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Roger and Don's families are off to the coast for Labor Day Weekend, along with all the wives and children in the state apparently. Betty's none too happy heading off with her replacement mommy, but she uses it as another way to angle in on her therapeutic goals. The agency continues to work on the Nixon campaign as things in the race finally begin to heat up. Rachel's father finally shows some face at Sterling Cooper, agreeing to a three-month shutdown in order to remake Mencken's as a lunch-and-shopping destination; he also approves of Don. Who doesn't? Dr. Scholl's, who drops Sterling Cooper due to their creative efforts, much to Pete's not-so-secret delight. A bit more ambiguous are his feelings toward Peggy, as he rewrites their history for like the eighteenth time, leaving her feeling abused and confused again, because she is very sweet and very smart, but also very self-destructive and dumb. At least this time she shows some backbone and manages to avoid making love to the lunch cart in response, so I guess she's learning.
To cheer Don up, Roger takes him down to the casting call for a twin-concept double-sided aluminum campaign, where they pick up a pair. One of the twins tries unsuccessfully to bed Don; the other gives Roger that heart attack the old pederast's been working on for awhile. Love Roger, but it's not that sad, mostly because first he rides her around like a horse in her panties, which is brutally and hard to watch levels of misogynistic, even for this show.
Joan's roommate Carol loses her job, but Joan's attempts to cheer her up result in a startling voyage into the Lesbian Zone. Joan, of course, totally deals with this like a champ and takes Carol out on the town. They bring some rando guys back to the apartment, but then Mr. Cooper calls her into the office to send out telegrams to every single client about Roger's heart attack. He also tells her to stop sleeping with Roger because he's too old and infirm. By the end of professionally typing out her lover's health scare news a billion times, she's closer to a wreck than we've ever seen her. Joan's life is really...complicated.
While in the hospital, Roger reconciles with his wife, his daughter, and his grownup responsibilities, which spurs Don to call up Betty on her vacation. It also spurs him to visit and finally bed the beautiful Rachel. Then he tells her that pesky life story nobody else ever gets to hear, right down to the prostitute mom. Is it weird that after all his bullshit, this is the first time it really feels like cheating? Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously, Peggy was the victim of even more sexual harassment than she even knew, because the boys of Sterling Cooper are a bunch of squealing harpies. Pete punched the blonde guy for saying all her meat was in her lobster tail, but of course that was more about male ego than Peggy's honor, because she has none. Roger admitted he was having his affair with Joan basically to save his marriage, Betty wouldn't stop talking about her mother, and Don had himself a case of Shtetl Fever.
The Draper kids are running around with all their beach stuff, ready to go to the coast with Betty's dad and his new paramour/"friend" Gloria. Don jokes with his daughter that he's ready to slip out the back, rather than deal with Grandpa, because fathers and daughters and their creepy freaky secrets are what this episode's all about. Much as with every other person, Don is adorable with his daughter. In the kitchen, it's hot; the fan's going and Betty's steaming. Her dad asks multiple times if she's hiding her "sugar bowl" from him, and lest you think that's not the first or second instance of the sick weirdo writing of this show rearing its head, you don't know Mad Men. Gloria offers Grandpa some "packets from Howard Johnson," but Betty's not about to let her fake mom offer Grandpa any sugar. He'll take her saccharine and love it. I'm sure she's made the same threats with Don; girl's got saccharine to spare. Grandpa continues to demand his daughter's sugar bowl; it continues to be creepy. "You wanna wake up with a cold leg like Uncle Herman?" she spits, warning him that diabetics "don't live long," and sometimes lose their legs. Fingers crossed! Betty can be kind of a downer.
Grandpa introduces Don to Gloria, and there's the usual talk about how Betty can use another woman around to do all the woman stuff. "I live to serve," Gloria says. She's kind of a nonentity. Grandpa gets gross: "You heard that, right? I have a witness!" Like all dating in 1960, it's kind of like flirting, kind of like the slave trade.
Betty hurries Don upstairs for "help with a suitcase," which is of course code for "I am about to have another psychotic break." She leans against the bureau, smoking crazily, complaining about how Gloria showed up at her mom's funeral with her top button unbuttoned like she was at a Sadie Hawkins dance; "So unseemly!" She begs to be allowed to stay so that she doesn't have to vacation with the "vulture," and then lists Gloria's many faults: her husband was a tax-cheating failure, her daughter Louisa is two years from trolling for dick at funerals herself, and her son Huntley, the same age as Betty's brother, was "always funny." Don explains that men are hopeless: "Birdie, your father was married, what, forty years?" He can barely fix his own tea, much less do his laundry. She replies that what Grandpa needs is a housekeeper, then, but Don points out that you can't fuck a housekeeper -- they go home at night. Ergo, Gloria. Dude, even when they're being nice, in 1960 everything's the worst! Betty gives that fake, translucent smile she gives right before whipping out the firearms, and he begs her to just, once again, go swimming in the deeps of Lake Birdie. She responds with an equivocal thumbs up that at least she won't have to make conversation, because Gloria's such a talker. Not that we see it. Don promises to come the afternoon and take Betty to "that place with the lobster rolls." Betty asks him to just come along now: "You hate the way I drive? My father taught me." Don begs off: half of everybody is out of the office for Labor Day as it is, and if Roger's much-foreshadowed death of old age comes around soon, he wants to look like he was trying. Also, he wants to get away from Betty, because he secretly thinks she's kind of annoying. I totally adore her, but then I love Izzie Stevens, so you can't trust me.
