Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A- | 415 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT There's That Past, Informing the Present Again
By Couch Baron | Season 4 | Episode 5 | Aired on 2010.08.22
Once Don has led his group into the conference room, he reads a quote from the book: "A man is shamed by being openly ridiculed and rejected. It requires an audience." Jeez. If that's the cultural belief, how do people in Japan ever leave the house? Pete asks if he got that off a fortune cookie, but Don informs him that it's from "that book you were all supposed to read," and, irrespective of happenings and drinking birds, I'm kind of shocked that apple-polisher Peggy didn't crack it open. Anyway, Don's point is that the quote has given him a rather Machiavellian idea: CGC is their approximate size, and as such can't afford to make a commercial any more than they can, but Chaough is clearly so intent on tailgating Don that all they have to do is pretend they're making an expensive commercial, and Chaough will follow suit. Joan, unsurprisingly, is the first one to follow Don's logic, but Pete is worried that if Chaough does something amazing, he'll win the account. Don: "You let me worry about that." I'm enjoying the machinations, to be sure, but Don, before you place your entire financial future on The Chrysanthemum And The Sword, shouldn't someone tell you that many people think that book is horseshit?
Regardless of how well-advised Don's plan is, Joan is playing her part to the hilt, as she has this director who's working for Chaough on the Clearasil commercial in her office and is tempting him with fake storyboards for the fake commercial. Don then knocks, and when Joan answers, we see he's got a red Honda motorcycle, which he says he thought he could put in her office. Joan whispers, "Oh, how impossibly inconvenient your timing is, with this director in my office who's going to go blab to Chaough now!" Well, she actually only says, "Later!" but she conveyed a lot with that one word. Anyway, after Joan informs the director that he didn't see that, she bullshits that it'll be twelve scenes, and he'll need to figure out how to shoot on the Staten Island Ferry and to close Fifth Avenue. Heh. The director tells her he's dying to do it but he's really just too busy at the moment...