The Moth Chase

Season 4, Episode 1

Dear Natalie,

I am so glad Mad Men is back! And not just because I love Peggy’s new hairdo and I missed Roger’s sardonic one-liners (favorite of the premier: “Oh good, I caught you in a vulnerable position” to Don as he lays on his office sofa drinking scotch). There really is no other show on TV right now that creates such perfectly crafted episodes and the premier was a glorious example of how well the show does what it does.

It is 1964 and things they are a’changing. No longer the stable married man in the suburbs, Don is living a lonely bachelor’s life in the Village, right around the corner, in fact, from Stonewall and the cultural revolution that is brewing. Is Don pining for the carefree days of his marital philandering? Is he trying to capture the free-for-all spirit of the beatniks he dallied with once upon a time (remember Midge from season 1?)? If so, he is failing miserably, unable even to pick up a pretty co-ed and resorting to a prostitute who is willing to slap him around a little. After all his unfaithfulness, we realize that Don was the old fashioned one, never really intending to leave the idyllic middle class life he fought so hard to attain.

But the real sign of the times is not in Don’s spartan bedroom, but in his striped office at the newly constituted Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce. It has become a common place in speculation about the season to remark how bold the creators were to “reset” the show by freeing our protagonists from their stuffy Madison Avenue firm. And the new SCDP is anything but stuffy. They are, whether Don likes it or not, the scrappy upstart. And that tension – between wanting to maintain the Mad Men image and polish and going for the gutsy new thing – is what made the premier pop for me. Best of all, I loved that they played this tension out via two ad campaigns.

Peggy and Pete’s stunt with the ham fight is exactly the kind of thing a white-shoed firm is going to look down on, and the old Don is disdainful of such gimmicks. As we learned in season 1, Don does not do gimmicks. The problem is, the world wants gimmicks. It wants two-pieces that are actually bikinis and to buy products associated with just a touch of gossip and mild newspaper scandal. We may be a ways away from reality television, but Don’s Glo-Coat ads are tapping into that nascent desire to blur the line between advertising and entertainment, reality and virtual reality. Somewhere after scolding Peggy for her stunt and dressing down the prudish bathing suit company, Don enters the modern world, holsters on his guns and gives the Wall Street Journal the gimmicky pop piece that blurs the line between the Don we’ve always known – tight-lipped and toeing the line – and Don of the modern age – willing to give the world the show it wants. If this is going to set the tone for the rest of the season, I can’t wait! Give me more of SCDP, even if they can’t show me the second floor.

Of course, the premier wasn’t all office politics and bickering around a non-existent conference table. We also got a first glimpse of the early culture of divorced families. I have worried how Betty and kids would stay involved, especially as the center of gravity shifts back to the work place. But I hope they can find a way to do it well, because Betty is only getting more interesting to me. Betty has always been both a cipher for the every-woman of her age, and a totally unique disaster, a child-mother crippled by her own stunted desires and her own strange proclivities. There is something telling that we didn’t see baby Eugene once this episode and that finally someone has called Betty on her parenting techniques (even if Henry’s mom was a bit of a prude herself, she’s got Betty’s number when she says her children are terrified of her). The seeds of discord are already planted in that marriage and I would love to see what happens if Betty really has to start fending for herself (though I shudder at the thought for poor Sally and Bobby’s sake).

There is so much more to say: I loved Peggy and Pete’s new office relationship – they actually make a great team and it was so fun to see them playing up each others strengths. I don’t really want to see them fall in love again – being creative sparring partners is too good to jinx. Give me more Roger anytime any day, especially as Don’s wing man in the new dating world (especially if he will continue to rate Don’s dates on a scale of how “grabby” he is in the cab). And please let Joan’s presence at the intra-office pow-wow signify that she will stay front and center.

I know you won’t be able to join in the conversation this week, but I can’t wait to hear what you think of the new season.

From a vulnerable position,

Kathryn

*******

Dear Kathryn,

Well, we are a long way from the sweet but mischievous Sally pictured here!  We have a self-induced haircut (which I thought turned out adorable and made her look more like Betty) and a little public masturbation (if you can call gesturing toward doing it while your friend dozes “public” – I mean, sure, inappropriate, but hardly public. And like the hair-cut also, it seems, an activity that makes her look more like Betty  – “I was private and mostly grew out of it” – mostly?  Are we to think Bets still indulges?  Perhaps if she did so more she’d be less terrifying and calm down a bit!).  Somewhere between this haircut and an awakening sexuality, I find myself pitying Sally and her total lack of healthy female role models.  As the credits began to roll on Doris Day’s “I enjoy being a girl” I realized how much Sally is groping for someone to show her how to be a woman without ending up as a silly overgrown girl.  And while Dr. Edna’s talking therapy (4 time/week – holy cow!) might help, I’m also left worrying that it will serve to close down Sally’s healthy attempts at sexual enjoyment rather than open them up to possibility.

It’s interesting to me to think of Roger as Sally’s flip side in this episode.  Just as she begins a therapeutic program to deal with whatever issues she might have, he evinces how far past that possibility he now is.  With long-buried anger erupting at inopportune times, Roger is a perfect candidate for the type of talking that might bring healing to old trauma.  But it’s almost certain that he would have none of it…instead attempting to unload on Joan who flatly tells him she doesn’t want to hear it.  Now he’s finally ready to talk, there’s no one there to listen – a situation that makes his current marital choices even more tragic, as he finds himself with someone from that generation he bemoans – the generation that finds forgiveness to be a better quality than loyalty.

This is, of course, a potentially dangerous ethic for life…but also a potentially liberating one.  The men of Mad Men tend to live according to it – trading loyalty to their wives for the illusion that their affairs would be forgiven if uncovered.  But we theologians also know that forgiveness might just be the thing that saves the world!  But then again, we feminists might side with Roger in saying that there are some traumas (like the trauma of extreme violence) that no one can ask anyone to forgive.  And in the most intriguing way, Mad Men is showing us that loyalty, forgiveness, and all the other goods and virtues we might take to be defined by an unfailing truth, are in fact contextually negotiated in ways that disallow any sort of fixed meaning.  As Mad Men’s chronology closes in on some of the political events that give postmodernity its teeth, it seems we’re also shifting into the possibilities associated with that ethic.

