Damn you, Matthew Weiner: Always making me work on a holiday. It's an apt metaphor for Sunday night's Mad Men, however. I suppose he'd greet my complaint with some paraphrase of Don's afterhours reality check to birthday girl Peggy -- "You're 30-something years old; it's time to get over Labor Day" -- before insisting I hunker down and bring ides for the year's seventh episode. And here I am! It worked.
The seventh episode means we've officially crossed the halfway point of Mad Men's fourth season, which has seriously been born again since last month's makeout session with irrelevance. Sunday nudged it into the entirely new realm of chamber drama; written by Weiner, directed by MM regular Jennifer Getzinger, and orbiting the strange, codependent world of Don and Peggy, it felt more like Scenes From a Marriage than the soapy, sexy, stylish series that keeps piling Emmys on its mantle. You could almost see it coming from the first shot: Harry Crane distributing tickets for the big-screen simulcast of the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston title fight on May 25, 1965. They were essentially exit passports for him and his chums, giving them something to preoccupy themselves with while Don and Peggy (and eventually another old friend) duked it out in their own glassed-in ring high above Manhattan.
Not that Don didn't want in; he has money on Liston, and he doesn't initially plan to stay late to lock horns over the Samsonite campaign. It's just that Peggy and her Three Stooges of creative -- Stan, Joey and Danny -- brought garbage for their initial pitch, and the rest of their concepts weren't much better. (Cave explorers? A suitcase flung off the Eiffel Tower? Really, guys?) "I'm glad you see this as a place where you're free to fail," Don tells her, the first step in what will become a marathon of scolding. Don can't even fall back on Roger, whose fight night has just been hijacked by Freddy Rumsen and Cal Rutledge -- the Pond's Cold Cream dream team and "AA brotherhood" who'd roped him into a dry dinner before the fight. Don rebuffs Roger's pleas to attend: "I wouldn't be good company."
Roger cracks some obvious line about never having minded that before, but seriously: Don would not be good company. Turns out Ms. Blankenship has an urgent message for him from California, and we all know what that means. Don will place this call himself, thank you very much -- except he won't, because the only thing waiting for him on the other end is the news that the one person who knows and actually cherishes his true identity (Betty and Pete wouldn't count, would they?) has slipped off this mortal coil. Word of Anna's death is a little too heavy for Dick Whitman to withstand at the moment, so he passes the cost along to Don Draper -- who in turn passes it along to Peggy, who does take an awkward phone call from her boyfriend Mark, who's waiting for her at a restaurant where they've planned her birthday dinner. Oh, and her family's there. Surprise! She's just going to be a few more minutes. Ha. Right.
That's neither the first nor the last tense call Peggy will receive on her birthday. Earlier she spoke with Duck Phillips, whom we last saw getting wasted, subdued and bounced at the Clio Awards. That little incident appears to have cost him his job at Gray, because now he's at home in the middle of the day, filling his idle time with drinking and business-card fabrication: "Phillips-Olson Advertising," Peggy's birthday "gift" reads. Flattering! So we're back to the scheming of season three, when Duck plotted to poach Pete and Peggy from Sterling Cooper. But Duck's leverage has waned; setting up his own shop, he has little to offer Peggy but partnership and a Tampax account. When that fails, he plays the old-times'-sake card: "Don't you know you're the last thing that made me feel good about myself?" He needs to see her tonight! Hiccup. Aww! Also: Eww. Peggy has just enough pity to lay him down gently, but not gently enough for Duck, apparently, who has a memory like like an elephant. A self-loathing, divorced, drunk, unemployed and unreasonably entitled elephant, but an elephant nonetheless. You'll see.
So with Don and Peggy having successfully quarantined themselves against the caring society zombies of the outside world, all that's left is to figure out a way to survive. And again, if you've watched any Bergman (and Lord knows Weiner has), they might as well be Scenes' Marianne and Johan, the couple whose dissolution and détente is captured over about five hours of draining, devastating and almost impossibly emotionally precise drama. Here, we get roughly five scenes, starting with Peggy and Don's dead-end brainstorm lapsing into rambling about the Clay/Liston fight. ("'I'm the greatest,'" he mockingly quotes Clay. "Not if you have to say it.") This is interrupted by another call to Peggy from Mark, who gives up the surprise and demands she hustle down to dinner immediately. She agrees and, for what feels like the hundredth time, throws on her overcoat and hat (sound like anyone we know?) and begins to make her exit.
Back upstairs, Peggy confides to Don that she broke up with Mark. Springboarding off this seeming empowerment, she pushes Don to recognize her sacrifices and contributions -- the messes she cleans up, the ideas she offers, the values she brings to Don's own creative process. Good luck with that, Pegster! "I give you money; you give me ideas!" Don yells. "You never thank me!" she says, tearing up. "That's what the money is for!" he replies. Let's face it: Don wouldn't likely put up with this even if his alter ego hadn't just lost its ballast to a painful, cancer-ravaged demise 3,000 miles away, but such conditions made it virtually impossible for any sort of emotional accommodation beyond yelling after Peggy, "I'm sorry about your boyfriend, OK?" It was a scene for the ages -- the heavyweight prizefight of the year to date, a classic up there with the famous "Wheel" monologue at the end of season one, or last year's "Who is Henry Francis?" showdown with Betty. Just unbelievable writing for two actors who inhabit its dynamics like the rest of us wear our skin.