Also annoying: the Kennedy campaign ad the boys are watching later at the office, which goes like this: "Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy!" JFK is "the man who answers straight," and also "the man who's always there." The horrible ad -- saccharine, if you will -- ends on a shot of the man himself, with Jackie and little Caroline. They have no idea what they are in for. The guys talk at length about how fun and catchy and content-free the advertisement is, and the nerdy one notes that it "gets in your head and makes you wanna blow your brains out." (Word choice!) Pete, ever the voice of reason when it comes to Nixon/Kennedy, advises them all never to forget that "the president is a product." They ignore him because he's a twerp, but he's right to like a sick degree, starting with JFK. up is Nixon, talking about...well, the only thing more boring than a politician is a politician in black and white, so I can't tell you for sure what he's talking about. But I'm guessing it's those tax-and-spend-and-fuck-Marilyn Democrats. They complain about the ad for awhile, but when Roger comes in he admonishes them all to start watching more television: the shows, and the ads. He points out that this is their job.
Pete wonders about the mud people are "harvesting" on Kennedy, and when Roger notes that he's known as a bit of a womanizer, Don realizes that they've handed them the election already, because soccer moms love a womanizer. And I would go off on how this is not only politically naïve but just as gross as the rest of the sinister creepy sexism on this show, but for once I'm just going to zip my big stupid mouth, because...what can you say? Everybody in the room says it shouldn't be "this close" a hundred million times. Meanwhile, though, Don sees it as essentially a battle of narrative, not an attack-ad situation at all, and launches into his usual thinly veiled Let's Talk About Don Draper Hour, Brought To You By Clabber Girl: how JFK is a nouveau riche, recent immigrant who bought his way into Harvard. (Wasn't his grandfather the Mayor of Boston or something? I don't know enough to quibble here.) Nixon came from nothing, a humble self-made Quaker with a face like a Bassett hound, "the Abe Lincoln of California," who ended up the Vice President of the U.S. six years after leaving the Navy. When Don sees Kennedy he sees a silver spoon, but when he looks at Nixon, he sees himself. I never thought about it this way, but they're both kind of Don-like, aren't they? Kennedy's just the Gatsby version of Don either way. Well, but: Catholic.
Roger takes Pete's side: with a positive ad, you're preaching to the choir, but with negative ads you're hitting people who are on the fence. And, as Pete notes, there are a lot of people on the fence right now. Roger calls the meeting to a close, asking for ideas after the long weekend. Pete smirks, "Yeah, let's go down swinging." Every time you wish somebody would pop poor Pete in the face just for existing, I will eat one of these Skittles I have bought for this purpose, starting with the yucky green ones, and we'll see how many are left. Roger also mentions the Menkens, who are coming to sign off on the strategic plan, which means two things: number one, Rachel! And number two, because this is the big father/daughter episode to bookend the father/son nightmare that was "Red In The Face," we'll finally get to see her dad. Bet he's awesome! Roger tells Don to "ride bareback over Pete here" during the meeting -- I guess the bra and panties are optional before five -- and to be on his best behavior, because, he asides quietly, he knows Rachel bothers Don. Um yeah, in the "hot and..." sense. Sorry, this show makes me go all Catskills.
Joan's out on the floor, wearing the Joan version of the Mamma Mia dress, meaning that she still looks hotter than a campfire on the sun, and Roger drags her across the room to his office, offering tantalizing snippets of sexual harassment as he goes: "I really need to get to the bottom of that, yes..." and "I would like to get a look at those..." Inside the office, he's all overjoyed, like a boy, about how daughter Margaret and wife Mona are "off to Black Island" for Labor Day, like every other set of wife and kids in the city, so they have the whole town to themselves. Red suggests a movie, perhaps The Apartment. The titular apartment, if you haven't seen it, is an executive suite where all the sleazebag guys in this office go to get their rocks off with fun-time girls. Specifically one fun-time girl that the main guy secretly loves but can't stop treating like trash, who in a rare flair of art-imitating-gross, was played by Shirley Maclaine, the Hollywood fun-time girl of all time, after Marilyn Monroe was passed over. Roger says he saw it last week with his wife: "A white elevator operator? And a girl, at that? I wanna work there!" Joan's unsurprised at this: "They passed that girl around like a tray of canapés, and she tried to commit suicide." Roger's like, "So...you've seen it." Seen it? It's a How Not To, in Joan's world. Joan's world is so specific; it has so many rules for survival. What's Joan's Dick Whitman like?
