The Day The Music Died: You Can Go Home Again

BY RYAN BYRNES

Can people truly change? Pete suggests that they can. (Credit: AMC)

The last voice you hear during the second-to-last episode of “Mad Men” is that of rock legend Buddy Holly, whose song “Everyday” plays as credits roll. Holly died in a plane crash in 1959, a tragedy that would later be memorialized by singer Don McLean as “the day the music died.” “Mad Men” too is nearing its final moments, and as Pete sits alone eating American Pie and Don sings with good old military boys drinking whiskey, the audience is left wondering – much like it has done with McLean’s song itself – how to interpret the many details this penultimate episode provides.

Fans have put forth many dark theories about the show’s possible conclusion, and for those looking for ominous signs, “The Milk and the Honey Route” provides plenty. The bell tolls for Betty as she ascends the staircase at Fairfield University, shortly before she is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Pete takes a job at a company that had one of its luxury jets crash just months earlier, and convinces his wife to move to Wichita the same weekend that city was also connected to an airline crash. Don is set up by an aspiring con man, jumped by a group of angry veterans, and ends up at a bus stop left with nothing but a bag from Sears. At every turn, there is a feeling of finality. “I know when it’s over,” Betty tells Sally. “It’s been a gift to me – to know when to move on.”

Yet by the end of the episode, Don is smiling, the Campbells are embracing, and Betty is telling her daughter that she loves her. Even Holly’s lyrics are optimistic (“Love like yours will surely come my way.”). It is a testament to this excellent episode that it is not so simply categorized as happy or dark, as uplifting or depressing. It is one, like many in its rear-view, that moves the viewer in a multitude of ways, that looks at life from both sides now. It is an hour that suggests that, even as the end approaches, individuals can evolve, that lessons can be passed on, and that – perhaps – you can in fact go home again.

Betty’s response to her diagnosis is the centerpiece of the episode – a wrenching possible farewell for one of the series’ most polarizing figures – and it demonstrates how far she has come in a decade. She spends much of Season 1 struggling with the recent loss of her own mother, and when her father tries to review his will and funeral arrangements with her in Season 3, she dismisses it as morbid. “I’m your little girl,” she responds then. “Can’t you keep it to yourself?”

But after a doctor tells Henry she has less than a year to live, Betty responds better than most people could be expected to. “I’ve learned to believe people when they tell you it’s over,” she says. “They don’t want to say it, so it’s usually the truth.” Like Anna Draper and Rachel Menken before her, Betty will succumb to cancer, but not before passing to Sally – on letterhead bearing her initials – instructions on how to behave when things happen quickly after she dies. For the reluctant housewife who once scolded her plastic bag-wearing daughter for potentially ruining her clothes, and for an impulsive mother who once fired the maid on the eve of a trip to Disneyland, Betty’s mature and measured (perhaps) final performance is a triumphant moment for her character and a suggestion that people can be at their best even when all else is at its worst. Sally also demonstrates great maturity, and it is noteworthy that when she sits with her brothers at the kitchen table, she sits in Betty’s seat.

After a life of inherited privilege and (apparently) predetermined promiscuity, Pete temporarily fights off Duck’s professional advances before realizing he has arrived at the crossroads of midtown and the Midwest. “How do you know when something is truly an opportunity?” he asks his brother, before they discuss how their constant desire for more may have been something passed on to them by their father. Duck first proposed the Lear-Jet marketing job to Pete during Season 6, but Pete – ever the Manhattanite (he chose to be with the city rather than his family during the Cuban Missile Crisis in Season 2) – was dismissive at the time (“Anything back here on Earth?” he retorted.). Duck’s advice then to a professionally-spiraling Pete was to spend more time at home. “One day,” says the recovering alcoholic Duck, “I looked in the mirror and realized I had regrets because I didn’t understand the wellspring of my confidence: my family.”

Pete’s journey has been the most fascinating example of the different values family can have. It is his mother’s family name (Dyckman) that saves him from being fired in Season 1, and he uses his relationship with his father-in-law as a bargaining chip throughout the series. He and Trudy struggle to build their own family, and he never recovers from her kicking him out of their home in Cos Cob. “I hate even the word ‘family,’” he tells Peggy in a Burger Chef during Season 7. “It’s vague.” But after a life of using family as a means to an end, the stars align for Peter Dyckman Campbell (“You are charmed, my friend,” Duck says) to relocate, restart and ask Trudy and Tammy to be his family again. “Because its origins were supernatural, I realize that its benefits may be as well,” he tells Trudy. Is it possible that the Dartmouth alum will have learned his most important lesson from an alcoholic, that the Manhattan elitist will only find true happiness living in Kansas, and that the woman he wants to go everywhere with is the one he has been running from since he spent the night with Peggy in the pilot episode? As Pete asks Trudy, who says things can’t be undone?

As Pete finds happiness in going home, Don too reverts back to his roots, rambling through the heartland and living the life of a hobo (albeit one who has a million dollars in the bank). He has been adept at reading people since his family’s farmhouse was visited by a traveler in Season 1’s “The Hobo Code,” one who informed a young Dick Whitman that his father was “a dishonest man.” So when Don enters the fundraiser and is warned by Dell that he’s “been a little dishonest” in explaining the purpose of the event, Don is already aware. He knows why the Sharon Motel conspired to keep “Don From New York” around long enough for their fundraiser, and he tells Andy he has poor instincts for a con man. During a season where Don has often reflected on his life not lived, he is faced with many examples of what his life may have been like if Dick Whitman had simply stayed out west, a hobo on that milk and honey route.

For better or for worse, Dick Whitman became Don Draper, though Don conveniently leaves that detail out when admitting to the fellow veterans that he killed his commanding officer in Korea. Don knows that living a lie is not a recommended path; he tells Andy that becoming somebody else isn’t what you think it is. “You cannot get off on that foot in this life,” Don tells him, shortly after correcting his English (twice) and shortly before giving him a Cadillac and an opportunity (“Don’t waste this.”). But Dick Whitman’s decision was one made out of necessity; as one veteran summarized, “You just do what you have to do to come home.”

The central question remaining is whether Don does in fact go to wherever he believes to be home. Does he return to California, where he has always seemed to be at his truest self? Does he return to his children, upon presumably learning of Betty’s diagnosis? Much like Don McLean’s song and Matthew Weiner’s series, the question is open to interpretation, and one the audience hopes to learn the answer to during the series finale. Until then, we are left with Don in Oklahoma, thinking of a man he admired most – the recent visit of Bert Cooper’s ghost – hopping on the next bus (but toward which coast?) the day, the music, died.

Notes:

• The airlines have played a pivotal role in the relationship of Pete and Duck. Pete’s father died in an airline crash in Season 2’s “Flight 1.” Duck uses the tragedy as an opportunity to convince Sterling Cooper to pursue American Airlines – and Pete joins him in that ultimately unsuccessful pursuit. Here, Duck – now a corporate recruiter (he helped SC&P hire Lou Avery when Don was put on leave) – sneakily convinces Pete to take an in-house job at a luxury jet company by, among other things, using a private jet as a perk and by telling Pete he is on a streak where the line “just goes up.”

• Don and the other veterans sing the military song “Over There” during an episode where Betty instructs Sally how to plan for her funeral. “Over There” also played during the end credits in Season 3’s “The Arrangements,” the episode when Betty’s father – a World War I veteran – passes away and plans are made for his funeral. This is the third consecutive week where a song has been reused from a past episode (“Stranger on the Shore” and “Lipstick”).

• Betty’s cancer diagnosis is preceded by the nurse calling her Mrs. Robinson, a joke and one presumably in reference to “The Graduate” film and the Simon & Garfunkel song. Interestingly, the episode that last featured a former-Mrs. Draper passing away from cancer (Anna Draper in Season 4’s “The Suitcase”) ended with the song “Bleecker Street” – by Simon & Garfunkel.

• A number of paperback novels are seen during Don’s time at the motel. James A. Michener’s “Hawaii” is on his nightstand, and Alberto Moravia’s “The Woman of Rome” is on the lap of the woman by the pool. Don vacationed with Megan in Hawaii in the Season 6 premiere “The Doorway,” and Don and Betty spent the final romantic moments of their marriage in Rome in Season 3’s “Souvenir.” Don also reads Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” and his Season 4 date Dr. Faye Miller suggested to Don that her father had mafia ties. Additionally, “The Woman of Rome” – another example of existentialist literature – focuses on a main character who, like Don, is the child of a prostitute.

• Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” plays on the radio during the opening Don dream sequence. Haggard’s band was called the Strangers. During the previous episode, the ghost of Bert Cooper tells Don “You like to play The Stranger.”

• In Season 3’s “Seven Twenty Three,” Don is knocked out in a motel room by a hitchhiker who is heading to Niagara Falls to avoid having to serve in Vietnam. The hitchhiker and his girlfriend steal Don’s money, but leave his car. Here, Don is accosted in a motel room by a group that presumably fulfilled their military service. They smack him – twice – with a phonebook and steal his car until he returns to them money he didn’t steal.

• When on the phone with Sally, Don encourages her to sell her field hockey equipment, telling her “You have no idea about money.” It is similar, though not identical, to what Betty said to Don when she learns about his true past in Season 3’s “The Gypsy and The Hobo.” “I knew you were poor,” she says then. “I see how you are with money, you don’t understand it.”

• In his Kansas motel, Don makes sure to drink Coors beer rather than Miller, the brand discussed in the meeting he walked out of during the previous episode. “I was in the advertising business,” he says, with significance placed on the past tense. However, even half-way across the country, he can’t escape the machine of McCann. He carries a Sears bag (the agency has that account) and he is tasked with fixing a Coke machine. It is the fourth consecutive week where Coca-Cola has been referenced in some capacity.

• Pete tells Trudy that he loves her and that he hasn’t loved anyone else. However, during the Season 2 finale “Meditations In An Emergency,” Pete tells Peggy that he loves her. That is, of course, just before she tells him that she could have had him in her life if she wanted to and that she had given birth to his child – and given it away.

