The Mad Men moment we've been waiting for all season finally arrived Sunday night -- or make that "moments," plural, one big black cascade of gruesome American dramas. Which, with one week to go before the season finale, raises the question: Can things possibly get any worse for the inhabitants of television's bleakest series? Count on Matthew Weiner and crew to try their hardest. But first things first: Week 12! Bring a tissue.
Simply seeing Barbet Schroeder announced as the episode's director triggered a sort of Gravity Alarm. As the bard of disaffection behind some of the late '80s/early '90s most enduring tales of doomed coupledom (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female), Schroeder seemed a fitting interpreter of the dissolution of Don and Betty Draper. But he could handle their panic and pathos in his sleep; better to get AMC's money's worth by piling on Jane and Roger Sterling, Pete and Trudy Campbell, Pete Campbell and Sterling Cooper, Don Draper and Lane Pryce, Peggy Olson and Duck Phillips, Margaret Sterling and, well, everyone, and most viciously of all, America's farewell to John F. Kennedy, slain on a chilly Friday in November, just as things were maybe looking up.
At least that was Pete's sense of things before Pryce demoted him and Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated, a one-two punch that sent him reeling into resentment on the weekend of his boss's daughter's wedding. "More of the same," he mutters, but he could be lamenting Kennedy just as easily as he's pouting his way out of attending Margaret's nuptials. "It's one thing to go to this wedding and act like I don't hate them. It's another thing to go and act like the president hasn't been murdered." Trudy, the enabler extraordinaire, slips off her heels, curls up beside him and watches the news coverage. "They don't appreciate you," she'll tell him later. Even in a national period of mourning, it's all about Pete.
But it's like Pryce said: Pete makes clients feel like their needs are being met, but Cosgrove makes them feel like they have no needs at all. It's the difference between Pete curling up with hot cocoa in his office when the building's heat is out, or Cosgrove fixing a secretary's floor heater. And anyway, Pryce has ducks to put in a row before offloading the company. Don is one of them. "I can't run my department without an art director!" he bellows at the cheapskate Pryce -- the episode's second pettiest concern to overlap with the Kennedy assassination, just ahead of Pete whining to Harry Crane and just behind Peggy asking Duck, "Did you give me a hickey?" after one of their famous nooner go-arounds. One can only imagine the story Peggy has since made up to answer the question, "Where were you when JFK was shot?"
Betty won't need to come up with cover, meanwhile. She was at home, right where she always is, cigarette dangling in one hand and her gaping jaw held up by the other. Carla races in. The news compels even her to light up. The women sob. Sally, in a measure of cold calculation or otherworldly tenderness, puts her arm around her mother. It's a perfect postmodern tableau -- Norman Rockwell by way of Weiner by way of Schroeder, wherein class, gender and ethnicity bond over smokes and death. Affecting as hell. I cried. So did Margaret, who had a chance just a day before to call her wedding off but went ahead with it anyway. Now, slumping in her wedding dress with her own mother/maid combo looking on in horror, she may as well be staring into the eye of God, railing at His caprice when He knows she has to take vows before Him the next day. Seriously, God, what gives?
Margaret's actually in pretty hale shape a day later at the reception. This, despite the significant number of no-shows, the cake's failure to materialize, and the cluster of guests watching news coverage in the kitchen. Jane's among them, and Roger's none too happy about it. He'll cart her drunken, dead-weight frame over his shoulder like wounded war buddy that night, even threaten to cut her out of her dress as she zonks out on the bed: "He was so handsome, and now I'll never get to vote for him!" That's his cue to call Joan, for what that's worth; she's no consolation to Roger, and no real use to us.
Not among the TV-bound at the reception: Henry Francis. "Of course," Betty mutters under her breath as he enters, recalling their introduction months ago during Roger's troubled Derby Days party. Attending with his daughter, Henry says nothing he can't telegraph across the dance floor with his eyes. Woozy with lust, confusion, terror or some cocktail of all three, Betty loses step with Don. "Everything's going to be OK," he lies to his wife before answering her tense reply -- "How do you know that?" -- with a long kiss. Steadfast concern masks her face, clings to it until a gunshot in Dallas shatters it the next day. She shrieks like Betty Draper isn't supposed to shriek -- like her dignity died Nov. 22, having bled nearly to death in the weeks since Don's confession, put out of its misery with a single long-range shot from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Its ghost isn't quite as stoic.
And now, as Lee Harvey Oswald perishes, so do the Drapers. Betty awakens Don from a nap, and you can see more than ever where Sally gets her embittered quietude. "I'm going for a drive," she announces. "I need to clear my head." Translation: Another illicit meeting with Henry Francis, who always knew she'd come to him and now wants to marry her himself. That was fast! He'd settle for a date at the movies, though -- Betty's favorite (Singin' in the Rain, trivia buffs) -- and their own longer, more passionate kiss in the front seat of he car. You'd think Don would have at least called Miss Farrell at this point, a little parallel plotting for those of us still mad at him for leaving her hidden in his car last week, but no. Instead he squares up, awaits Betty's return, and absorbs the blunt trauma force of her rage: "I want to scream at you for ruining all this. ... I don't love you anymore." The words ricochet off him. "You can't even hear me right now," she whispers. "You're right," Don replies.
There's a Pete coda here and a Peggy coda there, the latter coming as Don heads into work on Monday's day of mourning. He pours a stiff drink in a dark office and faces the long emptiness ahead. It feels a lot like today.