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.

'Mad Men:' The Summer Man (Otherwise Known as Don's Turning a Corner)

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

“People tell you who they are but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”

“When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him . . . If you listen, he’ll tell you how he got there.”

– Don Draper writing in his journal

Did you hear that? That was the sound of Don Draper bouncing off of rock bottom and starting to rebuild his shattered life. He’s finally coming up for air.

In “The Summer Man,” Don started to cut back on the drinking, began swimming (though he wheezes with smoker’s cough) and is dating as opposed to sleeping with escorts for whose sexual services he paid. He actually sent his secretary BACK to the store to RETURN liquor. When he was in a moment of stress, instead of reaching for the bottle as his instincts told him to do, he asked for coffee. He’s trying in earnest to, as he put it, “gain a modicum of control over the way I feel. I want to wake up. I don’t want to be that man.”

And Don is keeping a diary, something that requires him to have to examine his days, his thoughts, and actually survey what’s become of his life. He knows it’s not pretty. Through the beautifully lyrical voice-overs of Don reading aloud his journal entries – where we learned that Don didn’t finish high school and said if he had “everything could’ve been different” – we hear Don’s inner monologue for the first time, getting a glimpse into not just what he’s doing in his private moments, but what he’s thinking and feeling, something I think he never even really wanted to do before this because those feelings were just too scary.

As Don sat down to watch the news while eating Dinty Moore beef stew and drinking a can of Bud (NOT his preferred amber colored liquid), Don didn’t look like the sad sack who, in previous episodes this season, would come home from work, pointedly refuse to eat anything, grab a glass filled with liquor and eventually pass out on the couch. To see Don sitting at a table and eating is a sign that he cares about his physical health. While he chronicles his thoughts, he’s dealing with his mental and emotional health by working through issues like this one: “Sunday is Gene’s birthday party. I know I can’t go. I keep thinking about him. He was conceived in a moment of desperation and born into a mess.”

While Don obviously still aches to be part of his family again, I was pleased to see in this episode that though he had another date with Bethany, he realized she’s not a good match for him. (That crack from her about being in “different generations” and that she needed more from Don, and his response, “We are from different generations because I don’t remember women pushing this hard,” was a gigantic red flag.)

Bethany is simply a younger, naïve Betty, a replacement Betty, Don repeating past mistakes. Nothing made that clearer than to have the two of them, Betty and Bethany, in the same restaurant, wearing similarly colored dresses and blond hair in an updo, and to watch Don squirm as he was put into a corner about why he hasn’t called Bethany more often and about why he seems unknowable to Bethany, something Betty also complained about. “Don’t you want to be close with anyone?” Bethany asked, while desperately asking for more “intense, prolonged contact” with Don.

By contrast, Don’s behavior with Faye when they went on their date – after which he declined to physically go further than necking in the cab, unlike what he allowed Bethany to do to him in the cab – was starkly different. Faye reminds me of Rachel Mencken, a smart, educated businesswoman who exudes confidence and who is in control of her own life. With Rachel, Don opened up a bit, revealed himself to her, like sharing a story about his mother in a way he’d never done with Betty, at least not willingly. While speaking with Faye, he voluntarily “took off” his emotional coat and gave it to her by mentioning how he wasn’t welcome at Gene’s party, how Gene thinks Henry’s his father, again, something he would've never done with Bethany who remarked that every date with Don seemed like a first one because she didn’t know him at all.

The Joan-Joey-Peggy storyline was challenging to watch as Joan was mercilessly sexually harassed by Joey, aided and abetted by mooner Stan, as the impudent Joey reeled off these lines to and about Joan:

“The big Ragu . . . she’s an overblown secretary.” (Said to Peggy.)

“What do you do around here besides walking around like you’re trying to get raped?” (Said to Joan after she said his behavior won’t be “tolerated here.”)

“You’re not some young girl off the bus. I don’t need some madam from a Shanghai whorehouse to show me the ropes.” (To Joan.)