• Trudy tells Pete: “I’m jealous of your ability to be sentimental about the past. I’m not able to do that. I remember things as they were.” The series has always placed importance on how characters choose to view their pasts. After Peggy gave birth to Pete’s child, Don famously told her to forget it and to move forward. “It will shock you how much this never happened,” he says. Just last week, Roger suggested to Peggy how great the times were in the SC&P office, and Peggy more realistically points out that the good old days weren’t always good. Don’s most legendary pitch (for Kodak, in the Series 1 finale “The Wheel) relies on this power of nostalgia. In perhaps a preview of the series finale, Don pitches that nostalgia is “a twinge in your heart far more powerful that memory alone…it takes us to a place where we ache to go again…around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

On The Road Again: Don Draper’s Back Pages

BY RYAN BYRNES

Don has gone west – and may not be coming back. (Credit: AMC)

Two weeks ago, my uncle (an English teacher) and I exchanged emails about one possible final Don Draper theory that we have been discussing. He proposed the following:

“Does Don Draper, who overcame every challenge he ever faced, finally cast off the ‘drape’ he’s been wearing since Korea, leave Madison Avenue, and as Dick Whitman, write the Great American Novel?”

It would be uncharacteristic for Matt Weiner to provide us with such an answer – that is, to let us know definitively whether Don will actually end up writing his literary masterpiece. But this week’s episode “Lost Horizon” is as textually deep as any in recent memory, and in addition to drawing on references to the show’s own past, this third-to-final installment of the series features its most obvious use of literature as a source of where Don has been and where it is he is going.

One of the many, many appeals of “Mad Men” is the role literature has played throughout the series. Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations In An Emergency” provides direct dialogue during Season 2 as well as the title of that season’s finale. Season 6 commenced with Don reading Dante’s “The Inferno” on a hot Hawaiian beach, setting the tone for the dark hell that would unfold during that tumultuous year of 1968. While Betty reads Fitzgerald, Joy reads Faulkner, and both Lane and Henry take time with Mark Twain.

“Lost Horizon” presents the latest group of literary references in a series full of them. The episode draws its title from the 1933 novel of the same name, where the main character arrives in Shangri-La, but eventually leaves to return to his real life. (Don watches the 1937 film “Lost Horizon” in the Season 7 premiere “Time Zones.”) Jim Hobart channels his inner Ahab, with Don as his “Moby Dick.” “I’ve been trying to get you for 10 years,” he says. “You’re my white whale, Don.” The ghost of Bert Cooper tells Don “You like to play The Stranger,” perhaps in reference to Albert Camus’ novel of the same name, a classic piece of the existentialist philosophy that has always been at the show’s core. “You remember ‘On the Road’?” Don asks Bert, referring to Jack Kerouac’s epic work about the very Beat culture that Don got high with and spoke down to back when he was hanging in the Village with Midge in 1960. “I’m riding the rails.”

But the ghost of Bert tells Don “I‘ve never read that book, you know that,” and Don does. Despite the generational gap between them, Don always connected more with Bert’s traditional business philosophy than he did with the counterculture that displaced both of them as the sixties unfolded. This was clear in Season 1’s “The Hobo Code” when Bert recommends that Don read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a 1957 novel that helps shape Don’s views on capitalism. Its focus on the importance of individualism only emphasizes how out of place Don would be serving as a cog in a machine like McCann.

So once Don realizes the cog he has become – entering the Miller meeting as just another creative director with a roast beef sandwich and a Coke, listening to a researcher dictate a strategy, sitting as just one of many white shirts asked to bring the company “up a notch” – Don Draper as we know him is gone. He looks up at a plane flying over the Empire State Building, takes his box and goes home, to the many places he has lived (Westchester County, Pennsylvania, Illinois, perhaps eventually California). Unlike Roger, Don finally knew better than to get attached to and confined by walls, and he traded in the ship of advertising (“This was a hell of a boat,” says Roger) for his Cadillac, for a long drive on the road again. For much of the series, there has been a reason for Don to turn back around. He had an account to land, a business to build, a child to raise, a woman to see, a wife to apologize to.

But Don was so much older then, he’s younger than that now. In fact, he told us he was going to do this way back when he was first courted by McCann in Season 1. In the episode “Shoot,” Don uses McCann’s offer as leverage to get a raise from Roger, who asks Don why he decided to stay with Sterling Cooper. “I like the way you do business,” Don says. “If I leave this place one day, it will not be for more advertising.” Roger, always confined by the walls with his last name on them, asks what else there could be outside of advertising. “Life being lived,” Don answers. “I’d like to stop talking about it and get back to it.

“I want to do something else.”

It appears that Don is finally doing that something else, whatever it is. An enraged Hobart asks a finally-arriving Roger whether Don and company have pulled off “the con of the century.” Perhaps they have. Perhaps Hobart spent a decade and a fortune chasing a phantom that was never really there. Perhaps the greatest trick Don Draper ever pulled was convincing McCann – and all of us – that Don Draper actually did exist.

Early in the episode, Hobart tells Don to drop McCann’s name into his, but by the end he’s referring to himself as a salesman named Bill. Don has left McCann, left New York, and perhaps – as my uncle had suggested – left behind his drape and his Draper. He will likely never get that lunch with Joan, never watch Bobby play baseball, or be at McCann to oversee Peggy’s climb up the creative ladder. “Knock ‘em dead, Birdie,” he tells Betty. It’s probably the last we will see him say to her, as he is the one who has flown west.

The preview for next week’s penultimate episode did not include a single shot of Don, and despite how notoriously misleading those previews can be, it is entirely possible that the show focuses only on other characters next week and leaves Don’s conclusion for the series finale. Whether he is Don, Dick or someone else entirely, it is clear we have made it to the back pages of our main character. And I can’t wait to see how this great American story ends.

Notes:

• An episode that makes many subtle references to outer space ends with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” We see the ghost of Cooper, who passed away shortly after seeing the moon landing and who once eulogized the departed secretary Ida Blankenship as “an astronaut.” We hear of Conrad Hilton, who once expressed disappointment with Don’s Hilton pitch that failed to deliver “the moon.” We watch Don go AWOL in a manner we haven’t seen since he left Pete at an aeronautics convention in Season 2’s “The Jet Set.”

• The song playing during Peggy’s epic entrance into McCann is David Carbonara’s “Lipstick,” which was also played during Season 1’s “Babylon,” the episode where Peggy first makes a name for herself on the Belle Jolie lipstick account.

• Don checks the windows in his new office in a scene that seemed to be included by the writers just to troll those who have believed since the show’s inception that Don is destined to jump out of a window, just like the man falling out of the building in the show’s opening credits. Indeed, it seems as if he’s now escaped the skyscrapers such an act would require, so Roger’s two-story jump off a Navy ship in 1944 may be the closest fans get to a major character taking such a drop.

• Joan’s storyline is the most prominent example in an episode that deals with women’s struggle for equality in the workplace specifically and women’s independence generally. She references a feminist liberation sit-in at “Ladies Home Journal”, and that the ACLU helped a group of women settle a class action lawsuit against “Newsweek.” Peggy delays her arrival at McCann, where all indications are that they perceive her as a glorified secretary. Shirley proactively leaves advertising to find a professional setting that will be more comfortable. Betty tells Don that they “can’t get mad at [Sally] for being independent,” as Betty herself studies to attain a Master’s degree in psychology.

• In reference to Sally, Betty tells Don that “[s]he just comes and goes as she pleases.” This same phrase was said by copywriter Michael Ginsberg in Season 5’s “The Other Woman,” then in reference to Megan. The line is significant because it contributes to their eventual successful Jaguar pitch (“At last, something beautiful you can truly own.”). It is notable that the writers would repeat this phrase during the same episode where the topic of how Joan obtained her partnership was discussed (given the role the Jaguar account played in that development).

• Hobart mentions Hilton as one of the clients Don will be able to work with now that he is at McCann. McCann was the reason Hilton severed his ties with Don in the first place. In the Season 3 finale “Shut The Door, Have A Seat,” Hilton moves his New York business elsewhere upon hearing the news that McCann was going to buy Putnam Powell and Lowe, which owned Sterling Cooper at that time.

• In Season 1’s “Shoot,” where Jim Hobart first courts Don to join McCann, he tells him: “You’ve done your time in the farm leagues. Yankee Stadium is on the line.” It’s not a coincidence this week that we see Ed, the copywriter left stranded making long-distance calls after not being invited to the “Yankee Stadium” of McCann, eventually leave SC&P with nothing else but his bag and a New York Mets cap.
  

• While Roger plays the organ, Peggy skates around the office in a manner that is reminiscent of how she circles a commercial shoot riding a Honda scooter in Season 4’s “The Chrysanthemum and The Sword.” Roger opposed the agency’s pursuit of the Honda account due to resentments he still harbors against the Japanese stemming from his military service in the Pacific, an experience he brings up to Peggy during this week’s episode. The painting of Bert’s that Roger gives to Peggy (“The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”) is also of Japanese origin.

• Though Peggy and Roger rarely spent time together onscreen (she even makes a comment about how he so rarely paid her any attention), he tends to bring out the best in her. The last time they shared similar time together, we saw Peggy leveraging $400 cash out of him for secret creative work on the Mohawk Airlines account. Here he throws her a smaller stack of cash and settles for Vermouth.

• The hitchhiker Don picks up at the end of the episode is the latest in a long list of noteworthy passengers he’s given rides to over the years. In Season 2’s “The New Girl,” he and Bobbie Barrett end up in the drunk tank after a boozy ride to her beach house in Stony Brook. In Season 3’s “Seven Twenty Three,” Don is drugged and robbed by a pair of hitchhikers he drives to a roadside motel. Later that season, he offers to drive the epileptic brother of his then-mistress Suzanne, dropping him off with a wad of cash somewhere between Westchester County and Bedford, Massachusetts. In Season 5’s “Commissions and Fees,” he offers a lift to Glen Bishop from the Upper East Side to the Hotchkiss School, though Glen ends up being the one taking the wheel.

