* “Not in primetime.” Don sees bad things as important only to the extent that they’re well marketed.

* “I made the biggest mistake of my life.” “I hate actresses.” The truth comes out in jest?

* Is Don still good at his job? This is something Molly Lambert has been calling into question all season long, and I’ve been skeptical of her skepticism, but when the first words out of your mouth when you sit down at a partners’ meeting you forgot was taking place are “Are we done here?”, it makes one wonder.

* What a bunch of babies, arguing about the initials of the agency. I love how long that was drawn out — well past the point of it being a conversation worth having.

* Cutler’s bit about how delay in renaming the agency “will take it out of our hands and leave it up to the world” has the sound of him realizing he needs to take charge of the merger by any means necessary if “his side” is to come out on top, even if he doesn’t realize this is what he’s realizing just yet.

* “Leave the drudgery to Ted Chaough and the rest of the underlings.” Plenty of us-and-them from the other side, too, if Roger’s any indication.

* “Be slick. Be glib. Be you!” Point #1: Roger sure idealizes Don, doesn’t he. Point #2: That’s what the ideal Don looks like to Roger.

* “Our biggest challenge is not to get syphilis.” Boy oh boy, lots of good lines in this episode. It’s a Roger showcase, in part, so that makes sense. Sterling Silver-Tongued rides again.

* Everything about the blow-up between Cutler and Ginsberg was, like, this season in a nutshell — its unique, non-marquee players and conflicts given the spotlight. Stan’s strategic retreat (“This is my stop.”), Ginsberg’s hyperbolic angst, Cutler’s sociopathy, Bob Benson To The Rescue…what a strange little microcosm.

* “WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS DOWN HERE! GO BACK UPSTAIRS!” She doesn’t even go here!

* Yes, you could smell the wood burning as Joan shifted gears from thinking she was on a date to realizing she was on a business dinner, but it was no less satisfying for seeing the gears turn. The woman gave Harry Crane the hard sell, for god’s sake. She’s a professional, and given enough time by herself and by the agency, she’ll be a good professional.

* “You’re not going anywhere.” “I was, but then you appeared.” Cutler had previously attempted to banish BOB, but it is not his custom to go where he is not wanted. “I believe in you, Bob.” Oh, Jim — especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon.

* Does Pete even realize how insufferable he’s become? I get it — he feels he’s Cassandra, and his warnings are going unheeded. But he’s really that oblivious to Joan, with whom he’d appeared to have something of a rapport this season? His tirade at the end of the episode indicates that this has something to do with clinging to the Rules. Perhaps you can see some continuity between this and his reaction to the murder of Martin Luther King earlier in the season: Both events violated the way these things are supposed to work.

* Peggy gives good stank face.

* Wow, Roger and Don and Harry are really staring into the abyss with those wingnut Carnation execs. Who was scarier to you, the cackling “Democrats are over” guy or the fire-and-brimstone “Dutch Reagan is a patriot” guy?

* Adults don’t eat cereal, but hippies don’t wear makeup. The generation gap as demographic research. “What if we were to say we find the conflict unresolvable?”

* “We believe in the wholesomeness of both your intentions and your products,” says Don. The professional is political.

* Joan and Peggy’s relationship may be the trickiest in the whole show, because they were never clear-cut enemies and thus it’s hard to see them as clear-cut friends. Each resents, envies, admires, and enjoys the other in equal measure for different things.

* Bob’s listening to self-help recordings in his decorationless office. WHAT COULD GO WRONG

* Ginsberg, with characteristic calmness: “I’m a thug, I’m a pig, I’m a part of the problem. ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.'” If this is what he’s like pitching Manischewitz, I’m glad SDCP never picked up Volkswagen.

* Another hasty retreat from Rizzo: “I can’t watch this.”

* And another bizarre, protean performance from Bob Benson. The mystery of Bob is more confounding because it’s not the usual “mystery” where the show headfakes in one direction only to reveal the opposite. It’s not really faking in any one direction at all.

* This is Don’s happening, baby, and it freaks him out!