This is especially interesting to me as the figure who stands in for the discipline – psychiatry – that links Sally and Roger, Dr. Faye, herself is a bundle of contradictions.  Searching for the truths of the human mind, she lives with practically necessary lies (this week’s wedding ring, last week’s secretary dress).  Faye’s whole presence embodies a psychological paradigm, it seems.  With a simple work break-room conversation, she helps Don answer his own question of why everyone needs to talk about everything…because it really does help. And yet as she embodies this moments of potential healing, she also embodies a type of falsehood…pushing this season further and further beyond neat categories of good and evil than the series as a whole has already brilliantly taken us.

The one thing that is really striking me this season, though, is how damn funny it is!  I commented on this last week with Peggy’s one-liners paired with an almost physical comedy routine of climbing up for a better view of Don’s office.  Humour has always been a marker of power in Mad Men (Sterling far and away has gotten the funniest lines).  But now it’s being democratized, and in its democratization, its busting open into new forms.  From the Japanese businessman’s (unsubtle) questioning of how Joan doesn’t fall over, to Peggy driving the motorbike around as if she’s playing in a performance art loft, humour got physical while managing to stay classy – a tough line to hoe.  Peggy’s “Don’t touch it, I wanna see how long it goes” was both funny and somehow pregnant (although I haven’t yet figured out with what), and even Don’s involvement in the general japery of the great motorcycle escapade, culminating in a risky (personal $3K check-ed) reversal of dishonour felt a little giggly.

Can’t wait to hear what you thought!
xoxo,
Natalie

—-

Good morning Natalie,

You and I are on the same wavelength, it appears, because I also found the heart of this episode to be the rise of psychology or therapeutic culture. Sally’s entrance into the world of child psychology was the driver to this theme and perhaps more than you, I have great hope that the talking cure might actually do her some good. In many ways all Sally needs is someone to pay attention to her, to make her feel loved and affirmed, to listen to what she has to say. I thought it was telling that in the “previously on” they focused on her outburst about Grandpa Gene’s death and her confession to creepy Glenn about how lonely she was. Both could just be general reminders that all is not well for Sally Draper, but they were also moments when she was trying to communicate what she was feeling to an unreceptive, unprepared, or even hostile audience. I am holding out hope that the presence of a reasonably attentive, sympathetic adult might make all the difference. Besides, I got the sense that Dr. Edna wasn’t nearly as horrified by Sally’s natural sexual exploration as Betty assumed she would be.

However it works out in particular for Sally, closing the episode with the image of her walking into Dr. Edna’s office, the door shutting behind them, seemed symbolic of the generation she represents. They will (sometimes quite literally) come of age in the psychologist’s office. And even for those that don’t spend 4 days a week (and yes, wowzers that is a lot of talking) with a Dr. Edna, the language and tropes of psychology and therapy will be the hallmarks of their generation. They will learn to talk about what they feel and to privilege feeling in general in a way that Don and his cohort will never understand.

This generational difference is what made the exchange between Faye and Don so fascinating to me. I agree completely: Don performs the very act that he criticizes when he opens up to Faye, sharing more than is usual by far. At the same time, the whole exchange was loaded with flirtation and a new kind of intimacy. Is it that Don understands the power of sharing his thoughts and feelings with someone, but can’t get over the impersonal nature of the new therapy? He confessed to Betty and again to Anna just how wonderful it felt to tell Betty the truth – to pour out his soul and his secrets. He was roundly and painfully rebuffed and that had to affect his sense of whether or not the honest sharing of souls is a real possibility, but I suspect he might still hold out hope that it is. Don might understand the talking cure, but he prefers it with a pretty blond flirting in the kitchen. Which is to say, within the confines of the layers of social posturing, role playing, and self-presentation that dictate the world he moves in. It was also interesting that we see Don reading by himself in this episode (what was he reading? The Chryssanthum and the Moth or whatever the book was they were supposed to read for the Honda folks?). We’ve seen him do this all through the seasons. My husband pointed out to me that in a lot of ways the new therapeutic culture is going to compete with an older kind of humanist psychology, the kind that assumes we can learn about each other and probe our own inner worlds primary through literature and other encounters with expressive arts. Don has always been interested in this humanist psychology – whether it is reading Frank O’Hare or trying to read his clients. Don discovers the key to winning the Honda contest through reading; Faye would probably conduct a market research experiment. I am not sure how much the writers on the show want to play up this distinction, but I am intrigued by it.

I also think that the liklihood of Faye and Don having a rough and tumble roll in the hay is lower now that I know she is not really married. Suddenly it seems like the stakes are a lot higher – if they get it on it might actually have to go somewhere. Which could be good for both of them, but a lot harder for Don to do. What do you think?

I also agree that this season is full of great humor and I am loving it immensely. Though it is also a lot darker as a season to me. The turmoil of an age in transition can be felt closer to the surface than ever, emerging in this episode for me in Roger’s angry racism and Betty’s frigid rejection of Sally. All is not easy going in the world and while there is so much to be excited about – so much potential for humor, excitement, and cultural revolution – there is going to be a lot of grief and mourning as the old ways pass away. Then again, there is also something just delightful in watching Don (holstering on his pistols?) out con the sleezy competition in a fantastical farce that involves Peggy riding circles around an empty sound stage.

xoxo,

K

****************

Dear Kathryn,

One of my favourite tropes in the tv blogosphere wrt/ Mad Men is the perpetual, “here’s what Mad Men was about this week” statements that frame almost every one.  It’s all about money.  It’s all about loss.  It’s all about identity.  Yeah, I’ve played this game too, I know.  And I’m going to play it again – not to definitively say what this week was about, but rather to offer a possible rubric for its interpretation.  One way we can frame this episode – nay, this season – is in the bubbling up of history in our psyches.  LIFE, it’s a scary concept – so how do we sell it?  With nostalgia – that thing we remember – or didn’t know we remembered – that makes us sad…that thing in our history we try to hold back, but which grips us nevertheless because we haven’t dealt with it – that thing that makes us drink too much, lose days, sleep with strangers, find ourselves surprisingly sexually confident, lose ourselves in work and, yes, even buy cereal.  Nostalgia is a powerful and ugly thing.  In the first few seasons of Mad Men we as an audience started dressing better and drinking more because the nostalgia for that classy bygone era was so powerful.  Now we’re seeing its ugliness, I for one am looking at my liquor cabinet and gorgeous new red dress and wondering if I’ve made some mistakes.