• The Bauer home that Don visits in Racine shares some visual similarity with the former Draper residence in Ossining, and Don’s rouse of impersonating a salesman to get into the house reminds the viewer of the time Don scolded Betty during Season 1 for allowing a salesman into their home when he was not there.

• The scene in Racine also shared similarities with another one of Dick Whitman’s former homes: the brothel he was raised in in Pennsylvania. In the Season 6 finale “In Care Of,” a man being removed from the bordello turns to a teenage Dick on the front stoop and tells him “The only unpardonable sin is to believe God cannot forgive you.” Here, a similarly religious ex-husband of Diana approaches Don on another lawn and tells him that Don cannot save Diana. “Only Jesus can,” he says. “He’ll help you too. Ask him.” He also mentions losing his daughter to God and his wife to the devil, during an episode where the Sterling Cooper folks learn that the self-described “advertising heaven” of McCann is actually their hell. St. Paul is mentioned as a destination. For good measure, during Don’s foreboding check of his new office window, St. Patrick’s Cathedral is featured in the background, suggesting Don may find Jesus after all.

What’s In A Name: The End of Sterling Cooper

BY RYAN BYRNES

Don and the other partners react to their “victory.” (Credit: AMC)

In the Season 3 finale “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” Sterling Cooper’s major players are saved from being acquired by McCann Erickson by Don’s idea to have Lane Pryce sever their contracts and to secretly start their own agency. In this week’s episode “Time & Life,” directed by the actor (Jared Harris) who played Lane Pryce himself, Don, Roger and company reach for one more trick up their sleeve, but come up as empty as their two floors of the Time-Life Building soon will be.

“What’s in a name?” Don asks toward the end of an episode. For Sterling Cooper, a lot. As the partners say goodbye to each other at the bar, they are not only saying goodbye to the name of of their agency, but to the company itself that has kept them together through the years, despite their personal feelings toward each other at the time. It’s an agency that has continued to find ways to survive, often against all odds (“We’ve done this before, you know we can,” says Don). It averted the sale by Putnam Powell and Lowe to McCann in 1963. It stuck it out through the loss of Lucky Strike in 1965. It mucked through a messy merger in 1968 in time to make itself attractive enough to be bought by McCann as an independent subsidiary in 1969. “Boldness is always rewarded,” Roger tells Ken, and for SC, it often has been. But Don and his colleagues long ago sold their souls to the company store, and this week they find themselves absorbed by the agency they for so long were determined to stay away from.

“Time & Life” is a “Mad Men” fanatic’s dream, with plenty of nods to classic episodes of the series’ past. We have Roger and Pete attempting to lure Ken’s account to their new agency, just as Roger and Don sought Pete and his accounts when they last broke off. We see Peggy and Pete having a confidential chat on a couch for the first time since they similarly sat when she told them that she had given birth to his child. And we close at a bar where we have seen Don and Roger so many times before, like when Don inadvertently encouraged Roger to leave Mona for Jane, or when Roger inadvertently informed Don that Betty was leaving him for Henry. Here, Roger leaves Don to go see Marie, but not before he turns and says three words to Don in a manner they were once said by Don himself: “You are okay.”

Roger’s words and tone provide perhaps the episode’s most thematic hat tip to the series’ past, as he echoes the same words in the same way as they are delivered by Don during a Lucky Strike pitch in the first episode of the series, suggesting the words have stuck with Roger through all these years:

“Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.”

When Don says those words in 1960, he is attempting to convince himself as much as he is trying to convince the tobacco executives. But a decade has passed, and our main character does not appear any closer to truly believing the words that Roger tells him. Each of the partners leave the bar to check on a child or meet a significant other for a date. Don finds himself seeking out a fling who is no longer there. Rather than listening to what Roger tells him, Don might be more hung up on his final words from Lou: “Enjoy the rest of your miserable life.”

I anticipated that these final seven episodes would be focused on the central characters’ respective searches for happiness outside of the workplace. I’m surprised that we had an episode this work-centric this late in the series, but it provides a definitive endpoint for all of the characters’ professional arcs. Jim Hobart emphasizes that point. “It’s done – you passed the test,” he says, before telling them they have died and gone to advertising heaven. “Stop struggling – you won.”

Even as they achieve the money and resources and accounts and receive five of the most coveted jobs in advertising, the partners reflect a feeling of defeat rather than victory. It is perhaps a suggestion that money can only buy so much – and that their late partner was on to something when he spoke to Don last year saying “the best things in life are free.”

Notes:

• The song playing in the background while Peggy tells Stan she gave birth to a child is “Stranger On the Shore” by Acker Bilk. The song was also played during the Season 2 finale “Mediations In An Emergency,” which was the episode where Peggy informed Pete that she had given birth to their child.

• The feud alluded to by the headmaster at the private school Pete and Trudy visit appears to be the Campbell-MacDonald feud of Scottish fame, specifically the massacre at Glencoe in 1692. The massacre took place in Glen Coe, in the Highlands of Scotland. Interestingly, “Coe” is the name by which Ken refers to Pete in this short story he wrote in Season 5.

• Peggy instructs the children to “do what you would do if we weren’t watching.” It’s reminiscent of when she and the other secretaries were secretly monitored “playing” with lipstick during Season 1, when Peggy’s behavior lead to her being put on the Belle Joilie lipstick account and launched her copywriting career.

• Jim Hobart looks at Don when he tells him they will now be servicing the account of Coca-Cola. During the Season 1 episode “Shoot,” Hobart uses Betty as a model in Coca-Cola ads in attempt to persuade Don to leave Sterling Cooper for McCann. It symbolizes that McCann has finally acquired Don after a 10-year pursuit.

• As the partners drink at the bar, a Heinz ketchup bottle sits on the table – a symbol of much smaller battle they also fell short in pursuit of.

• This episode confirmed two plot points that have been suspected this season. One, that Ted has divorced his wife; he makes reference to his ex-wife living in California. Two, that Jim Cutler was bought out when the firm was purchased by McCann at the end of last season. “Jim Cutler wins again,“ Roger says. “All of that cash and no McCann.”

• It was Lane Pryce himself who punches out Pete during their conference room boxing match during Season 5’s “Signal 30”, so it was only right here to see an episode directed by the actor who played Lane include a scene where Pete settles a dispute with a punch to the face.

• “Greenwich, Connecticut is built on divorce money!” – The latest in a litany of great one-liners from Peter Dyckman Campbell.

Dylan & Draper: Will Don Paint His Masterpiece?

BY RYAN BYRNES

During an episode initially focused on the past, Don thinks about how to shape his future. (Credit: AMC)

“Someday, everything is gonna be different,
When I paint my masterpiece.” – Bob Dylan, “When I Paint My Masterpiece” (1971)

“When I Paint My Masterpiece” is a 1971 song written by Bob Dylan. It is a song about traveling to foreign places and seeing the wonders of the world, and ultimately one about an individual’s quest to achieve creative and personal satisfaction. It is a song about where a person and civilization has gone, and where one hopes to eventually arrive. It is a song performed by The Band, frequently covered by The Dead, and this week provided the thematic framework of one of the final five episodes of “Mad Men”, a show based during a decade where Dylan’s words were as powerful as any.

This week’s episode, titled “The Forecast,” initially appears to be one about conflict and war, both of the past and the present. Roger orders Don to write the agency’s version of the Gettysburg Address. Betty and Sally discuss colonial Williamsburg. Mathis thanks Don for fighting for him, Joan’s date asks her whose side she is on, Bobby and Gene play with guns, and Glenn decides to go to Vietnam. Characters blame each other for failed objectives, whether it’s the sale of an apartment or the correct creative approach for a peanut butter account. Adults express pride and optimism about the war while teenagers disagree over its purpose. But the episode eventually shifts to one about acknowledging the battles of our pasts to how we shape what is left of our futures. As Don paraphrases Lincoln’s words, he adds an optimistic twist, saying that we know where we’ve been and we know who we are, “let’s assume that it’s good, and that it’s going to be better – it’s supposed to be better.”

It’s not a surprise that when the agency needs someone to forecast the company’s goal for the future – to paint its masterpiece – the task falls to Don, the firm’s central artist for the last 15 years. He asks the Peter Pan team to give him “the broad strokes,” and is told by Ted that he is “so much better at painting a picture.” But the project takes on a larger meaning for introspective Don, and he seems disappointed that is colleagues do not be seem to be thinking the same way. Ted, less than a year removed from wanting out of advertising entirely, dreams of landing a pharmaceutical account. Peggy, having climbed from secretary to copy chief, dreams of titles and catchphrase fame. Neither is willing to admit to the out-of-office life objectives that Don knows each of them have. After letting work serve as distraction for so many years of his life, Don is frustrated that so many around him fail to provide an ambition that extends beyond the four walls and two floors of SC&P.

Dylan’s song mentions European cities (Rome, Brussels) and man-made structures (the Spanish Steps, the Coliseum) as stops on one’s quest for satisfaction, and this week’s episode similarly refers to such places as symbols of where one goes when professional success is achieved and something more important is sought. Don instructs the realtor to tell customers that the previous owner got rich and moved to a castle in France, and Joan’s date (after eating French cuisine) becomes frustrated that her son will keep her from going to see the pyramids with him. But the narrator’s contentment with those places is temporary, as he soon longs “to be back in the land of Coca-Cola.” (Ironically, this week we see Roger offer Don a Coke.) In effect, the figure realizes one can only learn so much by looking back, and that he must move things forward regardless of what has already happened. Similarly, several characters have to accept the reality of their current situations – that Joan is a twice-divorced mother of a four-year-old, that Sally is the daughter of Don and Betty, that Don’s apartment reeks of failure – and try to make the best of it.

Painting one’s masterpiece is not necessarily about traveling to a particular place or seeing a particular sight, nor is it necessarily the achievement of a particular accomplishment. The beauty of Dylan’s song is the level that it is open to interpretation, and Don realizes that so too is the idea of forecasting what the future will look like. His secretary thinks it will resemble the World’s Fair. Glenn thinks it will include him returning from the war to be with Betty. Sally’s friends want it to be one where they are senators and delegates; Sally just wants it to be one where she is away and different from her flirtation-oozing parents.

