Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A+ | 548 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Women On The Verge Of Kicking Some Ass
By Couch Baron | Season 2 | Episode 8 | Aired on 2008.09.14
Peggy answers her phone with the formal greeting of "Peggy Olson's office," and it's Father "John" Gill, who asks to speak with her, not realizing that women being copyrighters is one thing, but women having secretaries is going to be a few more seasons down the line. (It seems appropriate to add, "God willing.") Peggy pauses for a couple moments and then brightly answers as herself. We see that Father Gill is holding a flyer that bills the dance as "A Night To Remember," and has a large picture of a man and a woman ballroom-dancing, his hand on the small of her back. He asks if she could take "whatever this is" and turn it into a poster, a request that sounds both counterproductive (it's an off-putting way of referring to Peggy's work) and counterintuitive (why would he want a poster if he doesn't like the concept?). Peggy focuses on the former issue, asking what he means, and Father Gill tells her that the CYO committee is worried about the potential implications of the copy. Peggy, however, thinks it's romantic yet wholesome, and besides, if they don't get the girls out there, the boys won't come either. (She doesn't ask if they'd prefer "A Night To Forget," which shows that she was raised right, at least in certain respects.) Father Gill starts to hem and haw, so her tone turns slightly acidic: "Tell them that this is the way it works, and I know better than them." In a less explicit way than Duck did, Father Gill asks that she not shoot the messenger: "Couldn't you just speak with them? They just want to feel involved." Peggy softens her tone and agrees, and even manages to refrain from rolling her eyes after she hangs up.
Harry's smoking (heh) and watching a "Fresh" deodorant commercial when Joan enters and asks if she can be of assistance. Harry's confused, so Joan tells him that she got a memo from Roger saying Harry needed help with his workload. I'd imagine after his intervention on Jane's behalf, a memo is about the only thing he'd dare to throw Joan's way. Harry sulks, because that's not what he wanted, but Joan doesn't indulge him, saying that they're spread pretty thin. Warren returns from cleaning out the commissary or whatever and gets all tongue-tied over Joan, who at least does him the favor of knowing his name. Harry sighs that he needs someone both to run their commercial scripts past the network for approval and to read the network scripts for him to be sure SC's clients aren't misrepresented. Joan says she doesn't feel comfortable sending her girls out of the building (safety's probably one reason, but having seen quite a few of them I don't know if they could be trusted to find their way back from an unfamiliar place) but she will find someone to read the scripts. Harry confides that he just wants to be able to get home to his pregnant wife at a reasonable hour, and Joan, with a note of curiosity that wasn't there before, checks out the pile of scripts on Harry's desk and asks exactly what the clients are looking for. Harry says they just want to avoid potential problems -- "if a kid's pushing away his dinner in disgust, just make sure it's not Gorton's Fish Sticks. People can't be coughing and dying right before a Lucky ad -- things like that." Joan thinks it sounds interesting, which couldn't be more in character, because what Harry's talking about is having a producer's mindset, and if SC has a Supervising Producer, it is Miss Joan Holloway. After he warns her that Maytag is "very sensitive to communism" (hee), she heads out with the pile of scripts, leaving Warren to bemoan the fact that he can't talk to Joan the way Harry does. "She's so much woman." Indeed, and we'll soon be finding out why.