BLOGGING MAD MEN, Season 7 Episode 4: The Fault In Counting Our Stars

When I worked in telephone fundraising, we had donation quotas we had to hit every week. I always barely scraped by, but told enough jokes and engendered enough goodwill to compensate. Until one day, when a new, vaguely Nordic, forcibly affable guy named Derrick took over the office. He fired a lot of my old friends at the earliest opportunity, but I consistently, barely hit my quotas and evaded his grasp. Eventually, he told me that in order to keep my job, I had to clear the quota by 25% more than I had the week before, each week. I pointed out to him that this would quickly become mathematically impossible, and he just grinned and didn't acknowledge what I'd said. That's quite the power move, by the way; I lasted three weeks. That's the exactly the kind of thin ice Don is on at SC&c these days: Banned from drinking, thinking, or even looking clients in the eye, most of the partners are looking for any reason to throw him on his ass and rid themselves of his stake in the company. Presumably Pete would at least try to save him--their cosmic debt to each other is so extreme at this point that it will never be repaid in either direction--but Pete's too busy in California with Barbie.

Speaking of my new favorite couple, they're at a restaurant when Pete runs into his old pal Eugene, who needs to get to Washington DC to redirect the satellites and kill all the walkers. Sorry, wrong AMC show. Anyway he's a former Vicks employee who works for Burger Chef now, and he comes bearing news from Verona: They're considering dropping McCann, and also Trudy's father had a heart attack. Pete Campbell gets family news in the weirdest ways, right? 

Evil Mr. Rogers is still a panicky dick about having Don in his rear-view mirror all the time, and his discomfort fills me with life. I WILL WRING YOUR HEART YET, EVIL MR. ROGERS. But he puts a serious point on the board this week. Calling Peggy into his office (If you play the "Close the door" drinking came at home--bottoms up!), he gives her the Burger Chef assignment, which was earmarked even by his own half of the brass for Don. Burger Chef, by the way, was a real 70s-era burger chain, and the good times rolled all the way until 1982, when it was absorbed by Hardees. One of its slogans, circa 1970, was (this is not a joke) "INCREDIBURGIBLE." So honestly, this is probably a better account for Peggy and her awkward-ass tags anyway. 

She doesn't wait long to start swinging her brand new dick, asking for Don to be sent into her office rather than vice versa. He agrees to work for her, because he has literally nothing else to do, but his face lobsterizes so entirely over the course of the meeting that I checked his wrist for the Infinity Gauntlet. Later, he blows off writing taglines to read Portnoy's Complaint, which is nearly as literal a metaphor for jacking off as you can get away with on cable. 

Here's something--Peggy's whiteboard includes the September dates of the New York Film Festival, but it appears to read 1964, rather than '69. A quick few searches reveal that Peggy had a poster for the 1964 film festival on her office wall in Season 6, which puzzled folks at the time because season 6 took place in 1967. So what's the note about? Is she wondering where her poster went? Is there some kind of connection between Peggy and the films that showed that year? A Woman Is A Woman? L'Age D'Or?

I figured we'd get to cults sooner or later, and this week we learn that Roger's daughter Minnie Mouse has thrown in her hat with some Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes-y motherfuckers. Worried, her mother wants to send Roger and play the daddy issues card as early and often as possible. Roger thinks her husband, Josh Brolin's young brother Tosh Brolin, would be better suited to go. He does, but gets in a bar fight and thrown in jail. Mrs. Sterling 1, Tosh 0! (By the way--in case you forgot how quickly we're approaching the MOON LANDING, there's a shot of Roger's grandson careening down a Kubrickian hallway while looking exactly like Danny from The Shining.) Roger takes multiple steps forward and back while trying to reckon with his wife, his daughter, and the assorted Ersatz Akebozos he encounters upstate, but ends up leaving muddy and defeated. I would watch a three hour movie about this plotline and I hope it never ends. 

Outside of Don's new office, where Lane Pryce once killed himself, a giant computer is being installed where the former creative lounge once stood. Hey, did you guys ever think about how Modern technology has devalued and replaced a lot of human capital? No? WELL WILL YOU PLEASE THINK ABOUT IT A LOT NOW? (I also like how this is yet another way in which the War Over Sterling Cooper is played out in such big, overzealous grasps. Don sat in that lounge all day upon his return, making Cutler et al. feel weird, so now they're wiping it off the face of the earth.) The guy installing the computer talks to Don about the "cosmic disturbance" it tends to create in workplaces (what a weird, complex opinion this guy has of his own job!) and Don is like, "That's fine, there's already fifty other cosmic disturbances in here trying to crowd the others out." Our man D plays it cool in the face of words like, "infinite" and "god-like" and "MOON LANDING" but within a day he's getting drunk and harassing this poor computer guy--which honestly seems to be a pretty regular occurrence on the job. 

I wrote "You're gonna die one day" in binary because I am the greatest TV recapper of all time

Don's drinking spell is triggered after the partial castration he got courtesy of Lou and Peggy is finished off in rather blunt, brusque fashion by Burt Cooper, who gets angry at Don for even suggesting a new client. Pathetically, Don steals a bottle of vodka from Roger's office and has to call Freddy Rumsen to smuggle his wasted ass out of the office. A day later, remembering for the twentieth time what rock bottom tastes like, Don starts doing his work for Peggy, and the computer installation is finished.

After I got fired from that fundraising job, I got another one, at a company whose liberal politics were more reflected in their labor policies as well. Feeling safer and happier, I began writing Blogging Twilight between phone calls. And the rest, like Mad Men, is history. So go fuck yourself, Derrick. -ZL