* My contention is that this Boogie Nights/Austin Powers/Dragnet drug episode/”Mama Told Me Not to Come” Hollywood party was deliberately cartoonish on the part of the show. Danny’s return as a ridiculous homunculus avatar of ’60s LA, the outfits straight out of Hair‘s wardrobe department, the hookah, the pool, the bikini girls, the one-named zoned-out ingenues — if Don nearly collapses in as prefab a version of the counterculture as this, what hope does he have amid the real thing? This despite him being a more efficient mental codeshifter than Roger, who spends the party trying to reenact his bullying of Burt Peterson with a guy who could have hooked him up with Warner Bros.

* Don conjures up a pliant, pregnant, I would assume unemployed/unemployable Megan, and a maimed, dead soldier. These are the kids today, and this is how Don feels when he thinks of them.

* “My wife thinks I’m MIA, but I’m actually dead.” Chills. “Dying doesn’t make you whole. You should see what you look like.” MAJOR chills. That’s a horrifying line. “Man overboard!” Straight-up Rosemary’s Baby dream-sequence “Typhoon! Typhoon!” shit.

* Roger saved Don’s life, so I ship them now.

* “The job of your life is to know yourself. Sooner or later you’ll love who you are.” Through acid, Roger has gotten to know that he is an actual child. He’s perfectly happy about it.

* Good to see Creeper Peggy back in action — now with intercom powers!

* Peggy saves Joan with the power of copywriting.

* SC&P. Pete’s right: Don’s been reeled in without even feeling the hook in the eye.

* I laughed out loud at the final sequence of Pete smoking a joint in slow motion to the accompaniment of Janis Joplin. Pure Scorsese, and in Mean Streets Scorsese was one of the first filmmakers (preceded by Dennis Hopper on Easy Rider, and Kenneth Anger on Scorpio Rising if you wanna go there) to replace a score or original music with found pop songs, just like the exec Don was talking to at the party was talking about. Thank you, Film Studies major, for giving me a good laugh.

The death of an idea can hurt just as badly as the death of a person. People are mortal, after all, and come with an expiration date – it’s the cost of doing business with them. But ideas often have a wider impact than any one person. They’re passed down and passed around, like heirlooms or viruses. It’s easy to convince ourselves that an idea that gives our life meaning will outlast our life, any life, in turn. To lose an idea like that leaves us adrift, with no shore in sight.

I reviewed last night’s Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ad campaigns is up. This week: “It tastes better because it’s more expensive.”

* “It tastes better because it’s more expensive. It’s the premium brand, and it’s priced accordingly.” Those two sentences could be unpacked endlessly. Thanks, Ted.

* “Don–I agree with you!” Pete’s on the pay-no-mind list.

* It’s funny to me with the benefit of the entire episode in hindsight, but I actually wrote “Peggy has to choose between Ted and Don” as a note on this scene, as if this wouldn’t be the explicit subject matter of the hour.

* Mad Men‘s soap within the show is in the grand tradition of such things, most notably Invitation to Love on Twin Peaks, the show of which this show becomes more redolent with each passing season.

* Peggy on her two bosses: “You’re the same person sometimes.” But she’s convinced Ted values things other than himself. Perhaps he just has a more palatable way of presenting his self-interest to those close to him. “He never makes me feel this way.” “He doesn’t know you.”

* Abe gets stabbed, part 1 of 2. Taking his muggers’ side in the argument — that’s marvelous, because he’s both totally right and infuriatingly wrong in terms of understanding the role he plays in the life of the person who cares about him: “Fuck those unfortunate teenagers, I love you and you’re supposed to love me!” How can Peggy trust someone who’s on board with his own potential annihilation?

* “They’re two halves of the same person and they want the same thing but they’re trying to get it in different ways.” Mel-via-Megan delivers us another doozy. In a way, Mad Men Season Six has become sort of like All Star Superman, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s superhero-comic masterpiece. That comic primarily pitted a dying Superman against thinly veiled analogues of himself: Bizarro’s the one that would be most famous to non-superhero people, but he also faced the mythical strongmen Samson and Atlas; Zibarro, the one smart person on Bizarro World; superpowered Lois Lane; superpowered Lex Luthor; a small group of fellow Kryptonian survivors, and so on. The drama came from seeing Superman juxtaposed against these non-Superman supermen, discovering what they had to offer that he didn’t and vice versa. Superman always came out on top, because that is his essential superpower. That of course has been Don Draper’s superpower up to this point as well, as drawn out by Don Doppelgangers like Henry Francis and Ted Chaough and Pete Campbell, but mostly those men exist to show us how someone else goes about doing the kinds of things Don does without being Don, and where that gets them relative to where it gets him.

