Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B+ | 10 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Toeing The Line
By Couch Baron | Season 6 | Episode 9 | Aired on 05.26.2013
Arlene appears in a doorway, and her fairly artificial delivery of "Did you lose something?" suggests we're on set even before we cut to Megan -- wearing a blonde bob of a wig and sporting a French accent -- telling Arlene's character she was just looking for a pen. We learn that this character is "Colette," and Arlene accuses her of being interested "in things that belong to me." Megan takes a long time to reply even by normal standards, which is like an entire generation in soap-opera time, and then the director tells them to back it up and gives Megan the note she needs this character not to act like her sister Corinne. Megan looks frustrated, but Arlene tells her not to worry about it. Easy for her to say! No, I mean that; one word to her husband and that director will be getting coffee for Tisch filmmakers.
On his way out, Don pops in to see Peggy, and after some shop talk yields a cold front, Don tells her that he'll be looking at her work and forming an educated opinion. "You should try it sometime; it's what professionals do." Despite Harry's earlier comment, Peggy's smart enough not to bother coming up with one of the 180,000 ways Don has proven himself to be unprofessional since she's known him. Instead, she points out that the strategic debate he and Ted have had over Fleischmann's has been going on for weeks, and they both have a point; besides, they're both more experienced than she, so why does her opinion matter so much? He doesn't explicitly say that her relationship with both of them makes her the true tie-breaker here, but he does ask again what she thinks, and when she tells him she thinks the correct approach is somewhere in the middle of his and Ted's, he tells her no -- "there's a right and there's a wrong." Peggy's basically like, if we're going to make the subtext this transparent we might as well go all the way to text, so she tells him that what he means is there's him, and there's Ted, "and I don't know how I became in charge of turning this into a collaboration. Isn't that your job?" Sorry, Don, but that comeback sounded pretty pro to me. Peggy goes on that Don and Ted have a lot of similarities -- not all of them good -- but the difference is that Ted's interested in the idea, "and you're interested in your idea." Don sardonically demurs, saying Ted's interested in his own ideas as well, and when Peggy replies that Ted never makes her feel like Don does, Don counters, "He doesn't know you." Peggy, next time just tell him his idea stinks and move on.