Hosts (all in studio)

Lon Harris
Jacob Burch
Janie Haddad Tompkins
Jason McIntyre

Intro

Ladies and gentlemen, shall we begin 1965?

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Topics for Discussion

IS DRAPER GETTING PREDICTABLE?

Last week on our show, chat room member SteelWheel called that Don would be visiting Anna Draper, and how obvious was it to everyone that he’d try to hit on young Stephanie when he drove her home. Don, who once was such a cagey and unpredictable guy in the early seasons, has now grown all too familiar, and we can start to guess what his patterns of behavior will be. Is this evidence of Don just being really well-realized by Matt Weiner and Jon Hamm, so lifelike that we have now “gotten to know him” over 4 years? Or is the show just starting to run its course and get more predictable?

HOLIDAYS

Every episode of this season so far has centered around a holiday – Thanksgiving, Christmas, now New Years. In part, the holidays bring out the saddest and most poignant aspects of Don’s current predicament. It’s never sadder to have lost your family than at those times of year we’re expected to be with our families. But I’d also note how Don’s entire experience – and the reality of each episode – runs counter to the holiday that’s actually being celebrated:

- Thanksgiving: It should be about being thankful, and yet it finds Don with nothing to be thankful for. Henry and Betty won’t get out of his house, he’s slipping into alcoholism, and the interview he gave turned out to be a savage attack on him.

- Christmas: It should be all about giving. Instead, Don selfishly sleeps with his secretary and then pays her off. (Not to mention Burt Cooper’s cruel diatribe against Medicare, which Faye notes is an elaborate attempt to take food away from children…How Scrooge-like!)

- New Years: A time of new beginnings, but it just sees Don getting more deeply entrenched in the bad habits we’ve seen from the season thus far. The one promise of a new beginning – his trip to LA – ends in tragedy that only makes his situation feel that much worse.

Holidays, in a way, work as a similar metaphor to the advertising world. There’s the image that we present – the ideal of what each holiday means – and then there’s the contorted, twisted ways that these holidays actually play out in our lives.

COUNTER-CULTURE

For the first time, the counter-culture really invaded last night’s entire episode. (The trips to LA always remind us that there’s a lot more going on in the early ’60s in America than we’re seeing in button-down establishment Manhattan…) There were numerous little touchstones – Berkeley sit-in references, smoking “grass,” “House of the Rising Sun,” and the episode even opened with talk of Joan’s use of birth control and prior abortions.

Don doesn’t really seem all that hostile to the ideas of the counter-culture, at least compared to most of his SDCP colleagues. He likes free love, he smokes pot, he laughs at the comedian’s gay jokes, he digs foreign movies, and we all remember that he was against Sterling Cooper taking on the Nixon account back in 1960. Then we get to why he’s really hostile towards the young people…their anti-consumerism. Don has based his worldview around the idea that our possessions define us, and Stephanie’s rant that advertising is “pollution” and that a world where we don’t all spend our lives “buying things” is possible, is a direct threat to Don’s entire notion of who he is and what he does.

Is this a portent of things to come? Is Don’s experiences returning to his “Dick” personality really just another way of seeing the same argument. The suits and the job and the possessions don’t really make him more authentically “Don Draper.” In fact, what’s keeping him as “Don Draper” at all? The kids? Will he ever fully be able to let go of Don Draper and just become the overall happier and more relaxed Dick Whitman?

JOAN AND GREG

Greg has been one of the series’ most consistent boogeymen. He’s a rapist, a bully, a professional disappointment, a whiner…someone who we’ve all come to feel is very unworthy of Joan. And yet this episode seemed to depict him as not all bad, and even competent at his job. (Was Joan’s insistence on “doctor-medical ethics” an indication that even she didn’t trust him to clean up her wound?) Was this meant to be a redemptive episode for Greg? We feel sympathy for him being obviously not emotionally prepared to go to Vietnam, we see him caring for his wife in a way that’s largely unfamiliar, we get a feeling for how good he must be with young patients…Why redeem this guy, and why do it now? Is it so we don’t feel as put off when he and Joan actually do start planning a family? Are they setting us up for some big, momentous shift in his and Joan’s relationship?

Also, we now realize how much Joan is really like Don. When did she have these 2 abortions? (Was one of the baby’s Roger’s?) What was her life like before she was at Sterling Cooper? We really don’t KNOW her as well as we know a lot of the other people who populate that office.

CANCER

First of all, do any of us believe that, in the mid-1960s, doctors wouldn’t have informed a patient that they had terminal cancer? The whole thing just seems unlikely.

Do you think that Anna maybe knew her diagnosis but didn’t see the point in talking it out with everyone, and was instead choosing to just go out with dignity and act as if it’s not happening. (Maybe some of the same denial we saw in Greg when he insisted he may not be going to ‘Nam?) There was a flutter in her voice when she said that she’d go with Don and his kids to Catalina to see the buffalo.

THE MOVIES

The movies Don and Lane considered attending all had some kind of meaning, in terms of either the title or the content:

- Zorba the Greek: The story of the unlikely friendship between two men, one of them an uptight British guy
- It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World: “It certainly is,” says Don.
- Send Me No Flowers: An obvious reference to Lane’s difficulty sending roses to both Joan and his wife, Rebecca, which seemed to add to his marital strife.
- Guns of August: A documentary about the origins of WWI. Don says he hates “guns” and “August,” though he always seems a bit happier in the summertime and likes warm weather, so this seems odd)
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: This French musical about young lovers pulled apart by war could have relevance in its relation to the youth/counter-culture invasion that pervaded the rest of the episode, or in terms of its thematic relevance to Joan and Greg’s storyline.

What they eventually see, Gamera, was the only film that didn’t have any kind of relevance for either of them, which is probably the point. However, we should note that “Gamera” did not open in the US until the end of 1965 or 1996, depending on the source, and thus was a bit anachronistic.

Favorite Supporting Characters

Lane Pryce finally got to step into the spotlight in this episode. He tends to have the best little well-timed barbs and comments, and can make even a little aside amusing. (“It’s a Polaroid!” from last week’s episode, for example.) There’s a schoolboy sort of feeling to Lane’s personality, like he’s smart but perennially out of his element. Seeing him cut loose with Don was a lot of fun.

(NOTE: Rex Harrison is actor Jared Harris’ step-father, whom his mother married after divorcing his dad, Richard Harris. There’s a certain Rex Harrison-ness to his protrayal of Lane…what he calls an iron fist and a velvet glove. Genteel and very attentive to appearances, but knows what he wants deep down.)

Clip from Next Week

So Cosgrove is back, clearly, and we’ll get to see some of the old “Mad Men” together. It also gives an indication of how much better Harry is at networking than Pete, even though that’s really supposed to be Pete’s job. (Could this be how Harry got his hands on the Television department, probably a more fun and promising avenue at SCDP than Pete’s job?) Think we’ll see any of the other blasts from the past next week?

Closing

Special thanks to Mahalo.com’s Mad Men Season 4 Recap and Spoilers page for all the assistance!

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