THAT’S WHAT THE BLOG IS FOR! Mad Men S1E11–S1E13

S1E11 Indian Summer

Way back in the second episode I wrote that Peggy “spends a lot of these early episodes trying to be Joan, who is powerful in a way that Peggy is not good at and can’t access, but… that she succeeds more when she emulates Don – for better or for worse.” She tries both on in this episode, and there is no question of which goes better for her.

Don begins to mentor Peggy a little bit in this episode, the only copywriter in his employ that he ever really mentors as far as I can remember. When Don gives feedback it’s not to help his team become better writers, but to put them in their place. He wants the work to be good, but he also wants it to be the kind of work that he does. Paul’s idea to use astronauts to sell deodorant in a can is not terrible, but it isn’t how Don sells things. He wants Peggy to write like him but he actually coaches her instead of bullying the way he does the rest of his writers. I think it’s partially because she’s good, partially because she works in a similar register to his style (emotional, relational, nostalgic), and partially because she is not from the same kind of privileged prep-school background as everyone else he has to work with. Don is a runaway, and in Peggy’s hunger for more work he can see that she is also trying to leave something behind. When he teaches her how to brainstorm he teaches her how to work like Don Draper. When he teaches her how to pitch, he teaches her how to pitch like Don Draper. When he teaches her how to negotiate he teaches her how to ask for money like Don Draper. And it works for her.

Her attempt to be Joan for a night works less well. Even though Peggy comes out of their fight in “Shoot” mostly victorious, it would be difficult to continue feeling superior when Joan is always there to be more fun, more composed, and more sexy than anyone else (the finest piece of ass Roger Stirling has ever had! As he romantically confesses to her. His repentant streak did not last long!). The two of them barely interact in this episode, but it’s clear who Peggy is channeling on her date, as she smokes with her little brandy alexander (a cocktail that makes me think of Joaquin Phoenix in Two Lovers, another out-of-place Brooklynite). Peggy’s bad date (Beaver from Greek!) is my favorite kind of writing, where everyone is a little right but no one is on their best behavior. Peggy is being condescending and self-centered, and Beaver is cruel about her looks in return, which is rude by any measure but is especially bruising because he correctly identifies that Peggy is a pretender. It always hurts more to be rejected when you didn’t even want it in the first place. She can pitch like a man but she cannot yet flirt like a Joan.

She’s not giving up though. “Those people – in Manhattan – they are better than us. Because they want things they haven’t seen.” This is what Don wanted too – whatever was different from his childhood – and Peggy is not going to be put off by the boys she grew up with no matter how bad they temporarily make her feel. She has a vibrator now, she can take care of herself.

Don’s past, on the other hand, shows up in a box on his desk and is taken by a drunk, hurt, Peter Campbell. And just after Don was made partner! But that’s a problem for next week.

More Thoughts

Rest easy Adam Whitman, you poor boy. He’s not on the show for long, but the show never forgets him.

“Am I allowed to change the name?” – Peggy and Don’s brain working the same.

Ken trying to bro out a little with Peggy after her pitch, but absolutely not knowing how, is adorable, and the beginning of the magnificent Ken Cosgrove rehabilitation project.

I didn’t really talk about the other plotlines of the episode: Roger comes back to the office and immediately has another heart attack (hilarious). Mileage may vary on his heartfelt compliment to Joanie (“I am so glad I got to roam those hillsides”), but I don’t mind a truth-teller. Betty meanwhile, has an innocuous encounter with an air conditioning salesman, (Parker from Buffy! This show is full of WB/UPN faces) that she uses to make Don and Francine jealous, and then fantasizes about until she feels guilty. The extreme nothingness of her time with the man contrasted with how much she milks it really emphasizes how little stimulation she has in her life outside of Don, worse now that Don is in love with someone else again.

S1E12 Nixon Vs. Kennedy

“Mr. Campbell, who cares?”

