Mad Men -- Chinese Wall (Or, the Ad Agency's in Trouble)

Image credit: AMC

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

These are some dark days for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. After spending the bulk of this season focused on the downward-spiraling Don (who seems on the precipice of a relapse to his bad boy tendencies with the drinking and Alison 2.0), the darkness descended upon the brightly decorated home of the ad upstarts at SCDP.

We knew that Roger losing Lucky Strike was going to rear its head and upend the entire, cozy, complacency at SCDP. (You don’t blow off a multi-million-dollar account like North American Aviation without trying to desperately find another way to save it.) However I didn’t expect the fall-out to hit the fan so soon, thought that maybe Matt Weiner & Co. would hold off on SCDP’s near-end of days until the season finale.

And, while viewers knew that, despite all the hard work Don put into reshaping his life (cutting back on the drinking, dating an appropriate woman for him, journaling and going to the gym), he wasn’t going to be perfect and would likely slip up. I expected Don to mess up a bit in the form of drinking, maybe slack off on going to the gym as he worked longer hours, but I did NOT expect for him to sleep with another secretary, particularly given that he’s in a serious relationship with Faye, even ‘fessed up about his alias. Even though Don did give Megan the once-over at the end of the previous episode, I was surprised that he went there. (It was the same surprise I experienced when he started sleeping with Miss Farrell in season three.)

Has Don learned nothing? Don needs to start journaling again so he can see, in his own handwriting, how history is repeating itself and he’s doing himself no favors. I’m just waiting for the Dick Whitman situation to crop up once more to give Don a swift kick in the pants.

Aside from Don’s shaky foothold on leading a healthy life (emotionally and physically), Roger -- he of the stark white hair and the stark white office featuring a print with a blinding white background populated by little black dots -- found himself in danger of being swallowed up by darkness. He sunk to pathetic depths when he didn't tell his colleagues about Lucky Strike in time for them to do anything about it, and when he stood three feet away from them and lied about speaking on the phone with Lee Garner Jr., dovetailed by his cowardly flight to a Manhattan hotel when he was supposed to be in Raleigh having a face-to-face visit with Lee. After coasting by on his father’s coattails for his entire life -- with the exception of his stint in World War II – Roger now seems to be flailing professionally as well as personally.

He tried, once again, to use Joan as salve to make himself feel better, forgetting (or perhaps completely unaware) that he’d torpedoed any shot at a serious relationship with her with his calloused response to her pregnancy, saying he loved her “maybe” and, the icing on the cake, saying that if she had the baby, it wouldn’t be his. Having destroyed his first marriage with drinking and philandering, Roger’s now destroying his second marriage with the same behavior as he miserably skulked back into his home where his bright as a penny young wife/former secretary was waiting to show him copies of his newly published memoir and to tell him how proud she was. Sullen, Roger chose to not fill her in on the cataclysmic events of the past 24 hours and acted as though everything was fine.

As for Pete, who’d really blame him, the man who covered Don’s rear end in the North American Aviation imbroglio, for fleeing the sinking ship that is SCDP, particularly when he and Trudy just had a child? Watching Don chastise Pete for not being “focused” on the Glo-Coat account while Trudy was in the hospital and then accusing Pete of freaking the clients out (when Don spent the whole day at the hospital when Betty was giving birth to Gene), might’ve been the last straw. Or the 47th.

Peggy, well, I don’t know what to make of her hippie-fueled afterglow being doused by news of Lucky Strike, coupled with her feelings that when something good happens to her, she’s going to be punished for it with something bad. I did love seeing her triumph with the Playtex account despite the fact that the spurned moron Stan failed to tell her that she had lipstick on her teeth . . . which kind of proved her point, she was happy she got the account but was embarrassed no one told her about the lipstick.

What’d you think of “Chinese Wall?”

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC.

'Mad Men' -- Hands and Knees

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC

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

Weaknesses. And lies. Weaknesses compounded by lies. This “Hands and Knees” episode had all of this in spades.