Perhaps the most painful-to-watch history for me involved the actual flashbacks.  At first I thought Don’s eager younger self felt false – much as the passage from season 1 sexy Don to current pathetic loser Don has been swift and immense, at least we can see the seeds of today’s Don in the former Draper.  But this younger furrier bore little resemblance to the guy we knew and know…at least I felt that until the drunken LIFE cereal scene, in which Don appeared so childlike I could see his return to the green guy he once was while selling retail (apparently Mad Men’s purgatory as we recall Joan’s foray in the department store too!).  For me the interpretation of this relationship between youth-Don and drunk-Don hinges on one question – a question we can’t answer.  Did Sterling really give Don a job in his confused drunken state, or did that childlike Don have a moment of unexpected shrewdness and play Roger in his ignorance?  I don’t think it’s clear, and if it’s the latter, then this drunk/childlike Don’s shrewd capacities might be even more dangerous than his blacking out, confused ones.  Of course, the history repeating itself as Don slowly becomes the aspects of Roger he has pitied, derided and hated – typified in the turn of events that leads to Jane’s cousin’s hiring – is at the fore, but it’s this connection to a man who may have once been innocent as a dove and wise as a serpent that thrills me the most.

The dangers of drink is a theme continuing to rear itself this season.  And if we had any doubt, our brief shot of Duck, apparently a drunk again, heckling the Cleo’s announcer clued us in to the approaching danger.  As Don began to bed the jingle singer and his eyes grew heavy and the night faded to day, I gasped – oh my, is he really falling asleep during a blow job?!  I was horrified, but not nearly as horrified as I would become.  Losing an entire day, waking up with his waitress remembering none of it?!  This kind of black out is shocking enough.  But more intriguing to me is to wonder who that sister “Dick” was eating french fries with in Doris’ restaurant might have been?  Again, as happens consistently this season – we can guess but we can’t know.  And that matters – because if Don is losing himself enough that he can become Dick again for a day – then history is resurfacing in ways that are going to cause some real problems!

As Roger’s problems bubbled to the surface last week, verbalized to an uninterested Joan, I wondered if we would return to memories of their affair.  This week’s episode let us know that their love – and it really seems to be love – goes back even further than we’d realized.  Don was casting Betty in ads, but they didn’t seem to be married yet (no ring on Don or Sterling’s hands!).  That puts the flashback in the early 1950′s – at least 5 years before the opening of season 1.  The sweetness between Joan and Roger (and Don? that hand holding scene was incredibly powerful! but why?) endures as one of the deepest relationships on the show.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention Peggy – poor Peggy, excluded from the Cleos (great nod to the Emmy’s by the way) because the fourth ticket needed to impress clients, and Peggy just doesn’t have what Joan does…or does she?  For all the ways everyone pegs Peggy as prudish, we should remember her own history.  We originally met her in the doctor’s office requesting birth control.  Her big break in the ad world came when she figured out a weight control device could be used for sexual pleasure.  She might not have boobs the size of basketballs, but the girl has some erotic chutzpah…enough to be able to mock a guy masturbating in the bathroom because she’s too much for him!  The previews for the episode reminded us that Don sees himself in Peggy – perhaps his redemption this season – if redemption is to be found – will come in his return to the parts of her that animate him, and not the history he struggles to avoid.

Ok, that’s plenty for me – what did you think?  What do you make of Pete?  And Dr. Faye?  With the arrival of Jane’s cousin, do you think we’re going to bring Jane back into the picture for a showdown with Joan?

xoxo,
Natalie

—–

Dear Natalie,

I agree completely with your connection between the young Don and the drunk Don – it was like seeing a mask begin to melt leaving a distorted, sloppy, clown face where slick Draper used to be. The real question for me is why did Don want to win that Clio so badly? Maybe it was just revenge and in-your-faceness to his nemesis at Gray, but his nervousness and excitement was palpable up to the moment his ad was announced the winner. When does Don Draper ever turn to anyone and check that he looks OK? When does he clutch the hand of a friend/colleague under the table (and yes, that scene was one of the best tiny details of the episode. Joan’s power may be tied to her more traditional gender roles, but she has indeed become a bedrock of that firm, as irreplaceable as any of them)? Was the Clio the ultimate sign that he had made it in a business he had longed to join since he was an eager young fur peddler? It is fascinating that if winning that award was the apotheosis of Don Draper’s rise up the ladder of success, the next logical action was for Dick to come out of the shadows in a drunken orgy blackout.

When I first watched Don and the cocktail party lady getting it on, I thought, wow, this is the first time we are seeing Don score with a woman who actually welcomes his advances whom he isn’t paying. Then when he woke up with Doris, I had the twisted thought that perhaps he had fantasized the entire first hookup, and in fact had ended up in bed with another prostitute. My own guess at what happened in the interim was that he went home with cocktail party lady, got it on (or maybe feel asleep in flagrante delicto?!), woke up still drunk/kept drinking, ended up in Doris’ restaurant with first lady friend eating fries. First lady friend went home, after which Don/Dick told Doris she was his sister, and Doris amiably agreed to come home for round two.

Like you, I was wary of the parallels between Jane’s cousin and the younger Don – it all just seemed so obvious. And also like you I didn’t really buy the younger Don until I saw him in “freewheeling creative genius” mode in the Life pitch. More than all the other asinine things we have seen Don do this season (and previous seasons), this was the most embarrassing for me to watch. Perhaps because Don’s whole identity is built around mystery and intrigue: how does he do it, creative boy genius, turning out the perfect idea in the shrouded den of his imagination? Watching him fumble with half-baked ideas suggested his fallibility more than any one failed campaign ever could. And seeing Peggy’s disgust and disappointment mirrored my own. Though I loved it when she gives him a dressing down in perfect Don style, reversing the tables for a moment.

By the end of the episode I was less intrigued by the ingenue Don used to be (and yes, I think it is a wide-open question if he wasn’t playing Roger’s weakness to land that job) and more fascinated by imagining how he transformed himself into the man of mystery he is today. Roger kept hinting in his memoires that he should get the credit for Don’s rise to fame, because he discovered him. Though in reality he didn’t recognize his potential genius at all and was conned/shamed into giving Don a job. And I kind of loved that they didn’t show us much of younger Don’s book, and what they did show was not particularly stunning. Perhaps there really was no reason to suspect that Don had any spark of promise to show for himself other than an unlimited capacity to recreate himself as needed.

I know I keep going on about Don, but I loved that we were given such a full dose of the main man this episode. The portrait is not flattering, but it is rich and bitter and beautiful in its own fraying edges way. One senses a train wreck coming: one too many drunken nights and Don will tell his real story to the wrong person and what is left of the world he built will crash around him. Or, perhaps even more tragically, he’ll just devolve into dead weight like Roger, writing fictionalized memoirs in a boozy haze.

