The Mad Men Thread

[Guest mr. potato head]

This really isn't a great show to discuss week-by-week, is it?

Another good episode though. Character universe is in danger of getting large and unwieldy but so far it seems manageable.

[Froot Loop]

I really liked the Michael Ginsberg character so it'll be cool to see how he develops. I think Mad Men has introduced a few interesting characters, featured them enough to get us interested and then never showed them again so I hope that doesn't happen to him.

I'm finding the time jump quite disorientating with the younger characters - Harry and Pete especially. Harry's despondency when he was in the car with Don (was he eating mini-burgers?) was quite shocking.

[GoGo Yubari]

Is it? He's been kind of palpably pathetic for a while now (like last season finale when he was desperately hitting on the friend of Peggy's who was a secretary and being all "you know, you could be a model"). I'm not quite sure when that switch was flipped outright with Harry, though.

The Don/Harry plotline was my favorite, but I thought they used Betty well too. She was a lot more interesting this week than she was for all of season four.

[Froot Loop]

Harry's always been a bit awkward with women but this was the first time I thought, "Wow, here's a guy who is really unhappy with his life and he knows it."

Peggy, as always, totally stole the episiode for me. Her reaction to Michael during the first interview and then after seeing Don was awesome. Loved her reaction to Michael's portfolio when she was talking to Stan. I think she's grown and changed palpably between the time lapse as well, while some of the others haven't matured and evolved as well.

I don't know how we're dealing with spoilers here, so I'll put my Betty chat in tags:

I didn't mind the focus on her during the show and I found the tea leaves response quite moving. I still find it difficult to connect with Betty as a character though and it's even more difficult when I'm supposed to muster sympathy for her because she's a bit podgy.

[Mofoticon]

So

Remember that time Don killed Shelly Johnson?

Very good episode though, very glad to see the developments with Joan, finally.

Edited April 9, 2012 by Mofoticon

[GoGo Yubari]

I didn't like the Don stuff because I felt it was a little too on-the-nose. I knew it was a dream sequence from the moment Andrea came back and it was kind of an obvious metaphor.

But hey, last night's episode had this;

So it's all good.

[Guest mr. potato head]

The dream sequence was a little heavy-handed, but I think it was necessary to show people like me that Don still has plenty of room to fall past what we saw last season.

Really enjoyed the episode, even if there was barely any Pete or Roger or Betty or Henry and no Harry or Lane or Cooper (hmm, no wonder it felt a bit more leisurely than normal). Peggy was quite excellent, though I really hope they follow up on the Mohawk stuff because if they don't then it was just a blatant contrivance to get Peggy to work late, which is more telegraphed than Mad Men usually is. Enjoyed the Sally/Paulina stuff more than any Sally plot ever, I think. A little surprised Paulina's such a bad model of parenting (though not as bad as Betty) given how relatively OK Henry seems to have turned out. Ginsberg was his enjoyably erratic self and Ken remains an excellent straight man. Joan and Greg stuff was good too. I've never liked Greg (and I don't mean in the way we're supposed to not like Greg) so anything that gets him off the screen is excellent. Joan's mom is hilarious.

[Froot Loop]

Just saw the ep, almost spoiled it for myself on here >_<

I really liked the Ken bit in the bar as well, it's a nice reminder that the character's there and he is awesome. Peggy again

I thought the Joan bit was a bit heavy-handed. The whole "You know what I'm talking about" when she was ending things with Greg and the shot that ended the episode with her, Kevin and her Mum was a bit obvious.

[GoGo Yubari]

Yeah, I don't think they needed to reference the rape scene that directly. It's not like that one scene didn't become synonymous with Greg's character for the rest of his run on the show.

[Mofoticon]

Pete finally gets whats coming to him...thank you Lane!

[GoGo Yubari]

I'm pretty sure a good deal of Mad Men's audience has been waiting almost five years to see that happen.

They sort of went all-out in making Pete as loathsome as possible leading up to it with the sudden revelation that he's lapsed into adultery now on top of generally being an arrogant little shit, but it serves as an interesting contrast to Don that basically every married man in this episode except he and Ken (who is just as private and removed from social drama) cheated on their wives. Pete's become a cheap imitation of Don in season one and Don is trying to become a new man entirely.

Also, I love that the show briefly revisited one of the most interesting minor relationships it has with Ken and Peggy. I'm not sure if I can recall "the pact" being mentioned before but it makes sense, since Ken was the first of the younger Sterling-Cooper employees to accept Peggy and realize her talent.

EDIT: THERE'S A GIF OF IT NOW.

[zero]

Last night's Mad Men may have been my favorite episode yet. Everything about it was perfect.

[Guest mr. potato head]

I don't know if I'd go that far. I'm not a fan of when the show tries to add history to eras that took place since the show began. To wit, Ken and Peggy's pact would have been created at some point in the first couple seasons, but the first we heard about it was last night. That's a minus to me.