Chief among them were Don’s lies, which became relevant again as Don feared that the feds would find him and send him to prison because he’s not who he says he is. Uncharacteristically, this prompted Don to have a panic attack in front of Faye, which, all and all, was acutally good for him because it prompted him to be honest to her about the fact that he’s living under an assumed name. (Don’s having a really, REALLY crappy year, don't you think?)

Related to Don’s lies is the fact that slimy Pete Campbell knows about them. So when the feds started sniffing around in order to provide security clearance for people at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce to work on the North American Aviation account, Don, fearing his Dick Whitman past would catch up with him, applied enormous pressure on Pete to lie on his behalf about “losing the account,” or else Don said Pete would have to try to run the company without him.

As Pete sat up late at night mourning the fact that he was going to have to “lose” the $4+ million client he’d landed after years of wooing and he complained about the burden the “honest people” have to shoulder for their ethically challenged brethren, Pete ironically took his pregnant wife Trudy in his arms, with her completely unaware of the fact that he had a gigantic lie he was hiding, that he had a baby with another woman years ago. The following day, Pete withstood a verbal flogging from Roger for "losing" North American Aviation because of his own inattention.

Don’s lies have even longer legs as they also affect Betty even though she’s now married to Henry. She protected Don by not telling the feds who showed up from the Defense Department what she knew about who her ex-husband is. The fact that Betty knows about Don’s identity fraud and hasn’t shared it with Henry, who has lofty political ambitions of his own, could cause a problem for her down the road.

Joan’s weakness, her Achilles heel, is Roger. She and he cheated on their spouses together. Joan got pregnant from their post-mugging incident in the alley and decided to have another abortion to avoid what she called “a tragedy” because she’d been apart from Greg for too long for it to be his baby, which was highly ironic given that she’d been anxious to have a baby with Greg and now he’s been deployed to Vietnam.

Image credit: Michael Yarish/AMC

Roger’s weakness is, conversely, Joan, however his getting Joan pregnant jeopardized his marriage to Jane. (“What kind of man are you?” the doctor, who was going to hook Joan up with someone who’d give her an illegal abortion, said to Roger. “You’ve used this woman . . . A man of your age, only slightly younger than myself, that you could behave with such selfishness, such irresponsibility.”)

A corollary to Roger’s frailties is the fact that Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s huge weakness is the fact that without Lucky Strike, the company could fold, go bankrupt. Lucky Strike – the company Don once said “could put out our lights” -- is Roger’s big raison d’etre, without it, he’s just the guy who inherited his company from his dad. God, Roger might have to actually do some work in the month that he has before he has to tell his colleagues the Lucky Strike account is history.

Then there was poor Lane, poor, poor Lane. How depressing is it to see a man of his age so fearful of his stuffy, judgmental, violent, bullying father, the senior citizen who walks with a cane. Lane's father arrived at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, instead of Lane’s son, to inform Lane that he was there to take him home to London to be with his wife and family. However Lane’s now in love with Toni, who works as a costumed waitress at the Playboy Club, but didn’t come right out and tell his father about the fact that he’s dating not only a waitress, but a woman of a difference race. This brought Lane face-to-face with his weakness: That he’s still a child who’s cowed by his father, who allowed his father to strike him in the head with a cane (drawing blood) and threaten to crush his hands with his shoe while Lane was lying on the floor in pain, crying uncle, as Don did in the face of Duck's fists. The physical bullying to make Lane get his “home in order” did the trick as Lane promptly told the other SCDP partners that he was taking a leave of absence to go to London.

So, just when things were starting to look up for the folks around SCDP – Don was getting healthy and cutting back on drinking while seeing his children and having an adult relationship based on trust with Faye; Roger was married and not cheating (up until last week); Pete and Trudy were expecting a baby and Lane had helped build a solid company – now everything seems precarious. It apparently takes very little to send all of their houses of cards to come crashing down on top of them.

But I must admit, I was half expecting Faye to help Don come clean, to turn himself in so he could indeed stop running, as he said he wanted to. I feel like Matthew Weiner is hinting that Don’s going to have a big, humiliating public exposure of his big lie, or will need to, in order for him to go forward. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Don’s luck seems like it’s going to run out, soon, but after he takes Sally to see the Beatles.

Image credits: Michael Yarish AMC.