Joey targeting Joan for his barrage of insults and ongoing, unrepentant, sexually hostile disrespect, and Joan’s angry response toward Peggy served to illustrate the different places Joan and Peggy are in.

Joan is of old school thinking. She went to Don, then to Lane, hoping they'd just take care of the problem for her. She didn't say directly what happened to her and she veiled her issues under the weak heading of “there have been complaints” so that it didn’t appear as though she was the only one having problems with Joey. She thought her indirect methods were best, however they’re not getting the job done, not anymore.

Peggy’s way -- directness, no BS, taking on Stan’s baloney – is the one that is commanding respect in the workplace. With Don urging Peggy to seize the power (“I wouldn’t tolerate that if I were you . . . You want some respect, go out there and get it for yourself.”), Peggy did just that by firing the little pissant who posted the obscene cartoon of Joan on her office window and idiotically wised off to Peggy when she called him on it. To Joan -- who only feels empowered and comfortable in taking on other women and who clearly wanted Don to swoop in and rescue her from Joey’s nonsense -- found Peggy’s decisiveness extremely threatening, which is why I think she was so nasty to Peggy in the elevator, because Joan had lost her power while Peggy had gained it.

Oh . . . on the scenes of Betty -- who mistakenly believes Don is “living the life” -- where she fled to the restaurant bathroom after seeing Don on a date with her younger doppelganger and became very, very upset (smoking up a storm, sweating, dropping her purse), coupled with the longing gaze she directed at Don when he appeared at Gene’s birthday party (to which he was not invited courtesy of the increasingly angry Henry Francis, who intentionally crushed Don’s boxes in the garage and suggested to Betty that they’d rushed into their marriage . . . ya think?!), those were also big, stinkin’ red flags.

And hearing the Rolling Stones on Mad Men -- the show I associate with fedoras and women in big skirts – was jarring. But obviously, the times, styles and social mores were in a state of flux and folks could either get on board or let them, like that younger swimmer in the pool whom Don wanted to beat to the wall, pass people by.

What did you think of “The Summer Man?” Of Don’s dealings with Bethany and Faye? Of the Joan-Peggy-Joey situation? The “we have everything including pent-up anger” Francis family? Anyone hear echoes from the "Marriage of Figaro" episode in season one?

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

'Mad Men' -- The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

*Warning – Spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Mad Men.*

After this episode concluded, the first thing I asked my husband, with whom I was watching it, was, “What would we do if we walked in on that?” That, of course, was the most shocking scene of the episode (other than Betty’s face-slapping of Sally after the 10-year-old had impulsively cut her hair), the one where Sally acted like a normal, curious kid, except that she picked the wrong venue in which she should've, shall we say, explored.

What happened next was an unfortunate overreaction on the part of Sally’s friend’s mother: Bringing Sally home and shaming her, but I suppose that’s probably what would’ve happened in 1965. (Betty then storming into Sally's room and threatening to cut Sally’s fingers off as the penalty for lying and for her "transgression" . . . Mother. Of. The. Freakin'. Year.)

Betty is becoming so harsh in her treatment of Sally that it's growing more difficult to sit through these mother-daughter scenes, particularly when Betty thinks that everything Sally does is in some way directed at her, as opposed to Sally's way of crying out for help. Sally’s humanity, her imperfections, seem to gall Betty, like they're an affront to Betty's vision of the perfect suburban family and must be eliminated, or ignored, no matter the cost. So cold is Betty toward Sally that she didn’t even accompany Sally to the psychiatrist’s office; she had Carla bring her instead. (As Dr. Edna said, I think it’s Betty who needs the therapy more than Sally.)

Sally has been practically invisible to Betty for so long. Sure, Betty was able to tell the child psychologist that Sally took the death of her grandfather especially hard, but Betty never really helped Sally get through all of that grief. Weeks later, when Sally's little brother was born and there was that whole naming-the-baby-Gene-and-sleeping-in-dead-Grandpa Gene’s-room which thoroughly freaked Sally out, Betty was largely oblivious to her daughter’s pain.