* Case in point: Henry getting revved up by other men’s desire for Betty. His demands that she tell him exactly how his creepy colleague hit on her were very Dom Draper, but remember that Don was always mortified when Betty made her attractiveness evident for the enjoyment of others (or herself).

* Roger Sterling’s a grandpa! Ha, you knew that wouldn’t end well, though I figure the kid really does love his Grandpa Roger, nightmares notwithstanding.

* I am inordinately pleased to see Duck Phillips again. Always am. I love seeing characters continue to live on in the tapestry of a show they’ve departed, for one thing, but I also simply enjoy seeing how Duck’s career marches on in the face of his repeated flameouts. And hey, he landed poor Burt Peterson a plum gig! And hey, he’s doling out life advice! Pete’s in a bad enough place that he might well take it.

* Betty’s a knockout again. When I saw where things were headed with her and Don, I simply typed “Uh-oh.”

* “Is this all me? Because that’ll help.” “…I think about it.” That’s an intense little exchange from Ted and Peggy. I’ll admit I was surprised to see him lay it all on the line like that.

* Bobby Draper gets a scene!

* So both the Drapers have a “let the right one in” situation going on. Arlene sweats her way into Megan’s apartment, while Don is the vampire being allowed into Betty’s motel room. “Close the door. You’ll let the bugs in.” Oh, Betty, there are all different kinds of bloodsuckers.

* “What did you think when you saw me?” “That you are as beautiful as the day I met you.” Good answer, apparently!

* “Fine….No, I’m ‘fine’ with being a tease.” Arlene’s advances and Megan’s rebuffs were endearingly clumsy, if only because I still tend to believe Arlene that she and Mel won’t take it out on Megan.

* “Status quo antebellum: Everything as it was.” Cut to Don and Betty, post-coital. Nice.

* “I can only hold your attention for so long.” Jeez, that whole bit about the look in his eyes was so good, especially because Jon Hamm’s eyes are unusually communicative in a sexual context. I’ve written before that he never looks more human or more vulnerable than when he makes a move, his eyes all hazy and cloudy with lust and hope just like anyone.

* I typed this out as fast as I could: “Why is sex the definition of being close to someone?” “I don’t know, but it is for me. It is for most people.” “Just because you climb a mountain doesn’t mean you love it….If we lied here together with you in my arms I’d have felt just as close. But the rest of it, I don’t know, I don’t know, it doesn’t mean that much to me.” That’s a huge piece of the Don Draper puzzle, right there.

* Roger follows Don to the movies, then uses Don as an explicit reason why it was okay to do so. Adorable! I guess that vision in the mirror during his LSD trip wasn’t a one-off.

* The transformation of sleepy morning-after Don into PERFECT DON was just tremendous.

* Joan and Bob! The reveal of his shorts — we see them only after Roger does — was too fucking funny.

* Abe gets stabbed, part 2 of 2. He can forgive random dudes from the neighborhood, but not his girlfriend of several years. And he just annihilates her with resentment. I’m semi-surprised she didn’t grab the knife and finish the job.

* Megan on the balcony in a t-shirt and underwear. Ohhhhh, alright.

* Joan’s got poor Roger’s number like you wouldn’t believe. Worse than Betty had Don’s by telling him loving him is the worst way to get to him, worse than Abe had Peggy’s by telling her she’ll always be the enemy. Roger really can’t be relied upon by anyone except the agency.

* Final note of the night: “Who ARE you, Bob Benson???”

My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ad campaigns is up. This week: The ultimate Draper Pitch.

Newcomer Daario Naharis is a man the Hound would recognize – a killer for cash. Unlike the Hound, he seems to take pleasure in the badass trappings of a successful sellsword – the rep, the women, the tricked-out dagger hilts – while the Hound himself takes pleasure, and barely, in the act of killing itself. But because of this, Naharis has the flexibility to bend before he breaks. Confronted with a physically stunning, tactically advantaged opponent in the form of Daenerys Targaryen, he kills his comrades and switches sides rather than toss himself into the fray on behalf of a wealthy but likely defeatable city. (As an aside, a show that can find time for an extensive visit to the camp of the Second Sons ought to be able to give Catelyn Stark more to do this season than scold her dopey son Robb. Okay, moving on.) Duty to his captains and his client would appear to leave him little choice, but “Daario Naharis always has a choice,” he tells Daenerys. Judging from her outrageously pulp-fictional bathtub dismount, he chose wisely.

