Juvenile Cinephile

MAD MEN QUESTIONS & PREDICTIONS

There are numerous questions that I have about this upcoming Mad Men finale.  I may be guilty of leading the witness with these question we all have our biases and theories. 

• Is the opening point of view shot of Jonesy’s heart attack mean we could have a bookend moment with Don in the same position?   Or was that just a setter of tone and theme by showing a man’s rebirth? 
• Could Don promising to visit Dr. Rosen’s work like he promised in the premiere ever really have good connotations? 
• Will we ever see the petulant early version of Ted Chaough or will he remain in Peggy’s ideal image? 
• Will Michael Ginsberg get a girl?  Or does he ever care either way? 
• What is Roger’s story for the season?  Does it include the ‘opportunity’ in the refrigerated truck business venture he agreed to with his daughter in the premiere?  Is Roger just the new Bert or the guy who was a step ahead of everybody at the old agency with General Motors? 
• The side door of the Draper penthouse has been used in the literal and figurative violating of Don’s personal space.  Will it come up again? 
• Sally has a secret she can use against Don?  Will she so mercy or will she internalize that kind of shame?  Or will she shed her Draper skin and really become Henry’s adopted daughter by taking the Francis name- her ‘rebellious’ trajectory in becoming a preppie Betty? 
• Does Joan know about Bob Benson?  Would she even care about his sexuality?  Could they be friends or a non-sexual work couple who help each other out?  If Bob Benson is the new Don Draper could Joan be his Anna Draper?  Or is that actually Manolo’s role in Bob’s life? 
• Don ended the ceasefire with Ted in the Ocean Spray vs. Sunkist tiff.  Will Ted’s end of the bargain, securing Mitchell in the New York Air National Guard, be kept or will something happen there?  Will it be Ted’s doing or something else? 
• Will Ken want to still be working at the agency or was getting shot in the face a wake-up call? 
• Is Megan’s career still stuck playing in soap operas or something bigger on the rise?  Or will her figurative/literal inhibiting of the theme of twins/doppelgangers go down with the season?  Could she ever return to Don as his housewife or his work wife?   How come we see her constantly on the phone with her agent Jeff Hunter but never in the flesh? 
• Will Megan ever find out about the Sylvia affair?  Does she have an idea that he might be cheating but not necessarily with a friend?  Will she forgive him?  Will she leave him?  Is she really in the position to leave him? 
• Will Sylvia ever spill about the affair to Arnold?  Will she be able to specify with whom she had the affair? 
• Is Harry a little too comfortable with the certainty he will become a partner or is he onto something?  Could the agency be expanding to the West Coast in addition to setting up shop in Detroit? 
• With titles like “The Quality of Mercy”, “For Immediate Release”, and “Favors” actually telling us quite a lot about their episodes, does “In Care Of” present us a finale having about somebody handle matters, responsibilities, and news on the behalf of somebody else?   That speaks to a lot of characters (Bob Benson, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Joan, the agency, etc.) over the course of this season except for Don- but could that change?   Could that mean that Don is somebody ‘In Care Of’ (lest we forget Dante needed a Virgil)? 
• Ted scratching off Don Draper’s name in SCDP in his interview with Peggy actually foreshadowed the SC&P name, but could that also foreshadow something happening to Don that is work-related that makes him dropped from the company name probably in the long-term a good idea?
• Is the next step for Don to have his secret identity exposed if Sally has seen the Dick Whitman side to her father by seeing him cheat? 
• How much of the season is a reflection of 1968 and is there a calming of the status quo among the office when Nixon is elected?  Will the finale take place exactly a year after the premiere? 
• Is California still in play or was that party a composite of it being corrupted from Don’s idealized paradise?  Will the decay of New York City cause people to not just leave the city personally but professionally? 
• Will Cutler ever show his wrath again in he way Ted neutralized or is their compromise of SC&P the ultimate Trojan horse? 
• Since the show likes to play with the literal/figurative marriage in symbolism could the finale possibly taking place in winter symbolize the ninth circle of hell (Treachery)?
• Does the motif of Rosemary’s Baby actually hold not just symbolism for the women on the show but also Don?  But is he Guy or is he the anti-Christ (the subtle way Ted posited him in the homage commercial as the baby)?  

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EP. #4.12 “THE QUALITY OF MERCY”

You thought last week was a wakeup call?  You thought Don Draper was going to get out of this inferno?  You thought Sally Draper catching her father in the act would shame Don to some self-introspection and the self-realization that he needs to get his shit together?   You were wrong.  Don is not just running in circles, he is waving around a flamethrower as he reaches his bottomless ninth circle.   With Don getting isolated by Sally and Don isolating Megan in this episode, the Draper penthouse would not the stage for Don’s most despicable demons to come out (though hiding a morning screwdriver while your wife is telling you to use this day off as a cleansing was pretty bad).  Don decided to re-direct his energies to work and to the people who were once or could have been his strongest allies: Ted and Peggy. 

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Here’s just a reminder. 