One of the funniest lines on a very funny show, and also a bit of a mission statement for what kind of show this is: One that is much more interested in character than plot. Earlier in the episode, when Pete first threatens Don with the spectre of Dick Whitman, Don reminds him that any information threatening enough to make someone do what you want, is also powerful enough to make them do something much worse, but this is not a show in which he begins to murder people to cover up his secret. He’s a runner not a fighter: what’s true with his secret, what’s true in his marriage, what’s true with his time at war. And even more than that, Don is someone who tends to get caught in recursive loops, trying the same things over again and thinking they’ll end differently this time. For someone whose instinct is always to leave, he is remarkably stuck. The accident that frees him also keeps him in amber.

The best thing about this anti-plot twist is that it doesn’t change anything dramatically, and yet everything is a little different. The wind is certainly blown out of Pete’s sails, and Don is relieved, but although everything goes back to the status quo, two people now know Don’s secret, and that isn’t nothing. When Burt advises Don not to fire Pete, telling him to keep an eye on him instead, he’s giving genuine advice but he is also telling Don that he is trapped now, that he owes Burt something. “One never knows how loyalty is born.”

So what kind of show is this if it isn’t one where we need to constantly be on the edge of our seat waiting to see if Don bashes Pete’s head in with a Clio? In a piece about Succession that I wish I could find, I remember reading that it functioned like a soap opera in the sense that the driving suspense of the show was about watching people receive information, wondering when and how it would happen, and how it would be received. I remember Mad Men receiving a lot of comparisons to daytime soaps when it first aired, not complimentary, especially with all its affairs and Don’s mysterious backstory, but the engine on Mad Men is not always about how information is received as much as how it is expressed.

Rachel Menken is never going to know everything about Don’s past – even with Pete’s threat hanging over his head he can’t bring himself to tell her – but Don’s thoughtless romantic gesture in combination with his refusal to be any more open than he already has is enough to force Rachel to confront the coward she’s actually dealing with. This is a man willing to abandon his children. Similarly, I don’t believe that Don ever finds out that he and Peggy share a Peter Campbell problem, but when she talks about being hated for following the rules while some people get to hurt whomever they want, there is understanding and empathy between the two of them even without the specifics of her pain being articulated. One never knows how loyalty is born.

More Thoughts

“I have money” – this being the best Don can do to try and convince Rachel to run with him is one of the perfect tragicomic lines this show does better than maybe anything else. Don trying to reassure the department store heiress by telling her he has money (especially when he’s trying to run away from his job and keeps giving all his savings away) is really a misread.

When Rachel tells Don, “What kind of man are you?” It is possibly the most hurtful thing she could have said to someone as identity tortured and guilt-ridden as Mr. Draper. Then Don inadvertently does the same thing to Pete when he chides him for thinking he deserved the head of accounts job: “Because your parents are rich? Because you went to prep school and have a $5 haircut? You’ve been given everything. You’ve never worked for anything in your life.” The boy recoils at this confirmation of everything he worries other people think about him. What’s really interesting, that I never caught before, is that when Pete asks Don “Why can’t you give me what I want?” It is almost word for word the same thing he asks his father in “New Amsterdam”. Daddy issues abound!

Pete’s idiocy is almost admirable. He’s a slimy squirrel but you gotta hand it to him for not backing down. He’s one of the only people not intimidated by Don who isn’t Peggy Olson or a literal schizophrenic (more on that later).

Speaking of Peggy, she softens so much over the course of the show that I forgot how truly annoying she can be at the beginning (to other characters, not to me as a viewer). Like, she is a hundred percent right to be pissed about someone stealing her money, but oh my god she handles it in the most annoying way possible.

I didn’t write at all about the office election party, which is one of my favorite sequences on the show. Secretary sexual harassment aside, it looks like a pretty fun time, and I love the water cooler full of creme de menth. It’s nice to see Joan being fun after a season of being told how fun she is. I particularly love the morning after conversation and dance between her and Kinsey where you learn why they broke up. On another show they would have gotten back together at some point, but this is both sweeter and truer. Meanwhile Harry sleeps with Pete’s secretary (who still fucking hates Pete), and I’m sure he’ll never do anything like that again.

Duck! More on him later.

The woman on the train in Don’s flashback who wants to buy a good soldier boy a drink is a pretty corny moment that we didn’t need. I didn’t need an origin story for John Hamm being handsome and appealing to women.

S1E13 The Wheel

“Technology is cyclical” – Dennis Duffy

“Technology is cyclical” – My husband, watching “The Wheel”

Technology is cyclical.