He tries to...Roger, come on...he tries to sweet-talk her about how it's just Hollywood blowing things out of proportion: "That ridiculous Psycho!" He says these days the cinema folks just aren't happy unless everything's that extreme. Joan points out that, sexist-wise and grossness-wise, The Apartment is less sci-fi and more vérité, from where she's standing. He doesn't get it, and then builds an extra floor over his not-getting-it so that he can not get it on a whole new level, comparing Joan's take on the very topical and creepy movie to this time his wife dreamt that he ran over their dog with the car. He laughs because it's so crazy, because she was mad at him all day, and they don't even have a dog. Joan bounces with a quickness, because don't talk to me about your wife, don't talk to me about your fucking imaginary dog, and don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. And knowing Roger, that's literal.
The boys go all out in their presentation to Daddy Menken, on and on about the atrium and newer, wider aisles, and the restaurant -- an "elegant tearoom" with "champagne linens," and if you need me to tell you which of the crew jumped in with those oh-so-butch terms, you're not really paying attention -- and it's not so much that Mr. Menken isn't impressed, but he's confused a bit. Specifically, why the hell should he give up 30% of his retail space on the ground floor so he can somehow go into the restaurant business. Pete explains that it's an immersive indulgent experience, both shopping and lunch, and "that's what ladies like." You know what ladies like, Pete? Never mind, too easy. These Skittles are delicious! Mr. Menken notes that this is in the promotional materials, in a font a thousand times bigger than the part where it says they'll have to close down the store for three months. Don explains that this will build "enormous anticipation," like a movie premiere: "The New Menken's." They'll have a line around the block. "Even if you have to pay people" to stand in it, Mr. Menken notes good-naturedly. I adore Mr. Menken because we both believe very strongly in his daughter Rachel, and because we both respect the hell out of Donald Draper. It's entirely possible that the only person on this show that I don't love is Peggy, and I kind of love her. It's fun to watch TV you like.
You can tell by the fact that his daughter Rachel is all up in his business, Mr. Menken says, that he's not a man afraid of change. So even if this is the best idea ever -- and he's not really selling resistance to it, because he can see the value -- it still sticks in his craw that he'll have to lose anything in the deal. "Can't I keep what I have, and build on it?" Don takes the calculated risk of broaching the "unpleasant truth" that Mr. Menken has: nothing in particular. "Your customers can't be depended on. Their lives have changed. They're prosperous. Over the years, they've developed new tastes. Like your daughter: they're educated, sophisticated, they know what they deserve and they want to pay for it." Valid, but Mr. Menken still wonders why he'd want to own a store he wouldn't, himself, shop in. Don pushes the negs, all about how he's already done that once when he left the original second floor hosiery store on 7th Avenue (thanks to Rachel for that info), and that honestly, he's banking on being proud of himself and bragging to his grandchildren, but they're not going to care, because a billion years ago is a billion years ago either way.
Rachel gets her back up a little bit, not liking how easily Don's leading her dad around, and reminds everybody in the room that Mr. Menken actually did start with nothing and actually did rock the fuck out in building his business, so maybe a little less of the negative campaigning, because Dad's not on the fence anyway. She ends the meeting through sheer force of will, and both Menkens agree that it's a good plan. They all shake hands, and Don whispers to Rachel that hopefully they'll both keep their jobs a while longer. "Don't screw this up," she hisses back, and Don chuckles that he thinks her dad likes him. "I guarantee there's nothing about you he likes," she says. Fathers and daughters. Don knows better. Heading toward the elevator, Mr. Menken notes that Sterling Cooper is like the Czarist Ministry; you leave thinking it was all your idea in the first place. She's like, "I have no idea what you're talking about," even though she totally does. Mr. Menken praises Don: "He's good. Persuasive. A little dashing for my tastes..." She smiles at him all brittle and ushers him onto the elevator, and that's when I realized she was going to bone Don by the end of the episode.
Joan's putting up a memo in the break room about the long weekend when her roommate Carol -- looking kind of hellish -- comes in, freaking out. Joan's all caring and business-like: "Don't tell me you're late again! Do you need to see Dr. Emerson?" Carol's all WTF but Joan's like, "You walked twelve blocks in a heat wave! And I see you didn't take my advice about the dress shields..." Carol feels bad about herself for a while, because it's hard to be friends with Joan, and then explains the situation: her job at this magazine is reading the slush pile and writing rejection letters, a job Joan calls "depressing." To cover for her boss Mr. Aldredge, she told the Editorial Director, in front of a whole meeting, that she accidentally passed on this giant Yale poet, instead of the truth: Aldredge dropped the ball. So they got together and made Mr. Aldredge fire her right then and there. Joan points out that this makes Mr. Aldredge a dick for going through with it, no matter how bad he felt about it, but Carol's more embarrassed about asking her father for money, which is a chronic issue. Joan counsels her to lose her money shame, because there's never enough money (although thanks to her ranks of Rats and Super Rats she doesn't have to worry so much, I'm guessing) and also that men are pigs: "We build these men up and for what? Dinner and jewelry?" She suggests a night on the town, to "shake off the gloominess," and won't take Carol's request -- to sit in a movie and cry -- for an answer. "Let's find some bachelors and empty their wallets." Carol whines that she hates Manhattan sometimes, and Joan gets intense for a sec: "Don't say that! The city's everything." She loves it so much! She's like a highly evolved mutant creature that was bred to live in the city and kill for her food.