Really, really good episode though. Best of the season so far. Possibly in part because of the lack of Betty.

[TheSqauredCircleMessiah]

It was really good, but I'd say any Dick Whittman episode tops anything in the series run.

It pays off to this sense of Pete Campbell has wanted since the day he walked into Sterling Cooper in 1960. He always wanted the idealistic life Don Draper had back in season 1. The big(ger) office, the title, the partnership, the respect of his colleagues, the beautiful wife and daughter. House in the suburbs. He's only more miserable than Don ever was because Don knew he was living a lie. Don always knew that those things were something you had to have to fit in with the Roger Sterling's of the world. Only Roger and now his younger version, Pete, never know that stuff wont make you really happen.

Would it surprise anybody to find out that Roger Sterling is actually Pete Campbell's father?

Don, on his second wife lost all that status and seems finally being able to live as Don Draper and not Dick Whittman in hiding. That scene at the bar in the whorehouse was simply "Don being Don" and we haven't seen that stuff in a while.

[Froot Loop]

There was some funky editing in this episode that seemed kind of 'clunky' at points. The transition mirroring Ken leaving Peggy's office and Roger entering Lane's, Pete's face in the office to the driving class and the fade thing at the end. I can't decide about the symmetry of the dripping tap noise at the end - it was either forced and artificial or a nice way to round off the episode.

I thought the dinner scene was really fun and genuine. It seemed like everyone was interested with each other and at ease. I was quite disappointed when Pete cheated, I was hoping that could be the status quo for a while.

Definitely my favourite episode so far. I totally agree with the sentiment of seeing more Ken and Peggy (I don't remember anything about the pact either.)

[Jimmy]

Fantastic episode, I was laughing all the way through. I was saying the other day that, while I was really glad to have it back, it hadn't quite gripped me yet like past seasons - but I thought this episode was perfect. Some really interest parallels between Pete and Don, and I thought the Ken stuff was very comeplling. More like that please.

[GoGo Yubari]

Holy fuck, what an awesome episode. It's always weird seeing Mad Men suddenly break from its usual format for an almost anthology-ish episode like this, but it paid off huge. My favorite of the three stories was by far the Roger one; it was so nice seeing Peyton List get to do more than bicker, though I suspect/fear this will be her final episode of the series, and it used maybe my favorite Beach Boys song to glorious effect.

And I like that basically once every other season we get a scene where you remember why Bert Cooper got to a position of power. It wasn't as amazing a smackdown as "Mr. Campbell, who cares?" in season one or "would you say I know something about you, Don?" in season three, but in one short exchange the show illuminated why Bert Cooper inevitably came back after "quitting" last season. He has nowhere else that he wants to be or can be, Sterling Cooper is his life.

[Guest mr. potato head]

Definitely a good episode, I suspect I'll like it more if I ever rewatch it - I think I was hampered by not figuring out the format of the episode until Don's story began, so I was confused just how much Peggy was imagining and how much was real, even with the Roger/Jane stuff (though tripped-out Roger's musical bottle of booze was awesome). Looks like just about everybody's moved into a pretty dark place (except for Cooper, who, yes GoGo, is awesome), and they wouldn't be doing that without a plan, so I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

[AnnIQ Edison]

Definitely a good episode, I suspect I'll like it more if I ever rewatch it - I think I was hampered by not figuring out the format of the episode until Don's story began, so I was confused just how much Peggy was imagining and how much was real, even with the Roger/Jane stuff (though tripped-out Roger's musical bottle of booze was awesome). Looks like just about everybody's moved into a pretty dark place (except for Cooper, who, yes GoGo, is awesome), and they wouldn't be doing that without a plan, so I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Was she imagining anything in the episode? I didn't pick up on that at all. My view was that she is slowly devolving from the "perfect" girl of season one into one of the boys now. It's like watching a non married version of Campbell's storyline.

[TheSqauredCircleMessiah]

Definitely a good episode, I suspect I'll like it more if I ever rewatch it - I think I was hampered by not figuring out the format of the episode until Don's story began, so I was confused just how much Peggy was imagining and how much was real, even with the Roger/Jane stuff (though tripped-out Roger's musical bottle of booze was awesome). Looks like just about everybody's moved into a pretty dark place (except for Cooper, who, yes GoGo, is awesome), and they wouldn't be doing that without a plan, so I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Was she imagining anything in the episode? I didn't pick up on that at all. My view was that she is slowly devolving from the "perfect" girl of season one into one of the boys now. It's like watching a non married version of Campbell's storyline.

I didn't pick up on that at all. She was just high and didn't give a fuck so she gave a stranger an old fashioned at the movies.

The story-telling was really, really good. I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't notice they were telling parallel stories until the third act. I'm not sure Mad Men has ever done that. This season may have avoided the hiatus jetlag I had feared and may end up being the best of the 5.