To lighten up the mood last night, I enjoyed the delightfully caper-ish storyline where the folks from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce completely played the rival advertising agency that’s been snapping up some of SCDP’s accounts, making the competition think that SCDP was cutting a high-priced TV ad for the Honda pitch. Notwithstanding Roger’s attempts to fatally sabotage the Honda account – because he fought the Japanese in World War II and still considered them the enemy – SCDP’s subterfuge and appeal to the Honda people’s code of honor won out in the end. Though SCDP didn't get the account, at least Don got the competition to shell out major bucks to try to win it, hobbling their future ability to make pitches for other clients.

Over the course of the past two episodes, is it possible that Don’s confrontation with Allison in “The Rejected” -- where Allison quit and called Don a mean person – was a catalyst of sorts to get him to right his ship and (hopefully) put an end to the sad, mean, drunken divorce guy who pays for sex routine? He hasn't seemed his old charming, dapper self in quite some time. (In last night's episode, he was, once again, seeing Bethany, who’s potentially a mate, not just a bed partner, though I still think she’s a younger version of Betty.)Throw in the surprisingly open chat Don had with Faye in the break room, where he uttered a massive understatement (“It is not going well.”) and confessed that his daughter was going to start seeing a psychiatrist and that he misses his children when they’re not around and yet when he drops them off at his old house he's relieved, and I'm wondering if we're seeing Don gradually turn the corner.

A moment of levity from last week: Seeing Peggy’s head appear in the glass part of the wall between her office and Don's, peering into the room to see what was going on after Allison heaved a paperweight at Don and broke some glass made me laugh out loud.

Another observation from last week: The way in which the news of Trudy’s pregnancy played out between Pete and Peggy was delicate and awkward and real as they silently acknowledged that this won’t be Pete’s first child. That look they exchanged at the end of the episode . . . priceless.

Speaking of Peggy, that Life Magazine gal who invited Peggy to the party, Joyce . . . that situation didn’t go the way that I expected. I was greatly impressed that Peggy didn’t flip out over Joyce’s sexual overture like the way Joan did with her roommate in season one. But then again, most of these episodes have been surprising me lately. I never know what to expect, anything from Lane Pryce wearing a steak belt buckle and heckling a movie, to Roger Sterling playing Santa Claus and Betty's house getting trashed in a home invasion.

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

'Mad Men' -- Signs of Strain in Betty's New Marriage?

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

While Don Draper stewed in what used to be his living room, sitting on what used to be his sofa, waiting in the dark for the woman who used to be his wife to return home with her new husband – she was late, intentionally, it appears – after he’d put his and her children to bed, Don informed his ex that she and her new spouse had to vacate the house immediately, per their divorce agreement.

When the new hubby, Henry Francis said that their living in the house was temporarily, Don responded, “Believe me Henry, everyone thinks this is temporary.”

The bloom appears to be off the rose when it comes to “newlyweds” Betty and Henry Francis. During the season four premiere, "Public Relations," Henry was seen grimacing as Betty reprimanded Sally and shoved sweet potato into her mouth during Thanksgiving dinner at Henry's mother's house. Later that night, he gently rebuffed Betty’s physical advances in bed, then they heard Sally fumbling in the hallway as she was trying to call Don on the phone.

The one time we saw glimmers of the season three Henry -- the white knight who was going to rescue Betty, take care of her, not take anything from Don, not owe him a thing -- was right after Don had picked up Bobby and Sally. Henry, who’s now the man of that house having “bested” the handsome Don, made the moves on Betty in the front seat of the car while it was parked in the garage, as, some commentators have noted, he did when he was courting her the previous year.

Throw in the fact that Henry seems cowed by his mother, who loathes Betty and disapproves of the marriage (asking him how he can “live in that man’s dirt?”), and I’m surprised by how fast things appear to have gone from promising to not so great. They haven’t even been married a year yet.

