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

 

Different things put different smiles on different faces

Wow, what an excellent episode Sunday night.  Let me get right to the meat and potatoes of this week’s show, Don and Peggy will be reunited at a new ad agency!!!!!!  It really was the last thing I thought would happen but it makes so much sense, Lane Pryce is deceased and Cutler from Cutler, Gleasan and Chough is sick with cancer so they had to do something and what a great fit it is.  So in a moment in a dark bar in Detroit, sipping a few old fashioned the long time rivals being Don Draper and Ted Chough formulate the plan to merge the two firms and also lock down the Chevy account at the same time.  A real automobile account being what Don has always wanted in his career.  It’s good to see Don happy and getting his creative skills back to use. 

How about good old Roger Sterling, he strategically carries on a romance with a stewardess and gets tipped off by her when high level executives are stuck in the airport for long waits or delays.  He then shows up to the airport, buys the unsuspecting mark a drink and has his girl get him on the flight wherever it may be going so he can get his foot in the door on the ad business.  The maneuvering by Roger with his airport girl is how he got Don the meeting with Chevy.  What a clever move by Roger, its great see Roger back in some action, selling and doing what a good account man would do back in 1968. 

Then comes the public stock offering that Bert Cooper and Pete Campbell were working on, the deal may or may not have fallen apart with the news that the agency lost the Jaguar account and the Vicks Chemical account.  The agency loses the Vicks account because Pete runs into his father in law of all people at a New York City brothel, his father in law tells Pete he’s despicable for being there and pulls his business………interesting.  And the jaguar account goes away when Don tells the slimy guy from the dealers association over dinner to basically go find a new agency.  Don never liked that guy, the way he asked to be set up with Joan for a night so he would vote in the agency’s favor at the pitch meeting.  What a slime ball, good for Don.

Peggy does get an apartment with her hippie boyfriend in not such a good area of New York.  She gets kissed by her boss Ted Chough and continues to fantasize about him later in the episode.  There are always lots of relationships that start at work, this won’t be the 1^st or last that’s for sure.  The look on her face when Don was in Ted office and they told her about the merger was great. 

The best is yet to come this season, is the new agency going to be Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Gleason and Chough?  Check out the sneak peak of next week’s episode, we see Peggy is back and Ted is working in the new office with his new team. 

 http://www.amctv.com/mad-men/videos/next-on-mad-men-episode-607

Sneek Peak at Next Week

A Glimpse Into the Day when A Great Man was Struck Down

This week’s episode starts off with Peggy looking at a new apartment for her and her man, a continuation of the theme from this season that Peggy has become a very strong woman that’s on her own and a force in the Madison Avenue ad business. 

As Don and Megan walk thru the apartment complex lobby they run into there friendly neighbors, the Rosen’s who are on the way out of town for the weekend to Washington DC.  Don, clearly mesmerized by this woman asks not once but twice as to where they were going for the weekend as Mr. Rosen pokes at Don as he walks away to his car stating for a 3^rd time that they’re going to DC for the weekend.  Don really is on love with this woman, so much so he can’t even hide it well.  This should be interesting to see how long it takes to have this affair exposed.

The mood turns as we get a glimpse of what is was like to be in the shoes of some Americans as the news came across the wire that Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated.  The show as it always does captures the moment in history so well and then intertwines different personal things that are happening to each of the characters.  For example we see the offer Peggy made on her apartment decrease per the realtors recommendation because of the area of the apartment and the rioting that may have been happening, we see Don call Washington DC to track down the Rosen’s so he can make sure that the mistress he loves in safe, we see Pete Campbell call his wife with whom he’s separated from and offers to come out and see her and his daughter and be with them in that trying time but she declines (good for her). 

The most interesting exchange being between Harry Crane and Pete Campbell, Harry was complaining to Pete about how their customers were pulling ads because of the regularly scheduled TV programming being pulled in favor of the news coverage on the assassination.  Pete got very, very angry and called out Harry then Bert Cooper had to come out and have them break it up.  This was one of the few moments ever in Mad Men that I actually liked what Pete said and did. 

We again are left to see Don Draper peel away another layer of him, he doesn’t say much about himself but when he does he definitely makes a point.  This admission by him to his wife Megan about his children and how he basically fakes being happy just because he thought that was what he was supposed to do.  He admits he didn’t have a good childhood and that he doesn’t know how to be parent but then also confesses that the moment he sees something in his children he had never seen before makes his heart want to explode.  He was referring to the time he spent with his oldest son at the movie theatre watching planet of the apes as he listens to his son talking and finds himself amazed at what he hears. 

As always the writing in this show is superb as we see Don’s son Bobby peel away little strips of wall paper from his bedroom wall only to later see him reveal things about himself to his dad and Don peel away and reveal more about himself to his wife.  I could only imagine what difficult times it was to live during those days. Until next week…….In the mean time, check out the most talked about part of this episode. 
Video Clip From This Weeks Episode

Can I get a little Napalm on the side?

