Breaking Up In An Ambulance

It doesn’t happen every day, some girls wish they could do it when angered and others wouldn’t dream of it.  This episode of Mad Men gets violent, yes that’s right, violent.  Peggy who is living in some rundown apartment building in some terrible part of Manhattan is so freaked out that she is going to be robbed that she ties a knife to the end of a broom stick like some sort of homemade spear and walks around her apartment at night listening to all of the noises outside preparing herself for an intruder that may come in.  Well her hippie boyfriend sneaks up from behind her and he takes a shank right to the gut.  On the ride to the emergency room, knife still lodged in his stomach he tells her he thinks it’s about time they break up.  Think so eh??

In this episode little Bobby Draper has a camping weekend away, Don goes up north to the camp site and runs into his ex-wife Betty who is also up for the weekend.  Betty is back to looking very trim again, she changed her dark hair back to her blonde hair and shed the excess weight that she had or at least the writer of the show put on her to signify some sort of 60’s housewife mid life crisis.  Don pulls up in his Caddy as she is being stared at by the gas station attendant, after the kids are asleep they have an evening of sitting outside on the porch of the motel drinking and reminiscing about how they used to be together.  Betty gets up and walks into her hotel room, Don is watching her closely as she leaves the hotel door room open behind her.  Don being Don follows her in and then this former married couple and both currently married man and woman gets back together again intimately.  Betty makes an interesting comment in bed to Don about the only mistake that poor girl Megan, (Don current wife) had made was to think that falling in love with him was the way to get close to him.  The next morning Henry, Betty’s current husband comes up for the camping weekend.  Don walks into the restaurant as Henry and Betty are eating breakfast, he says good morning to the both of them.  Little does Henry know what she was doing last night with Don.  The drama continues, didn’t see that one coming. 

While Don is away Megan is home having drinks with her bosses wife, the same boss and wife who asked Megan and Don to come home with them to, “explore” during a prior dinner party.  She spills what she has been feeling about Don and her personal life and also vents about her new role in the daytime television show.  The friend takes this as a signal that she should make a move on Megan; she does and is politely denied.  Poor Megan, all she wanted was a friend to talk with and she gets some crazy woman who’s had too many drinks and has too many other ideas about how the evening should go. 

They actually do get some work done in this episode as it pertains to advertising; Don and Ted are working on an idea and ask Peggy for an opinion.  She doesn’t like being stuck in the middle between her mentor and her current crush to be the final decision make ran whose idea is better.  She stands up to Don and tells him she doesn’t like it, it’s very interesting to see how far Peggy has come and evolved in this storyline. 

The season is near coming to a close, 1968 is almost in the books.  I can’t wait until next Sunday, 10 pm on AMC for the next episode of Mad Men. 

No Rest for The Wicked

The episode gets bizarre right from the rip; we see one of the advertising agencies account representatives, Ken Cosgrove speeding in a Chevy Impala with a bunch of drunken Chevy executives.  One has a hand gun pointed out the window shooting at mail boxes the other is covering the driver’s eyes as another pushes Ken to drive faster.  Ken comes home all banged up from a car accident and gives the news that Chevy isn’t happy with anything the firm has done for the advertising campaign and that they need to keep working thru the weekend for another idea. 

Jim Cutler, a new addition in the merger brings in his doctor to inject some of the employees with a serum so they will have the energy to work thru the weekend.  I don’t know what the serum was or what it had in it but all of a sudden the episode got very crazy.  Don took his shot and then began hallucinating about his childhood.  He had images of when he was a teenager and was living in the brothel with his step mom.  He had a bad fever and he was nursed back to health by one of the prostitutes in the brothel, she gave him soup, gave him a place to rest and then later when he was feeling better she took from him his virginity.  No wonder Don is so screwed up with women, he was raised in a brothel and his 1^st sexual encounter was a prostitute taking his innocence from him.  Here is a good pic on the creative advertising duo of Don and Peggy during better not drug indused days. 