Though we don’t receive total closure in this episode on what Don envisions for the future, viewers can take solace in the fact that Don is at his best when he is looking forward. It is the mindset that allowed him to shed his tattered Dick Whitman past and to become the millionaire he is presently. It is the advice he gave to Peggy after she gave birth to Pete’s child (“Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”), and to Lane when he told him to resign (“Tell them the next thing will be better, because it always is.”). It has even inspired some of his best creative work: “The future,” he planned to pitch to Chevy, “is something you haven’t even thought of yet.”

This question is hardly novel for a series that has always grappled with the existential questions like the meaning of life and the reality of true happiness. But after recent episodes that, on the surface, appeared to be odd detours for viewers, “The Forecast” puts on a more direct road a series drawing closer to its final stop. It is a road on which Don demonstrates signs of optimism, telling his realtor he has a good feeling and encouraging her to share in having “a little glamour, a little hope.” It seems, for the moment, the question is not whether Don will paint his masterpiece, but when he will do it and what it will be.

Notes:

– Bob Dylan and “Mad Men” have a long history. The Season 1 finale, “The Wheel,” ends with Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Season’s 3’s “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency” ends with Dylan’s “Song To Woody.” Additionally, during Season 2, Peggy plans to see a Dylan concert in the Village with then-creative worker Kurt.

– Don tells realtor that a lot of good things happened at his Upper East Side apartment, but I struggle to think of any. It is where he had a surprise 40^th birthday party he didn’t want and didn’t enjoy; where he killed an ex-fling during a fever dream; where he was robbed by a thief who terrified his home-alone kids; where Megan would sleep while he cheated on her with his neighbor one floor below; where he had a door slammed on his face by Sally after Sally walked in on him with said neighbor; where he stayed in confinement rather than be in California with his wife when on exile from his company; and finally where he had all of his possessions (alarm clock included) moved out by his second ex-mother-in-law. But yes, other than that, the place was filled with wonderful memories.

– When Don uses the office vending machine, a Hershey bar is prominently featured in the middle of the row of candy, a powerful of a symbol as any of Don’s breakdown during the Season 6 finale. His past is also brought up later, when Sally makes sure to let her friends at dinner know that her father grew up poor.

– But as Sally’s friend points out, Don grew up poor and ended up in a penthouse. Don purchased his Upper East Side apartment for $75,000 sometime between late 1964 and early 1965. He sells it for $85,000 roughly six years later.

– It speaks to the quality of character development on the series that a scene with three characters – Betty, Sally and Glenn – who have been pushed to the show’s margins for several seasons can still carry so much weight. Glenn arrives at the Rye home for the first time and asks for Mrs. Draper, is reminded she’s now Mrs. Francis, and minutes later is calling her Betty. Their history started when she gave him a lock of her hair when babysitting him during Season 1 when he was 10 years younger. He has become one of Sally’s few true friends, and she is justifiably crushed to hear of his decision to enlist as well as the flirtation between the two that she is able to pick up on.

– In Season 4 finale (the last time Betty sees Glenn), Glenn is let into the Ossining house by then-maid Carla to see Sally, and their meeting is intended to be secret from Betty. This week, Glenn is let into the Rye home for his second visit by now-maid Loretta to see Betty, and their meeting is intended to be secret from Sally.

– Sally’s skepticism and fear of impersonation when signing traveler’s checks reminds the viewer of Lane forging Don’s signature on a check when he embezzled money from the agency.

– During the first half of Season 7, we learn of Lou Avery’s side project, a comic titled “Scout’s Honor.” It is about a monkey in the Army who struggles to follow orders, fitting into this week’s military theme. The L.A. office secretary mentions his recent meetings at Hanna Barbera animation studio, which was launching the “Josie and the Pussycats” cartoon in 1970 after the success of “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” during the 1960s.

– Joan’s son Kevin watches Sesame Street, which was in its inaugural season during 1969-1970. Bobby tells Betty that they want to watch “The Brady Bunch,” which also had just launched in the fall of 1969.

Don Does Disney: It’s A Small World After All

BY RYAN BYRNES

From milkshakes to wedding rings, this week’s “Mad Men” presented many symbols of a happier time in Don’s past.  (Credit: AMC)

This week’s episode of “Mad Men” presented a taste of Disney, from the mentioning of Peter Pan Peanut Butter to the official (and expensive) conclusion of an always-doomed marriage born in Disneyland itself. Don proposed to Megan in the Season 4 finale titled “Tomorrowland,” though justifiably-skeptical viewers always deemed “Fantasyland” a more appropriate birthplace for the marriage. Ironically, it is in the Fantasyland section of the Disneyland theme park where the It’s A Small World ride is located, and in this week’s episode (titled “New Business”), our protagonist Don Draper is consistently reminded that life is indeed a small, small world.

As we move closer to the conclusion of series, things are coming full circle for Don. During “Tomorrowland,” it is Megan’s cool and calm reaction to a milkshake spilled by Bobby that causes Don to view Megan as the anti-Betty; he proposes to her later that night. Flash forward to 1970, and Don is again sharing milkshakes with his sons, but this time on good terms with Betty and instead preparing to finalize his divorce with Megan. On that same trip to Disneyland in Season 4, Don receives the wedding ring bequeathed to him by Anna Draper, which he later offers to Megan. Skip forward again, and Megan is returning that very ring in the divorce attorney’s office (after, of course, getting her $1 million check – things sure have changed since Megan told Don last summer that he didn’t owe her anything).

As Don says au revoir to the French Canadian chapter of his past, he is reminded just how small this world really is, both in terms of his relationships and his life choices. It’s a world that presents him with familiar faces, from elevator run-ins with mistresses of past affairs to attorneys retained for past divorces. But it’s also a world that brings him to similar life crossroads, opportunities to make a change for the better or to make the same mistakes that lead to his current situation. In the moment, it is difficult for him to realize which choice will lead to the better outcome, and which will just lead him back to where he started. As Pete asks Don during their car ride, “You think you’re going to live your life over and do it right, but what if you never get past the beginning again?”

That’s the best I can do to contextualize the odd storyline of Don and Diana the waitress. Don has his job back and has made millions of dollars through the acquisition by McCann. But his greatest life worries – that he never did anything, and that he doesn’t have anyone – are becoming closer to a reality for him. He stares jealously at Betty and Henry in the kitchen with the sons he only sees every other weekend. He doesn’t see his daughter, who is off at boarding school. His divorce from Megan has been long, exhausting and expensive. She later tells him that he is an aging, sloppy, selfish liar, and he does not fight back, because he knows that each one of those accusations is true. Nothing, she says, about Don is real – and he knows it.

So for whatever reason, he sees his chance at having something and someone truly real in a waitress that he finds in a diner and later finds himself with at her crappy apartment. They share their stories of divorce and of children and of grief and of pain. He told her last week that he believes that he knows her, and perhaps that it is because he is assuming that he knows what she needs and that he can provide her with whatever that is. Perhaps he confuses his feelings for Diana with his feelings for Rachel, and his attempt to have something with Diana is merely a way for him to achieve his “life not lived” with the former Ms. Menken.

But just when the episode teetered on the brink of cliché – of Don once again presenting a ring from a former Mrs. Draper to a dark-haired woman he barely knows, and of him naively pursuing a road that he believes will lead him to happily ever after – Diana stops him. “Can’t you see I don’t want anything?” she asks. He tells her he has done this before, and that he is ready to go with her, but she isn’t interested in going there with him, wherever “there” is. He offers her a guidebook of Manhattan and offer to move in and up with him, but she knows that’s an empty bargain. “You’re fooling yourself,” she tells him, “if you think this will make a difference.”

She is right. Who is Don to offer anyone any type of guidance? And as Don learns in the next scene, when he returns to his expensive but empty Upper East Side apartment, now missing examples of his wealth and Megan’s touch, his invitation was just as hollow as Diana perceived it to be. Diana also tells Don that she can’t be with him because she doesn’t want to feel anything other than the feeling she has of missing her daughter. Don makes her forget her daughter, and that’s something she won’t allow herself to do.

And hopefully, that is something Don won’t let himself do either. Rather than repeating the mistake of his past by always trying to find happiness in starting something new, Don needs to move forward by building on whatever it is that he has. Don’s daughter, Sally, has been the most glaring omission through the season’s first two episodes, and the show needs to correct that. With Megan flying back to L.A. a million dollars richer and Betty seemingly happy with her life with Henry, Sally is the one (young) woman in Don’s life that offers him the best chance at what he is looking for. With 87 episodes in the books and only five yet to come, viewers do not have the patience or emotional capital available to spend on Don looking for happiness between spread legs in dark alleys behind diners. They know his best chance at being happy is driving up to the boarding school to see Sally, taking his daughter to dinner and joking about skipping out on the check.

When Don and Betty inform their children during the Season 3 finale that they are divorcing, Don tells Sally “I will always come home.” Don has put his daughter through hell since then, but it’s finally time for Don to follow through on that promise. It is, perhaps, the show’s only chance to have a feel-good ending fit for a Disney story.

Notes:

– This week’s episode was directed by Michael Uppendahl, who has now directed 11 episodes of the series. He directed Season 5’s “The Codfish Ball”, in which Megan’s family visits New York and Roger and Marie first meet. There are many similarities between that episode and tonight’s, including copious French subtitles and mass boredom for the many viewers who have no interest in Megan and her family.

– In addition to milkshakes, wedding rings and Disneyland, there are many tips of the cap to the West Coast in this episode. Meredith and Harry discuss how tiring it is to travel to and from LA. Diana makes reference to possibly moving to San Francisco. Most noticeably, the dress Megan wears to her lunch with Harry is the same she wore when picking up Don at LAX last season – perhaps a symbol of how her life in Hollywood has not progressed much over the past year.

– The “Manson family” reference made by Don’s secretary could have been a nod to the popular internet theory that Megan was Sharon Tate or a similar victim of the killers in late 1960s Los Angeles.