If sooner or later Don’s day is going to pass, is Peggy indeed his heir apparent? If nothing else this episode showed that she has the bravado to match the best of them. I loved her pragmatic approach to Stan’s tiresome boasting. Nothing like testing the new found freedom of the sexually liberated than seeing who can actually work without their clothes on. I also like how Peggy is figuring out the new generation that she hasn’t quite joined, trying to understand what makes them tick, willing to get on board with the revolution, provided it actually seems headed somewhere. I stick with my hope that she will be our ticket into the the late 60s counter-culture.

There is undoubtedly more to say, but I am worried I will cross the board to morose and will wrap it up.

Eating life by the bowlful,

Kathryn

**************

Dear Kathryn,

What a stunning episode!  Our reflections so far this season have oscillated their focus back and forth between Don and Peggy, hinting toward but never quite landing on their connection.  This season is intently focused on each of them – but whether that focus intends to pick up a passing of a gauntlet, the mystery of friendship, the painful beauty of a mentor relation or (and it’s almost certainly always this in some way with Mad Men) the erotics of all the above, remains unclear.  Don’s loss of domestic, family life and Peggy’s ongoing inability to attain it came together in “The Suitcase” as the two modeled something that looked like that life, but also looked different.  I was stunned by the naturalness of their bickering – how much they seemed like an old married couple while at the same time they didn’t.  And then the sexual tension panic began as Don sought to save her from a mouse…such an image from domestic life of the wife on the chair while the husband scurries around on the floor.  Their hands came so close to each other across the diner table (the french fry eating was a nice echo to last week’s pick-up of Doris – Don with his “sister” eating fries).  They flirted or, rather, explained their lack of flirtation over drinks – and then performed the marital, “should we head out now, honey” move – taking them back to the office.  She basically held his hair while he puked and put him to bed – the two falling asleep on the couch, much in the same position we saw Don and Betty fall into in the first season a few times.   Each scene built the sexual tension and released it just a little – holding enough heat into the next that I worried over and over and over again that they were going to end up wrecking everything with consummation.  To end with that hand-hold (another echo back last week and the Joan hand-holding?  But also demonstrating something decidedly more heated than the hold, or even the kiss, with Joan…really, is there anything sexier than hidden touches in plain sight?!) was perfect!  Open or closed?  Open, yes.  But to what?

Only a week after the Emmy’s, this episode had me screaming out for next year’s nominations.  Hamm and Moss were incredible! How he manages to maintain that look of defeat and desperation throughout an entire episode without drifting into melodrama is astounding.  And when he actually broke into the sob over Anna’s death, I was amazed that he could manage continuity between all the Don’s he’s been over these seasons, culminating in a moment so helpless  that I couldn’t believe he remained recognizable.  And Moss paced him all the way – holding her own with her own incredible ability to balance emotion with its restraint.  Their fight over the Cleo and her own crying in the mirror (not to mention her hilariously awkward first look at a urinal) all conveyed the fullness of her character and more.

We wrote last week about how Don’s unraveling is leading him to share more and more Dick with those around him (and I mean that in the sense of his old self, although the crasser interpretation holds too).  His bonding with Peggy – war stories, both watching their dad’s die, shared avoidance of difficult phone calls, etc… – is certainly opening up a dangerous can of worms.  And even so, it feels like the least dangerous thing they did in the course of their night.

I loved the backdrop of the Ali/Liston fight – not only because of the fun historical situating, but also because of the opportunities it afforded to remind us how racist the 1960s were, and all of what is brewing in the background of our narrative.  Don’s secretary – usually deployed for comedic relief – demonstrated a more sinister side with her comment about “two Negroes fighting” and a “dollar bill”.  And Peggy’s dad’s tossing of the Nat King Cole’s records too reminded us how African Americans might have been developing cultural capital by the 1960s (paving the way for Civil Rights), but that they were still outsiders to any mainstream inclusion.  The role of women, African Americans, Jews and other ethnic minorities have always provided for interesting side-themes in Mad Men, but I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be able to stay on the sidelines.

One more side-note – Anna, RIP.  I liked her as a character, and the stability she gave to Don.  But even as they took away the last thing I thought he had to lose, they gave him back Peggy – which leaves me wondering where we go from here.  Watching Anna walk out with that suitcase – prepping for the greatest journey of all – felt like a sweet, sad good-bye to an old friend.  But it was also a sweet, sad good-bye to the last vestige of who Don was – an invitation for reinvention, perhaps, and the ability to form some genuine relationships, honest friendships as the man he has become.  I’m excited to see where Peggy will fit into all this (and very, very hopeful that she’ll, like Anna, maintain a non-sexual role in Don’s life).

Can’t wait to hear what you thought!

xoxo,
Natalie

—–

Dear Natalie,

This was one of my favorite episodes so far. It is rare that Mad Men hunkers down and focuses on one storyline so intently, and I absolutely loved it. I think, like you, I was so hungry to see more of Don and Peggy interacting. We’ve had hints all seasons that he thinks of her as a protegee, and they both share the burden of hiding huge, life-changing secrets, but we have barely seen more than Don’s constant ragging and nagging and a few sweet moments of Peggy returning the favor (when she shows up at his house after his blackout weekend, for instance). The sexual tension was definitely there, and the whole time I kept thinking, wow, in a couple more decades, these two could get married and have a super productive, healthy, slightly competitive, partnership/marriage. In 1964 and given their personalities, I don’t see that happening. And, frankly, I like it that way. They might have the most healthy male/female relationship on the show, if not one of the best relationships, period.

This episode also helped focus attention on each of them as individuals. We’ve watched Peggy struggle with the tension between social expectations and personal ambition throughout the series, and this episode encapsulated the struggle so perfectly: does she want to be Trudy (fecund image of maternal womanhood hungry for a rare steak and male violence!) or does she want to be Don Draper? The pleasure of watching her slowly but surely choose the latter option is enhanced because one suspects she might just achieve the zen balance Don tries so hard to project but is incapable of capturing. It is hard to imagine a washed out, drunk Peggy collapsing on her sofa twenty years from now.