Don does snap out of the day dream but he’s still on the drugs, he’s scurrying around the office ripping ads from magazines.  He thinks he has a great idea for Chevy but can’t quite explain it, he’s been up for days straight and he hasn’t been home at all.  His wife Megan goes out for the night and leaves his 3 kids who are with him for the weekend alone with Sally his oldest daughter who is a teenager.  The apartment gets broken into by a woman who claims she’s Dons grandmother.  The woman tells the kids to relax and then starts stealing a bunch of things from the apartment.  When Don finally comes home from days of being away in the office on drugs working with no sleep he comes home to find his ex wife, her husband, the police along with all of the kids and his current wife Megan in the apartment talking over the burglary.  Don says nothing and then passes out face 1^st on the floor in front of all of them. 

Some of the other highlights from the episode were the creepy way Don was standing in the hallway smoking cigarettes listening to his ex lover in her apartment, she calls him and tells him to leave her alone.  Finally later in the episode Don snaps out of his love/lust for her and runs into her in the elevator and says nothing at all.  No hello, no tears, no begging, all business.  We also see Peggy back in the mix at the office working away the weekend not on drugs, Ted Chaugh was off all weekend a the funeral of his old friend and colleague he used to work with.  Roger Sterling whom is one of my favorite characters makes a few appearances; he has the line of the episode where he tells a gaunt looking Don Draper, “You need to get some rest, your face looks like a bag of walnuts”. 

What Goes Around Comes Around

This season Don has been carrying on an affair with his neighbors wife, this episode proves to be quite interesting as it pertains to Don Draper’s philandering ways.  She calls him at work, tells him that she can’t be without him and needs him right away.  He tells her to get a hotel room and call to him back with the room number, he arrives and they meet, he leaves and tells her to get undressed, get back into bed and to not go anywhere and to not answer the phone and says things to her like, “you’re here for my pleasure only”.  He has a red dress delivered to the room for her from Saks Fifth Avenue, he comes back to find her wearing it and then subsequently asks her to take it all off.  He leaves again on business, comes back and she tells him it’s over and that she needs to go home and that she had a dream that Don was killed in an airplane crash and that she went back to her husband.  We see Don tear up as this is the 1^st time in the history of this show that a woman has broke up with Don, later in the episode we see Don listening to his wife talking and then just tune out what she is saying to him.  He’s smiling and looking at her, pretending he is listening to what she is saying but he isn’t grasping any of it at all.  So Don gets dumped by his lover and tunes out his wife, the guys got problems when it comes to women.  His ex wife Betty is below on the right and his perhaps soon to be ex wife Megan below on the left. 

The episode starts off very crazy as all of the new employees in the merger are trying to figure out where they go on the 1^st day.  Ted Chaugh from Cutler, Gleason and Chaugh attempts to work with Don on his 1^st day on some creative work for a margarine brand.  Don gets him so drunk on his 1^st day that he embarrasses himself and passes out on the desk.  Peggy doesn’t like that at all and tells Don to take it easy on the drinking with him.  Ted was quite embarrassed of how drunk he got and vowed to make up for what he did and come back  the next day, he really wants to earn Dons respect so he takes him on a flight in his airplane to see some clients in upstate New York.  The weather is terrible and Don is looking like death from all of the turbulence, I suppose Ted got him back good for all of the drinks the day before.  All and all the transition looks to be happening smoothly, I really like the part in the episode where Joan saves the job of the guy who helped her get to the hospital when she wasn’t feeling well. 

There was a lot of craziness from Pete Campbell this episode, he as usual is all paranoid about the merger and about being let go from his position at the firm.  As with any merger there can be dead weight or redundant workers that are let go, Pete being a partner you would think would be safe but never the less he’s super paranoid he’s going to get fired. My favorite scene of the episode comes again from the character of Roger Sterling; he fires Dan Gleason again for the 2^nd time in a few years.  Roger really doesn’t like the guy and took a lot of enjoyment out of firing him.  In his usual Roger smart ass approach to it all he mocks him in a professional and elegant way all at once while letting him go. 

Check out a sneak preview into next weeks episode - http://bit.ly/13eZpc7