BLOGGING MAD MEN, Season 7 Episode 6: To Pimp A Butterfly

As a content-creator person who likes to make things, I am very much enjoying the current trend of creative work that explores the nature of creative work. This past season of Girls was a thrilling (for me, anyway) exploration of what drives artistic impulse and ambition, and whether or not any of it is even worth pursuing. Kendrick Lamar just released an album about whether or not success in a broken, racist culture counts as success. And hell, even The Newsroom engaged with Internet Criticism a lot more than Internet Critics ever gave it credit for. I don't have any grand theories about why this is happening now, and I won't try to develop one. My style of TV recapping is superficial and joke-y on purpose. Rampant speculation and analysis is usually a real killjoy, especially when the shows in question are already looking inward on their own. Let's just see where they take us, eh?

This episode of Mad Men is about creativity, and frustration, and the knowledge that, as Don says, "There's always a better idea." In a lot of ways it feels like it is about the show itself, as it rounds the home stretch and the writers look around and wonder if they did it right, and whether or not they can live with what they could have done differently. (If I have the timeline right, the much dreamed of "Salvatore at Stonewall" storyline is officially never going to happen, because Stonewall was right before the MOON LANDING.)

It's also the closest Mad Men will ever get to fan service. Bob Benson is back! Trudy is back! Pete Campbell is back in New York! And at the end, we get a lovely, tender, "Leslie And Ron" style scene between Don and Peggy, followed by an awkward, goofy scene between Don, Peggy, and Pete around a table at Burger Chef. I couldn't have asked for more. Well, I could have, but I know not to.

Speaking of asking for too much: Bob Benson, ladies and gentlemen! He returns to New York with his Chevy men in tow and proceeds to charm the pants on Joan (he certainly doesn't need them to come off--they can do whatever they want. But he would like them to be charmed, nonetheless). But after a too-honest proposal--"I'm gay and you're old--want to have a political marriage?"--he comes up empty. It's interesting to see Bob allow himself to approach candor with Joan, especially after we've already seen him bailing out one of the Chevy Execs, who has been beaten by an undercover cop for trying to hook up with him. Chevy Guy tries to have an honest conversation with Bob about being a gay man in these strange times, but Bob will only barely acknowledge what they're talking about.

Peggy has a solid pitch for Burger Chef, but she's barely even finished before Pete is suggesting that Don should be the one who performs it for real. Pete seems to just be looking for ways to improve Don's standing in the company, but Peggy is hurt by it. Then Don, perhaps deliberately and perhaps just stupidly (from season 4 onward that has been one of the pressing questions and guiding themes on the show: is Don doing any of this on purpose, or is he a lucky idiot?) questions the bedrock principles of her ad. Her confidence shot, Peggy starts spiraling.

Pete Campbell has a banner episode, by the way--first her joins the mile high-club with Barbie, then he drinks some rum, and then he gets to go creep out his family! Whatever real or perceived head games Pete and Trudy are playing with each other, it's just fun to see them together again. And Pete jamming his beer bottle into that birthday cake was the best. Classic Pete! I've always been Pete's number one fan, and for the record I mean that almost totally unironically!

Megan comes back to New York, apparently in part to bring some summer clothes back to LA, but when she also starts grabbing appliances, Don is reasonably alarmed. (And when we see Barbie and Megan both flying back to LA solo, it seems to indicate bad news for both of our boys.) In this, as with many other times of trouble, Don finds himself having an evening of honesty with Peggy (you could almost tell the entire story of Mad Men just by stringing together Don and Peggy scenes--and I'm sure some asshole already has). After the aforementioned discussion about the fickle, shitty nature of creativity, Peggy confesses that she's worried about her age. Don admits that he's afraid that "I never did anything, and I don't have anyone." (Every creative person watching is like, "Yes, yes, and yes" while pouring another drink.)

