So who is Ultron again?

I've probably discussed this before but with Avengers: Age of Ultron coming out, perhaps it's time to review.

Ultron is an indestructible evil robot with an Oedipus complex. Founding Avenger Hank Pym invented him way back in the '60s. Ultron turned on his creator and briefly duped the Avengers' butler, Edwin Jarvis, into betraying the team. The thing with Ultron is that he can continually reinvent himself so there have been various models each with a new number attached, like a car, but I think they've given up that naming convention. The comic Ultron has the evil jack o' lantern face that the movie gets right.

Made of the rare metal adamantium, Ultron is indestructible except by extraordinary measures. The only way to harm him is to hope a non-adamantium component in his robotic shell breaks, and the Scarlet Witch's hex power has done this over the years. Among his powers is an "encephalo-ray" that can put anyone it strikes into a state resembling death.

I'm calling Ultron "him" instead of "it" because he has a malevolent human personality. We found out in recent years that Pym based Ultron's personality on his own, which raises a lot of questions about how responsible the father is for the actions of the son. I don't think Pym is responsible for all the evil his creation has done because Ultron's personality has taken on a life of his own and doesn't necessarily act as Pym would. (For awhile in the '80s there was a kinder version of Ultron that was trying to become friends with Hank, which was unsettling.) Besides, Ultron created the Vision so Hank is indirectly responsible for the good the Vision has done. Ultron regards Pym as his father, Pym's ex-wife the Wasp as his mother, the Vision as his son, the Vision's sort-of brother Wonder Man as his stepson and the Scarlet Witch as his ex-daughter-in-law. Ultron once used the Wasp's brain as a template for the robot Jocasta but she refused to serve Ultron and became an Avengers ally. Ultron also used the brain of Mockingbird (Bobbi Morse on Agents of SHIELD) as a template for the evil robot Alkhema.

In the pages of the Avengers, Ultron has had many fierce battles with the team. The worst was in one of the greatest Avengers stories, Ultron Unlimited in 1999, where Ultron destroyed the fictional nation of Slorenia, killing untold people. The Avengers fought back and Hank Pym battled his demons over the robot's creation and finally destroyed him by unleashing a special element that dissolved all metals, including adamantium. He's since been resurrected, as much as any non-living creation can be.

There is also an Age of Ultron comic but it has nothing to do with the movie. It's a story of how Ultron conquered the planet and Wolverine and the Invisible Woman went back in time to kill Hank Pym and prevent the robot's creation but ended up making things much worse because as Marvel superheroes never learn, time travel always backfires.

Enjoy the movie. There will be a test at the end.

Some people deserve a little public shame

There’s a book called So You’ve Been Publically Shamed and I read an interview where the author implies that people are too hard on public figures who have transgressed. I sort of agree. I think people who commit Tweet Crimes — posting something dumb on Twitter — sometimes don’t deserve outrage to the point of hysteria. However, I do think someone like Brian Williams deserves some shame. Williams’ fall from grace was not the fault of some overzealous social media witch hunt; it was the fault of a man working in a profession that places a premium on trust who lied his face off for years while parlaying his fame into smirking guest spots on every comedy show on NBC.

Anyhoo, there are a few people in the public eye who I think deserve a soupcon of shame. One of these is the Australian food blogger (maybe I can sound more impressive if I brand myself “American TV recap and comics trivia blogger”) Belle Gibson. She falsely claimed to have cancer that her healthy eating had cured and made some money in apps and a cookbook based on her healthy eating.

There’s an interview with Gibson in Australia Women’s Weekly. In it, she says, "I don't want forgiveness. I just think [speaking out] was the responsible thing to do. Above anything, I would like people to say, 'Okay, she's human.'" No, the responsible thing to do would be not pretending to have cancer and profiting off that in the first place. She’s human but she’s also a lying asshole.

The headline of this interview reads “My Life-Long Struggle With the Truth,” which is what really pissed me off. I don’t know if the magazine or Gibson is framing her story as a struggle but this is not some disease of honesty this woman was beset with. She is GD liar who made money off faking a horrible disease. This kind of hoax just bothers me because plenty of otherwise rational people, vulnerable and desperate to do anything to cure their cancer, probably believed this woman’s nonsense about beating brain cancer through avoiding gluten and dairy.

It seems like there are a lot of these people selling snake oil. You can see the red flags when health experts talk about “toxins” without being specific as to what these toxins are. My kidneys are working so I think I’ll skip your miracle clam juice and barley cleanse, thanks. My favorite is the Food Babe, who rails against any chemical (did you know there is cyanide in apple seeds?!) and seems like a person who would be on the streets protesting against the presence of dihydrogen monoxide in baby food. This is the person who was appalled that they don’t use 100 percent oxygen in airplane cabins. There’s some nitrogen in there! (I’d add a “GASP!” but I don’t want to breathe in anything that’s not pure oxygen.) This is the person people are taking health advice from.