It was also very pleasurable to watch Don become Dick just a little bit more. It has taken desolation and abandonment to force him to open up to Peggy, but it is so much more interesting. Who knew that a broken, vulnerable, screwed up Draper was so damn compelling? Do you remember the look on Don’s face when he finally finished confessing to Peggy last season: a man completely stripped of facade, broken, humiliated… and so hopeful, with a look of such longing to be loved and accepted, and with so much joy that he was done lying. That face constantly rises up in my mind when I see the Draper mask plastered on for another day. I saw something like it again when he crumbled in the wake of Anna’s death. I think the small hand-holding gesture at the end was his own, small, but very profound way of affirming a relationship with someone who saw him broken down and didn’t turn away. That in itself might make Peggy his most substantial relationship now that Anna is gone.

I do wonder if he might not eventually share some of his real story with Peggy. After all, he knows her deepest “this never happened” story. There relationship will always seem imbalanced so far as the revelations are not mutual.

I have nothing but agreement to add to your observation that this episode brought race simmering to the surface again without really dealing with it. Which, I think, is actually probably a lot what it was like for upper middle class white America. I really hope the series stays around long enough to show us what happens when the simmer turns to a full blown boil.

Final thought before I sign off: did you suspect for one moment that Anna showing up with a suitcase was going to lead to the cheesiest ad campaign ever? I totally worried that Don would wake up convinced that Anna had given him the perfect slogan/image: Samsonite, the suitcase for the ultimate journey. Thank god the writers are more creative than my half-baked brain. Though, why, do you think she was carrying a suitcase?

hankering for a rare piece of meat,

Kathryn

************

Hey Kathryn,

So I’m still puzzling about how I think, or whether I think this episode worked.  It was a bundle of cliches – noire-ish voiceovers, long pained stares directed at booze bottles, and even a moment of emotional vulnerability paired with a character (Don) suspended in water, weightless – oh so adrift…sigh.  But even with the cliched nature of them all, they still kinda worked.  Don’s diary writing isn’t just the declaration of feelings presumed to always be there but inaccessible.  That would be corny.  Rather, the diary writing seemed to allow him to invent thoughts he’d never had before.  Which is probably why they sounded like a really smart teenager – cool patches on the covers, stretching out like a skydiver, imagining the models in the Barbizon touching themselves, the desire to go anywhere in Africa, wanting to wake up… none of these thoughts are particularly profound outside of adolescence (while they were quite elegantly expressed, and beautifully monologued).  Spoken by an adult, they usually elicit the response, “ugh, grow up!”.  But these cliches were made less so by the fact that they were in fact new for Don.  He’d never written more than 250 words before.  His self discovery is going to be shaky.

This is also why I both loved it and balked when he came out of the gym into bright sunlight and a slo-mo moving African American couple walking by while Satisfaction played over top…again, ack – so cliched! What, there’s black people in Manhattan?  Oof, times they are a changing.  Rock and roll – wtf!  But even as it all felt so obvious, I felt it remind me that there was a time when these weren’t obvious cliches.  And sometimes it takes the obvious repetition of that cliche to remind us of its origin.

Cliches work because we encounter them with a type of genesis amnesia (to borrow a phrase from my favourite sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu) – we forget when they were born, and so we think we’ve had them forever.  But I think this week’s episode tried to show us how many of these things we think we’ve had forever weren’t actually born until the 1960s – or at least, they were reborn anew then.  Joan, Peggy and Faye brought this together perfectly – as each continues to seek out new ways to be women, they simultaneously produce correlative flip side identities no one would want (self assured secretary meets sexpot, creative insightful copywriter/team leader  becomes the ‘humourless bitch’, and the career woman who seems to have it all ends up shrieking at her boyfriend over the phone coz she can’t land a man – it’s all just so proto-sex and the city, but those images of New York women had to come from somewhere!).

Even the ex-wife harpie shrew came into play, in a way that reminded us how dysfunctional Betty and Don were together, and how he’s not the only one who will need to learn new life patterns.  Betty’s childish behaviour was painful to watch (and January Jones, who I go back and forth on for respect of her talent) played it perfectly.  Even as she realized she has everything to lose, meaning she has everything – there was a hint of that child in her face (I’m constantly amazed how much her and Sally look alike and, more so, act alike) – a child I’m not entirely sure we’ll see grow up.  But then again, with Henry joining her in immaturity (crushing Don’s boxes, for e.g.), perhaps that’s not the worst thing.

And of course, boys will be boys – and while Joey’s transition to becoming one of those boys felt a little swift to me, that’s also kind of how it works in real life.  Sometimes pure sexist ugly can come out of the sweetest person (guy or girl) in a way that is shocking mostly because it’s so sub-conscious.  At the same time, the brutal scene between Joan and Peggy reminded us that girls will be girls – and girls will fight each other when the chips are down rather than looking out for a sister.  It’s another ugly stereotype, but one that comes from somewhere – sometimes when we lack power, in our attempts to  grab what we can, we end up stepping on other powerless people.

I left this episode struck by the fact that for all the ways we are reminded how women and minorities had it rough back then, that power system that seemed to give it all to men also damaged them.  And I don’t just mean in the drinking and ‘oh, poor thing’ promiscuity – but more so in the complete lack of father’s rights.  It’s not just that Don is being kept out of his kids’ lives (and that he’s failing in that regard himself), but it’s also the case that that is normal – the exclusion is acceptable, as is – in some ways – his failure.

I’ll leave the other story elements to you – favourite lines of course included Peggy’s confident declaration, “You need 3 ingredients for a cocktail; Vodka and Mountain Dew is an emergency” – how true!  And Don’s description of Gene – “conceived in desperation, born into a mess” could so easily have been a description of his own – very different – entry to the world.  And finally, for all the ways she got screwed in this episode, Joan’s comment that when the boys are drafted in Vietnam they must “remember, you’re not dying for me because I never liked you” is such a devastating reminder that while their treatment of her reveals how much it sucks to be a woman, there’s a whole other set of reasons why it sucks to be a man – and they best not find any honor in that.

Signing off with the realization that next time my husband and I quarrel, I’m going to be overwhelmingly tempted to tell him to go shit in the ocean!
xoxo,
Natalie

—–

Dear Natalie,

I am sorry it took me all day to write back. I’ve been thinking about my response and just waiting for a moment to get it in prose. I loved this episode! It was not perfect, not nearly, and compared to last week (which was, perhaps, actually perfect) it felt like a strange experiment for a show that has a masterful handle on what it does best: give us hints of the repressed, conflictual inner lives of characters without pretending to plumb their depths. Don journaling? Could anything be worse? And yet, it worked for me at all because it was such a departure from the show as we know it. Heaven forbid Don’s voice overs become standard fair – I don’t think I could bear that. But as a one time experiment, I loved it.

