Peggy takes a big step towards becoming Don by deciding to screw over Stan Rizzo for the Heinz Ketchup account.
One of Mad Men’s greatest flaws– an unfortunate part of its creative hardwiring since the beginning– is its inability to foreshadow without oscillating wildly between extremities.
Sometimes show-creator Matthew Weiner will treat us like fools and drop a big, laughably obvious hint about the direction of the upcoming episodes (death was interweaved everywhere in Season 5 leading to Lane’s suicide). In direct contrast, sometimes he’ll be overly cryptic, giving us nothing to chew on beyond a sullen Don Draper staring into the wilderness lurking just off-camera.
This week’s episode “The Collaborators” was sub-par compared to the pensive, brilliantly understated season premiere, despite containing all the elements of a classic Mad Men episode: a savvy Don Draper anti-pitch, Peggy and Stan yukking it up on the phone, and the return of promiscuous Pete and the continuation of promiscuous Don. Where it fails ultimately can be linked back to its frustrating inability to suggest things about the direction of the show without revealing too much or too little. Here, it’s mostly too little.
Closure is, in fact, hinted at. Knowing our impulsive, compulsively dishonest characters, though, these are probably just teasers. After Trudy finds out that Pete had sex with one of their neighbors in his Manhattan apartment – this becoming apparent after the woman shows up at the Campbells’ front door with bloody bruises on her face from her jealous husband – she threatens to divorce him and file a restraining order. (We’ll check back on this in a few episodes, where Pete will most likely run back to his fledgling support system once his “affair” leads to more personal discontent with the course of his overall unhappy existence.)
We also learn that Megan had a miscarriage as a result of – supposedly – reckless behavior in Hawaii during the season premiere. But the guilt stems less from losing a child and more from her indifference to the whole situation. In fact, with her budding acting career taking up more time, she’s relieved that she doesn’t have to raise the baby. This new development in their marriage hardly interests Don, though. He comforts her for a few moments after hearing the news, instructs her to go to bed, and then slips back upstairs to be with Sylvia – his new mistress.
In an episode where – like most other Mad Men episodes – dishonesty reigns, it is Peggy who takes a massive step at the very end towards morphing into the cutthroat professional we always thought she – as Don’s protege – would become. Earlier on, we find out that the representative for Heinz beans, a SCDP client since the birth of the business, is fed up with the younger, flashier Heinz ketchup rep who is helping push a product far more successful than beans. Don pledges his loyalty, claiming – by way of a super esoteric Reaganism – that they’ll abstain from working with the ketchup man because sometimes you need to “dance with the one that brung ya.” There you go again, Weiner.
Peggy takes this tip, after Stan tells her about it in a harmless, likely off-record phone conversation, and, via the stern influence of her boss, ends the episode by starting work on a pitch to Heinz.
What bogs down this episode on the whole is the frustratingly retrodden paths that many of the characters seem to be taking. The final shot is of Don, slumped against the wall in the hallway near his apartment door, blindsided by either lust or remorse or a confusing mix of both. We’ve seen this Don before, practically every season in fact. At one point he even tells Sylvia, laced with his trademark nihilism, “You want to feel shitty, right up until the point where I take your dress off. Because I’m going to do that.” The same thing can possibly be said about him – the lingering effects of betraying Betty, Faye, Megan and even the noble Dr. Rosen swimming under his wispy, brown hair. But how can Don, the alpha-male with the impetuous, ceaseless sexual gleam who – something we can now confirm with this episode – grew up as a voyeur in a whore house possibly stop?
To paraphrase Roger at one point, we can choose dishonor or war but we might get war regardless. Dishonor is sidestepping the entropy lurking below the surface and war may suggest facing the realities of life – which actually blare all over this episode in the form of news organizations broadcasting the Tet Offensive tragedy – but in the end, you’ll probably still have to confront the truth.
And whether Weiner wants to stage it with bombast or in quiet, little pieces the foreshadow something greater, everything will come crashing down soon enough.
Tidbits:
-Don’s anti-pitch to the Jaguar people was delicious.
-I’m not sure if Rob said it last week but I’m so glad that Linda Cardellini, as Sylvia, is on Mad Men now. She’s such a brilliant, under-appreciated actress.
-I’ll never quite understand why Weiner decided to paraphrase Reagan here. Was there some commentary regarding it that I didn’t pick up on?
-The striking image of Dr. Rosen on skis in the season premiere still looms large here.
-I’m not sure if Roger was paraphrasing Winston Churchill with his “dishonor or war” discussion but it certainly seemed like it.
-Pete’s sideburns are the most distracting thing on this show
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