By the way, buy my new book, How My Gluten-Free Paleo/Vegan Diet Helped Me Look Younger and Cured My Sickle Cell Anemia.

Mad Men S7 E11: Time and Life

After a few episodes of table setting, “Time and Life” is the first one that really feels like the beginning of a goodbye for Mad Men. There were plenty of callbacks to past episodes and little instances of characters expressing affection to each other as people do before saying the end. The last half of the season has more of a purpose now.

Sterling Cooper and Partners, the scrappy little ad agency that started out of a hotel room, is soon to be no more, absorbed into McCann Erickson. It was clever the way the show set up the partners making one last save, trying to establish Sterling Cooper West and maintain their autonomy, before the show throws a curveball and they surrender to assimilation. Those scenes of Don, Roger, Joan, Pete and Ted staying at the office all night to round up clients were a little thrill, a callback to the end of season three, when they broke into the old agency, stole clients and struck out on their own (nice callback to good old Secor Laxatives, which has been a client and source of jokes from the beginning).

Back then, there was a sense of possibility and excitement. Now, the five partners realize they can’t outmaneuver Jim Hobart and with their contracts and non-compete clauses, they can’t run away like they did in 1963. In that conference room, he tells the five they passed the test and they will attain a sort of advertising nirvana with dream clients. Roger gets Buick. Pete gets Nabisco. Ted gets Ortho Pharmaceuticals. Don gets, as Hobart says in hushed tones … Coca-Cola. This could be a dream but knowing this show, it’s more likely a nightmare. Will these creative, driven people be satisfied being the fat and happy cogs in a machine? This is the problem Mad Men has three more episodes to solve. At the end, the five partners sit pondering this at a conference room table. It was a visual echo of the scene at the end of season five, when they were lined up in the second floor of Sterling Cooper, but there was more possibility then. That was a beginning and this is an ending.

It’s not lost on Joan that while the four men get big clients, she gets nothing. It’s one of the tragedies of this series that Joan, the one person on the show who is good at everything in business, can’t be taken seriously.

I liked all the little signs of affection in the episode, like Joan comforting Roger in the office, Pete telling Peggy about the assimilation (in a scene reminiscent of her confession about the baby during the Cuban Missile Crisis), Pete complimenting Joan in the cab, Peggy and Stan staying on the phone just to have a friend on the other end, and Joan telling Don, “We went down swinging.”

I also loved the group going to the bar and toasting Bert. There was a revealing little exchange when Roger hugs Don and tells him, “You are OK.” This is a callback to the pilot, when Don explained that advertising is ultimately a way of telling people they are OK. Is this some absolution for Don that will let him heal the many demons he carries around?

Speaking of affection, might there be a chance for a reconciliation between Pete and Trudy? Neither of them seems happy being divorced. At least in that fight with the school administrator, Pete finally got to punch someone instead of being punched. The whole idea of a 300-year-old feud between the Campbells and the McDonalds was hilarious. Of course blue-blooded Pete would have an ancestor working for the British king.

Peggy, already rattled by the kids running around, gets further rattled when the stage mom tells her, “You do what you want with your children. I’ll do what I want with mine.” She remembers what Don told her to forget and the show gives us a very rare example of Peggy looking back at her adopted child. I liked the scene of Stan subtly realizing Peggy is talking about herself when she talks about mothers leaving their kids because they have no choice. It’s not that Peggy doesn’t care where her child is, it’s that she “doesn’t know because you’re not supposed to know or you can't go on with your life.” Stan’s kindness was very sweet in this scene and Peggy’s tears were just heartbreaking.

What the partners don’t seem to realize is that they may have saved themselves by going to McCann but the rank and file employees at Sterling Cooper are not so lucky. I loved the scene of the employees talking over the announcement and leaving. Back in season five, Don could make a triumphant speech and make working the weekends for the Jaguar account seem like an amazing adventure. Now he can’t sell this assimilation. He tries to tell the employees that it’s a new beginning but nobody wants to listen. For them, it will be redundancies and pink slips.

The partners end the episode alone with nobody listening, gathered maybe for the last time in the modern ‘60s office. There are three more big goodbyes to go. 

The Americans S3 E13: March 8, 1983

Unlike the first two seasons, the third season finale of The Americans skipped the fireworks for something much more insidious and disturbing. It’s strange that a season that started with several nasty murders didn’t shed much blood at the end but that made for a satisfyingly unpredictable finale.