This episode got ripping and rolling right from the get go, Megan (Dons wife) finally lands a more significant acting role in her day time soap opera but the catch is that it’s a love scene and she is dreading having to tell Don about it.  The irony of course is that Don is cheating on her with the neighbor upstairs yet she is scared to tell Don about a scene where she kisses a man for a minute which in the late 1960’s would be considered more than most could handle on American television.  Speaking of the affair Don is having with the neighbor, he tells her to take off her cross on her necklace and he asks, “Do you pray for me when I leave, pray for me to come back”.  She says, “I do pray for you, I pray that you find peace”.  Very interesting moment in the show as Don just turns her cross around to the back of her neck and carries on with his business with her.    

To add more wackiness to Megan’s work situation her and Don have dinner with her director and his wife, the conversation goes from the Vietnam war to how Don and Megan had met one another and then they propose that Don and Megan came back to their apartment so they can, “get to know each other better, and conduct an experiment”.  The look on Dons face is really quite priceless as he puts out his smokes and allows his wife to politely decline the offer from these late 60’s swingers. That scene was creepy and funny all at once. 

Joan Harris makes her biggest appearance thus far in the new season, one of the fan favorites of the show Joan welcomes an old friend from back home and they go out for a night on the town.  They have a good but somewhat odd and immature night out on the town and wake up in the AM and have a conversation about how well Joan has done in New York City on her own and that how becoming a partner in a Madison Avenue advertising firm was an amazing accomplishment for a woman. Her friend talks about her success in Mary Kay but how that doesn’t compare to Joan’s success.  The irony is that Joan even as a partner of a company is still not treated equal and as she remarks is still treated like a secretary. 

As usual Mad Men writers do an excellent job at outlining the issues of the time, the inequality in women’s right in the workforce, the Vietnam War, the racial divides in the country.

What about Harry Crane and his pitch to Dow Chemical?  He has a great idea to rebuild Dows reputation which was getting hammered at the time because of the Napalm they were making and selling to the United States government that was being used on woman and children in Vietnam only to bust into a meeting later and go off about how Joan didn’t deserve her partnership and how he did deserve one.  From a business perspective he looked like a childish idiot, from an entertainment perspective it was quite comical.  We shall see how this develops, perhaps his head is getting big and he will leave Sterling Cooper Draper Price. 

Lastly my favorite part of the episode was the pitch to Heinz ketchup by Don and then as they walk out of the room they run into Peggy and Ted Shaw (the competition).  I loved how Don lingered back and listened thru the door as Peggy did her pitch to the Heinz executives.  She used a line she learned from Don, “if you don’t like the conversation, change it”, as she laid out a very impressive campaign that was more impressive than her mentors campaign that was presented before her.  Don listens thru the door and then walks away, later they both find out they didn’t get the account and that they even lost an account because of the pitch.  I really hope this pitch Don heard from Peggy snaps him out of his funk and gets him back to doing some creative work. Until next week……….. 

Season 6 Starts with Sin, Sauce and Sun

What a season opener it was, after a long awaited arrival we finally got a taste of what the new season of Mad Men will look like.

It was full of interesting changes in the characters, Roger Sterling with side burns, long hair on just about all of Don Draper’s creative team and well as a shaggy mop on Peggy’s boyfriend.  There were all types of inferences towards life and death, Don reading Dante’s Inferno, the door man having a heart attack in the lobby, Rogers’s mother’s funeral and then the news that Rogers shoe shine man had died.  Interestingly Roger was more upset about the latter.

Overall it was a very good opening episode, we find out Don is back to his old womanizing ways and that Megan is finally on her own two feet.  The ending of season 5 eluded that Don would be back to his cheating ways but to see him cheating on Megan with his neighbor’s wife whom they have dinner parties with is very interesting.  She is also much older than him which I suppose is consistent with Dons flings in the past.  Peggy is strong in her new position and Pete is still as wormy as ever at SCDP.  The most bizarre part of the episode was Betty making reference to her husband Henry about raping her daughter’s friend……wow.  Staying consistent with her immaturity Betty hangs out for a day in an abandoned apartment building with some squatters and assists in making some soup and then later dyes her hair brunette after years of being a blonde. 

Episode 2 right off the get go was all about portraying the sexual freedom that was happening during the late 60’s.  Pete is flirting with his neighbors and her husband is flirting with Pete’s wife.  Don is continuing his affair with his apartment building neighbor, having day time intimacy wife her in the maids bedroom.  This episode like the 1^st one was quite dark, it offered little in humor at all and really touched very little on business.

The Heinz beans and sausage meeting was a highlight for me, interesting to see the ketchup guy from Heinz to come in and meet Don.  I also really liked to quote by Don, “you gotta dance with the girl that brought you”.  Meaning they needed to stay loyal to the beans division of Heinz and stay away from trying to get the ketchup business. 

From a fashion perspective this episode offered more into taking us back to the loud colors and prints that were becoming popular in the late 60’s.  Don still stays true to his classy, simple suits he has always worn.  We see Joan is some new styles as well as Megan in her olive green sweater. 

The most bizarre part of this episode would be the scenes of Don with his mistress and then the shift back in time to Dons youth.  The scene was Don and his pregnant mother taking up room and board at a friend’s house which also served as a brothel.  Don had made reference in earlier episodes about growing up in a whore house, now we get a glimpse of that time in his life.  We also see him give his mistress cash money as he dresses himself for work after a morning in bed with her.  It’s safe to say his upbringing molded him into to man that he is and the way he views women and sex.