Meanwhile, Don's blind date with a younger version of his ex-wife -- whose name even sounded similar to Betty’s (Bethany) -- makes one wonder if Don would ever attempt to woo Betty back, or whether he’s just floundering around trying to figure out how to get back to where he was, a success at work and a success at home. I just hope that he seeks out a partner who's intelligent and insightful and not just young, blond, arm candy.

By the way, was it just me, or did Betty seem to dress -- hair and clothing-wise -- much older than she's seemed in previous seasons? She looked almost matronly to me, which was quite a stark contrast to her get-up in the "Souvenir" episode last season in Italy.

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

'Mad Men:' Public Relations (Season Premiere)

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

Who is Don Draper? Someone who was almost unrecognizable during the season four premiere of Mad Men.

His confidence in everything appeared to have been shaken: Don screwed up an interview with a reporter from Advertising Age, that was meant to promote Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, by refusing to say much of anything at all. He appeared to be flailing around in the sleek, glass-walled confines of SCDP as the face of an underdog firm with money issues and no conference table. He hasn’t been eating, according to his housekeeper. He was being set up on dates by, of all people, Jane Sterling and even got shot down (as far as walking her up to her apartment) by her young friend in a cab at the end of their date. And, most shocking, Don has been hiring a woman to have sex with him and repeatedly slap him in the face, because, apparently, he’s been a very bad boy and deserves to be punished.

Don Draper is now into being dominated? (Don, the child of a prostitute who was nicknamed “the whore child,” wanted to be slapped around by a call girl? Freud would have a field day.)

It seems as though his postcard-perfect (on the outside) family, with wife, kids and the house in the ‘burbs, really was important to him after all – though he realized it too late – and he now knows, deep in his core, that his deceitful and duplicitous ways are responsible for that. No more trying to shift blame onto Betty. When the episode began, Don was still allowing Betty and Henry to live in the Ossining house for which he was paying the mortgage (so much for Henry saying he didn’t want Betty to owe Don anything) even though the divorce agreement says they were supposed to have moved out a month ago.

I literally was dumb-founded watching this version of Don Draper walk around, lonely and disconnected. He was almost like a foreign character who I didn’t recognize, save for Jon Hamm’s face. Even in the first three seasons of Mad Men, when Don had tremendous difficulty allowing people to capture a glimpse of his true feelings (Midge, Rachel, even, to some extent, Miss Farrell got to see them), he wasn’t THIS inaccessible, just going through the motions of life. Observing a depressed Don Draper was disorienting. It made everything, from SCDP to his dark apartment, feel unstable, different.

Was this dour episode – where the fit he threw over Jantzen’s two-piece bathing suit campaign that his clients rejected – the catalyst for Don to finally say, “Enough of the self-flagellation?” For him to evolve? The Wall Street Journal interview, where he promoted himself with vigor, seemed like a turning point.

Meanwhile, I loved – LOVED! – what a year has done to bolster Peggy’s confidence so much so that not only would she pull a caper like hiring two actresses to stage a faux fight (which evolved into a real one that necessitated bail) over ham so that they wouldn’t lose their account without consulting Don, but Peggy was willing to talk back to Don as good as she got. When Don was feeling extremely down, he tried, as he has in the past, to direct some of his ugly hurt onto Peggy, but this time, Peggy was having none of it. It was a glorious site to behold.

By the way . . . Joan in her own office, a vision.

As for Betty and Henry, all I can say is . . . ick. The two of them, together, have zero chemistry, and are extremely unsettling to watch, particularly under the attentive eyes of Henry’s calloused mother who later referred to Betty as a “silly woman” and chastised Henry for “living in that man’s dirt.” (“Silly,” maybe so, that sweet potato/pinching incident was embarrassing. But “dirt?” No.)

What did you think of the season premiere? Of sad Don? Of Betty and Henry?