At the end of the season it’s clear that the Dr. House: Madison Avenue version of this show is not how Mad Men wants to spend its time. It’s been a while since we saw Don do his thing, and the last really effective pitch we saw him give was not his, but Peggy’s (unless you count seducing Rachel Menken). But when people think of Mad Men as a show where Don swoops in and pitches the hankies straight out of everyone’s pockets, this is the stuff they’re thinking of. This is the juice.

“It’s toasted”, back in the pilot, is a great introductory peek into the genius of Don Draper: It’s believably something he might have pulled out of his ass, it’s a good slogan, and it gives the viewer a sense of his thought process and style. What Don understands is that products are interchangeable, and his job is to create enough feeling around a brand that people form loyalties to a product even though on some level they know they’ve been had. It’s toasted is evocative and sensual.

“It’s a time machine”, is a masterpiece. The Kodak team is worried that no one will understand how revolutionary their slide-wheel is because it seems so simple. They think they want someone who can highlight the technological innovation, but Don’s pitch is based on the bet that more people feel they are already too late than worry about being an early adopter.

Everyone’s timing is off in this episode. Everyone is worried they’ve missed out on something. Harry, who is sleeping in the office after not coming home on election night, is so terrified he’s fucked up his marriage that he runs out of the Kodak pitch crying. Don decides to reconnect with his brother and finds out that he hung himself, leaving behind all the money he gave him to start a new life with.

It’s no surprise that Pete’s timing is off, missing out is, in some ways, the defining mark of his personality. Pete is often ideologically a little too ahead for the people around him, but he is almost always a little off-rhythm in his interpersonal dealings. Things just never work out the way he thinks they will. Here, he gets a big client too late to be named head of accounts, but just in time for Don to execute a slow and cold revenge on him for digging into his personal life by putting Peggy on Clearasil. This puts a nice little bow on Don and Peggy’s overlapping Pete problem for the season, as Don’s dislike for the man who treated her so badly ends up getting her the job she wants. Would she have gotten this job anyway, eventually? Probably, but she gets it now. And then she GOES INTO LABOR.

This show is so good! Everytime it seems like it’s just going to be beautiful people smoking and staring at the wall something like this happens. I can’t actually remember if I watched this season as it aired (definitely not the beginning, since I was working at a summer camp in the woods, but I might have caught up by the end via 123movies or something similar), but I do know that I was completely surprised by this plot twist. In any case, Peggy does not want this baby. She does not have time for this baby.

Don realizes too late that he needs to make time for his wife and babies, and they leave for Thanksgiving without him as Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” ends the season. It’s a song that won’t come out for another two years and it feels like the 60’s coming down the pipe even as melodically it gestures towards an older era, another time machine. This episode is not the first time Don has rejected the future as something to aspire towards, (he hates astronauts!) but he forgets part of the core message of his own pitch. Time, like technology, is cyclical, you can’t escape the past and the future is still coming for you. Would things end up different if he had caught up with his family and spent the holiday with them? Maybe, but probably not. Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

More Thoughts

Mad Men is an absolute GOAT of end-credit mic drops, always, but especially in its finales (with the exception of season two, which I believe ends with a Carbonara classic). My spoiler free ranking of finale mic drops from least to most favorite: 3, 4, 1, 6, 7, 5. My favorite seasons (SUBJECT TO CHANGE) are: 3, 1, 7, 2, 6, 5, 4.

Poor Betty got left out of my summary, which is unfair because January Jones really is great in this episode. Poor Betty. Poor creepy Glen. It’s astounding that their interaction is as genuinely poignant as it is given that it is undeniably inappropriate. Don knows that her anger at Francine’s two-timing husband is partially about him, although he probably doesn’t understand how clearly she sees him. When she tells the therapist that Don is kind on the inside, and just bad on the outside, I believe her. Don is not Tony Soprano, but he is too damaged to be a real partner and he gives the best parts of himself to his clients instead of his wife.

Okay, now Trudy’s dad is annoying.

Duck! Doesn’t drink. Something to watch…

I love Francine’s poison fantasy so much. I’d watch a whole spinoff by Ryan Murphy about her murdering Carlton, suburban diva that she is.

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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.