If Joan Holloway Harris could have seen what’s happened to Don Draper after building a life based on what he thought was expected of him, completely ignoring the many incompatibilities and red flags along the way, perhaps she’d be less anxious to get pregnant (for what we now know would be the third time). “The Good News” illustrated three different positions along the same trajectory: Don goes to California to try to recover from his disintegrating life, only to learn that it’s possible for life to break down even further, Lane Pryce is just starting to cope with a broken marriage, and Joan is doing her best to create a life based on the same model that these two men have so aptly demonstrated.

I didn't realize until making this image, but that chandelier is trying its best to stab Joan's husband

Lane’s failed marriage is useful as a foil for Don’s single man debauchery, but Joan is a more productive comparison for what happened between Betty and Don. Her husband is gone at all hours, he’s joined the army (like both Dick and Don), he treats his wife like a child (when he’s not raping her), and Joan clings to an image of marriage that relies on Hawaiian themed dinners and heating up your husband’s leftovers. Out in California, young people are having sit-ins at Berkeley, smoking grass and discussing politics, but Joan’s image of success is circa 1958, and so it’s almost eerily out-of-place to watch her trying to become a successful working woman while she’s still caught on an outdated image of herself at home. This is where Don has been for the past several seasons – he dates Midge and goes to performance art shows in the Village, and then goes home to his Coca-Cola ad wife. If Joan really understood where Don’s decisions have landed him, I wonder if she’d be able to make another choice?

As for Don, Anna Draper’s impending death seems to leave two paths open to him. Alan Sepinwall commented in his post that Anna is the last person tying Don to Dick Whitman, who can look at him and say, “I know everything about you, and I still love you.” Because of this, he says, Anna’s death will forever bury Dick Whitman, and that whole early part of Don’s life will be gone forever. I suppose that’s possible, but it seems so unlikely based on Don’s track record. Every attempt to squash his former life has led to its inevitable and ever-more-potent reoccurrence. Further, Don’s relationship with Anna may be the last remaining tie to Dick Whitman, but that means she’s also the last remaining witness of Don Draper as a persona instead of a person. When she dies, the last barrier between Don Draper as an act and Don Draper as a man will fall away, and Don will be the person he has made himself into. Even though Betty and Bert Cooper may know about his former life, it’s a very different thing to see it, and unless Betty is somehow able to use Don’s lie in a custody battle, every Dick Whitman-related conflict in Don’s life will totally dissolve.

So these seem to be the two options – Dick Whitman dies, and we discover that he was the only thing holding Don Draper together, or Dick Whitman dies, and Don is finally free to make himself something new. Maybe I’m too hopeful, but if I am, it’s because the episode invites us to be optimistic. This is the first time Mad Man has indulged in a signal of renewal as blatant as the New Year, or telegraphed its shifting times as obviously as “Gentlemen, shall we begin 1965?” and it’s hard not to take that as invitation to look forward. Things may still be bad in New York, but somewhere out there in California, Stephanie’s dancing to the Beatles and seeing the future.

If the dominant question from Mad Men’s premiere – “Who is Don Draper?” – is still in effect when reading last night’s episode, then it’s pretty clear that right now, Don Draper is a disgusting mess. The lines between his personal and professional lives, previously so carefully intact, have blurred beyond any reasonable limit, and those disintegrating boundaries result in some of the worst behavior we have ever seen Don Draper display. Somehow, his treatment of Allison is much, much worse than his neglectful, occasionally abusive relationship with Betty, his paternalistic dismissal of Sally’s teacher Ms. Farrell, or even his aggressive, S&M-tinted affair with Bobbi Barrett. Allison was compassionate and impressively competent, and to see Don so out of control that he cannot stop himself from taking advantage of her is to see him at his worst. (At least, I can only hope this is his worst.) Even the one constantly inspiring aspect of Don – his stunning skill as a creative director – is nearly absent from this episode. We see several instances of Peggy struggling with a growing appreciation of her own different advertising perspective, but we never get one of those classic moments where Don’s talent as a piercing social observer belies his own terrible conduct. He is rumpled, drunk, and pitiable.