I reviewed last night’s superb episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

* Maybe every episode should begin in medias res with Ken Cosgrove being forced at gunpoint to drive a carful of drunken Chevy execs down a dark road at 80mph. I truly thought he might have died.

* Don standing around smoking outside Sylvia’s apartment. Not taking this well, I see.

* Chevy is turning out to be a poisoned chalice. Everyone’s exhausted, and Don’s tearing into Kenny like he’s Pete.

* Even before I knew what he meant, I heard Jim Cutler say “I’m gonna get everybody fixed up” and thought “Cutler, you magnificent bastard.” A lot of the best Mad Men lines are the best because they have a recognizable emotional or narrative tone even though you haven’t been able to locate the context yet. (Cf. last season’s “Far Away Places,” which produced this phenomenon by showing events out of order.)

* I haven’t been crazy about Linda Cardellini as Sylvia, to be honest. I suppose I see what she represents to Don — age, experience, a housewife rather than a budding celebrity; perhaps even her ability to experience guilt and therefore the taboo are appealing — but as a performance…I don’t know, kind of…not a lot of zest to it? That changed last night, during her teary, desperate phone call with Don. Don’s looking for a big romantic moment, but Sylvia’s willing and able to boil their bad romance down to a growled “KNOCK IT OFF!”

* And Don is totally powerless before it. Seeing him in his mighty, Olympian office, hanging on the telephone because he can’t bring himself to hang up, a master of all he surveys except this one thing…it’s rough.

* Coughing fits. “Your face looks like a bag of walnuts.” Yeah, it’s rough on the guy alright.

* Betty’s blonde again. Okay.

* Poor Dawn. Her skill at Don management (Donagement?) is both a blessing and a curse.

* Ted Chaough on Frank Gleason: “He’s a piece that cannot be replaced.” Don, of course, was just replaced.

* A conversation between Roger and Stan! Alright!

* Cutler’s a cold customer, as it turns out. Doesn’t really care about Frank. Didn’t see that coming, frankly. Not that I saw the opposite coming mind you — just that it’s revealing of his character.

* I loved all the build-up to the doctor. They’re talking about him like he’s Col. Kurtz. Turns out he’s Dr. Robert.

* Mad Men excels at build-up, though, so I shouldn’t be surprised. I liked how the nature and effects of the drug were doled out in installments as well: Cutler leaping merrily around, then Cutler and Stan racing, then Don zoning out/zoning in, and so on.

* Don sees Peggy taking care of Ted and then flashes back to a sequence in which his mother failed to take care of him. Hm.

* “Do we know each other?” Hoo boy. “I meant from somewhere other than from this moment.” Zooms. Bells. It’s a drug episode! Hold all my calls!

* “Some kinda love transaction between a parent and a child and the greatest gift of all: a Chevy.” Ginsberg: straightedge by nature, messianic in his approach to crafting ad copy.

* “I hate how dying makes saints out of people.” Solid, true line, but I prefer the way it reveals the complexity of the workplace. Frank’s been painted as the perfect friend/partner by Ted, so to learn he was a dick to his underlings reminds us that everyone’s story has different heroes and villains.

* “I wanna write stuff down so it looks like I’m working.” Ginsberg nails it.

* “I’ll have 15 campaigns for you by then but you have to get me in a room so I can look them in the eye. The timbre of my voice is as important as the content. I don’t know whether I’ll be forceful or submissive, but I must be there in the flesh.” “You understand that I have no power whatsoever….I’m their favorite toy.” My first thought upon hearing this Don-Ken exchange: This drug transforms your subtext into text!

* “I know you’re all feeling the darkness here today, but there’s no reason to give in. No matter what you’ve heard, this process will not take years. In my heart, I know we cannot be defeated, because there is an answer that will open the door. There is a way around this system. This is a test of our patience and commitment. One great idea can win someone over.” I feel like that first sentence should be written on an anonymous notecard and pinned above Don’s hospital bed someday, Tony Soprano-style.

* Soup! Don’s looking for chicken soup for the soul.

* Whoa, it’s the next day, suddenly. That came as a shock.

