I don't know if it was the rat-a-tat-tat in the air or just the ticking clock of a season nearing its end, but Mad Men jammed through its 11th episode with unusual abandon on Sunday night. And by "unusual," I generally mean "forgettable" -- indeed an uncommon trait for any given airing of the series, and about as intriguing (for about as long) as the guy spinning plates at the circus.
On the one hand, I'm kind of glad: Neither you nor I really need another 2,000 words devoted to the series, so I can make this quick. (Or quick-er.) And after so many stirring weeks, it's good to have the inevitable let-down out of the way so the final two episodes can supply the customary wallop one must presume this snoozer set up. On the other hand, well... did I mention it was a snoozer? Moreover, it was all kind of despairingly redundant: Peggy is a sexually liberated young woman! Sexual harassment thrives at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce! Roger and Joan can never be together! Don will stick his dick in anything that answers a phone! (Apologies to Miss Blankenship, but she had her day.) Busy men like Pete work through anything, first child's birth included! All that was missing was Betty dragging on a cigarette, looking on blank-faced while Sally plotted murder.
That doesn't mean this needs to be boring, though, so: How about Peggy Olson? A full day at the beach naturally calls for a carnal nightcap with the lovesick beatnik she rebuffed weeks ago; "I swear I didn't plan it this way," Abe tells her as she climbs on his lap in the crowded back seat of Joyce's car. He didn't have to -- she's "giving it off," as Stan notes in his always-classy terms, going down easy for Abe and consequently, glowingly floating through her Monday at SCDP. She's late for the office meeting, however, at which Bert and Don deliver the devastating news that Lucky Strike has left the building. They'd only heard the night before, and not via Roger, alas -- it took a smarmy BBDO hotshot to upend Ken Cosgrove's family dinner, then a Cosgrove journey to visit Pete's family at the maternity-ward waiting room, then a call from Pete to Don, whose night with Faye is ruined because now everybody has to gather at the office for a whisky-soaked so-long to American Tobacco.
This all happens in the space of about five minutes, suggesting some meatier dramatic reckoning to come as the real details tumble forth. And we got it -- I guess -- with hangdog Roger all but giving up on Lucky Strike, his marriage, his career, perhaps even his legacy. Joan is the one thing worth lobbying for, but both demoralized and vaguely heartbroken at his reticence regarding the account, she cuts the poor bastard off. "I can't do this anymore," she says upon his house call. He stalks off to the future, or what's left of it. By the time he finally comes home to Jane -- who presents him with the published version of his just-arrived, long-awaited memoir. She expresses her pride, standing in direct contradiction to Bert's earlier claim to Roger that "Lee Garner Jr. never took you seriously because you never took yourself seriously." And so the silver fox is somehow stabilized, however temporarily, in his precarious tightrope walk over the abyss.
At least Pete is in some version of demand, holding court with his father-in-law ("There's no reward for going down with the ship," he tells the fraught daddy-to-be) and eventually even having an audience with good old Ted Chaough, who offers to make him a full partner at CGC. They just got the sporty new Alfa Romeo account! "I don't drive," Pete says. "I can teach you," Ted replies. Of course he can. And Pete misses Trudy's delivery of a baby girl because there's too much piling on Roger to do back at the office. An account man's work is never done, especially in a climate where Lane Pryce is AWOL and Don Draper himself is fielding phone calls from clients like Glo-Coat, for whom SCDP might have made a Clio-winning commercial but who needs to find a more secure agency. The caller acknowledges the "simple coincidence" of Lucky Strike's exit, but Don isn't stupid. He is angry, though, taking his rare failure of persuasion out on that Clio by smashing the statuette on his desk. There's the public smashing of Pete as well, with Don attributing the Glo-Coat loss to the young man's preoccupation with, you know, pregnant Trudy.
Writer Erin Levy and director Phil Abraham waste an opportunity for a refreshing breather here, dragging Don's secretary Megan into the toxic existential crisis for which whisky is the only antidote. "Stop me at three," he tells her after she enters his office. "This is one." It's his modest if typically misguided way of letting Megan help right the ship, though of course it won't be the only way. We know how these things go. We saw how Don was looking at her last week. We also have nearly four full seasons -- hell, we have this season -- of Don's nature to prepare us for his imminent subordinate-schtupping. When she drops in late to pick Don's brain about strategy statements and share her artistic upbringing in Montreal, we're about one step removed from a gratuitous porn-scene set up. "I'm not going to run out crying tomorrow" is the new "I didn't order a pizza, but..." That kind of crap. Of course Don is fueled in part by Faye's refusal to hook him up with clients from her other agencies; if she can't turn Heinz in this darkest hour, for example, what good is she really to Don?
Now that's interesting. Faye's intransigence as a means to more secretary sex? Not so interesting. It's old. Also old: Sexual tension between smarmy Stan and lusty Peggy, which skyrockets in her Abe afterglow and the fantastically tasteless assumption that "women get sex-crazed in an agency that's going down." Stan thinks his relaxation technique of, ahem, kissing her ahead of a big Playtex presentation is some next-level hardy-har, but she's revolted. "Come on, baby, it's the end of the world," he leers. "Why do you keep making me reject you?" Peggy replies. An entire audience at home asked the same question. And then -- final ignominy -- she had lipstick on her teeth! Alert me when the writers bother to not gratuitously humiliate Peggy.
The most you could say for what remained is a strange detour into the memorial service for one David Montgomery, a competing ad man who also happens to share a name with the current president of the formidable, playoff-bound Philadelphia Phillies. (Which reminds me: Go Giants!) Where was I? Oh: Don, Bert, Pete and Freddy all head off to the memorial in the hopes of possibly poaching some business. I awoke in time to see Don checking out (sizing up?) the widow and her daughter, but what happened beyond that is anyone's guess. It'll probably come back to us next week, likely in some tense "widow on line one, Mr. Draper" crossfire between Megan and Faye. One will get left in a car, and Sally will grill the other one about the man peeing inside the woman... Don's identity will be exposed again, etc. etc. You know the drill. We'll see.