– Roger makes reference to not being invited to golf with Derby Foods because Burt Peterson is head of the account at McCann. Roger has fired Bert twice – first in the Season 3 premiere, and then again after the SCDP merger with CGC in Season 6 – so it’s understandable why there is some bad blood there.

– Betty says she’s thinking of enrolling at Fairfield for a masters degree in psychology. She spent much of Season 1 seeing a psychiatrist and even spent a few sessions with Sally’s child psychiatrist in Season 4. For what it’s worth, she got her undergrad degree in anthropology at Bryn Mawr, but presumably didn’t use it much since she went into modeling after college.

– Don was likely not thrilled with the idea of golfing with clients, as the country club life has never been one he has been comfortable in. In Season 2, he leaves Betty and the kids at a Memorial Day luncheon at a Westchester County club. In Season 3, he is disgusted by Roger and Jane’s Derby Day party. Jim Cutler taunted Don last year by calling Don “a football player in a suit,” but the series has never given much indication that Don is any type of athlete.

– In sports news, it’s clear this week that Don has kept Lane Pryce’s Mets pennant, as it is hanging in Don’s corner office. By skipping from July 1969 to April 1970, the series skipped over the Mets’ 1969 World Series title of the Orioles. Don also makes reference to the New York Jets, when Megan tells him the cost of the movers. In 1970, the Jets were preparing for their first season in the NFL, which had just merged with the AFL.

– The show gave so much screen time to art director Stan Rizzo that I thought they were setting him up to be fired or leave the agency, much like how they portrayed Ken Cosgrove last week. Stan is a favorite character, but his departure would pave the clearest path for the one original character who hasn’t been seen since his Season 3 dismissal: Sal Romano.

From Russia (And The Future), With Love

BY EMILY VIVIANI

Clearly, Russian dystopian literature is providing the creative influence for Season 6. (Credit: AMC)

“The future is something you haven’t even thought of yet.” – Don Draper

In Season 1 of “Mad Men,” Don’s then-Sylvia, Rachel Menken, tells him the word “utopia” has two meanings: “’Eu-topos’, meaning the good place, and ‘u-topos’ meaning the place that cannot be.”

We should have seen it coming, when the season began with Dante in paradise, but the last two episodes of the series have definitely taken a dystopian turn for the worst. Matthew Weiner’s use of biblical, formulaic and futuristic allusion throughout the season in several ways mirrors motifs introduced through dystopian literature, specifically in the early Russian science fiction novel “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

A brief synopsis of the novel:

The narrator of “We” is a young man who lives in the futuristic One State, a world overseen by the great Benefactor. Individuals do not exist in One State, only We exists and the narrator’s identity has been reduced to a letter and number D-503, which also signifies his apartment of residence. One State is founded on the principal that pure happiness can only be achieved in a world measured by formulaic reason.

The narrator works as an engineer, building the spaceship Integral, which will be launched to imprint One State’s method of oppressive societal purification on the less-advanced societies that live beyond the Green Wall. The narrator begins to question his existence when he falls in love with I-330, a young woman who challenges the authority of The Benefactor and is planning a revolution against One State. After meeting I-330, the narrator senses that he is not one, but two of himself. His former self is a being governed by the rules of reason, whereas his new self is controlled by instinctual impulse and plagued with a primal sickness marked by dreams and known in One State as Incurable Soul.

This may all sound light years away from 1968 Madison Avenue, but this week’s episode, “Man With a Plan,” inspired the comparison. When Don meets Sylvia in hotel room 503, it alludes to the identity of the narrator in “We,” whose his apartment number in OneState is D-503.

But the series’ dystopian shift actually began with last week’s episode, “For Immediate Release,” when Don dumped Jaguar, then merged SCDP with competitor CGC to win Chevy. Don’s initiation of the strategic merger came in the wake of Joan’s denouncement of his selfish firing of Jaguar, an account for which she had sacrificed much more than him.  “Don’t you feel 300 pounds lighter?” Don asks her. Joan responds: “Just once, I would like to hear you use the word we. Because we’re all rooting for you from the sidelines, hoping that you’ll decide whatever you think is right for our lives.” This criticism from Joan appeared to impact him, and may have subconsciously inspired the merger. At the episode’s end, Don surprises Peggy in Ted’s office with the announcement: “We got it. We won Chevy. They wanted our ideas and a big agency, so we gave them both.”

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce & One State: Don and Ted’s compliance with Chevy’s formula for the perfect agency was appropriate considering that they would be working together to sell Chevy’s new “perfect car.” Unlike Jaguar, a brand reliant upon its frivolity and luxury, Chevy’s new model would capitalize on the ultramodern use of computer technology. The implication of the merger, along with the flavor of the new campaign, closely echoes the principles governing One State: perfection is achievable through technological advancement, formulaic reasoning and the sacrifice of individualistic freedom. For the first time, Don will be expected to partially surrender creative control to his professional equal, Ted Chaugh, for the betterment of the company.

Sylvia & I-330: “We” explores the notion that “those two in paradise were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.” This season has similarly investigated the relationship between freedom and happiness, through religious allegory. As the world of SCDP becomes more “We”-like, Don personifies many of the psychological conflicts explored by the novel’s narrator. Don’s affair with Sylvia parallels D-503’s clandestine relationship with I-330. In the novel, the equivalent of marriage is prescribed through One State’s system of pink slips, which regulate sexual encounters and has matched D-503 with a woman called O-90 (basically, the novel’s version of Megan). However, D-503 meets I-330 in secret and is overcome by his carnal attraction to her. At the same time, he is troubled by the dichotomy this creates within his psyche, which until that point had always been controlled by reason and “ethics based on subtraction, addition, division and multiplication.”

In the same way that Sylvia’s character is charged with biblical allegory (giving Don her copy of “Dante,” wearing her cross necklace, praying for his peace, dressing up in a red dress then ending the affair with the mention of “shame”), I-330 seems to embody a divine corruption that implores D-503 to consider the greater implications of his existence. I was reminded of the bizarre scene in which Don asks Sylvia to remove her cross necklace after D-503 describes I-330 as having “a face marked with a cross.”

Disorientation & Sickness: Everyone needed medical help this week. Sylvia’s husband, Dr. Rosen was away on business (or as Don suggested last week, “playing God”). Joan is waiting in the emergency room with an ovarian cyst. CGC’s artistic director Frank Gleason is dying from cancer. Pete’s mother is wandering around his apartment, deteriorating from Alzheimer’s and sucking down gin and tonics. Sickness is thematically prevalent in “We,” since D-503 reasons that the only justification for his sudden awareness of self is illness. He writes: “Only an eye with a speck of dust in it, an abscessed finger, an infected tooth feel themselves; a healthy eye, finger tooth are not felt—they seem nonexistent. Is it not clear that individual consciousness is merely a sickness?”

There were several references to disorientation in this week’s episode. When Don commands Sylvia to be ready for him when he returns from his business trip upstate, Sylvia responds, “I can do that standing on my head.” While piloting the flight upstate, Ted tells Don, “Sometimes when you’re flying, you think you’re right side up, but you’re really upside down.” Similarly this idea of inverted perspective is addressed in “We,” notably as D-503 walks to the Medical Offices for treatment of his “illness” in this passage: “I remember: what I resented most of all was that for the last time in my life, I was seeing everything in this absurdly upside-down, unreal state.”

If Weiner was at all deliberate in associating Don with D-503 and is in fact thematically channeling Yevgeny Zamyatin, it will be interesting to see how he incorporates “We” into the second half of this season. Several characters in the novel evoke an emblematic resemblance to this season’s auxiliary cast. Unfortunately, Zamyatin provides no hypothesis for the fate of Bob Benson.

The Ties That Bind

BY EMILY VIVIANI

In times of tragedy, Don and others turn to those they’ve often shunned – family. (Credit: AMC)

All of the vaporous allusion seeping through the plot lines of  this season of “Mad Men” converged into one big storm cloud on Sunday night’s installment, aptly titled “The Flood.”

So far, ominous murmurings of civil rights and Vietnam have peppered the episodes, in cocktail conversation and background radio, but 1968 really soaked in on Sunday, when Matthew Weiner decided to dress Don up in a tuxedo on the night that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Weiner was bold in choosing to focus on MLK’s assassination, considering the criticism the series has received for failing to infuse its African American characters with the authentic dimensionality that has defined the core cast. But since “Mad Men” is simplistically a show about a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1960’s (and not about the 1960’s itself), it seemed appropriate that Weiner didn’t attempt to use the event as an opportunity to cheaply memorialize the civil rights movement. Instead, the plot developed around the central characters’ (primarily upper-middle-class-white ones) respective reactions to the tragedy and the turmoil that followed.

The hour begins with Don and Megan, along with the rest of the SCDP crew (plus Peggy), at The Ad Club of New York’s Awards Dinner. A tiny Paul Newman is just wrapping up his speech when an anonymous crowd member shouts that Martin Luther King had been shot. Everyone moves to the lobby, stunned by the news. Abe heads up to Harlem in a tux, Megan dries her tears on Don’s shoulder, Peggy pops a breath mint and Pete gets aggravated with everyone ahead of him in line at the phone banks.

At the same time, Ginsberg is nervous, eating soup at a diner, on a date with a pretty girl that his father had insisted he take to dinner. “Do you like kids?” he asks the young student teacher, before a misdirected justification for the question clumsily transforms into a declaration of virginity. Then over the radio they hear that MLK has been shot and the date is cut short. In comparison to the award’s gala, the scene was well-lit and awkward, but proved to nicely highlight the redemptive implication of “The Flood,” which Ginsberg’s father seemed to spoon-feed later on:

“Now is the time when a man and woman need to be together the most – in a catastrophe. In The Flood, the animals went two by two. You, you’re going to get on the Ark with your father?!”

Thematically, the episode was very similar to a combination of Season 2’s “Meditations in An Emergency” (which pivoted around the Cuban Missile Crisis) and Season 3’s “The Grown Ups” (which followed the week of John F. Kennedy’s assassination). All three episodes are hinged on the notion that in times of fear and sadness, people seek love and security.[1] But I thought “The Flood” was most effective at communicating catastrophe’s ability to temper existential indulgence, to push people to glean a version of clarity through the promise of purpose that comes only through family.

