Mad Men -- Everybody's Lookin' Out for Number One

*Warning: Spoilers ahead from the latest episode of Mad Men.*

"You are not loyal. You only think about yourself." -- Peggy Olson to Roger Sterling after Roger gave a new copywriter extra work (and cash) instead of asking Peggy.

Everybody's got an agenda, and it's all about benefiting the person they see in the mirror every day.

Betty, who doesn't seem to want what she has but wants what she can't have (food, Don's affection/respect/confidences), wants to make Don and Megan miserable so she'll feel better about herself, particularly after getting a glimpse of the slender Megan when she was getting dressed.

Don, who hasn't been exercising his creative muscles lately, wants to best an up-and-coming copywriter so he'll feel better about himself and doesn't play fair when he uses his seniority to trump the guy.

Pete -- who, like Betty, doesn't want his life or his spouse -- daydreams about sexy dalliances with a woman who's married to the guy with whom he commutes to work every morning. That's when he wasn't off trying to promote himself and only himself, excluding other members of his firm . . . only to fail miserably in his public relations efforts. (Have I mentioned how much I hate Pete Campbell? Snake.)

Roger, who ditched the loyal mother of his first child for a younger wife who he also dumped after he grew bored with her too, wants to sully Jane's new digs so he'd be the first man to have her in her apartment even though Jane expressly said she wanted a fresh break from him, after she extracted a bribe from him in exchange for accompanying him to work dinner.

Everybody's a selfish git in this episode, scheming and maneuvering about how to handle situations in ways which are beneficial to themselves. Even characters who have always been selfish -- Don, Roger, Pete -- demonstrated a little extra self-absorption at the expense of others in their workplace with Don smacking down an employee whose efforts could help Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's bottom line, Roger blowing off Peggy who'd helped him in a pinch and Pete who was only looking out for himself and not his ad agency when he made his bid for New York Times publicity.

The cruelty we saw that was personal in nature was rooted in each character's insecurities. Betty, unhappily overweight, wanted to hurt Don and his thin trophy wife by not only trying to wreck Megan's warm relationship with Sally, but by telling Sally about Anna Draper, hoping to damage Sally's relationship with her father. Roger, who didn't like the notion of being replaced in Jane's bed by the twentysomething son of a client, wanted to wreck Jane's fresh start. Megan's friend Julia, who was trying out for a role that Megan said was fairly lousy, lashed out at Megan for being freed from having to audition for crappy scripts because she sits on an affluent "throne" courtesy of her husband's money.

Nobody seems happy with anybody. Nobody seems nice to anyone else, except for Henry, who chose not to tell his weight watching wife that he was starving after all the low-calorie dinners and fried up his own steak in the middle of the night, hoping she wouldn't notice. (Henry already demonstrated his insecurities earlier this season when he didn't tell Betty that Don had called to inquire about her health after she feared she had cancer.)

By the way, what is up with Megan being barefoot all the time? Is this supposed to represent a new, freer, youthful, late 1960s kinda vibe? It certainly contrasted with Betty who showed up in Don's apartment looking like the 1960s housewife she is.

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

Mad Men -- The Episode About Betty Getting Fat

*Warning, spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Mad Men.*

Last week, it was Megan's foxy little "Zou Bisou Bisou" song and dance, where she flashed ample thigh to Don while his colleagues looked on in astonishment, that caught everyone's attention. This week, Betty made her first season five appearance and viewers were, um, gobsmacked to see the transformation she'd undergone, eating her unhappy self into oblivion. (That was a genius way to deal with January Jones' real life pregnancy. Much better than a laundry basket propped up in front of her belly.)

Remember back in season one, when Peggy began to put on weight everywhere, including on her face and neck? Before it was revealed that she was pregnant (and unwilling to admit to herself that she was with child), people suggested that perhaps Peggy was purposefully getting bigger in an attempt to ward off sexual overtures from the Sterling Cooper neanderthals. She wanted them to see her as a copywriter, not an object of affection, or so the argument went.

Well Betty now seems to be doing exactly what folks thought Peggy was doing, putting pounds of flesh between herself and sex, specifically her husband Henry, to keep him away from her. Now I've always had a soft spot for Betty, her feelings about being confined in a gilded cage with a duplicitous, cheating husband and her struggles with the fears her mother instilled in her about becoming "stout." Even though she was depicted as cold and cruel last season, I still had sympathy for her.

But there was something a bit creepy about the way Betty's weight gain was handled. It was treated in a fetish-y fashion, from the scene of Betty's kids trying to unsuccessfully zip her into her dress, to the unnecessarily exploitative shot from behind when she was getting out of the tub. It's one thing to explore Betty's emotional issues, how she's dissatisfied with her life, so unhappy that she became overweight, that what she feared the most when she was younger -- gaining weight -- had occurred, with making a spectacle out of her body, the way in which Megan did by design with her performance. We can all see that she put on weight. We get it. The show's writers didn't need to make the point over and over and over again with visuals that don't seem to elucidate as much as they do exploit, as the internet is doing in the aftermath of the "Tea Leaves" episode.

The wrinkle in all of this was the specter of cancer, the possibility that the growth that was found on her thyroid was malignant. This brought to the surface Don and Betty's emotional connections, which still exist despite the extreme acrimony they've experienced as Don fretted over his potentially motherless children, admitting that Megan was no substitute. (There are mommy issues galore in this show.) It was particularly interesting that when Betty was afraid for her life, she sought out Don for comfort -- and his hollow "Everything's going to be okay" motto -- and Henry, who remains threatened by Don, didn't like it one bit.

Meanwhile, Megan was parading around in a bikini top and trying to get Don to come to a gathering with her twentysomething pals, with whom and from whom Don feels a generational disconnect. Seeing Don look "so square" that he "had corners," as Megan said, at the Rolling Stones concert amid all those teen fans, Don seemed even more out of place in his own skin, realizing that he wasn't "it," upstart young man any more. (Ironically, in season two, Don chastised Betty as "desperate" for wearing a bikini.) How times have changed.

What did you think of this episode?

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.