* Pete and Joan, flirting? Relatively convincingly? Don’t that beat all.
* It’s Mother’s Day, everyone.
* Going public surprised me, for sure. But for all the nattering about how Don doesn’t change, Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce) sure has, over the years. Independent, then bought out and wholly owned subsidiaried, then rogue and independent, then established and independent but small, then maybe publicly held, then merged and big.
* Roger goes Littlefinger, sexing a stewardess spy. It’s unorthodox, to be sure, but bedding down an airline employee so she can keep track of arrivals and departures from Detroit is some next-level thinking for an accounts man. But it’s not really a surprise that Roger’s good at his job, albeit in the most Roger way imaginable (“Good idea.” “I’m full of ’em!” He’s right!), any more than it’s a surprise that Joan keeps impeccable books. One of the great pleasures of Mad Men is that you get to watch people who, with rare exceptions, are quite good at their jobs.
* “But my mother just died.” You can practically see the insincere frowny-face emoticon after that line.
* Pete is exceptionally oily when he attempts to, I don’t know what you’d call it, “seduce” Trudy on Mother’s Day morning. Amazing how quickly she goes back to her usual cheery, gently nose-tweaking approach to interacting with him (“I’ve taken note of your efforts,” with a big smile), but routine is powerful.
* Maman is a piece of work.
* Great summary of Pete Campbell #1: Asking Don to dinner, getting rejected, Don walks into his office and Roger’s already in there. Pete is the man outside.
* I loved our little glimpse of Cutler Gleeson Chaough. I liked Frank when I thought he was just a high-strung depressive artist type, I liked him even more when we found out he’s dying, and I like that Ted is mean to his enemies but truly kind to his friends.
* “Everybody loves astronauts! I gotta go lie down.”
* Maman remains a piece of work, but she knows Don well enough to give Megan what turns out to be solid advice for their relationship. I mean, sort of — he’s at least as turned on by defenestrating Herb the Jaguar Asshole as he is by Megan’s high hemline.
* Best gasface of the night: Megan and Marie staring at Herb’s dopey wife, or Don staring at Herb after he quotes “The Girl from Ipanema”?
* I was kind of surprised Pete’s joke about serving Bert laudanum went over. But Pete’s not bad at everything all the time. It just doesn’t come as easily to him as it does to the true alpha males. He can work at it, and he can get there, but he just happens to fail.
* Do you think Herb was aware that he was insulting Don by telling him to learn from the kid who does their flyers at the lot? I’m not sure where I come down on that. Oh well, it was his mistake to tangle with a guy who loves nothing more than to use contempt as a blade to slice portions of his life away when they no longer serve him.
* Is it me or has it been a good long while since we had a good old-fashioned Mad Men last-minute save? When Roger called Don from the airport in Detroit, I almost got giddy.
* Oh shit. Trudy’s dad. Poor Pete — not even a rock-solid doctrine like Mutually Assured Destruction works out for him. He’s Dr. Strangelove on that shit.
* Also, uh, maybe not quite as enlightened about race as I gave him credit for last week, at least not when he’s pissed, which is when it counts.
* Pete Campbell summarized, #2: Falling down the stairs. Sometimes I think Matthew Weiner wants to give good .gif as much as Dan Harmon did on Community, at least where Pete’s concerned.
* Joan is devastated by Don’s caprice, how it took away her agency and rendered her choices meaningless. Don shakes it off and within minutes is doing what he does best, Roger smiling by his side. “How ’bout that.” “How ’bout it?”
* Ted has felt, all season long, like someone with a Draper-sized backstory behind him. That image of him sitting on the floor, failing to get his TV to work — that could have been the climax of an entire parallell Mad Men episode in which he’s been the main character all along.
* “Do not say I’m nice. I hate it when people say I’m nice.” “I was going to say strong.” Yeah, I can see the appeal those two people have for each other.
* “I don’t believe in fate. You make your own opportunities.” Says the guy who destroyed a client relationship in a fit of pique, only for dumb luck to pull his bacon out of the fire.
* “I love you like this.” “Desperate and scared?” “Fearless. And I want to do whatever I can to make sure you don’t fail. Then you can jump from the balcony and fly to work like Superman.” Superman, suicide, sex — is it just me, or did that scene with Megan perfectly summarize what we think about when we think about Don Draper?
* Don deliberately fucks with a client and is rewarded. Pete stumbles bass-ackwards into a relationship-destroying accident. Pete Campbell Summarized, #3.
* “Roger will handle it,” says Bert. Sure enough, Roger takes the call, hears the news, sits down, jokes around with his temperamental artiste friend, swallows it, keeps it to himself. Good at his job.
