BLOGGING MAD MEN, Season 7 Episode 5: Free The Nipple

Before we get to the threesome, and the autonipplectomy, and other assorted carnage, I'd like to offer a little drink recipe.

• 1.5oz bourbon
•  0.5oz sweet vermouth 
• Dash bitters 
• Orange slice, muddled 
• Cherry 
• Top with maple soda (and if you don't have that--seltzer with a few drops of maple syrup)

I call it the "All-Night Diner," and it's usually pretty good, but the one I'm drinking now is sub-par. The act of observing something changes it, obvi.

Anyway, "What if Amelia Bedelia was a budding fascist and monkey named Scout?" is not a question that a lot of people would even think to ask, but it turns out that Evil Mr. Rogers is among the few and proud and weird who would. (In a funny bit of parallel cringe comedy, this episode would have aired within weeks of Community's season five, and Jonathan Banks's "Jim the Duck.") He's working on a comic strip, see, and when Stan finds copies of "Scout's Honor" on the office Xerox, he can barely contain his glee.

He'd like Ginsberg to share in his delight, but he's a little preoccupied by the giant computer room now humming over the usual phones-ringing, ice-clinking, secretaries-crying audioscape of SC&etc. To be fair to Ginsberg, that computer room couldn't look much more horrifying if it tried, with its pink-garbed Kubrickian attendant and a disconcerting sign that just reads "THINK." The MOON LANDING is coming, by the way, IN CASE YOU FORGOT.

Remember Anna Draper's niece? The one Don drove home that one time and we all held our breath for ten minutes hoping he wouldn't fuck her? He didn't, but someone did, and she calls Don homeless and pregnant and looking for help. He says, "I'm only one of those things." JKJKJK you get what I meant. The All-Night Diner is starting to work and my modifiers start to dangle in situations such as this; she's the pregnant one, is what I'm saying. And she seems genuinely guilty and conflicted about calling him--this ain't no Midge play--and so Don hooks her up with Megan and makes plans to head west and revisit an old ghost or two.

Sending Stephanie into the skinny, shaky arms of his wife isn't necessarily the smartest move, of course, but it does at least give us a sense that Don and Megan aren't completely on the outs after last time they got together. Betty and Henry, on the opposite coast, are a different story. Henry's navigating the difficult waters of being a Republican in the era of George Wallace and Vietnam, and Betty has permanently replaced the food in her mouth with her own foot. She accidentally fells Henry with a gotcha question at a neighborhood party, and Bobby overhears their ensuing fight. I really have no room in my heart to pity Bobby Draper and all his minor tragedies, though. Do you? I didn't think so. Fuck that kid. But then Betty's personal Vietnam comes home from Hailsham sporting a broken nose from an accident at school, and resents Betty's horror at the prospect of an Owen Wilsonesque schnoz in the family. Sally Draper enlivens that scary old castle for a fleeting moment, and it's nice for us and nice for Bobby, but again, who cares about Bobby.

Don is stymied in his travel plans by Scout the fucking monkey, after Lou gets grumpy when he overhears Stan mocking him. He forces everyone to stay late and Don, in his new status as the underling's underling, can't do anything but laugh, especially at this truly remarkably exchange as Evil Mr. Rogers defends the financial fertility of syndicated newspaper comics.

LOU: You know who had a ridiculous dream and people laughed at him?
STAN: You?

In California, Steph decides she would rather bail than spend a full day alone with Megan, and Megan decides she'd rather cut Steph a check than have to contemplate the girl's advanced knowledge of Dick Whitman and the attendant intimacy of being inside at least a few of his many walls. The next day, Don turns up expecting his ersatz niece and instead finds Amy From Delaware, a dye-job Mephistopheles who, along with Megan, awkwardly forces Don into a threesome. The less said about it the better. Let's move on to less-gross topics:

For a show with such a sterling (wordplay) and staid reputation, Mad Men has twice now offered more creative carnage than one normally sees on The Walking Dead. (For a person with such sterling taste in TV, I have twice now offered Walking Dead references. Remind me to get more pretentious next time.) Ginsberg's mental decline in the face of the 20th century is swift, and after complaining that the computer makes people gay and trying to force himself on Peggy, he ends up slicing off his nipple and giving it to her in a box. But hey, at least this gift wasn't actually intended for her secretary!

By the way, my favorite detail about this episode is that Peggy hangs out with a little boy named Julio who lives in the apartment above hers. I'm sure there's a dozen think pieces on Slate about how this represents her guilt about giving up her child, but let's ignore that shit and imagine a spinoff of Mad Men in which Peggy and Julio become detectives. -ZL