Anyway, I think Mad Men has given us another nod to 30 Rock.

Manolo…..

…. Meet the Generalissimo. 

Mad Men seems to have played with the soap opera conventions that critics try to deride the show as really a soap opera behind its prestige, award-winning, critically-acclaimed cable drama surface.  Frankly, I think Mad Men embraces such a distinction. 

Let me just say, I definitely believe Bob Benson is gay.  I do not think he is putting up a front to something that is his actual front in being a straight-seeming gay man.  I do not necessarily think he can be an out and proud gay man in 1968.  Matthew Weiner’s coy ‘not necessarily gay’ but ‘infatuated with Pete’ (note: he also calls Peggy’s relationship to Ted an ‘infatuation’ when characters are explicitly calling that love too) statements in this past week’s “Inside the Episode” comments did at first alarm me but because an obsession with Pete leads Bob Benson alarmists to think we got a Tom Ripley character in our midst.

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NOTE: This Mad Men in particular was pretty loaded with a lot.  Later in the week I will break other parts down but this will be more about how the episode relates to Don in past episodes and themes. 

“FAVORS”

EPISODE #6.11

This episode illustrates that maybe Season 5’s “Mystery Date” is the Mad Men episode that best explains the current Don Draper/Dick Whitman we see.   I have gone over that in this season’s “The Crash” how those maligned flashbacks of the whorehouse re-contextualized a lot of “Mystery Date” in how it was not about Don’s issues of fidelity but his relationship to sex and women.  But there is that little moment where Don is actually working and presenting the fairytale theme ad to a client.  Wunderkind copy-writer Michael Ginsberg sees a darker, more sinister take to the Cinderella ad they are doing and upends the traditional telling of it in how in how it is really about the deep subconscious of Cinderella as somebody who ‘wants to get caught’.   Is there not a more Cinderella story than a Dick Whitman who with a new identity goes to the ball like royalty and sweeps everybody off their feet?  I always felt that this was the season where Don would get caught in his sloppy, increasingly disturbing affair with Sylvia.  But maybe there is something a little more cosmic and psychological going on.  Maybe the clock is striking midnight on Dick as Don and maybe there is a person who wants to get caught- leave the slipper behind- due to his own nature.   But before I get ahead of myself (because if you read last week’s recaps I was admittedly off, in hindsight), let’s go over why Sylvia and Don were always going to be the destructive affair that did it in for him.

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MAD MEN #6.10

“A TALE OF TWO CITIES”

Let’s start with the heart of the episode, which was the Peggy and Joan dynamic.  For the show’s entire run, everybody has been rooting for these two to be friends even when the earlier seasons were at the height of the hostilities between those two.  For all the love she gets, Joan operated under a pretty petty dictatorship leading the secretaries that followed the patriarchal structures of early 1960s office culture.  Even if Peggy did not have that out in copy-writing, one can only assume she would have left in not being a secretary there at the agency- mostly because she got it from both sides: the men and from Joan. 

The whole Mad Men letting its female characters have a feminist awakening has gone admittedly slower than I expected, and I say this as somebody who does not think they should cater to the idealized Boomer point of view of the 60s.  Betty still appears to never get there.  Megan may have read the feminist literature but her relationship to her husband seems a little mutually dependable at this point (more on that later).  Peggy has clearly never read the literature (although maybe Abe insisted she read it because he does seem like that asshole who thinks he knows what feminist literature is good for his then girlfriend).  Joan never has and probably never will but both she and Peggy as single women are trying as hard as they can in their success at work being independent of the men in this episode. 

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“THE BETTER HALF” EPISODE #6.09

Although this show has proven to be a show all about Don Draper, Matthew Weiner does spread it out in story and with Peggy Olson the show is very much her story too.  This episode showed that Peggy’s work life the moment the merger happened continues to blow up in her face, but that the merger itself reflected an unraveling home life.

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“THE CRASH”

EPISODE # 6.08

I have been sitting on this episode.  Not because I had second thoughts about its quality or anything like that (as some other recappers oddly did if you look at a few Twitter feeds the night of the episode followed by their more mixed reaction recaps).  No, there was actually a lot to pontificate about how this episode fits into the season and the series itself.   I am surprised how many people think this ‘drug episode’ is a stand alone, one-off episode that will somehow hold nothing for the rest of the season or the series.  What episode were these people watching?  

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“MAN WITH A PLAN”

Episode #6.07

I liked what this episode was doing.  Was it the best Mad Men episode?  No, not in this season especially.  But it was a welcomed relief.  Through the writing done by respected Matthew Weiner confidante, Semi Challas and Weiner himself along with John Slattery’s maturing skill and eye for direction that is equal parts dramatic and cheeky, this episode let us in on how we are really supposed to think of Don Draper in both relation to the show’s world of its characters and time period.  But I also was surprised that this show reciprocated my theory that Don Draper and Adam Sackler are actually the same type of person. 

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Saving it for later this week.

But I hope this week’s episode turned alarmists around on Bob Benson, Accounts.