* “Her name is Wendy.” I thought we were going to push the age limit for Don’s thing for brunettes, but he’s not feeling it, and in retrospect it’s easy to see why: He’s crafting the ultimate Draper Pitch, his product is Don Draper himself, and he’s got a target audience of one in mind.

* “I’ve got six hundred and sixty-six ideas!” HAIL STAN

* Complaints about Mad Men trying too hard or being too obvious or god help us being on the nose miss the point because that is the point. Symbolist TV. It’s all right there, dredged to the surface. If it’s obvious, well, aren’t we all, when that happens? Case in point: Wendy the would-be psychic, wearing a stethoscope while telling Don he wants to know if someone loves him. “I wanna hear your heart. Oh — I think it’s broken.” “You can hear that?!” “I can’t hear anything. I think it’s broken.” I mean, the show’s making a joke of it. This is not Matthew Weiner trying to be subtle but screwing it up.

* “You’re on TV every day. Don’t they know that?” Bobby Draper gives Megan the validation Don Draper can’t deliver.

* The old William Tell trick!

* “You’re pretentious, you know that? I love that.” Again, this is not Matthew Weiner making a mistake.

* “But you hate him!” “…I hate apples more.” Ginsberg’s great in this episode.

* Jesus, Don, not at Sylvia’s again!. Then an endless, immobile closeup of his head against her door. “Out of my head over you.”

* Doors: Don knows the perfect idea can open the door. His ultimate Draper Pitch involves telling Sylvia not to shut the door. He tells Ginsberg he’s got it when Ginsberg says he has to get his foot in the door. He tells Sally it’s all his fault since he left the door open.

* “You’re lucky I don’t like beards.” “Women say that, but they don’t act like it.” YESSSSSSSSS, PEGGY AND STAN / YESSSSSSSSS, BEARDS

* “You’ve got a great ass.” “Thank you.” is this generation’s “I love you.” “I know.”

* Sally’s reading Rosemary’s Baby. Girl, you’ll be a woman soon.

* Whoa, who is this lady? Grandma Ida? It was clear she was robbing the joint, but when she asked “Your daddy Mr. Donald Draper, or not?” I thought she was trying to rip off a very different Don Draper. That was a creepy moment.

* “Because you know what he needs.” And thus begins a game of connect the dots with beauty marks, from Amy the prostitute to the oatmeal mom to Sylvia.

* “Do you wanna know what all the fuss is about?” “No.” Famous last words, Don.

* Don’s first is a blonde. He marries a blonde, but spends his free time chasing brunettes like the mother who badly beat him for having sex while screaming at him that he’s filth. So there you go.

* “Are we negroes?”

* Don’s ultimate Draper Pitch uses history to attract its audience, even while Don’s lack of history is being used to bamboozle Sally and Bobby into giving up the goods to the world’s kindliest catburglar.

* “Have you been working on Chevy at all?” And that was the moment I finally realized what he was preparing to sell.

* Don finally opens the door, and walks into a nightmare tableau of broken domesticity — his ex, the wife he’s cheating on, his replacement, his abandoned kids, a cop. Lights out.

* That elevator ride. I was happy for both of them when it ended.

* Woof, Wendy was Frank’s daughter. Cutler is Roger if Roger were a sociopath rather than merely a nihilist.

* “Every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse.” The door into Don Draper is shut.

My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ad campaigns is up. This week: dominance, submission, and margarine.

* My favorite parts about the blow-up Don overhears between Sylvia and Arnold: the complete absence of Arnold’s voice, it’s just his stuff sitting there in the hallway, like the discarded clothing of the man who wasn’t there in Don’s Royal Hawaiian ad; Don’s frantic button pushing to close the door before he gets caught listening in.

* Margie! Nice to meet you, female copywriter! We hardly knew ye.

* When Peggy introduces Ted to her old colleagues she calls Stan by his first name and Ginsberg “Ginsberg.”

* Blink and you’ll miss it, but Bob briefly tails Peggy and Ted as they walk to their offices.

* No chair for Pete at the meeting. Never let it be said that Mad Men doesn’t place enough banana peels in front of that guy!

* “Now that we’ve dispensed with the gallantry.” Roger, you magnificent bastard.

* Cutler = Roger 2

* “Ted’s a pilot!” I swear you could hear Don’s balls shrivel.

* Pete’s mom was so lucid in her senility that she briefly had me confused. I kept mixing up her allegations regarding Pete’s late father — who died in a plane crash, which is worth noting in this plane-heavy episode — with the truth about Pete’s very much alive father-in law.