Pete comes into Don's office asking where "Howdy Dowdy" is at. Zing! I can't even eat a Skittle off that one. He tells Don that he just got off the phone with Dr. Scholl's, who are transferring their account to Leo Burnett, of Chicago. The reason being, according to Pete, that Sterling Cooper's creative efforts were "dull and humorless." Don asks a few token questions about the conversation, but he knows that Pete's a jerk and won't give anything up, and that he didn't fight them too hard anyway because he's douchey. "I never lost an account before! Especially one that was here before I got here!" He protests that the Scholl's guy was abusive on the phone, but Don just sighs. "The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them." Pete asks if he should report the loss to Sterling (spinning it as Don's failure, to be sure), leave Don to do it (so Roger can shoot the messenger), or just wait until after the weekend (thus being a pussy). Don tells him he'll take care of it, calmly smiling, but once Pete's gone, he shivers for a moment before brutally shoving everything off his desk. Peggy comes in immediately, asking if he's buzzing her -- the intercom's making a strange noise. She immediately locates the source of this problem and starts cleaning it up, but he tells her to leave everything in disarray, to throw away her Scholl's inserts, and to burn their file, which he rips in half before storming off to Roger's office. And by "storming," I mean "moving in a stealthy, terrifyingly efficient way, like a ninja, albeit a ninja who really needs to know if his raise is still happening."
Roger's first question is who got the account, of course, and then he makes fun of Chicago for awhile before apologizing to Don: he and Leo Burnett have the same hometown. Don bitterly relates Pete's subtle joy in mentioning that it was a creative failure that did it. Roger's so not worried about it, because he loves Don and is feeling expansive. "The day you sign a client..." he repeats, but neither he nor Don really believe it. I realize this show's all about lying v. truthing and outsides v. insides and how Don couldn't even tell his girlfriend was in love with a pothead until he saw a picture of them, but man do they stress and interrogate the whole façade issue this week. Oh, and Roger's getting a haircut this whole time and looks like a million bucks. I was going to joke about someday finding a cure for the John Slattery man-crush, but like, if this episode didn't do it, I don't think there's a shitload of hope to be had. Roger says something about accounting hoodoo, I think, something irregular about the billing of Dr. Scholl's, and then lays down another invented cliché for Don about how clients are like being in a marriage because you get into them for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face, and Don laughs charitably, but Roger's like whatever. "So we'll have to cut back. Let's go fire somebody!"
Don laughs and Roger tells him that, per the Long Weekend bylaws of Pig Nation, they have to "fall in love a dozen times" while their wives are at the beach. Don begs off, but Roger pushes him, explaining that the whole reason they work so hard is so they can afford to...send their wives to the coast and whore it up. That makes no sense, but making sense is not why Roger is special. He admits that he also wants to use Don's hot ass as bait, which causes Don to titter, and then he suggests that the head down to Casting at four, because if he knows Freddie Rumson, the casting call for this double-sided aluminum campaign is going to be both slow and obvious, which means fanny for all. "When God closes a door, he opens a dress," Roger reminds Don, but that's not God, that's Billy Dee Williams.
Pete trails Peggy through the typing pool; she is friendly but distant, all about the one-word answers. Like when he asks if she's "carrying precious cargo," like his baby that her fat ass is obviously pregnant with, she tells him if he wants to get a look at the proofs she's walking across the office, she refers him to Cosgrove, whose account it is. He calls her a "Minister of Protocol" and asks if Don's talked to Roger about Dr. Scholl's yet. Again, she says, talk to the concerned parties and leave my uterus out of it. He's not having it, finally grabbing at her elbow and asking WTF. She's like, "Excuse me? I'm just trying to do my job, and you're making it really difficult." (That's what she said!) He calls her "Peggy dear" and tells her she's being unprofessional. Oh hell no, is he playing the "your harmless crush" card? Why yes, yes he is. "I cannot believe I'm in this conversation," Peggy says to herself, and he tries to get in on the self-pity, but she decides to just keep telling it like it is. Peggy has this tendency to relate the way things actually are to the way they appear and/or are talked about. It's like unnerving.
"I don't know if you like me, or if you don't like me. I'm just trying to get along here, and every time I walk by I wonder, 'Is are you going to be nice to me? Or cruel?'" Pete's like, "Cruel!? I am married!" Which I don't even know what he means by that, but I'm done with the yellow and green Skittles now and I'm moving on to purple. "Yes, I know. I heard all about how...confusing that can be. Maybe you need me to lay on your couch to clear that up for you again?" Score one for Peggy. Most of the time she makes me want to punch myself in the head, but when she's had enough, girlfriend gets the job done. "That's some imagination you've got! Good thing you're a writer now!" Weak sauce, Peter Campbell, and getting weaker: "What do you need me for?" Um, nothing, you walking sack of enema. Oh no, wait! My bad. Child support.
