft way in which Megan identifies, gently mocks, and thereby neutralizes one of Don’s most destructive relationship dynamics in that brief exchange. That is some high-functioning shit!

I’m not saying they don’t have problems, or even issues — they obviously do. I’m just saying everyone has problems and issues in their relationships; Don and Megan are better at addressing theirs than literally any other couple on the show, and even when they have ruptures and blow-ups, you can understand why. Megan’s intense discomfort with discussing the idea or appeal of mistresses with Don for any reason, even just as the underpinning for some ad copy, is palpable, but totally understandable given Don’s history.

Similarly, Don’s command that Megan not take her acting gig if it means moving to Boston for a preview run appears to her like he’s being both possessive of her and dismissive of her talents and career prospects, but the way he clearly has relented the next time the subject comes out indicates that this is just a very Don way of reacting to the understandably upsetting prospect of your wife moving away for three months. I wouldn’t be happy about that either! Note that when she first brings up getting a callback and an interview with the producer, Don, despite all his preoccupations, is genuinely interested. “That’s terrific,” he responds, and you think he’s just giving her a boilerplate atta-girl, but then he pauses, and says with real dawning enthusiasm, “That’s a big deal!” He didn’t have to continue the discussion at all, but instead he chooses to express to her that he understands how important this is and is as excited about it as she is. You have to view his later freak-out in that light — even though Megan is likely right and Don has never seriously considered what her success might mean for their relationship, I don’t think that means he doesn’t want her to be successful, just that he hadn’t thought it through. Don takes his time, but he’s capable of coming around to new things, we’ve learned time and time again.

Ultimately, the difference between Megan and Don and any other couple comes down to Megan’s line about how she’d handle being forced to choose between acting and Don, should he decide to make her make that decision: “I’ll choose you, but I’ll hate you for it.” Betty or Pete would grin and bear it and be miserable and make everyone else miserable in the process; a few years ago Don and Joan would have swallowed it too. But Megan realizes there’s no future in a future like that, acknowledges it, and tells Don. Now he, and they as a couple, can evaluate the truth of the matter, instead of performing emotional kabuki. TV and film have trained us to view relationships as either/or — either you’re perfectly happy all the time, or a single fight is indicative of impending doom. But this is what a healthy relationship between two adults who aren’t clones of one another looks like.

Man oh man do I want things to work out for these two crazy kids!

* After all that, it sure was awful to discover that the producers wanted to see what Megan’s ass looked like.

* One last point on Megan—It looks like my crackpot theory is at least half-right: Ginsberg has a major thing for Megan. Staring wet-eyed at her as she breezes in and out of the conference room for afternoon delight with Don. “She just comes and go as she pleases, huh?” It took me embarrassingly long to realize that he wrote his killer-app tagline for Jaguar, “At last, something beautiful you can truly own,” about Megan. When Don sells the ad to Jaguar, he’s unwittingly selling a much younger man’s love for his own wife.

* Alright, I put it off long enough: Joan. In a show that’s shown us more than its fair share of completely mortifying and hateful things, her storyline in this episode is King Shit of Turd Mountain. Part of this is obvious. Joan is an intelligent, complex, capable, caring human being with a full inner and outer life, integral to the lives of any number of other human beings with which she interacts — from everyone at the agency, her participation in which is vital, to her child — but because she is a woman, and an attractive one, the fullness of her personhood is denied. Society in general and the men with whom she interacts in particular commodify her into an object to be bought and sold, a pleasing set of curves, a Jaguar you can fuck. (“At last, something beautiful you can truly own.”)

* But worse — worse than that, if you can imagine it! — is how this commodification is presented as a grotesque parody of empowerment. By agreeing to allow a stranger to purchase access to her tits and ass and pussy for the night, Joan achieves financial and professional success that would be impossible for her to achieve any other way. It really is the smart business decision for her, guaranteeing a better future for her and her baby and her business, provided you’re willing to ignore the intangible cost to the human fucking dignity of everyone involved.