Of course, someone has to lose the round, and this one goes to Don as Peggy retreats to the ladies room for a good sob. Worst birthday ever? Pretty much! But it can only improve, and it does when Don, in his ongoing quest to break the Samsonite deadlock, rummages through the supply room for a new Dictaphone tape only to find the tape containing Roger's memoir dictation.
If there's anything that can heal the breach between two quarreling office mates, trust me, it's the co-founder of the company rambling about Ms. Blankenship's oversexed past and Bert Cooper's botched orchiectomy -- at the hands of Dr. Lyle Evans! Mystery solved! (Also: Think twice before Googling "orchiectomy" -- or at least narrow your browser window enough to avoid the accompanying Google image results. You can thank me later.) Peggy isn't quite as amused by the gossip as Don is -- "It's like reading someone's diary" -- but again, the bonding opportunity is priceless, as is the lessening of tensions provided by a stray mouse scurrying around the office. Peggy won't go near it and Don can't find it, which means it'll probably wind up being Joan's problem in the weeks ahead. Can't. Wait.
Next up for Don and Peggy: Dinner. And Don knows how to treat a lady on her birthday, rolling into a Greek diner for a burger and fries and more stimulating conversation on subjects ranging from the Acropolis, the nature of suitcases, single womanhood ("I know what I'm supposed to want," Peggy says, "but it doesn't feel right."), plane travel, Don's service in Korea, and the deaths of their respective fathers -- both of whom were struck down while their children watched. Don suggests they leave: "Let's go someplace darker," meaning of course that their diner is a little too overlit for the occasion, but so packed with thematic innuendo as to be Weiner's own punch in our nose.
But they do find a dingy bar where they can listen to the game and talk over more of Peggy apprehensions about singledom -- not just that she hates dating ("I'm not good at it") or wishes men would check her out on the street, but that everyone at work thinks she slept with Don to get her job. Moreover, her mother hates Don because she thinks he's the deadbeat who knocked her daughter up four years ago. She comes tantalizingly close to dropping the name of the real father before her Draperesque discretion kicks in. Well, that and the broadcast of the Clay/Liston fight, which gracelessly interrupts them as Liston goes down mere seconds into the fight. Don joins the barroom chorus of "Get up!"; Peggy earnestly asks what's happening. Nothing more work couldn't fix, alas, and they trudge back to the office.
"That elevator's like a rocket," Don says upon entering his lobby, slumping and staggering under the influence of altitude sickness and maybe a few drinks too many (again), heading to the men's room with Peggy's help before puking his guts out. Not to be outdone, look who else had paid a late-night, bowel-vacating visit to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce: It's Duck Phillips, himself trashed beyond belief, bellowing Peggy's name and making the shattered equivalent of a beeline for Roger Sterling's office to take a dump on his chair. It's intended for Draper, but this'll do -- at least until Peggy intervenes, imploring him to pull his pants and let her escort him out. It's a plan until Don and Duck cross paths -- because obviously -- and the saber-rattling commences. "You don't belong here," Don growls, to which Duck comes back with a torrent of invective for him and Peggy, who's "just another whore."
How, though? Don's an acknowledged mess, vomit streaking his dress shirt, self-destruction as urgent a deadline as that of any client. Peggy, meanwhile, fulfills his prophecy from the end of last season, finally becoming the extension of Don he saw when he looked at her and her work. Thus they slump there in the dark -- an old couple, a new couple, a reflection, a symbiosis. When Peggy asks him what has happened to him, she asks not for his own benefit, but rather as a means of exorcising this low ebb from her own future.
I could go on and on... They fall asleep on his couch, he sees Anna's apparition (holding a suitcase -- a Samsonite, I presume), wakes at sunrise and calls Stephanie, gets the news about Anna, is discouraged from coming out to California (Anna left her body to science; maybe they can find out why she's so dramatically inert), breaks down and hangs up only to find Peggy having raptly witnessed and eavesdropped on his conversation. We haven't seen Don this vulnerable since he recounted his brother's death to Betty, and Peggy, like his ex before her, can offer only limited (if sincere) consolation to this man she literally doesn't even know -- this "Dick Whitman," this fake. Set adrift in the roiling sea of identity, Dick finally loses sight of land. He has no future but the one with her hand on his shoulder -- the one whose own tether has been cut without warning and who can't come up with the breakthrough that will help them sell millions of dollars worth of luggage. It's no mistake they have this exchange at dawn, but the dawn of what?
Their clasped hands hours later over Don's winning Samsonite idea -- a triumphant suitcase looming over a fallen old American Tourister, a la Clay over Liston -- hint at transference. Their exchanged glances hint at compassion. Their shared knowledge of the lives they went through in a single night hint at faith -- that they have each other. And even when it seems impossible to believe or communicate, each other is enough.