The gay one and the nerdy one, or the less-cute one that only looks like the nerdy one, are down in Casting, flirting with the double-sided aluminum ladies, which are sets of twins. As you can imagine, they're striking out horribly, because they're not really trying, because the ladies are not the point here. At the other end of the hall, which is lined by actual casting couches, the blonde one is being even creepier, as is his wont. He's telling this cute couple of girls about how on the farm you might get a pair of cows born "attached at the back" who, when "cut apart," still wanted to always be together. He asks if that's what happened to the pair of twins in question, and they're kind of dry-heaving in tandem, so I guess that's an answer. Sterling comes sweeping into the scene with such machismo and grandeur you know he's either going to die or get emasculated crazy bad again by the end of the episode. He scares the juniors off with a quickness and immediately picks his set of twins, Eleanor and Mirabelle. They are, of course, redheads with pale skin, because that's his deal, but compared to Joan they're pretty mousy. Just in case everybody didn't get the memo about his giant balls and virile power, Roger dispatches all the other hopefuls, saying that he and Don are using their authority to choose the new faces of Cartwright double-sided aluminum. Classically, it's this and not what he pulls upstairs that counts as his hubris: this is performance for other people, not his own inner weirdness. They giggle, of course, and Roger invites them upstairs, of course, and they agree, of course, and he asks one twin how old she is. Twenty. And the other one? Oh, how they laugh.
Upstairs in Roger's office, things are swanky and gross some more. "Aren't you two a pair of bookends? What do you say, Draper, shall we cast them in bronze and mount them on the credenza?" One of them is like, "Oh my! Everything he says means something else too!" Yeah, honey. You know you have to actually earn respect? It's not his sexism that's making you stupid. One or the other of them notices that it's warm, and Roger explains that they turn the building's air off at five. Don asks Mirabelle what her special talent is, and true to her face, it's dressage. Roger starts creeping out wildly on Eleanor: "Your skin is translucent -- that's see-through -- can I touch it?" She offers her arm, so of course he strokes her thigh up to about her right earlobe, and she giggles. He calls her "soft as a lamb's ear." Don's smile is pasted on. Roger makes Mirabelle feel her sister's cheek, then suggests that they make out. The twins wonder why it is that men always ask them that. The answer is that men are gross, but Roger says that actually it's because "it's a beautiful thing." Done slurps the rest of his drink and tries to escape; Roger calls him "wonderboy" and wishes him a good night. Eleanor kinda wants to leave, kinda wants to stay, and finally she starts dancing around with Don in the middle of the room. "That's nice, dance for us," says Roger, and nuzzles Mirabelle.
Joan is getting made up at the apartment with Loser Carol, complaining that she's "stuck between Doris Day in Pillow Talk and Midnight Lace," when what she really needs is to be "Kim Novak in just about anything." Midnight Lace I get, because of the whole "we will never actually have a relationship" aspect of her relationship with Roger, and I guess I can see Pillow Talk vaguely, because she has no idea what a giant bitch she is and probably thinks of herself as a fairly harmless charmer, not a femme fatale...so it's funny that she's thinking about Kim Novak now. I mean specifically right this second: "What a rut! 1960, I am so over you!" Carol zips up her gown and smells her hair, and you go uh oh. "Shalimar?" Carol asks, and Joan wonders if it's too much. "You never say die, do you?" Carol says affectionately, and Joan minces for a second before remembering to care: "Carol, sweetie, it's not that bad. Tomorrow's another day!" Carol protests that she's actually doing okay, and Joan snaps her head, that way she does when a subject is closed: "Good. No waterworks. Mascara!" But the subject is not closed. "I'm just so happy right now!" Joan laughs and asks if she's taking pills already. Carol's like, "No, silly! SSRIs won't be invented for twenty-eight years! I'm talking about totally lezzing out on you!" Joan's like, "We do have fun, don't we."
Which is where, I think, Carol screws this up. I am not a connoisseur by any stretch, but I do have a fair amount of knowledge, not to say experience, of the most likely sequence of events when the Girls successfully Go Wild. I venture to suggest that preparation for mining the fleshpots is far, far less advantageous a moment to Go Wild or attempt to induce spontaneous Going Wild in a female lady friend than, say, at the end of the night. Not to mention that this is a case in which actions are always, always going to trump words. There has never been a case of Going Wild that resulted purely from rhetorical skill, Carol. If you know what I'm saying, and I think you do. "Joan, I love you. I really do." Joan doesn't look, but there's a lilting lightness in her voice that suggests she just mentally flipped into My Life Is Now A Movie mode: "You." Sort of flirtatious, sort of warning her to take it to a lighter level, sort of an internal kind of "..And here we fuckin' go."