* Worse still? Despite their years together — 13 and counting, as Don helpfully/crushingly reminds us during his conversation with Peggy — all of the partners save Don are capable of viewing the leasing of Joan’s sex to some car salesman as a business expense. I’ve never wanted to punch Bert Cooper in his grinning face harder than I did when watching his nonchalance ooze all over the screen during those meetings. And Pete! Good Lord, whatever was good in him has been crushed to pieces. Actual note I wrote while Pete pitched her on prostituting herself: “What the FUCK, Pete, what the FUCK!” They’ve forced Joan into a position from which they can never respect her again, right? How can they respect her? That was my first thought. But then I thought, how can they respect themselves? Then: How can she respect them? Then: Given what she’s already seen of all of their behavior, how could she ever have respected them? Is this any worse than what all of them, to a man, have already done in her line of sight? Finally: How can she respect herself? Every time she sits in on a partners’ meeting, all of them knowing what she had to do to get there — isn’t her entire life and future now Jane Siegel-Sterling’s new apartment, forever tainted by sex she shouldn’t have been asked to have?

* But the absolute worst, from the narrow and narcissistic perspective of a heterosexual male Mad Men viewer? The loathsome car saleman Herb’s final line before getting down to business. “I don’t know how much longer I can restrain myself. Let me see ’em.” Emphasis mine. Actual, verbatim thought when looking at Christina Hendricks mine. Yours too, if you swing that way, I guaranfuckingtee it. The parallel storyline of Megan the actress being evaluated based on her hotness the same way we viewers evaluate the Mad Men actresses based on their hotness made it crystal clear: We’re all implicated in this transaction.

* OH JESUS PETE’S READING GOODNIGHT MOON TO HIS BABY DAUGHTER AFTER HELPING TO CREATE THIS UNBEARABLY SHITTY WORLD FOR WOMEN THAT HIS DAUGHTER WILL GROW UP TO INHERIT, OH JESUS. Yeah, that one hit home.

* Don’s involvement in and reaction to Joan’s transaction was the added degree of difficulty few if any other shows would even attempt. For starters, now we know why we spent so much time with the two of them last episode, and it wasn’t just because it’s deeply delightful to watch Don and Joan, and Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks, interact. It was to establish the depth of their friendship and respect for one another, a respect neither has every sullied (my, it’s perverse putting it this way, but it’s the truth) by sleeping together. (See also Olsen, Peggy.) As my co-worker pointed out, the show very much teases the possibility that had Joan known her friend Don was not on board with the plan, she never would have gone through with it at all. One thing the really great ensemble dramas do is explore relationships in which one character’s external voice echoes the internal voice of another. Downton Abbey‘s Thomas/Mrs. O’Brien partnership is the toxic, negative example of this, a case in which each brings out the worst in the other, eggs the other on, provides the other with the support and cover to behave abominably. It’s easy to see how Don and Joan can provide the exact opposite for each other, and how his failure to get to her in time — a failure abetted by Pete and Lane, who repeatedly smooth over the objections of the objectors (Don, but to a lesser extent Roger, who loathsomely, gutlessly agrees to go along with the pitch to Joan but clearly hates it and assumes she’ll hate it too) when presenting the plan to Joan — could well have been the thing that enabled her to go through with what she did.

* My co-worker also cracked open something I’d never ever thought of before: Don hates the idea of Joan prostituting herself because his mother was a prostitute! Moreover, this is, in its way, the Rosetta Stone for his entire view of women — relentlessly sexualized and possessive, but disgusted with himself and them alike for that possessive element. He’s all too familiar with what it means to own something beautiful, or at least rent it.

* Welcome to THE WORLD’S MOST ORANGE APARTMENT, Don Draper. Hope you survive the experience!

* That time shift? Clever girl, Mad Men.

* “I was just about to get into the shower, but how can I help you?” Depressingly/hilariously, even Joan’s alibi is sexy.

* Don’s “one of those good ones” according to Joan, whose condescension in that line is almost tender. Don’s pitch to Jaguar was “one of those good ones” according to Roger, whose hope in that line is almost touching.