And then they share a moment, dancing to the song "My Way." Now, there's been a lot of talk about how Mad Men is going to end. Will Don jump out a window? (No.) Will Megan become a ghost? (No.) Will Glen come back and kill Betty with the gun she used on those pigeons? (Maybe.) Will the Russian from "Pine Barrens" show up, having fallen through a time tunnel? (No.) The truth is (I hope) that Mad Men won't end in a big, splashy way. It will just end, quietly, and maybe hopefully, with a scene just like this one. -ZL

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

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

BLOGGING MAD MEN, Season 7 Episode 3: Parenthood

Don goes to the movies alone ("Model Shop," if yr curious--it's about a divorcee wandering around LA. Probably doesn't signify anything, right?) which is an underrated activity. But of course he's still calling the office and asking after his ex-girlfriend, advertising. Dawn tells him they're shooting a commercial for Mountain Dew at SC&etc called "Invisible Boy," which sounds like an MRA propaganda film or something (obviously not a bad marketing strategy for Mountain Dew). He also finds out that Frankie Funke's been leaving him messages about how Megan is acting like a coked-up monstrosity all over tinsel town and that he needs to come talk some sense into her. ROAD TRIP!

Don gets on an airplane, and a flirty stewardess reminds him and all of us that if we ran a blacklight over the interior of that or any other contemporary cabin we'd find ten thousand semen stains spelling out his initials. But he's a married man now, and his trainwreck of a (not particularly-) long-suffering wife needs confronting!

Meanwhile, Peggy is upset because her ad didn't get nominated for a Clio. God, I wonder how many thousands of percents The Clio Awards have risen in Name ID thanks to Mad Men. They really got the opposite of poor Jaguar, huh?

Jaguar's Spring 2015 ad campaign

Eventually she finds out that she didn't get nominated because Evil Mr. Rogers didn't even submit her work, or any work created prior to his reign of terror. Which is some severely understandable bullshit. I mean, I'm irritated by the way Ted Chaough and his ilk have been going about marking their territory, but I also understand. They threw in their hats with a real gang of cutthroat motherfuckers. Come at Sterling Cooper, you best not miss! Elsewhere, Harry is campaigning for a computer--his insecurity levels are so high these days that he needs to literally fill a room at SC&Etc with a throbbing, humming symbol of his relevance. But he's got the future on his side. That motherfucker always does. Isn't that so annoying?

Megan comes home and finds Don in her kitchen and does a pretty good job of stifling her gasp of horror. "Did you get fired?" she asks, and Don coughs "Technically almost a year ago" really fast and then fucks her. When he tries to broach the subject of her behavioral issues, she sarcastically and justifiably calls him "Daddy." Maybe the themes of parental angst didn't need to get THAT explicit, but maybe they did! And there's a lot more coming. Anyway, Megan turns it around HARD on Don, asking why he's never in the office when he calls. She thinks he's cheating on her, but really, he's just hiding his unemployment and fledgling sobriety. Which is kind of worse. At least it is the way Megan spins it. She's REALLY GOOD at arguing! Game recognize game!

Betty has a conversation with Francine, who will always be Precious from Friends to me, and who is a travel agent now to remind us that this show takes place in a bygone era, with landlines and no pop culture blogs. Later, Betty travels with Bobby Draper (who, as you know, regenerates in different forms every few years, like Doctor Who) on a school field trip, in order to be weird about lunch and pass her food issues on to the next generation. Somewhere, right now, Marc Maron is pushing pause on his DVR and running for a notebook.

Back in New York, Don has a meeting with another ad agency. A woman comes up and throws herself at him so hard she leaves lipstick stains on the wall over his shoulder, but the ad men insist she's not on their payroll. What's up with all the woman coming up to Don and almost literally tugging on his dick lately? Is this kind of like how a lightbulb gets real bright just before it burns out?
Don goes to Roger Sterling's penthouse with an offer from another agency in hand, which seems like something he could have done a long time ago. Roger just shrugs and tells him to come back to work tomorrow. Huh. That doesn't seem too good to be true or anything, does it?

Of course it does, but Don shows up the next day anyway, and the divorced family dynamics kick in hard. Stan and Ginsberg, falling into the younger sibling role, invite Don into the lounge and catch him up on their work. Peggy, America's older sister, is hostile and alarmed at his unwelcome presence in her fragile, slowly-repairing broken home. The executives panic and wring their hands about how to handle him, except Roger, who doesn't even show up for hours. It's some seriously A+ cringe theater, and it culminates in a meeting in the conference room with Joan reading Don the Riot Act to end all Riot Acts. He agrees to a contractual neutering with a smile on his face, and we end on one of the weirdest notes Mad Men has ever sounded (like, "This Could Be Our Year" could have started playing again and it wouldn't have been any weirder).  -ZL

BLOGGING MAD MEN, Season 7 Episode 2: The War Of The Roses

Everybody on this show is at their funniest and best when they're on a crazy warpath. Remember Pete tumbling down the stairs in fury last season? Remember how great that was? Now imagine if a character was falling down those stairs repeatedly, in slow motion, for an entire episode. That is what is happening to Peggy, and it's amazing.

