Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A | 479 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT Bertram is Evil. Evil!
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 7 | Aired on 2009.09.27
Peggy awakens and sits up in that same bed with the man next to her...
...and then, at SC, she's closing the door to her office as she calls Duck. He's in a hotel room with some people that look like business colleagues, and she tells him that she hasn't changed her mind and is planning to return the gift. He says he's been at the Pierre (how long it's been!) taking meetings all day, and Hermès is coming in at 4:30, so why doesn't she come and return it herself? She's confused about the hotel locale, but he tells her the Grey offices are "like a Penn Station toilet with Venetian blinds." Way to upsell the place, guy. Also, I can see why she'd want to meet Hermès people, but wouldn't it be a little awkward to do so while returning a Hermès product? It'd be like meeting Michael Bay and asking him to refund your ticket price for Transformers, only much less understandable. Anyway, Peggy tells Duck never to contact her again, and that instruction will be a lot colder if she repeats it later in the episode.
Roger and his tan come in to see Don, and they pour themselves a drink and tell Don they know he hasn't even sent the contract to his lawyer. They add that his lack of a contract is starting to affect their business, and that Don is their David Ogilvy and if he'll only sign, he could have his name out front. "After mine. And Cooper, probably." Heh. Not really sure Roger can promise that, as he doesn't own the place anymore, but let's ignore that, as Roger says they really only need a letter of intent, and his lawyer can rape them later. Don looks up wordlessly at him, so Roger offers, "Grunt once for yes!" Nice. Don's stony silence isn't what Roger was hoping for, though, so he takes his leave: "The problem is, I don't know whether you don't want to do this here, or you don't want to do this at all." I'm not sure why that actually makes a difference, unless Roger is just trying to figure out how personally to take the whole thing. When he opens the door, he sees Peggy, and is like, "Didn't we give you an office?" Hee. Peggy, posterboard in hand, asks Don to sign off before she sends it to the printer, and he invites her in. When she brings up Hilton and starts to say how she'd love to work on the account, however, Don tells her that they're not bringing Hilton in (which...if that's true, I'm guessing he's planning on leaving rather than sign the contract) and he doesn't appreciate her coming in wasting his time with something he didn't actually need to approve. Peggy, flustered, tries to say she was excited about the account, but he practically sneers, "And you thought you'd come in here and ask for it because I never say no." She really does not time her approaches to Don very well, does she? She points out he says no all the time, surely referring to the question of the raise, but that's a mistake as well, as he snaps that she was his secretary, and now she's got an office and a job "that a lot of full-grown men would kill for. Every time I turn around you've got your hand in my pocket." He tells her to put her nose down and pay attention to her work. "There's not one thing that you've done here that I couldn't live without." My reasoned response to this tirade is this: Ooooooooouch. Feeling the same way, Peggy holds it together enough to apologize, and he concedes that she's good, but she needs to get even better and stop asking for things. Obviously, his reaction to her request was disproportionate and incredibly nasty, but, in keeping with the theme here, I think his comment about her having been his secretary is more telling than it seems, because remember: She knows things about him, just as he knows things about her. And I think, when she asks him for stuff like this, it makes him wonder if she thinks she can treat him as an equal, which makes him resentful, despite her explicit request he not treat her badly because of what she knows. And it's easy to say she would never use what she knows against him, but...I would have thought that about Bertram, too.