* Trudy’s dad tells Pete he’ll do the right thing. He doesn’t. It doesn’t make any difference.
* Wow, that was some goopy fantasy sequence with Peggy and Ted! Ha, sure, why not, let’s go full soap in Peggy’s head. I’m sure she could use some of that from time to time.
* Ted’s ad: optimistic, all-american, adventurous. Don’s ad: driven by awe, another ad that wasn’t there.
* “‘We.’ That’s interesting.” Called it!!! I am very excited about this merger because nothing in fiction excites me like talented rivals overcoming their differences to respect and cooperate with one another.
* “Hey, Lieutenant — wanna get into some trouble?”
* Peggy enters Ted’s office, and Don’s voice is there to greet her. Don materializes. The past comes back to haunt her. What an amazing scene.
* “Make it sound like the agency you wanna work for.” Good luck with that, Peggy.
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
I felt like Joan was actually sort of oblivious to Pete’s actual flirting. She seemed so focused on the accountant guy & his praise/going public that his overtures barely seemed to register as anything more than comradery.
My favorite type of MadMen episode: one where there’s lots of pots bubbling on the stove, and lots of twists, turns, and laugh out loud moments (both from actual humor and structural audacity) aplenty.
I agree with Zack that Joan was basically obvlivious to Pete’s flirting, or less compelled to remark upon it due to her giddiness over the IPO. I feel the same way about Pete’s joshing with Bert. Bert puts up with it because he sees a load of fuck-off/retirement money coming his way, so it’s easy to put up with the weasel who has done something to make that happen.
Joan with her hair down is lovely.
While Joan’s rant at Don was on the money and mostly justified, there was a little falsity to it. After all, for all her talk about Don not being a team player, the team didn’t consult him on Joan sleeping with Herb Rennet (I always loved that Rennet is what makes milk into cheese), nor did they consult him on the IPO. It seemed like Weiner blurred whether Roger was aware of the IPO as well; almost certainly he was, but then, why trust Don to be with Herb and possibly blow the Jaguar account for good? Even if Roger was there, there was still a decent chance he couldn’t stop Don from saying something damaging.
As far as making one’s own opportunities, the flip side is that we are usually responsible for our own failures, or ruining those opportunities. It’s fair to say Don was thinking more of his own distaste for Herb than the good of the agency, but Herb was such an asshole he was going to eventually sour the relationship, anyway. I don’t think he was crafty enough to present the idea of his franchise’s local ad writer getting input into SDCP’s work as an insult. Herb is a piker.
There sure has been a lot of yelling in the office this season.
Yes, Pete will have to take off his “Friend of the Negro” badge. There wasn’t a moment in this episode where he wasn’t loathsome.
I knew when we saw Ted in a scene without Peggy that we were entering new territory, but the merger still took me by surprise. Great idea for fresh conflicts (apres Chevrolet, le deluge as far as Don and Ted figuring out who’s top creative guy), and I loved how Weiner didn’t explain too much about Peggy’s reaction to this change, just showed her struck dumb like the rest of us.
Curious how the merger will affect the Don/Sylvia affair. He seems reenergized. And is a blowjob too whorish for him? Is Megan hurrying her exit?
I liked the Superman analogy, too, but it also emphasizes how little Megan really knows Don. When he’s on the balcony, it’s out of despair.
Yes, what a good call about the falsity in Joan’s speech! She’s turning into a regular schemer. Maybe she’s learning from Pete.
BTW am I the only one who thinks Joan has a higher tolerance for alcohol than she lets on? (She’s always like, “oh I drank too fast” “I’m gonna fall over,” but she seems put together, and she’s a big girl after all, and she hangs out with heavy drinkers all the time. I don’t know.)
I didn’t mind Pete saying “the biggest, blackest prostitute you’ve ever seen” like in a racist way. I mean, that’s gossip! It’s not like he was saying it was bad; he was just relating what he saw, in a shocking way, to a friend. The dude was cheating on his wife with a prostitute, which is shocking no matter what type of girl! Haha, I don’t think Pete had much room in his heart at that time to be judging the dude, anyway.
That “Superman” line was so funny in the context of all the imagery and the lines about Don Draper wanting to jump off a building and not fly but KILL HIMSELF that we’re tossing around here.
BTW, in contrast to my comments last week about the housing subplot not going anywhere – it really zipped ahead in time so quickly this episode! So that worked for me. A whole episode of chasing nothing and then BAM they’re already in the new house. Nice that the dramatic payoff came neatly in the next episode. Well golly gee I should trust in Mad Men a little more. This episode got me thinking, “damn this show is real good.”
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