* Mad Men doesn’t usually go for this kind of “we know something they don’t know” gag anymore, not since those happy golden bygone days of “there’s no magic machine that makes copies” back in Season One, so I have to admit a twinge of cheap-date delight when I heard “When they finish the 2nd Avenue subway this apartment will quadruple in value.” LOL
* Bobby Draper hates his misaligned wallpaper. I’ll bet.
* “Come Monday morning it’ll all be a dream.” Lovely line from Sylvia.
* I’m not sure where you come down on Ginsberg, but I find him very funny. “Am I interrupting something?” is a great thing to say when you walk in on your old man and the girl he obviously brought home to set you up with. And all the business at his dinner: “I mean, you’re a sexy girl, and you smell great…”; “What am I doing? I ordered soup, I just said that…”; his delayed-reaction “…I am?” when his date tells him he’s handsome…funny and endearing. And he’s a virgin, too!
* Harry Hamlin! Giving Megan the eye, no less. I still ship Megan and Ginsberg, but “Roger with bad breath” would be an interesting road to take.
* Ethan Rom! I’m sorry, William Mapother! Here’s the thing about Lost: It’s very easy to forget in light of the later seasons, which wiped away much of the first few seasons’ early mystery (read: writers tap-dancing as fast as they could) regarding the Island and its inhabitants, but Lost was a terrifying show when it wanted to be, and it often wanted to be. The Lynch comparisons could run a lot deeper than just “It’s a stylish drama on ABC with an overarching mystery and a touch of the supernatural,” is what I’m saying. And some of the performers involved with that side of the show, Mapother among them, take on a similarly luminous/numinous quality to actors from Twin Peaks when you see them elsewhere, as Mad Men has taken advantage of multiple times (Leland Palmer, Shelly Johnson, Winkie’s dream guy). Ethan, I’m sorry, Mapother’s character Randall Walsh winds up being a bit of a joke, or more than a bit, but it’s perfect casting for someone you want to seem unusual in an imposing, slightly upsetting way.
* Tensions run high in House Chaough, I see.
* Very very smart misdirection with the Paul Newman sequence. Make it a joke about how SDCP is far away from the action, have Joan put on her glasses…then have Newman hijack the ceremony to endorse Gene McCarthy…then have a barely intelligible voice in the distance shout out that Martin Luther King has been shot. Even when you think the scene has revealed its true face, there’s another beneath.
* Mad Men does the spread of terrible news as well as anything I’ve ever seen. I got chills as the broadcast started reaching the diner, patrons dropped their silverware, employees collapsed into chairs. Actually, I started to cry. It’s not the first time the show’s done that to me.
* “They’re really still having the awards?” “What else are they gonna do?” Don and Megan stay for her award.
* “Why are you destroying this house?” Oh, Betty.
* Ginsberg’s father’s reaction to the news about King is to slowly put his sweater over his head. That’s awfully easy to relate to.
* It took the episode a while to acknowledge and inquire after the actual feelings of actual black people about King’s death — “Do you think your secretary’s okay?” from Megan was the first, I believe — but its portrayal of that yawning gulf between sympathy and empathy on the part of the white characters toward their black coworkers and acquaintances was sticky and prickly in all the right ways.
* The best reactions, in terms of maybe for a moment making you feel like the world isn’t a gigantic pile of shit:
** Roger: “Man knew how to talk. I don’t know why but I thought that would save him. I thought it’d solve the whole thing.” Roger believes in nothing but the gift of gab.
** Phyllis: “I knew it was going to happen. He knew it was going to happen. But it’s not going to stop anything.”
** Pete: “How dare you. This cannot be ‘made good.’ It’s shameful! It’s a shameful, shameful day!” First of all, he borrowed “shameful” from Trudy, which is deeply sad. Second, Pete’s on the level with this. He’s an asshole in so many ways, but ever since the “Negro TV company” debacle way back when, it’s been clear that he simply cannot comprehend or countenance why anyone would choose to be an asshole in this particular way.
* Harry just gets more loathsome with each episode.
* What a marvelously weird little setpiece Randall Walsh’s acid-casualty ad pitch turned out to be. I loved how even Don’s go-to guys, Stan and Ginsberg, couldn’t hide their amusement. “The ad sales guy didn’t like that?”, Stan openly giggling…man. But the guy’s deadly serious, and every once in a while something upsettingly real comes out: “There is a tear, and in that tear are all the tears in the world. All the animals crying. ” “This is an opportunity. The heavens are telling us to change.”
* Beautiful sound design as Don talks to Peggy on the phone about picking up the kids, then drives them back to his apartment. Phones, alarms, sirens, sewing machines.
* So Ginsberg’s bachelorhood is a sore spot with his father. Ginsberg’s like an exposed nerve in boxer shorts.
* When you see it in the context of an awestruck audience seeing it for the first time, the ending of Planet of the Apes is removed from cliché and camp and familiarity and becomes chilling — literally, this was another chills-up-and-down moment for me — and extremely powerful. In Bobby’s words, “Jesus!”
* “Stop being such a martyr. You’re having the time of your life.” Abe and Bobby both understand the appeal of apocalypse. “Everybody likes to go to the movies when they’re sad.”
* Henry wants to govern on a law & order platform? Oh brother.
* Don’s speech about his kids was…I didn’t see it coming. I’m not sure what to make of it. On a less self-assured show it could come across like a misstep (cf. Catelyn Stark’s similar recent monologue on Game of Thrones), but here…another piece of the puzzle.
* I wondered why Betty’s face fell when Henry told her he couldn’t wait for people to meet her, “really meet her.” Then she held the dress up to her body in the mirror.
* “What if somebody shoots Henry?” “Henry’s not that important.” Oh, Don.
* Don’s on the ledge again.
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
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