It’s not hard to see why, and as SCDP’s new consultants quickly note, his advertisements are an excellent starting point for reading Don’s Christmas-fueled misery. Faye Miller, the customer evaluation researcher, points out that Don’s Glow-Coat commercial is certainly about someone’s childhood, and it’s easy to pull that thread through Don’s previous work. His concept for the Kodak Carousel is most obvious, of course, with its overt use of nostalgia and familial sentiment, but you can see it even in the smaller campaigns he develops with Peggy in the previous seasons. The initial idea for Mohawk Airlines is something to do with stewardesses wearing short skirts, and with Don’s direction, Peggy moves toward focusing on the return rather than the departure, away from watching the city disappear beneath you, and toward “What did you bring me, Daddy?” At this point in his career and this place in his divorce, Don has a harder time finding his way back to those nostalgic ideals he once mined for advertising gold, and the family-friendly Jantzen campaign turns into a playful joke about censorship and the risqué bikini. Through his outward actions, it’s easy to dismiss Don as a liar and a cheater, but his ads make it clear how crucial his belief in the possibility of an intact family has been for his perception of himself.

I wrote a lot last season about how carefully this show is tied to the calendar year and to the insistent commemoration of holidays – most importantly for season three, that fabulous Halloween which ended in Sally and Bobby dressed as a gypsy and a hobo while Betty relentlessly peeled back Don’s costume. This is the first Mad Men Christmas, as well as Don’s first Christmas without access to that unrealistic but persuasive image of his loving, stable family. It’s no wonder he’s a mess.

Not that it excuses the way he treats Allison, or explains the full extent of his downward spiral into alcoholism. But even if it’s not excusable, Don’s extreme behavior becomes less unusual inside the context of everyone else’s response to the holiday. Peggy sleeps with her boyfriend, against her initial better judgment, Roger is forced to put on a Santa costume to placate Lee Gardner, Jr., Joan leads the most spirited, sexy Conga line in human history, and in my favorite part of the episode, creepy, too-knowing Glenn returns to give Sally some pointers on being a child of divorce. If Mad Men holidays have always been moments of stress or revelation inside Sterling Cooper, (last 4^th of July, some guy’s foot was cut off with a rider mower!), Christmas is a kind of emotional lightning rod. The whole company puts on an elaborate show of cheeriness and raunchy goodwill for the Lee Gardner, Jrs. of the world, playing games where they pass each other oranges under their chins and dressing as Santa, despite the fact that they are all inwardly fuming, disintegrating, or surrendering. Glenn’s vandalism is so satisfying because it gleefully punctures that outer pretense. And as with every holiday on the show, this Christmas is also a marker of larger segments of time passing – SCDP must employ new customer evaluation specialists, Lee Gardner, Jr. shows up at the party expecting something like a “Roman orgy” and then takes everyone’s photos with a brand-new model of Polaroid camera, Bert Cooper shakes his head sadly about impending socialism.

“I don’t hate Christmas,” Don says. “I hate this Christmas.” It is Mad Men’s particular genius that “this Christmas” is both so historically specific and universally human.

Season four’s “Public Relations” opens with the question “Who is Don Draper?”, a query Don scoffs at for its cuteness and its suggestion of replying in the third person, but it’s a question that quickly becomes an obvious touchstone for the episode. The idea is particularly canny because “Who is Don Draper?” is the same question we’ve been asking all along, and by the end of last season, we had a pretty firm grasp on the answer. He’s a creative genius, a guy who works without a contract, a lothario, a liar, a neglectful father and husband – and he’s also Dick Whitman, an entirely different person. The opening line of “Public Relations” is a quick, chastising jolt. We thought we knew Don Draper, and perhaps we did, but he is not the same character we remember from last fall.

Everything about Don is now just a little different – all of the same qualities are there, but he’s been set inside an alternate universe where he is called upon to be a single father, a public figure, a company man, a guy with his eye on the bottom line, and a guy who dates rather than seduces. Unlike the man from the first three seasons, who was entirely comfortable in his skin, this version of Don has not yet quite caught up with the times, and hasn’t yet figured out how to give promotional interviews or how to handle his ex-wife and her new husband. In that vein, one of the episode’s most telling moments was the run-up to Don’s blind date. He smoothes out the bed (something we know he’s expecting will soon be seen by his date) and then pulls on his jacket over his white shirt, which has a pack of cigarettes straining against the fabric of the front pocket. Don stands at the mirror, hunched, fiddling with his sleeves, scrunching up his shoulders, and combing his hair. Where before we have watched him effortlessly slide from one persona into another, perpetually coiffed and polished to a high sheen, Don Draper is now a guy who has to adjust himself and pluck at his clothing before it sits the way it should. He has to work at being himself. Of course, he’s been working at being Don Draper since he gave up being Dick Whitman, but before, it was invisible. Now we can see all of the seams and rough edges.

