Mad Men Thoughts

Warning:  SPOILERS for the latest Mad Men episode.

From Harry and Joan’s spat to Don and Megan’s invitation to become swingers, I have a lot of thoughts on this week’s Mad Men, so what was going to be a quick post got a bit long, but what can you do?

I’ll start with the SCDP vs. CGC (Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough) pitch showdown for Heinz because it was cool to see Peggy against Don (and Don listening through the door as Peggy used his old line on the client).  In a way it was Peggy cheating on Don and it might have been this as much as Megan’s love scene that drove Don to erupt at Megan (reminiscent of when he was mad at Megan when she left SCDP and he took it out on his work wife Peggy at the cool whip tasting).  And I have to give credit where credit is due.  Mrs. and I were talking after the episode and I said something about Peggy winning the account for CGC and Mrs. was like “they didn’t get the account”, and I later found out that Mrs. was correct and that I misunderstood what Teddy told Don.  Ooops.  Well Mrs. got a kick out of me telling her she was right (“can you repeat that one more time?”).  I’ll have to pay better attention so that never happens again.

So anyway lots of infidelity this week (well really every week) – we had Peggy cheating on Don, Don continuing to cheat on Megan, Megan “cheating” on Don in her love scene, Joan’s friend cheating on her husband, Timmy from Heinz hitting the town sans wedding ring, and of course SCDP cheating on beans with ketchup.  And it’s getting really hard to feel sorry for Don at this point.  He’s treating Megan like crap and acting like a hypocrite.  He gets mad at Peggy for doing something he himself would certainly have done (and was doing) by trying to win an account at all costs, and he gets mad at Megan for doing something that he does on a much worse level, since her “cheating” (and I’ll keep putting that in quotes because she didn’t really cheat) was fake and part of her job and done with his knowledge.  And note the similar way that Megan is thrown on the bed in her scene and the way Don throws Sylvia on the bed at her apartment (after giving her the penny – you know, just in case we missed all the prostitution allusions last week).  Don’s going to have to wake up and get himself right because he’s losing (or lost) all redeeming qualities.

Dawn finally gets some quality screen time this week and it’s about time.  I assume this is to help set up the MLK assassination next week (they couldn’t possibly skip over that, right?).  The show needs to give us more of the civil rights action going on, which I think will provide some interesting story lines.  I love that Joan put Dawn in charge of the supply closet and time cards.  She says it's a punishment, but it’s also passing the responsibility, which can only mean good things for Dawn, and hopefully for Joan as well.  She saw that she had to give up the secretarial/office manager duties if she’s ever going to be taken seriously as a partner.

And I guess I should at least mention the Harry and Joan argument.  Harry’s become quite the ass, but he’s both right and wrong here.  Right because he does appear to bring in a lot of business and is responsible at least in part for the company’s success, so he might really deserve to be partner (his personality notwithstanding).  But he’s wrong in that while Joan sleeping with the Jaguar guy was not the most moral or ethical way to become partner, she was a vital part of the organization prior to that and worked hard and was responsible for a lot of the firm’s success as well.  A partnership might really have been merited even if it wouldn’t have happened without the jerk from Jaguar.  And for some more parallels, I like how when Don and Megan were asked to join in some group love with her boss (or whatever he was) Megan said no even though she acknowledged this might cause her to lose her part, which contrasts her with Joan who gave in to sleeping with someone to get ahead at her job.

And finally, did I hear right that Ken’s father-in-law went to Notre Dame?  I always knew I liked that guy.