"That first week in college I saw you walking down the commons and I thought, who is she? When college was over, you came here. And I followed you." There's a certain amount of surprise on Joan's face, but you'd need a special pair of glasses to see it. If she was capable of registering this on her face she wouldn't be Joan; it's the first skill she learned. "You needed a roommate? I moved in. Just to be near you. I did everything I could, to be near you." Joan doesn't break eye contact. Once. She's walking a very thin line between being here for this and not being here at all; between admitting she knows what Carol's talking about, and pretending it's nothing. "All with the hope that one day you would notice me. Joanie. Just think of me as a boy." Joan doesn't look away, until she does, and then smiles sweetly. There are a thousand ways this could go: trust Joan to pick the most graceful, least damaging one. Trust Joan, even in this instance, to play the social organizer, reminding Carol about the rules, teaching her about the ways we behave: "You've had a hard day. Let's go out and try to forget about it, okay?" It's not just a no, it's defining the world and the possibilities it contains, for them both. If all you get to be is a Doris Day or a Kim Novak, a Birdie or a Joanie...not worth it. Not when even Doris Day has to sleep with Rock Hudson. When even Rock Hudson has to sleep with Doris Day: Carol nods, taking the offered out, and Joan smiles broadly, lovingly. "Good. Because I'm starving." She leaves her there, to get her shit together and come back into Joan's world.
"Volare" is playing in Roger's office, where Don sits with Eleanor's legs across his lap, totally not feeling this whole sordid scene. It's really refreshing to see, for once, somebody on this show be like, "Wait, I'm stuck in gender Viet Nam without an exit strategy! Gross! There is not really a compelling need for me to fuck a twenty-year-old in order to prove my future earning potential to Roger Sterling! 1960! I am so over you!" Not getting the obvious hints that he's not that into her, Eleanor -- whom you only thought was kind of demeaning herself here -- tries to kiss him, and he vaguely kisses her back. She finally hauls her legs off Don, and he makes to leave for the, what, eighth time, and then HOLY HELL. That Goddamned Roger Sterling comes into the room riding Mirabelle like a pony, in her underwear, laughing. And her back is bowing under him, and Don's about to barf, and both of them are laughing until they are rolling around in the floor, but I don't think either of them really mean it either. I don't think either of them find it very funny, I mean. Here's what I think: I think 1960 is gender Viet Nam and unless you really check in with yourself, you could end up almost anywhere at all, and I think that any time the Marquis De Sade shit starts, somebody's not being honest. And I think that Roger is like a toddler who actually really wants his limits defined for him, but nobody will do it because he's too rich and too powerful, and women can't do it because he's very, very beautiful in addition to those things, so he has to go to these grotesque extremes -- while also having his power illustrated for him by the fact that not one person is supplying the totally obvious fact that you do not ride naked ladies around like ponies, and fucking everybody knows that, 1960 or not. So that's the positive reinforcement as well: nobody can tell Roger Sterling no, so it's kind of like everybody is telling him yes. It makes me sad for him. I love Roger Sterling very much.
Don actually manages to make it out of the room this time, and Eleanor follows him -- not to continue her glacial creep up his pants leg, but to make sure that Roger Sterling manages to stop before he's gone all haywire. Eleanor, run. Put on your boots and run until you reach the Coney Island rollercoaster, because things are not getting better up in here! Rode the bitch like a horse! In front of you! She was naked and he was fully clothed! It was fucked up! Eleanor pretends that she's this world-weary roué and all this, and Don's like, "You're boring me so bad," and she's like "Don't think of an elephant! And by 'elephant,' I mean 'I am totally slutty!' In case you didn't know!" He tells her it's really not happening, and she's like "Um, pshyeah. Okay, dude." Meanwhile, some stunning dialogue is happening inside that creepy office. Roger's got his head on Mirabelle's thigh and he's kind of absentmindedly running his fingers up and down her leg, and she goes, "I like your office. It's really fancy." He replies that he similarly loves her name, for the same reason I guess, because check it: he wanted to call his daughter Margaret "Margaux," like the wine. And here I thought Mirabelle was as bad as it gets, he throws "Margaux" in your face like it's no big deal.
Roger rightly assumes that Margaret would hate "Margaux" even more than Margaret, but that's not because she's a mean old meanie who hurts her dad's feelings, it's just because...Roger likes dumb names. "Why is she so angry?" he whines, and it's like, "Have you see this show Mad Men?" He asks, since he can admit that Mirabelle is closer to Margaret's age than his own, how come she's not angry too -- guess somebody already broke that pony -- and she just asks him not to be sad. He wishes that his daughter would talk to him without rolling her eyes, but after all, she's right: he has nothing to say to her. Mirabelle opines that girls love their fathers, painting a woefully inadequate picture of the crazy, creepy crockpot of sexual neurosis that the nuclear family has wrought on them all, so he demonstrates it for her: "You have such beautiful skin! I just want to eat it. I want to suck your blood, like Dracula!" Rather than running as fast and as far as she can away from this situation, she drops her cigarette in some booze and kisses him.