Peggy seems to have undergone a reverse process, and I am absolutely in love with the new Peggy Olson. All of those little physical signals of discomfort and ill-fit (her hair, the dresses that managed to be both frumpy and girlish) have shifted into something much more self-assured, and Peggy can now spar with Don, joke with her illustrator about the Stan Freberg John and Marsha ad, and come up with ridiculous, back-firing promotional schemes all on her own. It’s about darn time, frankly, and Peggy’s confident stance in the office is just what’s necessary to balance a newly uncertain Don Draper.

Aside from these important and still developing character shifts, the thing I found most exciting about “Public Relations” was the commitment the show has made to all its foundational changes from the previous season. It would have been so unsatisfying to watch the show return to its regular status quo, but as I described in my post on procedurals, it’s just much easier for those blockbuster season-ending changes to quickly step backwards into familiar formula. In his interview with Alan Sepinwall, Matt Weiner talks about how important it was for him to commit to those changes, even the painful ones which required leaving behind characters like Paul Kinsey and Ken Cosgrove. Mad Men will continue to be a creatively interesting show for much longer because it’s clear that Betty and Don will not be getting back together in the near future, and Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is here to stay.

So it looks like that’s Mad Men for this season: we spent three years watching it build on the outside while slowly crumbling underneath, and now after the final implosion, we get to watch it all build again. But this time, it’ll be something entirely new.

After that stellar season finale, I find I’m loathe to let go of Mad Men quite so quickly, and wanted to make a few more comments before letting it drift off into hiatus-land. (For so long! Ahh!)

Most importantly, I want to point to this Daily Beast interview Matthew Weiner gave to Jace Lacob of Televisionary. It appears to be the only press piece of its kind right now, and it’s quite intriguing. Weiner describes the process of putting together each new season, admits he doesn’t know what will happen to characters like Sal Salvatore, Ken Cosgrove, or Paul Kinsey, and suggests that the Draper’s marriage is unambiguously finished (despite Alan Sepinwall’s musings to the contrary). Weiner also mentions that while he cares very little about giving the audience what they want, he does care a great deal about giving Roger and Joan what they want. My sense is that Joan Holloway would manage to reach outside her own fictional status and take what she wanted, regardless of whether Matt Weiner approved.

The most interesting aspect of the interview, from my perspective, is that Weiner describes his commitment to using all the material he has, refusing to save anything particularly good for a later moment. That sort of thinking makes dramas like Mad Men a radically different viewing experience than other shows built around perpetually delaying the thing the audience clearly wants. Often, that type of delayed gratification appears in the form of thwarted relationships (Luke and Lorelai on The Gilmore Girls comes to mind as a particularly egregious example), but it can also show up as the continually deferred explanations about the island on LOST, or even the perpetually ticking nuclear bomb on 24. Obviously, a certain amount of suspense is crucial to maintaining your audience, but there’s a difference between building tension as support for your storytelling, and building suspense with the ultimate goal of frustrating your audience. After a depressingly short length of time, the week-to-week experience of watching LOST starts to feel like an exercise in futility. Nothing will ever actually get explained, so everyone will continue to look at each other longingly while we occasionally discover that they once walked past each other in a convenience store a few years ago. When you don’t keep anything back, though, every single episode feels essential. In the middle of a season of LOST, you can be sure very little will get revealed or resolved. Midway through season three Mad Men, a secretary drove a John Deere over a guy’s foot.

Long story short, Mad Men is better than LOST, and if you read the interview with Matt Weiner, it’s not hard to figure out why. It’s sort of like that parable in Gattaca – you should never save something for the return trip.

If you, like me, are jonesing for a bit more Mad Men to assuage the grief of parting, there are Mad Men thoughts from The Daily Beast and Alan Sepinwall above, as well as Salon, the slate.com TV Club, and a nice interview with Chelcie Ross, the actor who plays Conrad Hilton, over at The Watcher.