I was surprised that the trip to West Germany to see Elizabeth’s mother went off without a hitch. I was expecting all kinds of trouble, especially given the way Elizabeth was sticking close to Paige on the streets, emphasizing the fact that these two were very vulnerable and without much of a support network. The meeting was emotional since I’m a sucker for Elizabeth speaking Russian as she only does it at times of great import. The way grandmom says Paige’s name in English spoke volumes, suggesting Elizabeth has been keeping her mother informed of her grandchildren all along.

Stan risks his career for Nina but gets a reprieve at the price of his relationship with Gaad. He also risks his career for no real reason as America will not work to free Nina, preferring to free another agent. Stan is realizing that there is a much bigger picture to consider as Nina is far from the only chess piece on the board. Ultimately I was disappointed with what they did with Zinaida. They didn’t actually show her doing much beyond leaving that message in the restroom. She seemed like more of a plot device for Stan, more of a symbol.

We leave Nina at a place of doubt in the USSR. “I can’t keep buying back my life. I don’t know if it’s worth it,” she says. Anton suggests that she stop playing the KGB’s games, emphasizing that they can imprison her body but not her mind.

Philip solves Martha’s bugged pen problem easier than I thought. I liked the way they shot this scene with him suddenly appearing behind the FBI employee and then the guy’s hanged body suddenly appearing in the background. After the build-up, it was odd that Martha didn’t appear at all in this episode but after last week’s breathtaking wig removal, it might have been anticlimactic to bring her back this week. She will break down further when she finds out that Philip killed for her.

Philip is having a hell of a breakdown of his own, with the murder of the FBI employee and the disposal of Annelise’s body making him crack. Sending his wife and daughter to Europe was an act of rebellion against the Center. The EST session was the first time all series that Philip did something for himself. There was no source to work; it was just him searching for answers.

He does not take Sandra up on her offer to confide his feelings but he does start to confide in Elizabeth. Philip struggles to express his deep reluctance to continue on his path but has the bad timing to talk just as Reagan begins his famous “evil empire” speech. Notice that Elizabeth immediately interrupts him to say they should watch the news report. This is true to her character. She is certainly not unfeeling but whenever there’s spy work to do, it’s a reflex for her to drop everything else and become Sovietbot.

In the next room, Paige is completely broken and this time, she actually does call Pastor Tim and tell him her parents are Soviet spies. She is in an impossible situation. She asked for the truth from her parents and they expect her to spend the rest of her life living a lie. The big question for next season: What will Pastor Tim do with this information and what will the Jenningses do when they find out he knows? What will they do when they find out their daughter ratted them out?

The last scene, with Reagan calling the USSR “the focus of evil in the modern world” at the moment Paige confesses to her pastor, was fantastic. This gauntlet has opposite effects on the two spies: It will rile up Elizabeth and stoke her hatred of America while it will make Philip want to get out of the game even more. The last shot was a resolute Elizabeth moving forward into the frame as a broken Philip recedes into the blurry background. Love it.

As I remember, after Reagan’s declaration on March 8, 1983, the cold war really ramped up. This was the beginning of real fears about nuclear war and that year ended with The Day After scaring the hell out of everyone. This will be the battleground of next season and there will be no relief until Gorbachev comes and institutes glasnost and perestroika.

The Americans has already been renewed for another season. I’ll be there next year and I hope a lot of other people join me for its superlative acting and writing. What a season.

The Stench of Death

Walking into the house, we can sense the stench of death hanging over it. Someone died here. It may not necessarily have happened right in this house but the person had clearly been dying here for years. The listing confirms it: Estate of so-and-so, recently removed chair lift, etc.

The arch in the living room and peaked parabola cutouts in the wall make it look a little like an abandoned church. The linoleum in the dining room is torn up. There are unwashed dishes in the sink. Someone still lives here; probably a grieving child trying to get the house in order.

In the paneled basement is the smell of smoke and mildew. No wonder: There are ashtrays full of crushed cigarettes, just sitting on top of the piles of junk. Numerous lamps are scattered around the room on the floor. On the wall is a creepy old painting of kids or horses or something. I note that since this is an older house, it was built before separate basement entrances became required so there is no way to get out in case of a fire. I really feel like leaving this place right now, fire or not.

It’s the same story in the bedrooms: Piles of debris from decades of living. One bedroom has a pile of vinyl records. More old paintings. At the bottom of the entertainment center, there are blades that go to circular saws.

There are closed doors and I am afraid to open them.

The house is a maze. We walk into one bedroom that must have belonged to the deceased. It is huge and contains its own bathroom designed for a person who didn’t get around too well. There are clothes hanging on hangers from the ceiling that remind me of a horror movie. This is where the person was living and dying for who knows how long.

The house tells a story and it saddens me. Someone was happy here once, amid piles and piles of possessions, but got sick and died. The family lists the house but must be too grief-stricken or infighting or overwhelmed to clean it out before showing it.

It saddens me but it is not our story. The best is yet to come for us. I just know it. 

