Don Draper meets a new friend. (Courtesy AMCtv)
Friends, I've seen some messed-up stuff on television in the past week:
a Scandal finale with a jaw-dropper of a last line;
leeches employed on Game of Thrones in surprising ways;
Prince reinterpreting "Let's Go Crazy" as a Hendrix-era jam;
a stunner of a Phillies comeback.
All of that, I can explain. Last night's Mad Men, not so much. Whether this all-drug Mad Men represented a giant Vietnam metaphor or a post-RFK fugue, or something else, it didn't quite work for me. Zoller Seitz:
More so than any Mad Men episode I can recall, it doesn’t quite feel like a Mad Men episode, but a bunch of half-formed ideas for a Mad Men episode; I bet if you totaled them up you’d have six-hundred-and-sixty-six ideas, pace Stan, inadvertently name-checking the number of the Beast. Some of the ideas are great, others stunningly bad; still others don’t quite feel like ideas, even if you squint. It feels like the TV-drama version of one of those papers that every halfway-smart student writes when they’re exhausted and can’t come up with an idea, and decides to write about their inability to come up with an idea instead, and hope they’ll be so clever that they’ll get an A anyway. That might be the whole point of this episode, but is it a point worth spending an episode to make? “If this strategy is successful, it’s way bigger than a car! It’s everything!” Don barks, playing the role of Brilliant Idea Man while Peggy stares at him blankly, as tired of his b.s. as we are.
The episode constituted a weird cheat: by writing out Joan and Pete from the episode for no real reason, the show eliminated the two characters who, had they been there, never would have put up with this nonsense. Frankly, I've had enough with the flashbacks to Li'l Dick Whitman and the whorehouse, and enough with
Mad Men's racial problem:
Remember when Roger and Joan got mugged and the mugger was black? Or when Dawn Chambers helped someone clock out early? Or Carla the maid gets fired by Betty, meaning that Don had to take Megan on vacation as a nanny? Or “the biggest, blackest prostitute you’ve ever seen” from two weeks ago?... Grandma Ida bugged the holy hell out of me not simply because she’s a black criminal—although a rich-looking white woman burglar would have been way creepier. It bugs me because her appearance underscores that the portrait of this world is incomplete. So why make her black at all? Why tease us with skin color, as if this great simmering issue will finally be addressed, only to retreat again? Why is this great and lingering theme in American culture not addressed as fully as the show addresses, say, capitalism, or gender?
I appreciated the audacity of this episode. I'd rather that shows experiment, dare, and fail than stick within a formulaic rut. But if the question is whether I
enjoyed this episode, or feel confident about where this is going? Nope, sorry, this did not work for me—though I did appreciate
Ken Cosgrove's dancing.