Unlike Don, I often write more than 250 words at a time, so let me say more. This episode showed us Don in the throes of self-transformation. Or at least in the process of experimenting with a new kind of self. We know Don is the master of this and occasional flashbacks have shown us earlier incarnations – Dick Whitman the backwoods boy in Korea, pseudo-Don Draper the furrier conning his way into an ad job. But we have not seen the work that goes into making the change. The new habits, the bodily practices, the rituals of self-reflection that are both internal to the person undertaking them, and foreign at the same time. Last week we saw Don hit one level of bottom (whether or not it was his rock bottom remains to be seen). He has lost Anna, the one person who knew and loved him fully. In her passing, I think, Don realizes it is time to go back to the drawing board. To think about the man he is and the man he wants to be. We have been watching Don flounder as a new era emerges around him – an era where expression is going to be more important that decorum, where self-help and reinvention are going to be bywords of pop psychology, not the skeleton in the closet. It felt like Don was trying this new age on – a little personal fitness, moderation and temperance, and some introspection via journaling, which even he acknowledged was cliched. What the episode didn’t tell us was whether or not any of this would work. If it was a short-lived dabble or the beginning of something new. Or even whether or not Don really meant it. I did not feel like I was seeing “the real Don Draper” or even “the real Dick Whitman” as I watched him journal. I felt like I was seeing Don Draper try on the role of a man who tries to enumerate and reflect on his feelings, his experiences, and the observations of the world around him. I don’t think Don can see clearly to who the new Don Draper will be. Then again, I doubt the young furrier could see clearly the stoic, tight lipped, demanding ad man he would become when he started acting the part. Chances are the process was somewhat the same – a slow and steady change of bodily habits, manners of comporting himself, change in dress, food, drink and even in the way he thought of himself that led to the creation of Don Draper, creative genius extraordinaire. I love that the show is brave enough to let us see Don at work on a new version of himself, with all the creaking wheels and awkward transitions such a reinvention involves.

Of course, I also think watching Don in this process is supposed to help us reflect on the broader changes of the era and just how difficult it is going to be those in Don’s generation to embrace the coming sea change. I think it is a testament to the incredible veracity of the show that “Satisfaction” felt like a clarion call when it started playing. I actually set up in my seat and thought “what the what is that.” Mad Men encourages me to inhabit the early ’60s so profoundly that it felt possible, for just a minute, to hear how different, how rebellious, how fucking awesome The Stones, nay rock and roll itself, must have sounded when it arrived on the scene. Sure, it is a bit heavy-handed to choose that particular ad-man bashing Stones single, but I didn’t really mind.

Now I’ve already gone on too long and not said a word about Joan and Peggy, which was another amazing part of the episode. I am not sure the show has ever been so explicit about the trial of women in the mid-century workplace or drawn such stark lines between the old and new guards represented by Joan and Peggy respectively. (it is implicitly in our faces every episode, of course). I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Joan’s powerlessness. It was heart-wrenching to see go up against the soul-crushing misogyny of the creative assholes and have nothing in her arsenal except scolding and nagging. Is it really true that she couldn’t have taken the offensive drawing to Lane and told him that she was going to fire Joey? Would Lane and Don have told her to let it go, boys will be boys after all? I guess I too thought Joan was more powerful than that and it was kind of devastating to think that she is, after all, just a glorified secretary. If she is write to think that the only way she could get things done would involve deploying her sexuality, then I can understand her anger and resentment at Peggy. I remember the very first episode when Joan told Peggy the secretary that the only way up was to marry the boss, which rarely if ever happened. Then we saw Peggy defy this and get hired by the boss instead. We’ve known that Joan has resented this, and probably wondered if she could have done the same if she hadn’t always played the sex card. That resentment came to a head when Peggy was able to exercise the power Joan only seems to wield symbolically. It is sad to see women hurting instead of helping each other, but if anything it really drove home to me how lonely Peggy’s forward path will be, and how lonely for Joan too, as the old ways cease to be the only ones that work.

Final thoughts: are Dr. Faye and Don for real? What did you make of her confession of her own less than WASP-y background? I loved that she called Don a two-bit gangster and I have hopes that she might be the kind of woman Don could actually come clean with.

feeling a bit like Margaret Mead myself,

Kathryn

******************

Dear Kathryn,

The death of Ms. Blenkenship was a shock, oddly, but well-played with the dark humour so characteristic of this season, and – in a way I hadn’t realized until Cooper summed it up for us – with a further revelation of the ascendancy of women in the 1960s.  Ms. B reminds us of the lineage from which Joan, Peggy and Faye found their forays into professional life.  Born in a barn in 1898, dying on the 37th floor of a skyscraper, possibly having entered the urban work force because a war was on, her astronautic moves may have been even more spectacular than those we see among the women benefiting from whatever women’s lib is brewing.  And while precisely what that women’s lib will look like in Mad Men thus far remains to be seen,  it won’t be a cleaned up, idealized vision of everyone who is marginalized working in tandem for some new utopia.  As usual, Mad Men is going to give us the full ugliness of how things went down – fraught with all the competition, confusion and complexity appropriate to the situation.

Peggy’s position gets more interesting each week.  We thought we might find a worthy guy for her among her new avant-garde friends, but alas Abe turned out to be as blind to the sexism of the work force as the guys with whom Peggy works…blinded by good intentions, but blind nonetheless.  Peggy’s line of self-defense in the bar got me thinking – no, an African American could not have gotten to where she was because she at least could get her foot in the door as a secretary.  With not one African American working in the whole office, it’s impossible to imagine a parallel case.  At the same time, there’s no point in minimizing all that Peggy went through – and continues to go through – for the minimal power she has gained.  And if we choose a different criteria for fighting the ‘who has the worst lot’ fight, Peggy is right to point out the issue of visibility and the fact that no one is marching for her.  Mad Men thus rightly points out that there’s not a competition for who is worst off, and that framing social struggles in that way only leads to failure.  But it’s also right to point out the difficult fact that competition will nevertheless mark the struggle for liberation – lacking the power to define how things are and will be in her work place, Peggy is left impotent to do much about Filmore Tires’ racist practices.  Indeed, all she’s left able to do is be frustrated.  And that really is her lot.