* Re: Roger’s firing of Burt Peterson: holy shit, Roger. Like the Comedian from Watchmen, to whom I will never stop comparing him (which fact renews my confidence somewhat in the idea that Watchmen has things to communicate outside its art form and era), this cackling nihilist has a mean streak a mile wide. Every line was a punch in the throat.

* “I need you, and nothing else will do.” Sylvia’s got a future in copywriting ahead of her.

* “A little rap session about margarine in general.”

* My notes for the beginning of Don and Sylvia’s hotel-room tryst: “No dom/sub games for Sylvia, Don, sorry.” [line break] “Whoops, I stand corrected.” Sorry, but that was all some hot shit. Don’s confidence comes from being unpleasant and adored for it.

* Don’s thoroughly out-alpha’ing Ted.

* Pete to his brother: “I don’t have a chair!” Wah wah wah.

* Ted Chaough asserting that every advertising archetype has its Gilligan’s Island analogue anticipates several decades of meta-pop.

* The best thing about Draper Pitches, as we see in his margarine spiel, is that he can take the most absurd and banal subjects imaginable and make it seem like he’s taking you through the stargate in 2001.

* Bob! “Just walk with me, and I’ll bother you all the way out. No one will know.”

* Bob! Furniture polish improv! Okay, maybe this guy’s a good accounts man after all.

* Unexpected and fascinating to get such a direct window into Ted’s thoughts about Don, during that conversation with Gleason. Ted’s amazed that Don seems more interested in him than in their work, because he doesn’t feel interesting. “He doesn’t talk for long stretches and then he’s incredibly eloquent.” Gleason’s got Don’s number, though: “Give him the early rounds. He’ll tire himself out.”

* “Peggy, he’s a grown man.” “So are you! Move forward.” Peggy, audience stand-in.

* I guess it should go without saying that Don’s playing control games because it makes him feel the most like himself and the least like his life is out of control in any other area.

* Don and Ted in a plane! Hahahahaha! Like something out of a single-camera comedy.

* “Sometimes when you’re flying you think you’re rightside up but you’re really upside down. Gotta watch your instruments.” Ted Chaough, accidental philospher.

* “No matter what I say, you’re the guy who flew us up here in his own plane.” Don’s been out-alpha’d.

* “Not every good deed is part of a plan.” Joan’s mom, voice of optimism.

* “My mother can go to hell. Ted Chaough can fly her there.” Pete Campbell, winner, line of the night.

* It’s a dopey tv-critic thing to worry about, I know, but what a sad state of affairs that Jon Hamm may never win an Emmy. What a marvel that guy is in this role! Don gets dumped, and it plays out on his face like someone dynamiting the sculpted surface of George Washington right off Mount Rushmore.

* Joan saves Bob, just like that. A good deed goes unpunished!

* Oof, that fadeout on Megan’s voice, brutal.

* “They’re shooting everybody.” With that, Pete’s mom disappears, walks behind the glass, becomes a silhouette, a ghost. Very creepy.

* That shot of Don arms akimbo, in the foreground of the shot, out of focus, Meagan and the news report behind him. Well done, Slattery.

* People are finally getting together.

* Using the assassination of Robert Kennedy to comment on the state of Mad Men, rather than the other way around, is the most Mad Men thing Mad Men has ever done, an act of creative hubris that would do Don himself proud.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for a character we first really got to know when he took a break from fucking his sister to toss a little boy out a window. By that time in his life Jaime had spent 17 years wearing his last great crime, the murder of the king he was sworn to protect, like a crown. He’d made a decision in the heat of the moment and adamantly refused to submit himself to anyone’s judgment, even if it meant hiding the fact that he’d saved, by his estimation in this episode, half a million lives. Squint at it long enough and it’s easy to see his defenestration of Bran Stark in a similar light: Kill this boy to cover up the crime, or watch as an enraged King Robert kills the sister he loves, the children they secretly had together and Jaime himself – and probably his father and brother for good measure. Prolonged exposure to Brienne, his first close contact with someone outside the closed systems of his family and the Kingsguard in years, forced him to think outside his snap-judgment comfort zone. With any luck, she’ll be the first of many people to benefit from his growth.

I reviewed last night’s Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ad campaigns is up. This week: a tale of two Chevys.