After news of the assassination, Pete displays some uncharacteristic decency when he calls his wife Trudy, asking to come home and be with her and his daughter Tammy. This is a stark contrast from Pete’s behavior in “Meditations” when Trudy asks Pete to come with her to Rehoboth Beach out of apocalyptic precaution. Pete responds, “If I’m going to die, I want to die in Manhattan.” After Trudy’s response to him this week, I wouldn’t be surprised if he does.

At the office the next day, Pete instigates an argument with Harry when he expresses frustration that business will suffer in wake of the tragedy. “It’s a shameful, shameful day,” Pete says, reprimanding Harry for his insensitivity and reminding him that MLK “was a man with a wife and four children.” The scene suggests that Pete, despite his terribleness, may have a soul. I’m not sure there’s hope for Harry.

Peggy appears uncharacteristically conventional when disappointment over losing her chance at an Upper East Side apartment transforms to joy after Abe insinuates it was for the best, since he had envisioned raising their kids in a more diverse neighborhood. This scene, again, directly contrasts Peggy’s attitude toward motherhood in “Meditations.” Back then, when Pete confesses his love for her, she responds: “I had your baby and I gave it away. I wanted other things.”

Don, whose initial reaction to the tragedy closely resembles his response to JFK’s assassination,[2] appears genuinely moved after a trip to the movie theater with little Bobby to see “Planet of the Apes” (twice). Don is touched by Bobby’s reaction to the to the film’s bleak conclusion, coupled with his unassuming exchange with an African American usher at the theater (“Everybody likes to go to the movies when they’re sad,”).

Later that evening, hunched in his bedroom, Don tells Megan that he’d only ever felt a kind of guilt-induced love for his children, but “[t]hen one day they get older, and you see them do something and you feel that feeling that you were pretending to have. And it feels like your heart is going to explode.” Don’s paternal epiphany is tainted when Bobby later tells Don that’s he’s only scared his stepfather Henry Francis (aka Don’s replacement) will be killed just as MLK had been murdered. “Henry’s not that important,” Don responds.

The final scene of the episode is Don standing on his balcony, overlooking a city drenched in mourning. It suggests that Don is beginning to realize he, too, may not be all that important. Perhaps it takes a tragedy of this proportion to make a Don Draper realize that the “catastrophe of [his] personality” that he’s been quietly nurturing since Season 2 may in fact never “seem beautiful, or interesting, or modern”[3] again.

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[1] In “Meditations in An Emergency” Don is living in The Roosevelt Hotel, “staring at the back of Sally and Bobby’s heads,” when he decides to write Betty a note telling her how much he loves her and at the end of the episode Don moves back home and Betty tells him she’s pregnant. In “The Grown Ups” the tragedy of the day was counter-balanced by the celebration or Roger’s daughter’s wedding.

[2] “I can’t sit here and watch the T.V. all day,” Don says to Betty. “Bars are closed,” Don says in response to Peggy asking why he’d come in to the office.

[3] Meditations in An Emergency by Frank O’Hara, as quoted by Don.

Appearance Is Everything

BY EMILY VIVIANI

Don handles his affairs more discreetly than Pete, but both men find themselves cut down by episode’s end.           (Photo Credit: AMC.)

A topical synopsis of the this week’s “Mad Men” (titled “The Collaborators”) might match the pitch and pallor of Megan’s soap opera. There was a lot of sex, smoke and blood.

Don and Pete are sleeping with their neighbor’s wives; Megan considers an abortion. Pete’s new fling is beat up by her husband; Trudy issues a verbal restraining order (VRO?) against Pete. Peggy leaks a secret; Joan pours herself a stiff drink. But “Mad Men” is “Mad Men,” so while the hour was chock-full of good, old-fashioned drama, the meat of it was heavily marinated in charade and allusion.

The plot parallels the extramarital dalliances of Don and Pete, highlighting the differences between their respective approaches toward infidelity. And in the end, the episode suggests that while sin is sin, fortunately for Don (and unfortunately for Pete), “it’s all about how it looks.”

With Trudy’s blessing, Pete has purchased an apartment in the city. After some dinner party flirtation, Pete lures his neighbor’s insipid wife, Brenda, to his Manhattan pied-a-terre with the promise of Broadway tickets. He greets her much like he would a client, offering to take her coat, pour her a drink, put on some music and change the temperature. He compliments the color of her lipstick and escorts her to the bedroom. Afterward, as Brenda is gathering herself to leave, she suggests next steps in the relationship, including various clandestine modes of communication and real Barbie dream phone material. These insinuate that she’s been toying with the allure of an affair for quite some time. But Pete seems uninterested, annoyed and eager to hurry her along.

This somewhat choreographed exchange between Pete and Brenda is contrasted by the passionate, opera-inducing romance that unfolds between Don and Sylvia. “Everything [works] out perfectly” for Don and Sylvia when their spouses skip out on dinner plans ((due to illness and emergency), both insisting that the two of them “have fun” together, alone at a candlelit dinner. Sylvia is initially tense and bothered by the trusting innocence of her loving, life-saving husband, but Don swoops in with a solid pitch:

“Now I understand. You want to feel shitty, right up until the point that I take your dress off – because I’m going to do that. You want to skip dinner, fine. But don’t pretend.”

If anyone other than Don Draper had delivered this, Sylvia may have realized that he’s not saying much of anything, and he’s kind of being a dick.  But it’s Don, so Sylvia responds by ordering him the steak diavolo and telling the waiter that they are in a bit of a hurry.

The variations between Pete and Don’s methods of persuasion in many ways mirrors their respective approaches to client interaction. Pete is a salesman, baiting suburban housewives with the promise of Broadway tickets and cosmetic compliments before closing the deal. But Don is an adman. Unlike Pete, his unfaithful tendencies seem to develop from an internal, desirous nostalgia, or as he called it in the Season 1 finale, “pain from an old wound.”

The correlation between Don’s past and his cyclic disloyalty is suggested through this episode’s flashbacks to Dick Whitman’s childhood, which are invoked upon Don’s encounters with Sylvia. We learn Don (aka Dick Whitman) spent his adolescent years in a brothel, run by his Uncle (“The Rooster”) Mac.  Through anecdotes from previous seasons, we know that Don respected Mac, so it makes some sense, given his indiscreet exposure to loose conceptions of marriage that, as an adult, Don has become a master at transforming “the affair” into an art form.

Unfortunately for Pete, his afternoon with Brenda is brutally revealed to his wife Trudy when Brenda’s bloody face arrives knocking and screaming at the Campbell’s backdoor. Brenda and her husband had gotten into a violent fight, presumably about the affair, and she did not know where else to go. Trudy immediately comforts crumpled Brenda, while Pete, alarmed and unprepared to be juggling the presence of his wife and mistress, is his terrible self. Pete’s apparent unease directly contrasts the finesse with which Don navigates an equivalently triangular scene between him, Sylvia and Megan, during which he casually reminds Sylvia of their dinner plans with a “See you tomorrow.”

After Brenda has cleaned and iced her face, Trudy escorts her to an inn for the evening, which is when, we deduce, Brenda tells Trudy about the affair. Trudy, who has tolerated Pete’s reckless tactlessness for a whopping five seasons, finally puts her foot down. The following morning, she tells Pete on his way out the door that their marriage is over (sort of), clarifying that she would have continued to tolerate his indulgent affairs had he possessed the decency to keep them discreet. “ Couldn’t you just pretend?” she asks. “I let you have that apartment […] She lives on our block.”

The episode further illustrates the distinctions between Don and Pete’s approaches by reintroducing Herb, the miserable, paunchy Jaguar dealer whom Joan is asked to sleep with in last season’s “The Other Woman” in order to secure the Jaguar account for the firm (and a partnership for Joan). The arrangement was ironic in that the “sale” of Joan in as many ways undercut (both literally and figuratively) the poetry of the Jaguar campaign, along with the credibility of the agency. “Jaguar: At last, something beautiful you can truly own,” relies not on the guarantee of satisfaction, but the potency of desire. This is similar to the way that Don has no intention of leaving Megan, and his affair with Sylvia is contingent upon its frivolity.

In this episode, Herb insists that Don persuade his superiors at Jaguar that a larger portion of its budget be allocated toward the rudimentary exposure of his dealership and “moving cars” rather than focusing on developing the Jaguar as a luxury brand. “I don’t want another thing with some schmuck on his lawnmower, fantasizing that he’s gonna win the Grand Prix driving a Jaguar,” Herb says. “I need foot traffic. Get em in the door so I can move metal.”

Herb’s boorish greed, reminiscent of his indecent proposal with respect to Joan, disgusts Don and reminded me of his response to Peggy’s shy boldness at the start of Season 2. After her insistence that “Sex sells, ” Don responded:

“Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this. They take all this monkey crap and stick it in a briefcase, completely unaware that their success depends on something more than shoeshine. You are the product. You feeling something. That’s what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can’t do what we do and they hate us for it.”

The agency’s persistence in placating Herb’s crude demands seems to not only insult Don’s ego by undermining his creative talent, but also appears to affect Don’s ability to tolerate his own selfish sins. Don tells Sylvia he doesn’t feel guilty about the affair because he doesn’t think about it. “This never happened.” But this foolproof method of denial is tested when Don returns from Sylvia’s (maid’s room) and discovers that Megan is awake, waiting up to tell him that she had a miscarriage earlier that week. Her exhaustion over the guilt of considering an abortion and not telling Don is the complete opposite of Draper’s denial. Megan’s confession coupled with Herb’s unvarnished gluttony seems, finally, to have an impact on Don.

In the episode’s final scene, Don stands in the hallway outside his apartment, unable to walk inside. He sits down against the wall, suggesting that while it’s possible to romanticize sin, guilt is an entirely different beast.