Meanwhile, Joan and Carol are reaching their own little gender freakout party, with two trolls they picked up at a bar and brought back to their apartment for some normalizing behavior. Joan send Carol in for ice and finds the gin, asking Professor Franklin, the elder of the two, about his interest in language. The other guy mentions a passion for carpentry, but nobody cares. Everybody's focused on Joan, who "loves words, and their ways," and Franklin explains that he collects "bad speech," by which he means "racism with a gloss of academia." He relates the charming tale of a Polish janitor of his acquaintance, who once described his bride as "not speaking real good English." Joan laughs, but not as hard as we did at the douche's line: "I cherish that gift." Joan's breezy and sexy and just a little mean: "Put that in a book and sell it!" Or choke on it. The other troll is like, "Now this is a party!" Everybody ignores him some more. Joan invites Professor Franklin into her boudoir to fix a light fixture, and they vanish. Troll guy says awkwardly, "Well, what are we going to do?" He starts kissing Carol and she looks at him for a second, then makes the call, and smiles: "Whatever you want." He commences doing so. Joan's world.
Eleanor tells Don that he kisses like a married man: "Your own way. No talking about it." She assures him this is a good thing, and after a creepy desperate pause, goes, "Tell me what to do, and I'll do it." He considers her, a little amused, and finally he's like, "Maybe it's this office, but you are selling too hard." She bites her lip and it's a pretty likeable face she makes at this point: she knows he's right and she feels dumb about it, but still with a sense of humor. God knows we can't have that on this show, though, so immediately Mirabelle starts screaming in the other room that something's wrong. "I knew I shouldn't have asked him to do it a second time!" They run inside, where Roger's on his back, sweating and all white, gasping that there's a tank on his chest. Don tells the twins to call an ambulance and scatter, and then as they're carting him away on a gurney, Roger starts calling Mirabelle's name. Don picks up Roger's head by his magical hair and slaps the shit out of him. "Mona. Your wife's name is Mona." Roger swallows, still ghostly, and Don stresses out. It just occurred to me that Don and Joan are kind of the same person. Have they ever had a scene together? That's like Philip K. Dick to think about.
Don enters Roger's room and nearly loses it; he looks very tiny. It's one thing when he's being bombastic Roger, annoying and insulting by turns, barfing in front of clients; that's funny. This isn't, because it's real and because it's undeserved. "All these years I thought it would be the ulcer," Roger says. He did it all, drank cream and ate his butter, and now he's having a heart attack. Slattery rocks; Roger says this with this complete bitterness at having been cheated. Don makes small talk but Roger's not having it: "Don. Do you believe in...energy?" Don asks if he means "the thing that gives you get up and go," which made me laugh so hard, because it's like an ad: "Yes! That thing!" And then Don could be like, "That's cocaine, now available in Coca-Cola! Gives you real get up and go!" But Roger, for once, isn't talking about drugs: he's talking about a soul. Don's so checked out and weirded out by this abrupt turn that he's like, "Um, tell me what you want to hear." Roger wows about how he's totally been living the last twenty years like he's on shore leave. "What the hell is that about?" Do the math. It's 1960. He has been on shore leave for twenty years.
My mom would be around Margaret's age, so like, when you say "the Greatest Generation," it's Roger or somebody like him that I'm thinking of: somebody who was too young to know what death was, until the War, and then when that proved he was invincible, he was incapable of changing or growing at all. He stayed the age he was when he was drafted, and all of this is like a horrible, wonderful surprise. The ones who came back, the survivors, had the world at their feet. The worst thing I can think of. Don assures him he was just "living," that it was just normal behavior, and Roger says, "God. I wish I was going somewhere." He closes his eyes, and Don's inability to handle this in any way is interrupted by wife Mona's arrival. Don swears Roger's doing great, and she leans in. Roger begins to cry, more honest than we've ever seen him. It's hard to watch. He says her name, over and over, swearing that he loves her. He cries, and she kisses his forehead and his cheek, and as she shushes him he begins to pull it together. "Listen to me, darling. Margaret is outside, and she needs to see you..." He falls apart again, begging her not to let their daughter see him so small and weak, but Mona refuses. Don ushers her into the room, and she smiles and cries and hugs him, but she doesn't say a word. Don watches from outside the glass at the three of them, hugging and crying, loving each other; a family. He takes off without saying goodbye. Don seems so much older than Roger, so much of the time, that it's hard to remember Mirabelle was only partially correct: girls love their fathers, but so do boys.
Professor Franklin escorts Joan into Sterling Cooper, in her beautiful black dress. "My goodness!" he exclaims. "All this from selling toilet paper!" Mr. Cooper's sitting at a desk up front, waiting for her, and when she asks where everybody is, Cooper orders Franklin out of the building. She tells him to go, and Cooper takes a big breath. "Miss Holloway. Roger Sterling has suffered a heart attack." She bends a little. "He survived it, and he's currently being hospitalized." She's been called in to type out telegrams to every client in their book, reassuring them that business will not be interrupted. He reads out the names and addresses one by one, starting with Alpine Real Estate. Joan cries, while she types.