But the disunity can be delightful, and nowhere was it stronger than in the episode’s closing minutes. At first, Lord Baelish’s voiceover, and the accompanying score by Ramin Djawadi, came across overheated and unsubtle. Sansa’s tears helped sell it, though, through another powerfully wordless Sophie Turner performance. So did the sad death of Ros, the rags-to-riches prostitute-turned-advisor-turned-double-agent who at long last crossed the wrong sociopaths; the staging of her corpse, riddled with bolts fromKing Joffrey’s crossbow, radiated the fervid sex-and-death fetishism of medieval martyr portraiture. (BTW: Two and a half seasons spent building up a character the show effectively invented, and they can’t even give her an on-screen death?)

Then we emerge from the squalid, tear-streaked, blood-soaked hellscape of Littlefinger’s monologue montage into the cold open air atop the Wall. We watch Jon and Ygritte collapse onto their backs, exhausted, looking up at the sky. We watch them stand up and take in first the view of the frozen forest to the north of this massive, magical structure; then of the comparative paradise to the south, a boundless world full of possibilities and danger for them both. As the camera cuts across the 180-degree line to flip their positions in the frame, they kiss. Alright, they straight-up make out, silhouetted against a glorious sky and magnificent view. Eventually, even as the camera keeps pulling back, they run out of steam and just stop and hold each other and gaze. It’s a feverishly romantic image – and without Littlefinger’s nasty speech, it wouldn’t have hit like such a blast of fresh air.

That’s the way to watch Game of Thrones, I think – to watch all the little pieces moving in all those directions and see how each new move affects your view of all the others.

I reviewed last night’s Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone, and sort of advanced a grand unified theory of watching this show in the process.

* 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.

My latest column on the world of Mad Men as viewed through its ads is up. This week: the comfort of violent imagery.

It was an emotionally merciless episode throughout. Delirious from pain and heat and 17 years of bitterness, Jaime reveals to Brienne that he slew the Mad King to stop him from burning King’s Landing to the ground, but refused to tell anyone because he was so outraged by Ned Stark’s pre-judgment that he couldn’t even bear to defend himself with the truth. “By what right does the wolf judge the lion?” he demands, weeping through the dirt and shit caked on his face. As if his system can’t withstand honesty he then passes out, his nude body cradled against Brienne’s own in a shot that rivals last episode’s Jaime-and-his-hand tableau. “My name is Jaime,” he insists, at long last deciding to be less, and therefore more, than his reputation would make him out to be.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, which I absolutely loved, for Rolling Stone. All-time Top 5 episode.

* 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.

* Pete standing alone.

* 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.

My latest column for Wired on the world of Mad Men as seen through its ads is up. This week: The Heinz that wasn’t there.

* “The prestige that comes with ketchup.”

* Pete’s apartment: good for backroom deals as well as affairs. And Pete as part of the three-man braintrust along with Don and Stan? You know my soft spot for teamwork and rapprochement, so they sure were playing my song there.

* Dawn’s initial conversation with her friend was the first time Mad Men ever had two not-white people talk to each other, right? Is there a not-white-person equivalent of the Bechdel Test? But I think that was simply the most dramatic example of what this episode was about, which was how people who aren’t Alpha Males navigate the world built by and for Alpha Males. Dawn, Scarlett, Harry, Joan.

* Always nice to return to Joan’s apocalyptically orange apartment. She has an older sister? And she was married before?

* A good old-fashioned elevator door closing on Don shot. Love it. Love that Don seemed more intrigued than irritated by Sylvia’s refusal to tell him what she was up to.

* It’s easy to forget that Ken Cosgrove was once the biggest creep in his cohort, because now he seems like such a mensch, especially in comparison to everyone else but also, I think, because maybe he became one over the years. I mean, he is legit shamefaced that he just came into Harry’s office just to complain.

* “Harry has great ideas!” She’s not wrong, as far as it goes, yet Harry’s incapable of capitalizing on them in anyone’s eyes but his clients and the networks, I suppose.

* “So…Project K. What does it stand for.” “Project Kill Machine! “That’s not what it stands for.” Bob and Ginsberg, now there’s a dynamic.

* “I’m tellin’ ya, it clears the cobwebs,” Stan says, looking like he’s been awake for six days.