The parade of indignities begins on the elevator, where Ginsberg tricks Peggy into revealing that she has no plans for this evening, which is Valentine's Day. She takes roses off of her secretary's desk, mistakenly believing they are intended for her, then double-mistakenly decides they've been sent by Ted. AND THEN she triple-mistakenly decides to rebuff Ted's (imagined) advances with a (rather thickly) veiled missive about an angry client, which ripples confusedly throughout the office. It's an A-bomb of embarrassment, and Peggy's poor secretary Shirley, who loses her flowers, is just the first casualty of war. Everything else just dies slower.

Don is still putting the "under" in "underemployed," sleeping in until noon and then eating Ritz Crackers in a bathrobe, which is the precise image in which he most resembles my own father, and probably yours as well. It's total #Dadcore, and it's the first of many Don moments in this episode that hits unexpectedly, and hard. He's drawing lines on his liquor bottles and there are roaches in his apartment. ("That's a little much."-Franz Kafka)

Sally Draper and her friends are cool. Is Sally Draper the hero of this show? She might be. Remember when we thought it was Ginsberg? Sally Draper misses a train back to Hailsham after a classmate's mother's funeral and goes to SCetc to find her father. But of course, her father isn't in his office. It's Evil Mr. Rogers, and turning the corner and running into that motherfucker is scarier than the last shot of Enemy.

Elsewhere, the adventures of California Pete continue. It's funny, but Pete's growth on this show actually tracks--you just have to subtract 18-20 years from his real age to get whatever his emotional age is now. Here, he's finally in college. Pete Campbell is in a state school of the mind, and Ted is his nervous roommate, mopey yet again because Pete forgot to leave a sock on the door.

Roger is delighted that an old woman called him a kike and disappointed that Evil Mr. Rogers isn't as amused. You can read that as just another hint of the divided leadership of SCetc., but I prefer to imagine that it's literally where all the trouble stems from. Roger just wants to laugh about racist old ladies, and Mr. Rogers just wants to frown! The conflict continues from there to a deal Pete is finalizing with a CA dealership association: Tim Gunn wants Bob Benson involved, Roger doesn't, Pete wants all the glory, Ted wants mom and dad to stop fighting, and Zac really wants any excuse for Bob Benson to show up again. The fight is partially exacerbated by shoddy conference call technology in a scene which which is, along with other scenes in this episode, an editing marvel.

Don is taking lunch meetings and pretending he still has a job. Pro-tip, Don: people who still have jobs don't say, "I still have a job!" like every other sentence. That's a serious tactical error! He comes home to find Sally in his living room and the clumsy ass-covering game begins. Don's gotten so bad at this over the years, huh? He finally fesses up, in a ferociously truth-telling car ride which once again strikes some kind of neurological funny bone for me that I won't be exploring until I can afford a therapist. To do otherwise would just be a waste of money, right?

At SC&c, Dawn is dismayed by Evil Mr. Rogers's handling of the Sally situation, and Evil Mr. Rogers turns out to be dismayed that she is black. It's another scrap of kindling on the slowly burning racial bonfire of the vanities that has been threatening to swallow SC&c whole for years, but this one results in a game of career-advancing (racist) musical chairs: Dawn eventually ends up taking over for Joan, and Joan solidifies her position as a partner and Accountswoman. It's a complicated victory, though still a point we can post on the scoreboard for our team. But as MC Skat Kat so artfully once observed--it's always two steps forward and one step back with this shit. Roger calls California Pete to let him know he rolled over on the dealership issue; Gunn won. Pete, perhaps speaking in the voice of the same teasing meta-poltergeist that led to Romneygate 2012, says that sometimes he feels like he is living in some kind of sun-bleached purgatory. LIKE MEGAN!? OMGGGGGGG. "Just cash the checks," Ted tells him. "You're gonna die one day." (Like the Sopranos before it, Mad Men is hands-down the funniest show on TV.)

As Don drops Sally off at school, she steps out of his car and says, simply, "Happy Valentine's Day. I love you." It hits Don like a truck, and the great Zombie's song "This Will Be Our Year" starts playing as he sits there and absorbs the moment. It's beautiful. I love this god damn show. -ZL