I’ve gotten the sense watching Mad Men from the beginning that some of its episodes are built and crafted for different purposes. The primary purpose is and always has been storytelling – a great deal of plot gets packed into several seemingly mundane events, and many different characters develop subplots in a single episode, and the most important effect is always to draw audiences into the story. Some episodes, though, are more about aesthetics than they are story. Quite a few episodes in season two felt that way, particularly toward the end, and in this recent season, I’d point to “Souvenir” as well, with its extended Hilton-induced meditation on Rome and travel. Then, of course, there are installments meant to startle or shock, and for that you need look no further than “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency,” which went all the way to blood spewing across the office. Two weeks ago, I sat tensed on the couch as I watched Betty pull the box out of Don’s drawer. Other things happened, and there was some hefty accompanying thematic material, but the entire episode built up to that moment and then startled the audience into rapt attention.

Empty Sterling Cooper offices

What I’m trying to say is, last night’s season finale was none of those, and I think there hasn’t been an episode like this one since the finale of the first season, “The Carousel.” Terrible, upsetting, poignant things happened in this last episode, especially all of the material relating to Don and Betty’s divorce. The scene when they have to tell Bobby and Sally what’s going on was intensely painful. But for the most part, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat,” was built to satisfy. All of the changes, the dramatic divisions and reunions, were developments of plots that had already been put into place, and the season has done an excellent job of priming us for some earth-shattering shifts. When it all collided into one big, wonderful mess in the nascent Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce advertising agency, there were some surprises and tense moments, but for the most part, it felt like inevitable, satisfying change, and it felt like we earned it.

A series of satisfying events

So many scenes from last night hit deeply satisfying notes, big and small. Perhaps the most important long-term development, the moment that has been stirring from Mad Men’s very first episode, was the final showdown between Peggy and Don when she forced him to acknowledge her worth. His pitch to her was all the more affecting because she was so aware of it, and was able to see both the pitch and the place where the campaign stopped and Don Draper began. The whole arc, from the earliest scenes of Peggy struggling to be a good secretary in season one, was given a lovely button at the end, as Roger told Peggy to get him a drink and she flatly, unapologetically, calmly refused. Perfect. In the same vein, Joan walking back into the office was as predictable as it was absolutely necessary, and I actually clapped my hands together with glee when I realized Roger would have to call her.

The whole Sterling Cooper meltdown was riddled with similarly pleasing moments. Don apologized to Roger, Lane Pryce cheerfully stuck it to smarmy St. John (has anyone good ever been named St. John? I hear his name and all I can think of is St. John Rivers from Jane Eyre, and I shudder), and Cooper begged the movers to put on gloves while carrying off his priceless Rothko. And Trudy. Maybe I loved her most of all, starting with her frantically filling the Chip ’N Dip to prepare for Don and Roger, to her strained “Peter, may I speak with you for a moment?” as she overheard Pete announce his plans to leave, to cheerfully providing sandwiches in the pitiful new office space/hotel room. Trudy has really grown on me.

Family portraits

The Draper family dissolution was awful. It was even more gut wrenching after Bobby’s hilarious line about why they were all in the living room if nothing was wrong. But even this, horrible as it was, was also satisfying. Like the doomed Sterling Cooper/PPL merger, it’s been clear from the beginning that Don and Betty’s union is shaky at best, built on deception and self-interest. There has been so much subterfuge and tense, uncertain, hidden emotion, that it was almost a relief to see it all dragged out into the open, including Betty’s relationship with Henry Francis. It was so artfully balanced with the changes in Don’s professional life, too, that what could have felt like an apocalypse instead felt appropriate. Don begged Betty not to break apart their family, but the whole process of building a new agency, and in particular the scene at the end with everyone hovering together over a meal, looked very much like a new family being made. It’s hard to see what could possibly come next between Don and Betty, but the new agency softens the finality of their split, promising challenges and growth in the future.

I have no idea what will come in the future or how long Mad Men will be on the air (at least one more season, hooray!), but this finale really did feel like a bookend to the whole show, not just for this season. The deaths of Sterling Cooper, the Draper’s marriage, and John F. Kennedy all feel like the final resolution of the themes set up from the first episode of the show. Now, at last, all of the powerful institutions from the show’s beginning have collapsed, and it feels like time to start all over again.

…but not until late next summer! Oh, the bittersweet satisfaction of a season finale.