* “I think a hot dog and a hamburger are too similar. Plus, a hot dog cries up for mustard.” DON STONED

* Megan in a French maid outfit. You’ve got to be FUCKING kidding me.

* “Megan, I don’t care.” Don’s response when Megan tries to tell him about her storyline from an in-world perspective was hopefully completely devastating to anyone who’s ever worked in a creative field ever, or really just anyone who’s ever wanted to talk about the minutiae of their job and been shot right down.

* Casting Leland Palmer as a Dow exec is so next-level brilliant I can hardly stand it. Sell that, Don.

* Scarlett’s dress could not have been more orange.

* My favorite, laugh out loud, pump my fists in delight moment during Harry’s boardroom freakout? “No, please. Let him go on.” Roger Sterling just wants to watch the world burn. Of course, this fire got out of control.

* My least favorite moment? Pretty much every moment, after a certain point. Harry, you piece of shit. Going for the jugular of someone who really has nothing to do with what he’s so resentful about.

* So is Joan’s deal an open secret? Or is Meredith the mousy secretary made prominent in this episode because she’ll be the one who leaks it to the office? Or does Joan’s newfound self-confidence (as represented by a blue power suit instead of her usual floral-display palette) negate that whole potential storyline?

* Don’s against the war. It doesn’t surprise me that he is, but it does surprise me that he says so.

* “You’re worried about people hating what you’re selling.” Life!

* “I’m sure he’s a man who plays many roles.” Life!

* “Let’s go back to our pad, smoke some grass and…see what happens.” Don’s face during every second of the scene from that point forward is worth a price beyond rubies. I mean, the whole scene was marvelous, a head-on collision of two brands of debauchery from opposite ends of the decade, but watching Don Draper react to being propositioned for a foursome? Goodness gracious.

* I loved that the exec and his wife were basically “hey, it’s cool, don’t worry” and apparently meant it. I loved that Don’s lines around appropriate and inappropriate forms of sexual indiscretion are so bright and red. I loved the Drapers’ mutual bafflement that the swingers have been married for 18 years.

* “What did I say?!” “What did he say?” “He said I’d want you.” Phhhhheeeewwwwwwwwwww, that is sexy.

* “I was different than you, Mr. Crane, in every way.” BERTMERKED

* I don’t like that Joan feels forever alone. I mean I don’t like it for her, not I don’t like the writing. I want her to be happy, more really than any of these other assholes, since she is not an asshole herself.

* I’m not 100% convinced I buy her sartorial and attitudinal turnaround following the pep talk from her sister, but maybe that’s seeing such makeovers in a million shitty shows and movies talking, rather than how it works within the Mad Men context.

* Don serves Heinz another ad that isn’t there, another absence. There is no man at Royal Hawaiian. There is no ketchup in the Heinz ketchup campaign. In “The greatest thing you have going for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint — it’s the imagination of the consumer. They have no budget. They have no time limit. And if you can get into that space, your ad can run all day.” What’s running in Don’s imagination-space all day?

* The great Heinz staredown. This is a funny show.

* OH MY GOD I JUST REALIZED THAT’S THE FIRST TIME DON SAW PEGGY SINCE SHE QUIT, OH MY GODDDDDDDDDD [they saw each other at the movies, I’ve been told 🙁 ] and he stops and listens to hear what she says and she quotes him and ugggggggh the FEEEEELS

(* sorry, I’ve been spending a lot of time on tumblr)

* “Heinz, the only ketchup.” Peggy tries to directly inflate their ego, Don tries to get them to have enough faith to let go of it?

* I saw an animated gif of Stan flippin’ Peggy the bird before I even started writing this.

* Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but when Ted tried commiserating with Don about the disadvantage their firms are at due to their smaller size, I wondered if there’s some merger storyline coming, so call me maybe?

* Don staring daggers at Megan following her love scene was deeply alarming. More alarming to me than the chase around the apartment after she disappeared from the Howard Johnson’s last season.

* “I’m sick of tiptoeing around you everytime something good happens to me.” Yeah, she’s got Don’s number.

* “You kiss people for money. You know who does that?” Yeah, Don’s got Don’s number.

* “I pray for you…For you to find peace.” I’m not optimistic.

Started strong, ended strong, maybe a little shaky in the middle but who cares: I reviewed tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone.

My new column for Wired.com on the world of Mad Men as seen through its ads is up. This week: the Jaguar war.