Mad Men S7 E10: The Forecast

This is more like it. After spending last week’s episode with new characters, we’re back to the core group. Everybody is forecasting the future. Don has the task of writing about the state of Sterling Cooper and Partners as the firm moves forward. Peggy and Ted ponder their professional goals. Joan is figuring out what she wants from her personal life. Only Sally isn’t interested in prognostications, declaring she’s tired of answering what she wants to be when she grows up.

Since Joan is one of my favorite Mad Men characters, and one of my favorite characters period, I am happy about this episode’s focus on her. We seem to be winding down her story and possibly settling her down, although the dalliance with that guy from California did seem a bit rushed.

“I need to work. I finally found the job I always wanted,” Joan says in answer to Peggy’s question of why she continues working although she’s filthy rich. She hides the existence of Kevin at first and her beau doesn’t take kindly to the kid’s existence, noting that he put a lot off while he was married and doesn’t want to start over again with a child. “You’re ruining my life,” Joan says ostensibly to her babysitter but really to Kevin. This was hard to watch. Joan has always seemed kind of ambivalent about motherhood. She’s not neglectful but it was not exactly a planned pregnancy and I thought maybe she only had the baby because it was her last chance. Her heart is in that office.

The two make up again after he decides he can be with a woman with a young child. Joan confides she’s had two divorces. Wait, what? Who was she married to besides Dr. Rape? Did this happen before the show started?

Don is leaving his apartment but is going nowhere as he doesn’t have anywhere to live yet. The realtor wakes him up and tells him he lives in an “$85,000 fixer-upper” (those 1970 prices are galling to me now that we’re in our real estate hunt) and although Don insists a lot of good things happened, the realtor says you wouldn’t know it. The Calvets left him his bed and outdoor furniture but that’s it. Without the swanky furniture, the place is bare and crappy. Later Don notes he came from nothing and ended up in the penthouse but by the end, he’s out of that place with his marriage erased and facing an uncertain future.

It seems like little things are starting to get to Don and little cracks are starting to register on his face. Peggy, the one person at the company who knows what she wants and where she’s going, tells Don during her performance review that he’s shitting on her dreams and that affects him. Mathis’ plan to use Don’s comeback to the peanut butter cookie people backfires (because he’s not Don and can’t get away with what Don does) and Mathis tells Don he doesn’t have any character but he’s just handsome. The fact that this gets Mathis fired shows his comment got to Don.

At the Francis house, Betty actually seems happy and she and Sally seem to have a healthier relationship. Betty’s maturity faces a test as Glen returns, having ignored his anti-war sentiments to volunteer for Vietnam after failing school (what are the odds on him dying in combat?). There’s some icky sexual tension between the two, calling back to their dysfunctional relationship in the early seasons. Thankfully, it’s Betty who refuses his kiss, noting that she’s married (I liked Betty touching her hair as a callback to giving young Glen a lock of it years before).

You could take that comment two ways: Betty could mean that marriage is the only barrier to the kiss as she didn’t mention the age difference and the fact that it’s completely inappropriate to kiss someone who is barely 18 and that she’s known since he was a child. You could also read this situation as Betty having no interest in Glen but just reacting reflexively to someone who paid attention to her. That’s exactly what Sally was noting later after Don got inappropriate attention from her teen friend. Speaking of her parents, Sally hit the bull’s eye: “Anyone pays attention to either of you — and they always do — and you just ooze everywhere.”

Don hits another bull’s eye in response: Sally may want to get far away from her parents but Don knows she’s exactly like them. Anyone who’s watched this girl develop over the last few years can see she’s got her mother’s snark and her father’s liar tendencies. That last scene with father and daughter was worth all the nonsense from last week. The end of the show will come down to the relationship between these two.

The Americans S3 E12: I Am Abassin Zadran

All the intrigue that had been bubbling all season over Afghanistan, Yousaf and the CIA got a hell of a payoff this week. Philip and Elizabeth suggest to Abassin Zadran that his fellow Mujahideen members are communists in disguise who might prevent him from getting American weapons and Zadran brutally stabs his friends with the CIA just outside.

This was the most dangerous mission the Jennings couple has ever undertaken, posing as CIA agents to fool actual CIA agents. They were also very close to death in that car as Zadran revealed his passionate hatred of communists to two undercover communists. Philip had to be thinking of his son when the Afghani told him what he’d do to infidels like the Soviet soldiers. With the death of the Mujahideen and their leader apparently in American custody for murder, that’s fewer people who can kill Mischa Jr.

Paige is really her parents’ daughter, questioning her history and family as she reviews a sort of greatest hits of The Americans’ adventures. She’s thinking like a spy and looking for things that others might not notice but that seem out of place to her. It has to be lonely as a Jennings child, having no family beyond the four of them. The relationship with Paige is so delicate and so crucial that Elizabeth and Philip are also in potential danger just living with her, as one word to an authority figure would mean their heads.