Mad Men Returns: Peggy Leans In, Roger Breaks Down, and Don Jumps Off

BY EMILY VIVIANI

Don used to sell happiness. Now, he pitches suicide. Is he seeking rebirth or salvation? (Photo Credit: AMC)

When we left Donald Draper at the close of Season 5, he was walking off the bright sound stage of Megan’s acting debut toward a dimly lit bar. The scene closed with a young, attractive woman approaching him and asking, “Are you alone?” as the overture of the James Bond theme “You Only Live Twice” faded into the credits.

In several ways, it feels like that scene should have opened Sunday’s Season 6 premiere, “The Doorway.” Even Don’s first line – a voice-over of an excerpt from Dante’s Inferno (because who doesn’t like to read about Hell in paradise) – could be read as a prolonged response to the young, attractive woman’s hovering question. “Midway through our life’s journey,” Don reads, “I went astray from the straight road and awoke to find myself alone.”

But “The Doorway” didn’t begin on Don and Megan’s holiday in Hawaii. Instead, the dream-like opening shot (Megan’s scream and a doctor’s face, administering CPR) is from the perspective of doorman, Jonesy. After Don and Megan return from their tropical vacation, we flashback to them seeing him falling to the ground, experiencing a heart attack. Luckily, new friend Dr. Arnold Rosen rushes to the rescue, as Don stands speechless and Megan calls for an ambulance. In short, the opening scene of Season 6 is shot from the perspective of a man quite literally coming back to life.[1]

Much like last season, this week’s episode included its share of allusions to death. But more subtly, this opener heavily focused on rebirth and transformation. There seemed to be a pure, meditative quality underlying the character plot lines  Perhaps it was because several new characters were introduced, and in many ways seemed to be driving the action, but I thought the familiar cast (Don, Roger, Betty and Peggy) seemed particularly introspective about their respective relationships between role and circumstance. It was appropriate that the episode ended with a New Year (1968), a fresh start. [2]

The rebirth theme was most directly alluded to through Don’s pitch for Sheraton’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel. After all, he didn’t go on vacation to Hawaii – he had “an experience.” He suggested that the ad feature a picture of a man’s suit and tie strewn on the beach, with footprints leading to the water and the tagline “Hawaii: The Jumping Off Point.” But the client felt the image suggested suicide, which surprised Don, since the association hadn’t occurred to him. “This make you think of suicide?” Don asked Art Director Stan after the meeting. “Of course!” Stan responded. “That’s what’s so great about it.”

Don’s pitch made me think of the final scene of Season 2’s “The Mountain King,” where Don walks into the Pacific Ocean after his three-week hiatus in California. It makes sense that a man so accustomed to reinventing himself wouldn’t associate this kind of baptismal ritual with suicide. Perhaps in the same way he didn’t recognize how incapable Lane Pryce would be at moving forward after scandal, Don is proving himself to be almost toxically resilient.

Peggy also has a bit of this freakish knack for adaptability. We’ve seen in previous season’s how much Peggy mimics Don in spirit, but it’s perhaps most clear in this episode when we see her thriving as a creative director at her new agency. Upon coming up with a brilliant campaign for Koss Headphones under pressure, her boss congratulates her, telling Peggy she’s “good in a crisis.” This scene again made me think of Season 2 and its references to Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, along with Don’s guidance to Peggy at that time.[3]

There was also a lot of taking and leaving behind in this episode. It is curious – for a show about advertising – how many of the character vignettes centered or culminated around once useful objects becoming, in one way or another, useless.

For Don, it was a lighter. While in Hawaii with Megan, Don ends up alone at a bar.[4] He then meets a young Private Dinkins, who is on R&R from Vietnam and has come to Hawaii to get married. He notices that Don has the same army-issued gold Zippo lighter inscribed with their names and the line “In life, we often have to do things that just are not our bag.”

He drunkenly asks Don to give away his bride at the wedding, since all the hotel employees that would otherwise substitute “just look like the enemy.” It all sounds a little too emotional for Draper, until Dinkins, in his stupor, bangs out: “Look, I believe in what goes around comes around. One day I want to be a veteran in paradise. One day I’ll be the man who can’t sleep and talks to strangers.” That gets Don, and he agrees to give away the bride, while Megan snaps a picture.

Somewhere in the exchange, the boys exchange lighters. Don doesn’t discover this until he’s back in New York City attempting to radiate Draper dominance in front of the camera for a SCDP publicity photo shoot. Upon noticing that he inadvertently, in a small way, has stolen yet another soldier’s identity, his face drops. I would like to have seen that photo. This small thing seems to disrupt Don for the remainder of the episode, from vomiting at Mimsey Sterling’s funeral to stumbling through a pitch for The Royal Hawaiian resort. Like some bad luck charm, Draper had no interest in becoming Dinkins.

For Roger, it was a shoeshine kit. Roger has replaced his Dictaphone with a psychiatrist. Last season, we left him naked on an acid trip and this season we find him fully clothed, lounging in a psychologists’ chaise, ranting and musing about the meaning of the meaningless of life. Most of the things he says in are depressing in flavor, but sprinkled in sterling wit: “Experiences are nothing. Like pennies you pick up and put in your pocket, they mean nothing.”

At the office, Roger demands to have his shoes shined before his publicity portrait. “No one is going to see your shoes,” his secretary Caroline ensures. But he is adamant she contact Giorgio, the shoeshine boy. Later that day, Caroline enters Roger’s office sobbing, to tell him his mother passed away from a stroke in the bathtub. Roger is unmoved, practical, almost comic about the news. “I suppose I’m in charge of the arrangements,” he says. “[My Aunt’s] a fruitcake, she’ll want to have a seance.”

At the funeral, Don throws up, Roger throws a tantrum and then throws everyone out. He seems verbal and unimpressed with the entire notion of grief.[5] When Roger asks Caroline when Giorgio is coming to shine his shoes, she responds that he’d passed away, but that his shoeshine kit had been sent over, since Roger was the only person that had inquired his absence. Roger looks stunned, takes the shoeshine kit into his office, closes the door and breaks down in tears.

For Betty, it was a violin. Since Betty’s marriage to Harry Francis, we’ve watched her transform (or regress?) from a statuesque, steely-eyed fox of a woman to a kind of awkward, innocent adolescent girl inhabiting a pudgy homemaker’s body. In this episode, we’re introduced to her daughter Sally’s friend Sandy, who frequently spends time at the Francis household and is accustomed to repaying their hospitality with impromptu violin recitals. “Please play,” Betty says. “It makes me feel so much.”

Betty especially seems to enjoy Sandy’s company, despite her awkward playful urging that Henry rape the girl. In a meeting over a midnight snack and cigarette, Sandy confides in Betty that she didn’t get accepted to Julliard and plans to runaway to a tenement in the East Village. Betty advises against it, encouraging Sandy to tell people she wanted to finish high school instead of moving onto Julliard so soon.[6] Regardless, Sandy runs away, and Betty later chases her like an owner searching for a lost puppy on St. Mark’s Place.

It was uncomfortable watching Betty’s blonde-and-baby-blue-self poke around the hip and dirty tenement where she thought she might uncover little Sandy. When she found Sandy’s violin, she decided to hang around and help the team make goulash on the hunch that the girl would return for her precious instrument. But Betty is stunned to learn that Sandy had sold the instrument to one of the tenants and put the money toward a ticket to California. The tenant she sold the instrument to seemed particularly keen on putting Betty right in her place, grabbing her purse, mocking its contents and calling her a nark. “We don’t like your life anymore than you do.” Betty leaves without the violin.[7]

It was interesting that several of the product campaigns introduced in this episode had a sharp, sensory edge.  Air fresheners! Headphones! Cameras! Everything, even the Hawaiian vacation, was about heightening some experience through the consumption of a product. It proved to be poignant that Don’s meeting with creative, when he rejects their prosaic usage of the word “love” in an air freshener campaign, is interrupted by a visit from Jonesy’s savior, Dr. Rosen. “Why are we contributing to the trivialization of [love]?” Don asks, “It’s like a drug, it’s not domestic. What’s the difference between a husband knocking on a door and a sailor getting off a ship? About 10,000 volts.”

The scene quickly turns when Don notices Dr. Rosen standing in the doorway. “These are great,” he closes with and ends the meeting. We learn in the last few minutes of the episode (through structural reveal similar to the pilot) that Don is sleeping with Dr. Rosen’s wife, Sylvia. This gives his rant on love, along with most other events in the episode, new light and weight.

Overall, the season began much like the series itself. Although most of the characters have undergone drastic transformations through the last few years, Don’s persona – the centerpiece of both this episode and of the pilot – appears to have regained its signature, impervious gloss.

One thing has changed though, a small distinction that suggests the anxiety of life is beginning to permeate Don’s perpetual ease. In the pilot, Don equates advertising with happiness, but in “The Doorway,” he unintentionally associates it with suicide. Ironically, Don aligned cigarettes with happiness and paradise with death. Roger says it best: “You know, we sold actual death for 25 years with Lucky Strike. You know how we did it? We ignored it.”

It’s a subtle shift, but still suggestive that in some small way, even Don, despite all the pomp, is in the market for some form of salvation.

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[1] Again, “You Only Live Twice” is almost stupidly applicable here.

[2] Or as The New York Times headline put it: “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year, City Gets Snowfall.”

[3] “This never happened,” Don tells Peggy, after the shock of her pregnancy. “It will shock you how much it never happened.”

[4] Classic Draper.

[5] Roger vents to his psychologist: “My mother loved me in some completely pointless way and now it’s gone. So there it is. She gave me my last new experience. And now I know that all I’m going to be doing from here on is losing everything. Dammit. I don’t feel anything. All I’m doing is acknowledging life, unlike this analysis, will eventually end. And someone else will get the bill.”

[6] Sandy’s response? “It’s incredible how fast some people can come up with lies.”

[7] We discover later that Betty quite characteristically responds to this much like a 14-year-old girl who was just bullied at the school dance would respond. She dyes her hair dark.