Other news in women’s issues – Joan and Faye slept with Roger and Don! In the midst of fear and panic, it seemed the absence of her rings – the symbol of her marriage – allowed Joan to stray.  What desperation made a quickie with passers-by worth it for her?  For all my feminist analysis, when it comes to Joan and Roger, I simply think they work.  I like them together, and the inevitability of their hook-up surpasses any other interpretation I could make of it.  An inevitability I wouldn’t say existed for Faye and Don – even as they seemed so natural and good together post-coitus.  Chatting about their work, refusing to share secrets that shouldn’t be shared, holding each other as equals – the moment was lovely…which was why I found myself surprised that Faye’s later frustration with Don wasn’t that he was continually treating her like a babysitter, secretary (he admits he’s asking her to do the job he would have had a secretary do) and a servanty-wife figure (demanding she get him a drink), but that he had rushed her meeting of his kid.  There was something very simple to that frustration that I liked.

Speaking of Sally – oof!  That kid is holding her own!  But where does she fit into the roles for women being carved out?  She’s fiercely independent, but also parroting Betty in so many ways – childish tantrums, attempts to get Don to accept her by offering domestic services (making breakfast with rum and promising to watch the kids).  The whole falling flat on her face while running for liberation, only to be told that we all fall and we all get up again felt a little heavy-handed to me (especially with all those women gathered to watch), but just as with the heavier cliches of last week’s episode, it too kinda worked.  And it made me want to see more.

A few random thoughts – I’m so glad that Don didn’t write when he picked up his journal!  Will that signal the end of that trope?  Cooper’s sadness at Ms. B’s passing was lovely – he’s of an old guard, one I’d like a few more glimpses of as we continue to pass off to the new.  How awesome was it to see Sally in Don’s chair! It’ll be the late ’80s when she’s his age – maybe it will be his path she’ll follow, and not those being forged by the other women she sees.  And the “everyman” campaign thrown together in such a panicked flurry for Filmore, I have to wonder if it’s going to get them in trouble with their protests – it’s clear Filmore isn’t for “every man” and so that’s going to be easy to exploit!

Hoping my last words in this world will be something as awesome as, “It’s the business of sadists and masochists, and you know which one you are”!

xoxo,
Natalie

—-

Dear Natalie,

Mad Men is really upping the ante on how far they will push the black humor shtick this season. It was a comedy of errors straight out of a talky or the sitcoms that are waiting to be birthed – Don having to scurry back and forth from the office to the glass conference room while his tempermental daughter is hidden away in his office and a corpse is removed behind the backs of clients. I almost wondered if the glass conference room was a set-up just for this visual gag. Despite the stagey quality of the gag, it didn’t actually feel forced. I think this owes everything to the fact that there was so much real emotion behind each of the events, which if handled in a sitcom, would just be place holders for canned laughter.

Like, as you say, the return of Sally Draper, haunting the halls of SCDP! She is one of my favorite characters and you are so right, for all the attention the show is giving to the various struggles of women for equal rights, Sally needs to be in the mix. If Peggy and Joan and Faye are each riding the coattails of the Ms. Blenkenships of the world, Sally will be coasting into her future on the wake of their meteoric rises. Watching Sally mimic Betty (Kiernan Shipka really showed her chops this episode – there was more than one moment when she actually mirrored January Jones facial expressions to a T) and at the same time assert an independence and confidence that blurred the line of spoiled girl and confused young woman made me think about what a hard row she is going to have to hoe (you know how the middle classes love metaphors about manual labor!). Peggy is learning the hard way that love and conventional family life may not mesh with the career path she’s chosen. As I watched her spark with Abe fizzle out as his self-righteousness trumped her experience, I thought about how difficult it is ever going to be for Peggy to find a man who respects her and will take her on as an equal. It is why I proposed that really Don would be perfect for her in another few decades. And it might explain why Faye and Don actually seem good for each other. He encountered Faye as an independent “equal” (as much as she can be) in the workplace, not a mentee or subordinate. Faye has already learned the lesson Peggy is still struggling with – she made her choice to have a career over children and whatever regret she might sometimes feel, she is standing by it. As a working parent it is pretty painful to watch these two women struggle with the either/or of family and work. And yet, I can’t help but think they have it easier than Sally will. Sally is going to come of age at the beginning of the superwoman myth when woman are trying to “have it all.” She may succeed in getting married and having kids and having a career, but as the endless mommy war tells us, you never “have it all” – there is always a choice, a struggle, a feeling of loss on one or both sides of the equation. It is sad and frustrating and unfortunate, but maybe Faye and Peggy will be saner for picking their battles and hunkering down.

Do you think the show is choosing to focus on woman’s rights over civil rights? The struggles of racial equality keep emerging on the edges of the action, but they have never been front and center. I suppose they really can’t be, given that the show is so faithful to history and its own characters. As you say, where would a black character on the rise fit in the world of SCDP? But is it also a sign of how much touchier race is even than gender in this country? Especially in our own present day, racism feels too close to the surface, too intense to take on. Maybe it feels like we have come further with gender equality (whether or not that is true we could discuss) and therefore it is easier to see the bad old days in action than it would to really look at the embodiment of racism we are so clearly not over.

Final thought: I too am cheering for Joan and Roger. I am a little wary that it will just be a repeat of their old fling and that Joan, who has made so much progress moving on, will get hurt again. But it also feels a bit like a comedy of re-marriage. Only maybe this time, eventually, they’ll just get married.

Wishing for a half-day at the zoo,

Kathryn

*********************

Dear Kathryn,

Well, I feel we must begin with Don’s own elaborate version of Peggy’s old turkey stunt – what the what! Of course it was bold, daring and simply all-the-buzz exciting…but most of all I think it reminded us how very much Don is not a team player – not a partner.  After kicking off with a promisingly bold interview, this season quickly moved to having Don floundering to find himself (not sure that’s the theme I would have pegged in the first episode!).  And find himself he did with this ‘why I’m quitting tobacco’ stunt! So much so, we even get the shot of Henry reading the paper, being reminded of the shrewd charisma his wife’s ex really has.  This lone-acting Don is kind of dangerous – I’m sure we’re all riding the wave of excitement with the other SCDP kids (at least the ones who didn’t get fired), but this still could not work.  And I have to wonder what colossal failure looks like on Don – we’ve seen him fail when he doesn’t step up to the plate (we’ve seen a lot of that this season).  But conventional wisdom dictates that a stunt like this should yield marvelous results…what if it doesn’t?  That’s a twist I’d be curious to see play out.

In the end, it was Cooper who captivated me most in this plot turn.  Sure, Don just figured out this little loophole to exploit in the system – and then everyone else recognized it when Don pointed it out.  But when Cooper’s anger was expressed at the fact not that Don had put the company at risk, but that he had left the rest of them behind in the hypocrisy, we realized that Cooper knew this tension all along…there’s a big-picture wisdom to Cooper that is missing from all the younger guys.  I sure hope he hasn’t really collected his shoes for the last time!