I don’t know about this trip to the USSR, which I assume will happen next episode and lead to a hell of a cliffhanger. This could go either way: Either Paige can find some connection with her grandmother and Mother Russia or she will rebel against it further. Or the trip will be botched and they will all die horribly.

The three sweetest words in the opening credits of The Americans are “with Margo Martindale” so we were very excited. Claudia did what she does best on this show: Offer grave pronouncements and reveal secrets. This time it’s that they almost shut down Directorate S after Jared killed his family, yet the young illegals program continues.

Stan is closer to the truth about the illegals than he knows, drawing a line from shooting Elizabeth in season one to the death of his partner. It was a nice bit of misdirection to have Clark going to Martha’s apartment and then show Stan sitting there having tea with her. He must suspect her of planting the bug and she must know that and want nothing to do with it. Before I realized Hans tipped off Clark that Stan was at Martha’s, I was afraid Clark would walk in, Stan would recognize him as Philip and all hell would break loose.

Oh God, Martha. She knows she’s doomed. She’s seeing her situation more clearly, with a husband who must stay away from the FBI and a strange man offering her a ride to a safe house. After she called her parents, I thought for a second that she was saying goodbye before killing herself. Just run away, Martha. Get somewhere with a lot of witnesses and stay there. There was that throwaway line from Philip about the two of them having to go away and I wonder if that meant he would send her somewhere and not follow despite promises that he would, or if “going away” is a euphemism for death or what.

The last scene, with Martha weeping as Clark pulled off his wig (looking for a second like he would pull off his face), was stunning. This is Philip’s Hail Mary move, stripping down to honesty to get Martha not to turn on him.

I should invest in a defibrillator before watching the season finale.

One Man's Trash

Last Saturday I volunteered to help with the Elsmere cleanup day, picking up the bulk trash that people discarded from their homes. It was a chance to get some exercise outdoors, chat with neighbors and be judgmental about what people threw away.

A few houses were getting rid of books. I don’t like that. Take them to Goodwill or the library but don’t just leave them on the curb. It was a lot of romance novels and stuff so it was nothing I wanted to rescue. It’s just so wasteful to throw away books.

There was a perfectly good armchair that someone threw away. I would have claimed it but we’re trying to travel lighter in anticipation of our move. People also got rid of clothes that they could have just donated.

Some people just left their trash out. Just regular trash that they could have put out on Thursdays with, like, the regular trash. Have they been holding onto a bunch of crap in anticipation of the annual cleanup? People also left their recycling for us to pick up. One house put out a dozen large bottles of Tide. Unless they were doing industrial levels of laundry, these were the type of Tide bottles that would last months each. Every house in Elsmere gets a trash can and recycling can for free so I don’t know why people don’t use them.

Then there were the saddest sights of all: Discarded plastic children’s toys, like little play houses and oven sets. They will stay in a landfill until the last person on Earth is long gone.

We did find a picnic table for the garden, so that’s a plus.

Mad Men S7 E9: New Business

After last week’s thematic cohesiveness, I don’t know what to make of “New Business.” I didn’t much care for it. Everyone seemed like they were getting involved in new affairs that were crappy and depressing.

This episode mostly served as Megan’s farewell. After the divorce, there’s no reason for her to have any contact with the rest of the cast and anything else would be anticlimactic. A lot of viewers seemed to hate Megan but I never minded her. She did use her relationships to get what she wanted in life but no more than anyone else on Mad Men. She was a match for Don.

Some of Megan’s anger here is understandable. She’s right in calling Don “an aging, sloppy, selfish liar” because many of the problems in their marriage were his fault and related to his lies. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she gave up her youth for him as the years living in the penthouse were not exactly wasted, but Don did uproot her to California and then didn’t follow her.

Some of that anger has been pent up for awhile but I’m sure some of it came from the pressures from the Calvet family. Marie-France is a piece of work, saying “We’re here to support Megan, not make her ashamed of this failure.” Thanks, sis. Megan looked beatified after getting that $1 million check from Don. She seemed freer and rightfully told her sister off for being ghoulish about wallowing in other people’s pain. When she noted that her mother was unhappy for a long time and finally did something about it, Megan was no doubt referring somewhat to herself. The cracks in the Draper marriage had been showing since at least “Far Away Places,” when he left her at the Howard Johnson’s and later chased her around the apartment like a murderer.

Harry was an ass for hitting on Megan, especially with his suggestion that she didn’t get any good parts since she didn’t sleep with any directors. He was one of a number of people to treat her like a prostitute this episode but Megan is one of the very few main cast members who has never been unfaithful to a spouse.