Don is affected by the event in another way. He calls Betty, who complains about the way her father and Gloria made such a big deal about sleeping in separate bedrooms, but once Don tells her about the heart attack, she's all concern. She says she's glad Don's there, that Mona must be a wreck. Don tells her Roger just randomly keeled over at work. "It was awful, actually..." Betty says that she'd come be with him, if it wouldn't break the kids' hearts. To make the point, she begins listing all the horrors of beach life: "She was making some...pot roast with ketchup, and my father started hovering behind her, watching! Like he used to do with my mother. How can he pretend that she never existed?" Betty admits that she still sometimes picks up the phone to call her mother, and Don kind of tunes her out, right up until she echoes Roger's suicidal sentiment from before: "I know people say life goes on, and it does. But nobody tells you that's not a good thing. Why is that?" He pleads ignorance, then weakly offers: "...Stop thinking about that?" She asks again if he wants her to come, but he knows it wouldn't do anything. She can't give him what he needs right now. But she can try: "Give Mona my love... And Don? Make sure you eat something."
Pete arrives at the hospital as Don's hanging up; the last person Don or anyone else on Earth wants to see. "How's he doing?" Not great. "What happened?" I don't know, Don says, and crams a whole fistful of Skittles in his mouth. They nod, and on the television Eisenhower's explaining that, all positives aside, he can't really recall any specific decisions Nixon ever made that had an impact on him. Don's really good at his job, but the truth is that Pete Campbell is really good at Roger Sterling's job. Or will be, if somebody will just give him the keys. This poor kid.
Don's knocking on an apartment door: it's Rachel's house, and she looks like a billion dollars even in the middle of the night. He apologizes for just showing up, but she's already seen the telegram so she's got it mostly figured out. "Let me in," he says, simply, and when she asks if he's okay he only tells her no and asks for a drink. She offers to have her dad make a call, for better medical care, but Don shrugs. "He's rich, they seem to be taking care of him." She asks him for details, but prefaces it by specifying he can be honest; she's not moving the account. Now here is a woman who understands Don Draper. "He's gray and weak. His skin looks like paper." It's translucent. That means see-through. "He's your friend, isn't he?" Don doesn't know the word for what Roger is, but either way, she's right when she asserts he doesn't want to lose him. He just tries to kiss her. She pushes him off: "What good is that going to do? Is this like some solar eclipse? The end of the world? Just do whatever you want?" All of those. He can't form sentences. She tries the Joan route: "You're exhausted, you need to sleep. That's all." He asks her to sit with him: "I feel like you're looking right through me over there." They've always had that in common.
Her house is beautiful, all scarlet and cream. Just like her clothes, power and grace in one tight-cornered package, her house says it all. If she can see through him already then he can be as honest as he likes. "I don't like feeling like this," he says. She nods. Nobody does. He tells her about the first time he was a pallbearer: "They're letting me carry the box. Letting me be this close to it. Nobody's hiding anything from me now." Death becomes translucent when it's this close to you, when you can hear it coming; you can see through it. Just like Birdie. "I looked aver and saw the old people waiting together by the grave... I remember thinking: I just moved up a notch." Rachel's moved: "Never heard you talk that much before." He says her name again and she asks what the hell he wants from her. "You know, I know you do. You know everything about me." She swears she doesn't, but she's lying. He kisses her again. She protests -- he's got a wife; he should go to her. He doesn't explain that he tried that already: "Rachel. This is it, this is all there is. Slipping through my fingers like a handful of sand. This is it. This is all there is." She tells him it's just an excuse, for bad behavior, but this time when he kisses her, she leans back beneath him. He stops at the last second, because this is Rachel: "No. Unless you tell me you want this." She stares up at his eyes, like either of them have an actual choice at this point: "Yes please."
Heading toward the elevator, Cooper clears his throat. "Miss Holloway, I know it's none of my business. But you could do a lot better." She waves him off; Franklin's just a friend, if that even. "That's not what I'm talking about, my dear. Don't waste your youth on age." She doesn't register it on her face, or even in her back, but you can see it in her eyes: the fear. She stands before the doors of the elevator, and he asks her to press the button for the lobby. (A white elevator operator, and a girl, at that? I wanna work there. They passed that girl around like a tray of canapés; she tried to commit suicide.) When I said I wanted an episode all about Roger and Joan, it was because they're my favorite characters. I should have been more specific. I didn't think about how you never know if this show's going to be nice, or cruel. I love Roger because he desperately needs it. I love Joan because she's a pioneer, an astronaut, born at the wrong time. Too strong and too smart and too beautiful to be valuable, to be anything but dangerous. A little sex bomb, tossed over the transom. And as the doors close on her beautiful face, as she gets caged in by yet another secret, by another demand, as she realizes that as much as she hates it, it's within her to fear for this man, and maybe she loves Roger after all, you might wonder: Laika was an astronaut too.
Rachel lights a cigarette but tonight, after all he's seen, and lately, after all he's learned, he's not in the mood. Death becomes translucent. "You told me your mother died in childbirth. Mine did too. She was a prostitute. I don't know what my father paid her, but when she died they brought me to him, and his wife. And when I was ten years old he died. He was a drunk who got kicked in the face by a horse. She buried him and took up with some other man, and I was raised by...those two sorry people." She kisses his forehead. He nearly weeps. Those two sorry people.
week: The Indian Summer has Betty in its hot and treacherous grip, Cooper's still in charge, Rachel makes her move on Don's loooove territory, and Pete Campbell foments revolution.