I’m very glad that Mad Men tackled the Kennedy assassination an episode before the season finale (as was suggested in a comment on my blog post last week). Obviously, the event provided an impetus for the imminent collapse of the Draper marriage, which has always been at the core of Mad Men’s thematic content. The assassination also created the shift we always expected that it would – from the slowly disintegrating gleaming surfaces of the early part of the decade, we finally reach a point when disintegration rapidly accelerates and all of the collective inner turmoil leaps into full view. It was a necessary step in the show’s storyline, and it would have been unreasonable to downplay the assassination or its reception. Still, the whole event created the upheaval we expected it would create, and so I’m glad we still have the last episode for a conclusion that will hopefully be less predictable.

A meditation on watching the television

I think the challenge of the episode was to depict the event’s magnitude without losing sight of the characters and the effect it has on their development, and “The Grown-Ups” did so with moderate, uneven success. In order to recreate some of the disoriented, rudderless sensation the characters were experiencing, one of the episode’s strategies was to jump quickly between scenes and locations, leaping from the initial moment of realization at Sterling Cooper, to Don’s reaction, to Duck Philips and Peggy, to Betty and back to Sterling Cooper. Although that jerky, jarring viewing experience was effective, its downside was that it allowed some of the character development to get lost inside the almost montage-like transitions. Without question, the scenes that made last week’s episode so remarkable were the long, focused, quiet, painfully still moments between Don and Betty, and the need to embody an entire country’s response to national tragedy made it impossible to include any similarly intense, motionless scenes this week. As a result, characters made emotional jumps in time with the physical and temporal gaps in the episode. Betty switches from confused housewife to determined adulterer, Don moves from shaky-but-functioning man of the house to pleading husband, Margaret from weeping, immature child to calm bride, and Roger from henpecked patriarch to misunderstood sensitive guy without any explanation other than “Kennedy’s dead.” I understand the reasoning, but “The Grown-Ups” sacrificed individual emotional intensity for depictions of collective mood.

It didn’t help that Margaret’s wedding forced the plot to follow the same “how are a large group of people responding” concept – the wedding did allow Betty and Henry Francis to reconnect, but the primary impression was that everyone wanted to be somewhere else, myself included. The New York Times City blog published an interesting piece today about New York marriages that actually took place on the same day as Margaret Sterling’s in 1963, and their anecdotal evidence indicates that those who decided to attend weddings were relieved to have a reason to think about something other than Kennedy. That certainly was not the case at the Sterling-Hargrove wedding, and it’s a shame. This season has been so good at balancing overpowering emotional experience with wry, ironic sensibility, and the wedding missed its opportunity to offer a different tonal register.

All that being said, there were several moments in “The Grown-Ups” that I found powerfully effective, among them, Carla’s heartfelt response to the assassination, Betty’s refusal to let Don join her on her drive, and every interaction between the Drapers and their children. It was heartbreaking to watch Don and Betty struggle to interpret the grown-up tragedy for Sally and Bobby. And oddly, my favorite scenes from last night’s episode were those involving Pete and Trudy Campbell, who I often find annoying. Theirs was the one emotional journey I felt was fully explicated within the episode, starting with the news of Pete’s demotion all the way through Trudy’s complete shift in worldview. The Campbells have always been crucial figures on the show; they are young, privileged members of society whose ambitions are to achieve the same (but bigger) success as their parents. As usual, Pete is completely tone deaf, and on watching Lyndon Johnson, remarks sadly that now they have “more of the same,” and before Kennedy’s death it “felt for a second like everything was about to change.” Trudy, far cannier than her husband, suddenly realizes the immense change that has already occurred, and she shifts tactics, encouraging Pete to gather his clients and leave Sterling Cooper. Like Betty, Trudy realizes that as sad as the end of Camelot may be, change and mobility are possible in ways they were not before. Except unlike Betty in “The Grown-Ups,” we get to watch that realization happen on Trudy’s face.

Change is now possible. Next week, season finale!

P.S. Does this ad for AquaNet remind you of anything? Yeah, Peggy’s probably going to need to rewrite this one.

Well, that was one of the most riveting hours of television I’ve seen in a long time. It’s hard to know how to start, except to quote the beginning of Alan Sepinwall’s blog post on last night’s episode:

Damn.

Damn.

Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn.

Damn.