Prostitution overtones are always heavy on Mad Men. This week we see Marie ask for money from Roger to pay the movers who (hilariously) moved all the furniture out from Don’s apartment. Never change, Maman Calvet. (I think Don gets his stuff back because the next episode tease shows his sleeping in his bed with his old bedspread.) She really did seem to be in pain and far from her usual snark. I wonder if she and Roger will really end the series in one another’s company.

The inadvertent prostitute Diana the waitress reappears. I didn’t much care for this storyline and hope that’s the end of it. The way that Don followed her to her new job seemed desperate and stalker-y and at a time when we should be focusing on the rich main characters, she just seemed like a plot device. The revelation that her daughter died brings context to her being so freaked out last week with Don talking about death. Diana echoed Marie-France’s wallowing in other people’s pain as she can’t allow herself to forget her own daughter. She is punishing herself in that apartment and seemed close to suicide. Diana is somewhat of a Doppelganger to Sylvia, who we meet again in the elevator with Arnie. I don’t mind how old characters pop up now and again because it’s not like these people disappear once the main cast is done with them.

New photographer Pima sleeps with Stan and flirts with Peggy. I agree with Peggy that she is a hustler because she was kind of slick and pretentious. We don’t even see her work so we have to take the cast’s word for it that she’s a good photographer. Pima seemed like future Peggy because the two have similar hair, with a gray streak in the older woman’s. Maybe she’s a cautionary example for Peggy.

Does the opening scene at the Francis house mean Don and Betty’s story is not yet done? Was the wistful look at his family meant for his ex-wife or just remembering his life with his kids? The “previously on Mad Men” showed the season six scene of Don and Betty sleeping together. Maybe that means they’ll sleep together again but that whole thing was clearly something Betty needed to get out of her system, and then she didn’t look back. Good for Betty for advancing herself and getting a master’s in psychology but it seems like an odd choice for someone with zero self-awareness to be helping others understand themselves. 

Roger and Pete both gave Don some divorce advice. One thing about this show that interests me is that Don has become Roger: both divorced a first wife to marry a secretary, a woman with artistic pretentions who flaunted her money. Pete in turn has become Don: having affairs in the city like Don and divorcing a woman who is similar to Betty without the hang-ups. Roger was right in that Megan echoed Jane’s statement that she gave up her youth to her ex-husband. Pete was on target, saying “You think you’re going to do it all again and start over but you don’t know if you’re going to get past the beginning.”

As Faye wisely pointed out years ago, Don only likes the beginnings of things. He never made it past the beginning with Diana. After leaving her and giving away $1 million to Megan, he returns home to an apartment that is empty of possessions as well as companionship.

The Americans S3 E11: One Day in the Life of Anton Baklanov

Do you think Paige is regretting her curiosity into her parents’ mysterious lives? This week she deals with the fallout from last week’s revelations, grilling Elizabeth and Philip like a pro. She hasn’t forgotten last season’s bizarre middle-of-the-night vacation to the woods and is now probably going back over the rest of her life, looking for what might be spycraft.

The shock has worn off and it’s sinking in for Paige just how much of a lie her life has been. She pointedly asks Elizabeth how she can believe anything her mother says. Cut to commercial because there can be no answer. Philip already told her a casual lie when she asked if her parents were really married. If this girl could only see herself, though, she would have an answer to whether she is really a Jennings child. She’s never been as much like her mother when she told a curious Henry to shut up and eat his breakfast.

The flip side to all these trust issues in the Jennings household is how much the parents can trust the daughter not to rat them out. This tension now colors all their scenes together.

I saw the beginnings of some sympathy in the end scene in the bedroom when Paige finds out that her grandmother is dying. She knows the cost to Elizabeth possibly never seeing her mother again before she dies. Yet there’s a flip side to that, too: Paige probably wonders whether the espionage will throw up a similar barrier between her and her mother when one cannot be there for the other in a time of need.

You have to feel for the titular Anton Baklanov. People he trusted ripped him from his homeland and his family doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. He writes letters to his son that the boy will never see. I have to wonder how much of Nina’s interactions with him are genuine and how much is her playing him to win her release.

The scene with Martha focusing on the tip of Walter Taffet’s nose was a bit of comic relief in a tense story. As Philip says, Taffet’s job is to make her think he knows. I think he suspects Martha planted the bug. It would make sense as she’s the closest administrative person to Gaad and would have the most access. Also in the comic relief department were the bored Oleg and Tatiana imitating the beeping of the bugged mail robot. Who knew they were such goofballs?

Is it me or have Maurice and Lisa turned the tables on Elizabeth? They don’t know exactly who she is but they’ve figured out that she’s after information from Northrop and are willing to trade the secrets from Lisa's workplace to save their house. It was really unexpected and exciting to have this guy, who doesn’t seem to have his life together at all, come closer to discovering Elizabeth’s identity than any of the government agents. Elizabeth played it cool but I don’t expect him to survive the season. Between this guy and her daughter, the walls between Elizabeth and her true identity are getting more porous.