* Don thought he’d won the Jaguar account, but he was doubly wrong. First of all, he was unwittingly cuckolding himself by selling a line written by Ginsberg about his own wife. Second, he was bringing coals to Newcastle, telling a man who’d already found a way to own something beautiful that only this car could make that possible. But everyone heard what they needed to hear. It was only when Joan entered Roger’s office along with the other partners that Don’s own failure — to protect her, to succeed on his own — became known to him. I wouldn’t be in a celebrating mood either.

* “Every time someone’s asked me what I wanted, I’ve never told them the truth.” Lane provides an epitaph for the entire episode, which is all about the consequences of choosing to tell the truth about what you want, or not.

* I miss those giant headphones of Pete’s. My Dad had a pair.

* “I can never tell, ballerina, if you’re ambitious or just like to complain.” With that, Freddy Rumsen sums up my own dilemma with Peggy all season long, ever since a friend suggested that the source of Peggy’s troubles is that she might just be mediocre, what Bill Murray once devastatingly called a “medium talent.” The contrast with the “genius” of Michael Ginsberg, and her patterning of her life and career after an endangered species like Don, seemed to imply that her talent and ambition would only serve to lock her into a middling career as a middling person. Fitting that Freddy breaks her free of the impasse by telling her it’s what Don himself would tell her to do. She says as much to Don, in fact: “You know this is what you would do.” She’s trying to be like him even as she leaves him behind.

* My first thought when I saw she was interviewing with the odious, improbably spelled Ted Chaough? “Oh gross, Ted Chaough!” The kind of guy who knows his rival must be talking about him all the time, you know? Blehh. But when I saw his “negotiated” job offer — all the authority Peggy’d demanded as copy chief, but with more money than she was asking for — I sure did a 180. I shouted “Peggy! Fuckin’ take the job, Peggy!” at the screen! Who cares if Ted’s just the professional version of Duck Phillips, trying to steal the other guy’s girl?

* But I think there’s more to it than that, clearly. You don’t get to be a partner in an ad agency by throwing money and power at someone you actually think is so-so just to spite someone else. Peggy really is great at her job, and we’ve been so dazzled by Don for so long, and by Ginsberg for this brief honeymoon period, that we’ve forgotten it just like they did. (Hence the Hail Mary conference-call pitch — we needed that evidence.)

* Don is crushed by Peggy leaving. Crushed like we haven’t seen him be crushed since Anna Draper died and he sobbed in Peggy’s arms. He snorts with peevish, furious, smiling impotence when she tells him she’s going to his hated rival’s firm, like a child. Then he takes her hand and kisses it — the hand she used to come on to him during her first day only for him to brush it away, the hand she used to comfort him after the death of his only real friend (other than, perhaps, Peggy herself). He pours six years of affection, intimacy, and rivalry into a physical interaction. It’s the kiss they never shared, it’s a romantic gesture from a dead-and-gone era, it’s an indication of huge and melodramatic Respect funneled through the pressing of lips against skin. He holds it and holds it and holds it. They both hold back tears. I couldn’t.

* The kicker: Joan watches Peggy walk away from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The symbolically resonant death-elevator opens not on an elevator shaft, but a kickass Kinks song about being totally at the mercy of a kickass woman. If Jaguar is proof that SDCP has a future, that exit, that song, is proof that so does Peggy.

* (Poor Kenny–Peggy broke the pact!)

* There are a couple of episodes to go, so this may change — the Lane shoe still needs to drop, obviously, and Jaguar could run back into the jungle. But now we at least can see how the show can square the circle of the agency’s story this season. The show has always ended each season with good news on the business end: Don defeats Pete, Don defeats Duck, the team defeats the Brits, Peggy and Kenny secure just enough of an account to show the world that SDCP isn’t dead after the departure of Lucky Strike. But this season was so devoted to showing everything that wasn’t working at SDCP that I wasn’t sure how, or if, they’d maintain the pattern. Could Mad Men even get away with showing the characters fail on a professional level? I don’t doubt that Matthew Weiner has the guts to do it, mind you, but would it injure a key element of the show’s appeal, even though we all oughta know better? Well, here’s your answer, perhaps: A victory that feels like a failure, like a loss, like the only way to truly be a winner is to get on the elevator and get the hell out of there.

* I’ll say it: Best show on television right now, best episode ever?

Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews

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