Agreed. “The Gypsy and the Hobo” started with a familiar pace and familiar scenes – Don at work and with Suzanne Farrell, Roger and an old love interest, Joan and her horrible husband. Then Joan cracks a vase over the idiot’s head, Betty has a confidential discussion with the family lawyer, and the pace begins to accelerate; things feel tighter and more meaningful. Even given those signals, the moment when Betty orders Don to open his desk drawer and the scenes that followed were heart-stopping. Narrative time seemed to be infinitely still, with every thing coming to a sudden halt while Don wept over his dead brother. At the same time, it was like watching every hint about Don’s past from the previous two seasons all collapse into one five-minute stretch, and it was all the more effective because he was so unexpectedly truthful. And Suzanne’s presence, hovering just outside the door, added a thrumming, unspoken note of tension underneath the entire proceeding. There’s a ton to say about those scenes and the rest of the episode, but if nothing else, I want to make sure I mention how completely amazing it is that Matthew Weiner and the rest of the writing staff made the decision to enact this turn of events with two full episodes left in the season. Any other show I know would have made this episode the season finale, leaving us with a giant, revelatory cliffhanger. Instead, the aftermath of Don’s exposure will drive the show to this season’s conclusion. It’s great writing.

My favorite of these images is the bottom left, with pieces of Halloween costumes strewn in the foreground

This episode was also perhaps the most blatant entry in Mad Men’s ongoing fascination with holidays and the way they structure time. Season one ended with Thanksgiving and Don’s poignant speech about memory, family and nostalgia. This season has been downright riddled with appropriate festive metaphors and notable days of the calendar year – there was the Kentucky Derby party, the eclipse, and the British invasion on the 4^th of July. Now, on Halloween, Don’s costume gets stripped away while his children dress up as figures from the impoverished, misunderstood, marginalized social strata Don once occupied. Betty calls up ghosts from Don’s past, and as he weeps we realize how much Adam’s death has haunted him. Halloween also provided us with the episode’s concluding moment, that thoroughly routine question now laden with new significance: “And who are you supposed to be?” The thematic consistency would almost be too tidy if it weren’t so completely shocking. And of course, these ghosts won’t disappear the next day.

It can’t be an accident that this episode, containing one of the most significant moments in the series to date, was also explicitly aware of its own fictional impact. First, we had Roger and his Casablanca-themed youth. His former lover directly compares their lives with that film, and in her memory at least, the young Roger was already an extra-fictional figure. He boxed, and spent all his money, and basically wandered around Paris “hoping to be a character in someone else’s novel.” Here is Roger now, thirty years later, a prominent but unmistakably supporting character in The Life of Don Draper. Then, there was the Caldecott Farms subplot. The ad campaigns at Sterling Cooper have always had a strong thematic relationship with the rest of the episode, but this one was particularly apropos, especially the focus group scene. Don’s line that he’s “not saying a new name is easy to find,” was the most overt, but there was also that great line from Peggy Olson. As everyone’s gathered in the darkened viewing room in front of a window that looks very much like a screen, Mrs. Dog Food snaps at the ad execs to “turn off” the unpleasant focus group, and Peggy says wonderingly, “I can’t turn it off, it’s actually happening.” For any other television show, that line would have to be some joke about TiVo and the death of destination viewing. On tonight’s episode of Mad Men, though, the scenes between Betty and Don completely achieved that remarkable, all-absorbing fictional suspense that creates a sensation of relentless immediacy for the audience. Who could turn off the television as Don actually fumbled his cigarette? And then, to everyone’s amazement, told his wife the truth?

Twenty-three days until the Kennedy assassination. Two episodes to go.

In one of my favorite, if slightly predictable, scenes from last night’s episode, Paul Kinsey manages to inspire intelligent ad copy despite his drunken late-night office escapades. The pleasure of the scene comes both from Peggy and Don’s surprisingly sympathetic responses to a familiar writer’s tragedy (“I hate when that happens”) and, of course, from Peggy’s impressive on-the-fly thinking. Trying to find the benefit of telegrams over phone calls, Peggy hits on Paul’s wistful Chinese aphorism, “the faintest ink is better than the best memory” and turns it into copy for Western Union. A telegram, unlike a phone call, leaves a permanent physical trace that can be framed and kept as a memento. After railing against Peggy’s use of her gender, which Paul views as an unfair advantage, it’s deeply satisfying to watch him gape at Peggy in amazement when she turns his own idea into the concept for a great ad campaign.