This was a quiet episode after last week’s bombshell. It’s setting the table for the end of the season (and the show has been renewed, so yay!). There are two more episodes of The Americans left and I don’t know where it’s going to go next.

Gaysplaining Indiana

If the religious freedom law in Indiana has nothing to do with gay people, as some of its supporters claim, why is this happening now? Why did this law arise at this particular moment in history? Laws don’t form in a vacuum. Legislators sponsor and pass them because of some real or perceived need to defend a principle or outlaw something immoral or unfair. As the issue of gay marriage arises in state after state, and with this summer’s Supreme Court decision, I cannot believe that this law has nothing to do with businesses refusing to serve gay weddings.

As I’ve been reading, many of the lobbyists who sponsored the bill and stood with Gov. Pence as he signed it have said the law would protect Christian businesses from catering weddings. These lobbyists are all from groups like Family Focus or Yay! For the American Family or whatever. The names of these groups seem harmless but I think they’re insidious. I support the traditional American family like these groups do but I also support many different types of families and these groups do not.

I read somewhere that the people behind this law are afraid that the government would force churches to marry gay couples but the Constitution already protects churches from that. Houses of worship can’t be forced to facilitate or celebrate gay marriages (they have no obligation to marry straight couples if they don't agree with the union either) but baking a cake or putting together a flower arrangement is not a celebration. It’s just a business transaction. The guy who baked our wedding cake just dropped it off and left. We paid him. You’re not going to go to hell over some fondant and frosting.

I don’t care if people oppose gay marriage because my husband and I don’t have to care what they think anymore. Oppose it until you’re blue in the face. What do you want us to do, draw an asterisk on our wedding license? But there is a difference between speech and actions and those actions can sometimes be constrained by the law. If you really don’t like the fact that gay people are married, the action to take is not to marry someone of the same sex. But please don’t obstruct those of us who want to.

This is a catch-22 because if people insist that the law is not specifically aimed at gays, they should be open to the idea that they could find themselves barred from some businesses, too. Can you imagine if a business owner cited his religious beliefs for not catering a Christian wedding (which I think would be just as unfair)? There would be a run on all the hardware stores in Indiana so offended people could buy nails to hang themselves on the cross. We’d never hear the end of it and it would come from some of the same people who had no problem with this law until it applied to them. Only then would it be a grave injustice.

That’s precisely why we shy away from these broad “I don’t have to do things I don’t believe in” laws in the United States: Because laws like this can target someone you don’t like but they can also target you.     

Mad Men S7 E8: Severance

… and we’re back. In the first episode of this home stretch of the show, Mad Men didn’t explicitly say what month or year it was but I had guessed it was summer 1971. This is based on the comments that Ken first left McCann Erickson six years earlier, which I believe happened in 1965. I’m sure many astute viewers could pinpoint an exact time based on the product mentions of L’eggs and Pop Tarts but that’s my best guess. (Other reviewers are saying spring 1970 so I stand corrected. It’s less than a year after we last saw these characters.)

“Severance” was a somewhat overstuffed episode both in terms of plot points and appearance. The show is looking more decadent and crowded and the aesthetic almost looks dirtier. The scene in the diner, with Roger hitting on those models and a strikingly relaxed Don telling Dick Whitman stories, looked to me like it was shot to look like a movie set in ‘70s New York, all grimy and sweaty.

The men of the show are still catting around, with Roger and Ted now sporting trashy mustaches to show the passage of time. The show opens with a casting scene that seems almost like a dream or a fantasy, with former fur salesman Don directing a model wearing little more than an expensive fur coat. Just as in season four, he is enjoying a rather fun but empty single life, sleeping with a stewardess and later a waitress (in an exchange with parallels to the first episode of the season where Don has another elliptical conversation with a woman on a plane). When he returns to his apartment, he keeps the lights off.

Another woman in a fur coat appears, Rachel Menken Katz, Don’s department store owner mistress from the first season. She is at first a dream and then a ghost as Don finds out Rachel had died days before. At her shiva, he seems haunted by her children from another man. This is the life not lived for Don, a theme articulated by Ken after he gets fired and realizes his own life not lived is that of full-time novelist.

We have a contender for theme of the season or half-season. Although the viewers haven’t seen her in years, Rachel always loomed large as the love he could have had. She was one of the more level-headed women Don had an affair with. She was the one who pointed out the folly of them running away together. In a nice parallel, Peggy plans to run away to Paris with her blind date. The verdict is still out on him. He was very neurotic and pissy in the beginning of her dinner but turned out to be charming. (Peggy looks fabulous, by the way.)