Whenever Sally takes a significant role in an episode, she ends up as it’s star.  This week we got to hear some of the philosophically complex thoughts that run around her head.  And I want to pause on this for a moment – to connect a lack of belief in Heaven, sadness at the concept of forever, and the visual image of the eternal return of the same captured on the infinite repetition of the Land of Lakes butter girl…that would be a surprisingly esoteric, intelligent connection of thoughts for an adult on this show!  We know that Sally is spunky, rebellious, sexually awakened, insolent but also quite sweet when she wants to be, and most of all broken – but we didn’t know she was wicked smart.  More so than I’m interested in seeing where her relationship with the shrink goes (although I am intrigued by the level of self-awareness she’s gaining in therapy), and more so than I’m interested in what the move will do to her (although, if anyone could tell me what that was she was holding while crying on the bed, I’d much appreciate it), I want to see where the revelation of this genius element to her character goes.  That, I think or, at least, I hope is what’s going to blossom in the next season!

Oh man I was excited for Midge’s return – I’ve hoped to see her again ever since she left.  I thought her bohemian life was such a fun counter-part to Don, so ugh – how sad to see that that bohemian life has led into a desperate, depressing dependence on heroin!  Cheap whiskey (is there a better symbol for a worse life in the symbol-set of Mad Men?), anguished paintings, and a creepy husband who’ll try to sell his wife for sex for drugs…I’m so disappointed to see what has happened to one of the few free, fun-loving ladies of the show (if not the only!).

For all the ways Don’s stunt was a re-assertion of his own autonomous power, I think it was also an expression of his mourning for what Midge had become.  He was inspired to write the article while looking at her painting.  And while cigarettes are certainly a product that “never improves” and “causes illness,” I’m not sure his assertion that they “make people unhappy” really referred to cigarettes as much as it referred to the heroin addiction that inspired his cigarette-addiction tirade.

Finally, I’m curious to see where this new level of dependence to Don and Pete’s relationship ends up.  Pete has long kept Don’s secret (at his own loss), but now he finds himself reversing that dependence to the tune of $50K.  For all the ways it was risky to Pete to hold Don’s secret, his love of power (paired with a creepy spinelessness) kept him from spilling it.  Balance the scales like this, and I’m not quite sure what will happen.  But I’m excited to see!

Can’t wait to hear what you thought!
xoxo,
Natalie

—-

Good morning Natalie, from the other side of irony! What a stunt indeed! I have so much confidence in Don’s creative savvy that I half expected the phones to be ringing off the hook with new business the moment he walked in the door. And clearly he expected the same, the way he kept asking Megan if anyone else had called. I like that the show is making Don – and us – sweat it out a bit waiting to see if the big gamble will pay off and how. It will be interesting to see what Don does with real failure – and if it means he would have to consider joining another firm and signing an even more binding contract. We all know that what Don fears most of all is being controlled and tied down – in this he is most not a partner. But it would also be interesting to see how he would handle no response. What if the stunt doesn’t do much of anything, or just barely helps them stay afloat? He wanted it to be a bold statement to save the day and maybe it will just be an interesting moment that quickly fades.

Before it does, let’s talk about what exactly the stunt was. I agree that there was probably some connection around addiction going on, but also a desire in the face of a slow death at work and Midge’s slow death at home to be active, bold, unpredictable. To grab life by the balls, so to speak, and show that he would not go gently into that good night. I don’t think we are supposed to think he really meant it – as Stan says to Danny when he asks if Don is going to stop smoking “you’re missing the point.” The ad isn’t really about addiction, cigarettes, vices, or socially responsible advertising – it is a stunt, a gimmick, or as Don says “a full page ad for the firm and if you can’t recognize that you shouldn’t be in this business.” But it is also clear that not everyone is in on the joke. In fact, the only business the ad seemed to drum up was from the American Cancer Society, which clearly took the ad very seriously. Does this mean Don is too far ahead of his own times, peddling irony in a pre-ironic age? I kind of love that Mr. Tight-Lipped, Close to the Chest Don (who once sneered at Volkswaggon’s “Lemon” ads) is too ironic for his moment. I also love the idea that this stunt might propel SDCP into an era of socially responsible advertising. Does it mean they would have to stop smoking at work? I haven’t taken the time to see if 1965 represented some landmark turn in social issues advertising to see if that might be in the future for SDCP, but the other alternatives don’t seem realistic for the big finale: they can’t start another firm again this year right? They won’t seriously considering breaking up the team again, will they? Any predictions of your own?

In other news, I also loved Sally Draper – her self-awareness, her budding self-control. Not only her brilliant existential/philosophical musings, but the sense that she really is coming into her own and thanks to Dr. Edna, she just might escape the fate of her childish mother (a bit heavy handed, but oh so accurate when Betty feels more comfortable with a child psychologist). I think what Sally was holding was the lanyard Glenn made for her back in the season and left on her bed during his nighttime raid. As she cradled it sobbing into her pillow, I couldn’t help but think how much more therapy she was going to need. Instead of letting Sally and Glenn figure out their own safe boundaries and enjoy the permutations of a friendship that is also a crush, Betty vilifies it and pushes them apart. I have a lot of hope that Sally will avoid the pitfalls she sees modeled for her, but it is going to be an uphill battle.

Especially since, as you say, the only woman who actually seemed free and independent has turned into a heroine junkie. Speaking of sad female dynamics, what did you make of the exchange between Faye and Peggy? It was sweet and supportive, but kind of strange that Faye didn’t take Peggy up on the offer of drinks someday. I think this is a subtle generational difference too. Faye isn’t ready for ladies nights out and women’s support groups, whereas Peggy would probably love them. It was a real reminder of just how lonely it must have been scrambling up that ladder.

Final thought for the week: Trudy is out of those nighties, and wearing a very realistic post-maternity smock! I love that they left her with the slightly protruding post-partum body – oh so realistic. I also loved that her new motherhood has made her even fiercer and more confident in relation to Pete. As much as I knew he had to say it, I don’t think even he believed himself when he told her she had no right to forbid him. The outward forms of marital hierarchy might be in place, but I would say that Trudy can and will put her foot down.

I am in complete denial that the season is coming to an end. I am going to keep on typing while the walls come down around us…

Kathryn

p.s. I too have loved Burt these past few episodes. Who knew an orchiectomy could make one so irenic?