Eat your heart out, Paul Kinsey

The scene is about Peggy earning her male peer’s respect in the workplace, something she deserves and has often been denied. But as is so often the case on Mad Men, the shallow, manipulative ads, which appeal to our basest instincts and unthinking emotional responses, also provide important subtext for other aspects of the plot. The many plot threads were so thoughtfully, subtly entangled in this episode that it’s almost a shame to pull them out and set them against each other in a comparative way, but nevertheless: thanks to Betty finally submitting to curiosity and breaking into her husband’s locked desk drawer, we now understand that the faintest ink may be better than the best memory, but it’s also far more dangerous.

What, after all, is Betty examining as she sifts through the documents in Don’s shoebox, his tombstone for Dick Whitman, but pages and pages of faint ink? She finds pictures that say “Dick and Adam, 1944” on the back, a deed to a house in California under the name Anna Draper, and most damningly, a decree of divorce between Don and Anna Draper. The documents are dangerous because they live in a permanent, physical place outside Don’s ever malleable, ever playacting identity, and for some reason he can’t bring himself to destroy them. (What’s more, he’s even continuing to create them, giving Suzanne Farrell’s little brother his business card.) The ink is also dangerous because it forms an incomplete narrative. Sure, you have the telegram to permanently remind you of the message you received, but it can only retell the message’s content, not its context.

Dick Whitman's papery remains

From the beginning, that’s what Mad Men was striving to be – a retelling of more than just our surface assumptions about the 1960s. It’s easy to grow distracted from that initial intent, because as the show progresses we get all caught up in the singularity of Don Draper and the whole cast of characters. The earliest episodes, though, were more about showing us both the typewriter – the physical reminder of the period, the newfangled ink-slinger – and then also showing us Joan Holloway reassuring Peggy Olson that the typewriter would be simple enough for a woman to use. We saw the faint remnant ink, but we also got to see its surprising, forgotten context. It was lovely to see that early intention return, now carefully embedded inside an ad campaign and a character’s plot line.

Much of Mad Men’s punch has always relied on the juxtaposition of our contemporary perspective with the unflinching portrayal of urban corporate America in the 1960s. We watch Betty down a gimlet and take a puff on her cigarette while she’s nine months pregnant, and we love the frisson of transgression it gives us. Many of the best of those moments go unspoken – one of my favorites from season two happens after Don buys his new Cadillac and he takes Betty and the kids out for a picnic. They lounge on a blanket after lunch, music playing from the open car door, and when they’re done, Betty blithely shakes the trash onto the pristine green grass, folds up the blanket, and walks away. The scene is all the better for its winking silence.

The subtext of “Wee Small House” operates on the same principle, but does so in a far more explicit way. While Don struggles with Conrad Hilton’s demanding requirements and Betty continues to entertain and reject Henry Francis, Sal Romano finally falls victim to the homophobia we’ve all feared since season one. Lee Gardner Jr. comes on to him, Sal exercises his perfect right to work in unmolested peace, and Don’s irritability finally expresses itself by lashing out at someone else’s inability to keep secrets. Thanks to Connie, Don has had to quash his wayward ways (at least professionally), and resents the continuing existence of others’ hidden lives. We saw it recently in Don’s impatience with Peggy’s ambition, and now Don’s previously secret knowledge of Sal’s sexual preference causes him to strike out against Sal.

This is the type of plot that usually goes without commentary on Mad Men. We see, understand, and are saddened by the social context that permits and even encourages homophobia. But for whatever reason, “Wee Small House” goes farther. Underneath Sal’s disgrace, we see Don listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech early in the morning with his daughter’s teacher, we hear clips from the memorial service for the four girls who died in a church in Birmingham, the neighborhood women discussing the march on Washington, and perhaps most importantly, we see more from the Drapers’ “girl” than we’ve ever seen in the past. While we’re upset when Don fires Sal, the real emotional response to injustice comes out of these scenes, watching Carla and her employers while we hear Martin Luther King Jr. in the background. We feel the weight of cultural memory as Carla listens to “[her] station” on the radio, and we’re certainly not allowed to watch without anger as Betty shakes her head and wonders if civil rights are just “not supposed to happen right now.”

"Do you know how bad it must be, for the negroes to descend on Washington like that, just to be heard?"

