Lane's Mets pennant, Freddy Rumsen Burger Chef and Roger hanging with people who are lost, on drugs and have venereal diseases! What else can you ask for from your Sunday night?!
Or from your Monday morning, which is when I watched this week's episode of Mad Men. I worked late on Sunday night, which meant I couldn't watch it live, but I drove up to my fiancé's house after work so we could wake up early the next day to watch it on demand. Hanging out with Don Draper and crew at 5:30 in the morning on a Monday really is the best to way to start your week. If this week turns out to be a good one for me, and I think it will since it consists of my birthday and our two year anniversary coupled with a weekend off from work, then I am going to start every single week for the rest of my life watching the Mad Men theme song Monday morning. For the record, did the theme song change? Has the office always crumbled around Don in the opening theme song? My fiancé noticed this as well. I have never noticed that, and if that is a sign for the future of this show, all readers can email me with questions about what lottery numbers to play and I'd be happy to help you all out. All five of you.
Anyway, where to begin with this week's episode. I guess the main story in "The Monolith" is the new computer. The episode opens with Lloyd and his cronies coming into the office, kicking creative to the curb and setting up the new computer in the lounge. Have I mentioned at any point that I hate Harry Crane? I don't think he's funny, only when he doesn't mean to be, and I don't think he is actually good at his job. He somehow wound up as the head of media, which was really happenstance. Of course, media turned out to be the industry that would boom in years to come as technology advances started rolling out. This somehow, in a really backwards and annoying way, makes Crane look good and intelligent when really is just slimy and lame. But regardless, SC&P now has a computer like they promised and finds themselves keeping up with the times of a changing industry. As Lloyd asked Don later in the episode, does advertising work? It does when you can promise clients that you have a computer in 1968.
Of course, with the new machine, man power gets beat up a little bit. That is the case for creative, who needs to find a place to put their couch. However, creative needs to come up with some tags for their new business, Burger Chef, which Lou has placed Peggy in charge of. Oh, not because he believes in her or admires her work or anything. She is a chick so she belongs in the kitchen so she would resonate well with a food place. Each week, I wonder more and more how in the blue hell Lou wound up with a job. First of all, he knows nothing about Peggy if he thinks she belongs in the kitchen because I would doubt that Peggy has ever even attempted cooking a full course meal in her life. Second of all, he is a sexist and an asshole. Third of all, Burger Chef isn't exactly fine dining, I don't think they need a woman who can cook as their advertising account head. And fourth, the whole "let's make a ton of tags but we don't even really have a strategy yet" outlook is the opposite of anything Lou would have learned in business school. You can't come up with a campaign without the strategy first. It'd be like picking out new curtains for the house you just bought out of state without looking up directions on how to get to said house first. I also don't know who has heard a worst wardrobe throughout their time on the show, Lou or Pete. Pete makes the Gap look cool and Lou appears to be somewhere between 98 and 117 in those hideous sweaters and glasses. I actually think Lou and Pete would get along.
To make matters worse for Peggy and Don, Peggy is put in charge of Don for the Burger Chef account. But hey, as Joan says when the two girls gossip about the men of the office, they weren't thinking about Peggy when they made that decision. They wanted to make an example of Don, they wanted to keep Don down and that's about it. At no point did they consider the emotional toil that would come for Peggy with the inevitable insubordination that would stem from Don. I do love the scene when Don finds out that Peggy is overseeing him on this account. Don asks what the strategy is, as if he cares about her answer at all. He also flings what appeared to be his typewriter at the window in vintage angry Don fashion. Could we be foreshadowing Don breaking the company computer somewhere down the line (I also think the scene when Don walked by the computer meant something, referencing the old genus in the company in Don and the new genius in the computer)? I think we might be. Either way, Don doesn't want to work under Peggy, he storms out of their meeting, he confronts Cooper about it, doesn't like what Cooper tells him about working in a dead man's office, storms to Sterling's office, steals vodka, goes back to his office and gets hammered. If you haven't seen some sequence of these events on a Mad Men episode before, then you're new to the "BALLGAME".
So Don is drunk, Peggy is pissed off and feeling undermined (which she is, but she doesn't need to constantly sulk about everything in her life) and Ginsberg just wants his damn couch! But there is hope, because Don finds himself on the phone inviting someone to a Mets game. When we discover it is Freddy Rumsen, the tables have turned and now it is up to Freddy to help a drunk Don (flashback to when Freddy pisses himself before a client meeting because he is so drunk and Don fires him). Freddy brings Don home and even gives him some coffee in the morning to help him through his hangover. Perhaps the greatest line of this season comes from Freddy, who also opened the season with his great pitch that Don wrote him for that watch. "Just do the work". Freddy encourages Don by telling him that he was given a second chance and that he shouldn't waste it, but thrive on it. DO the freaking work, Don. Don't be an idiot, don't be a drunk, don't be me. I love Freddy! And apparently, so does Don, because it takes a lot for Don to take the advice from someone. But he does just that, as he sobers himself up, cleans himself up, and goes into work to begin working on those tags with the Don Draper smile that we all know and love and hate. Is this the beginning of a new Don Draper? I wouldn't go that far, as it seems that any time Don makes progress, he matches it with another dramatic failure. I would expect that dramatic failure in next week's episode because thats what Mad Men has programmed for us. Don Draper growth is short lived and followed by chaos. But I bet those 25 tag lines wind up pretty good!
The other major story of this week's episode is the relationship between Roger and Margaret (excuse me, Marigold), and really, Mona as well. Margaret has left her husband and her son for what seems to be some "cult" as Mona describes it, and she wants to go save her from it. When they finally go to see what this commune is all about, of course Roger isn't as hard pressed to force her to leave. Its full of hippies, drugs and drugs. Roger is the most open minded character on this show, and Mona is the only one talking to Margaret, who now goes by Marigold in this commune, about taking on her responsibility as a mother and coming home. Margaret won't listen though. Roger tells an upset Mona to go home and leave him behind to try and talk her out of this his way, which Mona assumes will be his business talk. "Talk to her like a client", she barks at him, lights a cigarette and drives off. So Roger stays, peels some potatoes and smokes some doobie before calling it a day. He sleeps on what seems to be a haystack staring up at the clear sky next to his daughter, bonding with her for the first time since the first season, really. He kisses her on the forehead, not once mentioning that she should leave this life behind, and goes to sleep. Everything seems just peachy until a drugged up, horny hippy pulls Margaret away to go make sexy time, much to Roger's dismay. The next morning, he confronts her and tells her to "man up" and go home to be a mother to her son. This doesn't go over so smoothly once she accuses Roger of never being there for her, being a horrible father who never showed her love and always did what he wanted. It is almost hard to watch when he picks her up and they fall into the mud. It is even harder to watch as Roger hears the stinging words of his daughter, which he knows are all too true, and starts walking away, head facing the ground. Roger failed as a dad, and he had a second chance with his son with Joan, but at the same time, he didn't. He hates that his daughter is making the same poor decisions that he has made, much like Don doesn't want for Sally what he has done. But its different with Roger. Sterling as always been self-absorbed, foolish and provocative. Now, his daughter is all three of those things as well. She is exploring her sexual soul and she has put all of her responsibilities on the back burner, and he can't do anything about it without being a hypocrite. And he knows it.
So what's to come for these folks? Well, there is only three episodes left in this season, but this episode actually had the feeling of a finale. Don typing away at his typewriter while a computer sits in the room he used to thrive in, Roger walking away from his failed relationship with another family member, and the office thriving while falling apart at its seems all at the same time. Will Don do the work? Or will the work of being the broken man that he doesn't love do Don?
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