Peggy and Joan are finding out the drawbacks of working for a subsidiary of another company. In a supremely uncomfortable meeting, the guys from McCann Erickson make horribly sexist comments to both women. Neither has the latitude to stand up to these two men, who are basically their superiors. It’s a depressing reminder that as far as these women have come and as supremely competent and talented as they are, they can’t get away from these sexist pigs. The boardroom conversation might as well have been happening in 1960 or 1950.

Peggy compounds the conversation by implying that Joan draws such sexist comments by the way she dresses, which is a horrible thing to hear, especially from an ally. Joan hits back with some weirdly nasty comments of her own, telling Peggy she never had to deal with sexism, when we know she has. She also implies that Peggy is unattractive.

As a partner, Joan had power at the old agency but now she’s more of a cog, despite being filthy rich. So she ignores calls from McCann Erickson and asserts the power she still has: spending money on clothes at Bonwit Teller. The salesgirl recognizes Joan from her short stint working at the store years ago but Joan tells her, “You must have me confused with someone else.” It’s another life not lived.

Ken also finds a drawback of working for McCann Erickson as the firm fires him, bitter over his having left them years ago. To add insult to injury, his old rival Pete is getting his clients (while the latter whines about making an unmanageable amount of money during the merger). I was happy for Ken, the one person at Sterling Cooper who recognized that his life was more important than the office, as he was free to write that book. But he turned the tables, with his new job at Dow Chemical making him a client of his former coworkers. This could be interesting.

But who knows if that was Ken’s actual sendoff or if we’ll see him in the next six episodes. The thing with the end of Mad Men is that there will be many staggered goodbyes to characters and you never know if someone’s last scene will be their last scene. You are saying goodbye without even knowing it.

The Americans S3 E10: Stingers

The communist cat is out of the bag in the Jennings household. I don’t think I breathed for about 10 minutes. Given that Paige backed them into a corner with her curiosity, her parents handled it about as well as they could have and The Americans handled it about as well as it could have. This was one of my favorite episodes yet.

There were so many subtle touches that I loved about the reveal. I liked how the episode focused on the Jennings family in uninterrupted scenes, as if savoring the shock the characters and viewers felt, as if nobody could look away to the other characters. When Paige finally asked her parents where they went at night, I liked the “I told you so” look Elizabeth gave Philip and how you could then see the sad surrender on his face. There was no way to avoid telling her at that point.

I loved loved loved Paige asking them to speak Russian. Elizabeth had spoken Russian only once to my knowledge since living in America. The last time she did it, asking Philip to come home at the end of season one, it was enormously powerful (and left me slack-jawed), so I loved the emotion in Elizabeth’s voice. She expressed love for her daughter but I think there was also some pride in her country and a feeling of relief that she could in some small way be herself.

When Philip was asking Paige not to tell anyone, I thought for a second that he’d tell her “or we’ll have to kill you.” If it ever came to that, it would be the end of television. I loved the suspense of Paige’s phone call to the priest (I keep wanting to call him Rev. Tim Tom after the guy on The Middle) because I really didn’t know if she would tell him or what. On a related note, the priest’s visit to the travel agency was hilarious. Philip has never booked a trip in his life and I kept picturing him looking through fake binders and shuffling papers and stalling and having no idea how to book a flight to Kenya.

Now we wait and see how many specifics the Jennings parents reveal to their daughter and how she processes the information. Maybe she’ll conclude that her parents’ evasiveness was nothing personal since it wasn’t that they didn’t love her but they were working toward something greater. Maybe she’ll make the connection between revolution and religion. Maybe she’ll get an inkling of the nuts and bolts of what her parents actually do and realize, like that woman in the warehouse, that her parents are telling themselves what evil people tell themselves.

At the end of the episode, when the FBI agent came over for dinner, it began to sink into Paige just how much danger her parents were in and I loved the shot framing her claustrophobically at the table. It was the blackest of comedy to have Philip sharpening knives while sending the subtle message to Paige not to say anything and I loved the frighteningly stern look Elizabeth gave her. All that said, “We love you and we will protect you but do not mess this up.”

Other things happened in “Stingers” but they kind of fade away next to the momentousness of the Paige revelation. Mischa Jr. does not want to leave Afghanistan. Zinaida is, to nobody’s surprise, a Soviet double agent and there are some bureaucratic shenanigans involving her and the Rezidentura. I have no idea what Philip and Elizabeth were up to in that hotel because I need remedial help with some of the intrigue on this show (something with Yousaf and the CIA).

There was one potentially big non-Paige development: Stan totally suspects Martha planted the bug. I don’t know what he’ll do with this information. It will not be as straightforward as Stan being a good company man and turning her in so maybe he’ll leverage the information for something for himself. Martha might catch a break because the person who discovered her may be the one person with no room to talk about betrayal.