The parallel is not subtle, and Betty’s comment about civil rights ensures we catch the drift. The 1960s were the time for civil rights, but it won’t be Sal’s time for decades to come. It’s the first time I can recall Mad Men not only capitalizing on our shock about the past, but also using that shock to rebound with explicit commentary on the current day. With Prop 8 and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it is still an open question for some people about whether gay rights are not supposed to happen right now. Watching Carla stand quietly in the kitchen and listen to the funeral service on the radio, Matthew Weiner’s contemporary answer sounds  clearly from his historical fiction.

After several episodes with multiple plotlines and hefty thematic weight, “Souvenir” felt much like a television version of a short but sweet jaunt to Rome – memorable, intense, and uncomplicated. (At least, as uncomplicated as an episode of Mad Man can be.) It was also more directly about the visual, which happens often on the show but particularly when the plotline moves its characters out of their familiar settings, as in last season’s The Jet Set. So much storytelling happened here on a visual rather than verbal level – Betty looking out the hotel window, Pete Campbell slumped on the couch oblivious to time passing, Sally watching her mother looking in the mirror.

Perpetually throughout “Souvenir,” I found myself distracted by clothing. The (rape?) subplot involving Pete and the German au pair used a ruined party dress as a classic Macguffin, where the dress itself had no meaning other than its use as an object to introduce the two characters and allow the au pair to feel beholden to Pete. (It also allowed us to see Joan in her new job, but that could have been arranged without the elaborate stained dress plotline). That it was a dress mattered very little – the au pair could easily have broken a vase or stained a rug and the result would have been the same, which is how a Macguffin works. But while the fluffy dress held little meaning other than as a plot instigator for Pete Campbell, its presence in the episode acted as a key for other characters and other plotlines, a sort of self-annotated item that floated through scenes with its own footnote – “Hey, look at that giant dress! What’s going on with clothing in this episode?”

Enter Betty, three times. In the first third of the episode, she wears a white dress with a pleated skirt and a blue patterned scarf tied around her throat, her naval-inspired Junior League outfit. It allows her to slip readily from her city council meeting, to her developing affair with Henry Francis in a dark car, and then back into her kitchen, where she chats with her husband about city politics. It’s sharp and attractive, but it’s not overtly sexy, which is in accord with the way we understand Mr. Francis’s attraction to Betty. He first met her, after all, when she was nine months pregnant, and the maternal housewife is clearly part of her appeal. Next we move to Rome, where Betty makes an appointment at the beauty parlor in fluent Italian and then strolls out onto the darkened streets like a figure straight off the runway. The camera gives her a full body pan-up, beginning with her feet and moving up to her black fringed hem, oversized beaded necklace, multi-stranded cleavage-bearing neckline, giant pearl earrings, and finally, her dramatic, impeccable beehive. She wears heavy, shadowy eye makeup, carries a tiny black clutch, and is fully high fashion, sexy, educated and sassy. The game she plays with Don at the table underlines the point – this is Betty without marriage or children or the Junior League. She loves it, and is good at it.

Finally, we return to Betty at home, after beehives at the beauty salon and sex in the shower with her husband. From the first season of Mad Men, set in 1960, Betty has been dressed as the perfect fifties housewife, with wide, tea-length skirts, and short coiffed hair. As season two progressed, Betty began to shift toward more modern fashions, with narrower skirts and bright floral patterns, but always a recognizable Betty Draper. Suddenly, after returning from Rome, Betty wears an outfit that makes her look like the fifties are a distant memory. Her floor length color block patterned dress is almost shocking, a sharp departure from tailored suits and Junior League scarves. It is – dare I say – casual, a tone further emphasized by her practical, embroidered headband.

The narrative here is not hard to follow. All along, Mad Men has been right at the edge of major cultural change, shifting slowly but noticeably away from the fifties and into the sixties. With a trip to Rome and a return home, it seems as though Betty Draper is the first character to really make the leap, internally and externally. She begins with her almost fussy white Junior League dress, rediscovers that she has sex appeal and value, and ends the episode in a casual sixties dress, frustrated with her limited options in life. The dress Pete Campbell replaces for the au pair is like Betty’s old dresses – it has a large, fluffy ballerina skirt and tight bodice. It is also, as we learn at the department store, “last season.” Before everyone else on the show, Betty has begun to move forward. I doubt she’ll ever go for full-on hippie status, but the seeds of discontent and self-awareness may have finally been sown. Bring on the sixties.