You Only Live Twice

BY EMILY VIVIANI

Lane didn’t quite blow his mind out in a car, but you can’t say he didn’t try. (Credit: Capitol Records/Emily Vivani)

Editor’s Note: Earlier this season, our resident “Mad Men” expert Emily Viviani posited that the Beatles’ classic album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” is actually serving as a structural and thematic template for the fifth season of the series. The theory spurred much discussion among “Mad Men” fans, and was even discussed by Vulture and New York Magazine. Below is an update on the theory and how it fits into the season’s final three episodes.

Over the past six weeks, I’ve learned a lot about the the Beatles. I didn’t know that before Yoko, John Lennon – like Kenny Cosgrove – had a wife named Cynthia. Or that Paul McCartney – like Bert Cooper – had a penchant to go shoeless. Maybe this matters, but probably not.

I just finished reading the little-known gem, “Turn me on, Dead Man: The Complete Story of the Paul McCartney Death Hoax” by Andru J. Reeve. It’s an interesting read, which traces the origin and trajectory of the rumor-turned-hoax that McCartney was killed in a car accident in January of 1967 and replaced by look alike, William Campbell Shears.  In 1969, American college students in particular clung to the notion, forming clubs and organizations devoted to deciphering the “clues” that alluded to his death, which they were convinced permeated the lyrics, melodies and images, dispensed to the masses through Sgt. Pepper’s, the White Album and Abbey Road.  People really believed it, and after reading the book, I understand why. It’s really really cool. It was a conversation and a unifier, but maybe mostly it was an excuse to listen one more time.

No, I don’t think it will do us any good to watch “Mad Men” episodes in reverse, upside-down or in French. Nor am I suggesting my theory is anyway comparable in depth, influence or sensational wonder, to that which reverberated through the notorious death hoax. However, I do think there are similarities in the flavor of analysis.

Like the tantalizing genius of a somewhat cryptic Beatles’ track, there is something weighted, baited and lingering about “Mad Men”’s poignant silences, detailed discourse and structural control. Things we love that feel random but true impress upon us a need for interpretation. It’s nice to believe a kind of secret code is folded into the dialogue and drama of “Mad Men.” It’s an excuse to watch one more time, ingest one more detail and feel a bit closer to understanding the timeline of a marvelously unpredictable series. So for these reasons and for the sake of completion:

SIDE TWO

1. Within You Without You (Lady Lazarus)

2. When I’m Sixty-Four (Dark Shadows)

3. Lovely Rita (Christmas Waltz)

        4. Good Morning, Good Morning (The Other Woman)

        5. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band (Reprise) (Commissions and Fees)

        6. A Day in the Life (The Phantom)

511: “The Other Woman” (“Good Morning, Good Morning”)

About the song: “Good Morning, Good Morning”

“Inspiration for the song came to Lennon from a television commercial for Kellogg‘s Corn Flakes. The line “It’s time for tea and Meet the Wife” refers to a BBC sitcom, Meet the Wife. At Lennon’s request, George Martin brought in Sounds Incorporated to provide the song’s prominent brass backing. Lennon asked engineer Geoff Emerick to arrange the animal noises heard at beginning (and end) of the song so that each animal heard was one capable of devouring (or frightening) the animal preceding it. The final sound effect of a chicken clucking was so placed that it transforms into the guitar on the following track, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)“. The song has an unusual rhythmical feel and does not use the same time signature throughout.”[1]

How it relates to 511:

The fact that the song “Good Morning, Good Morning” was inspired in part by a television commercial is similar to “The Other Woman” in that the plotline of the episode directly reflects the implication of the Jaguar campaign. The animal sounds that pervade the song mimic the primal flavor of the episode’s carnal subtext. As commenter Jared Ravich noted, the two times that “good morning” is said in the episode directly precede the most pivotal scenes: Pete’s bold proposition to Joan and Peggy giving Don her notice. The apathy of the lyrical protagonist could allude to the partners’ meek objections to the episode’s tawdry transaction.  The suggestion that “nothing has changed” could be aligned with Joan and Peggy’s inclination that although they’ve established themselves as integral assets to SCDP, the fact that they’re women will forever taint their professional reputations. Ravich also commented that he thinks the final scene, as Peggy’s footsteps overpower the clamor of the conference room celebration, rhythmically echoes the song’s final arrangement of animal sounds with Ringo’s steady drumbeats.

Applicable lyrics:

Good morning, good morning 

(1. Caroline to Joan and 2. Dawn to Don)

Good morning, good morning


 

Nothing to do it’s up to you

I’ve got nothing to say but it’s OK (The partners’ mild objections and Don’s exit from the meeting)

 

And you’re on your own you’re in the street (Joan’s evaluation of her position and justification for accepting the offer)

 

After a while you start to smile now you feel cool


Then you decide to take a walk by the old school


Nothing is changed it’s still the same
 (Women in the workplace etc.)

I’ve got nothing to say but it’s OK

512: “Commissions and Fees” (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band (Reprise))”

About the song: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band (Reprise)”

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” is a somewhat modified repeat of the opening song at a faster tempo with heavier instrumentation. The track opens with McCartney’s count-in (retained in the manner of “I Saw Her Standing There“, the first song on their first album); between 2 and 3, Lennon jokingly interjects “Bye!” Starr starts the song proper by playing the drum part unaccompanied for four bars, at the end of which a brief bass glissando cues the full ensemble of two distorted guitars, bass, drums and overdubbed percussion.

The idea for a reprise was Aspinall’s, who thought that as there was a “welcome song”, there should be a “goodbye song”. The song contains broadly the same melody as the opening version, but with different lyrics and omitting the “It’s wonderful to be here” section.”[2]

How it relates to 512:

Since this song is a reprise of the opening track on the album, I looked for similarities between this episode and the season’s premiere.  There is a notion that “A Little Kiss” is a welcome whereas “Commissions and Fees” is a goodbye: “A Little Kiss” is oriented around a celebration of Don’s birth, while “Commissions and Fees” is an account of Lane’s death. This correlation could have been alluded to through Pete’s superfluous inquiry at the partners’ meeting about the upcoming birthdays. The episodes similarly inversely mirror each other in that in the premiere, Lane finds a stranger’s wallet and sees to its return, whereas in this episode he is caught embezzling money. Also, the premiere episode closes with Lane accepting applications for a new hire, and this episode closes with his tragic resignation. Additionally, a few of Lane’s lines from the premiere episode eerily foreshadow his fate this season, namely “I’ll be here [at the office] for the rest of my life,” and “It’s only a matter of time before they discover I’m a sham.”

Applicable lyrics:

We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

We hope you have enjoyed the show

We’re sorry but it’s time to go. (Suicide and resignation)

513: “The Phantom” (“A Day in the Life”)

About the song: “A Day in the Life”

“According to Lennon, the inspiration for the first two verses was the death of Tara Browne, the 21-year-old heir to the Guinness fortune and close friend of Lennon and McCartney, who had crashed his Lotus Elan on 18 December 1966 in Redcliffe Gardens, Earls Court. Lennon’s verses were adapted from a story in the 17 January 1967 edition of The Daily Mail, which reported the coroner’s verdict into Browne’s death.

“I didn’t copy the accident,” Lennon said. “Tara didn’t blow his mind out, but it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. The details of the accident in the song—not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene—were similarly part of the fiction.”

The second verse contains the line “The English Army had just won the war”; Lennon was making reference to his role in the movie How I Won the War, released on 18 October 1967. In Many Years from Now, McCartney said about the line “I’d love to turn you on”, which concludes both verse sections: “This was the time of Tim Leary‘s ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out‘ and we wrote, ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ John and I gave each other a knowing look: ‘Uh-huh, it’s a drug song. You know that, don’t you?’.”

McCartney provided the middle section of the song, a short piano piece he had been working on independently, with lyrics about a commuter whose uneventful morning routine leads him to drift off into a dream.

The final verse was inspired by an article in the Daily Mail in January 1967 regarding a substantial number of potholes in Blackburn, a town in Lancashire. However, Lennon had a problem with the words of the final verse, not being able to think of how to connect “Now they know how many holes it takes to” and “the Albert Hall“. His friend Terry Doran suggested that they would “fill” the Albert Hall.”[3]

How it relates to 513:

Many of the episodes this season foreshadow Lane’s death through various allusions to mortality, but the season finale was the first episode that plays with the concept of rebirth (the episode concludes with the song “You Only Live Twice”). Set during Easter season in the wake of Lane’s suicide, most of the character plotlines ended with some version of a fresh start. Pete’s mistress Beth receives electroshock therapy, which expunges the affair from her memory. Peggy and Joan excel in their new professional positions. SCDP gets a new floor to renovate. Megan (via Don) gets a part in a commercial and Roger takes LSD.

The song “A Day in the Life” mirrors the episode insomuch that the song opens with the description of a tragic, morbid accident, then touches on people’s response to it and moves quite jovially into a jingle about a monotonous morning commute and the protagonist’s desire to “turn you on.” Similarly, the drama of this episode traces the characters’ subconscious responses to Lane’s suicide. While everyone appears to be maintaining composure and routine, they all seem to be simultaneously fighting an internal urge to reevaluate and rejuvenate their existence. Don, however, is just fighting a toothache.  (See “Mystery Date”/“Getting Better”). So it makes sense that his version of “reincarnation,” which we sense in the final scene of the episode, looks a lot more like retrogression. After all, as Don is told, “It’s not your tooth that’s rotten.”

Applicable lyrics:

He blew his mind out in a car (Lane’s suicide)

He didn’t notice that the lights had changed

A crowd of people stood and stared

They’d seen his face before (Adam visions)

 

I saw a film today oh boy (Peggy and Don at the movies.)

 

I’d love to turn you on (Affairs and drugs.)

 

Woke up, fell out of bed,

Dragged a comb across my head

Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,

And looking up I noticed I was late. (Megan: “Don, you’re gonna be late!”)

Somebody spoke and I went into a dream (Adam dream sequence)

 

Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire (Pete: “I fell asleep and ran into a ditch.”)

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Morning_Good_Morning

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgt._Pepper%27s_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band_(song)#Reprise

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_in_the_Life