Confrontations! Accusations of undermining! Burger Chef
carside surveys! The recrudescence of marital bliss! A beer bottle slammed into
a child’s birthday cake! And the return of Bob Benson!
This was one of those episodes of Mad Men that makes me glad I didn’t come of age in the ‘60s. Back
then, so many gay men ended up like Bob, wearing a rainbow plaid suit and proposing
to a woman to act as a beard since his workplace required a “certain kind of
executive.” He was understandably freaked out by having to bail out a friend
who got beaten up for offering oral sex to an undercover cop, on the eve of
Stonewall. Good thing Joan was wise enough to let him down and tell him he
shouldn’t be with a woman. The arrangement might have worked for Joan, as it would
have opened her world up beyond the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her
son and mother.
An arrangement like that certainly can’t work like that in
the long term, however. Bob and Joan might have security and look like the
perfect couple to the outside world but they would both end up miserable and
never get what they really wanted. “I want love and I’d rather die hoping that
happens than make some arrangement and you should too,” Joan told Bob and she
was right. Still, in 1969, it wouldn’t be easy for Bob to live as a gay man.
Peggy found out that while her ideas for Burger Chef are
effective (I liked that pitch), the rest of the firm would rather have Don
selling it. It was a relief to see the two of them work past their overdue
confrontation and work together to come up with a new pitch after a boozy night
in the office and a slow dance to “My Way.” It was definitely a callback to the
all-nighter in the fourth season episode “The Suitcase” but this time Peggy was
a supervisor and not a subordinate. She had one more thing to learn from Don:
When he needs a pitch, he “abuses the people he needs and then takes a nap.” The
whole scene was lovely and paid dividends for the people who have been
following Mad Men all along, building
on the history of the characters.
I feel for Peggy. She is exhausted, having traveled the
country to survey the Burger Chef restaurants, and wondering what she did
wrong. Having just turned 30, she feels the depression of age that comes when
your odometer turns over another zero (I can relate). She is in full Don Draper
mode, given her meaty line of “What do I know about being a mother?” The
question is whether Peggy is being self-aware about the child she gave up or if
she really did take Don’s advice and forget it ever happened.
The scene at the end was cute, with the show’s three core
characters, Don, Peggy and Pete, sharing dinner at Burger Chef, where they note
every table is the family table. Their personal lives are in limbo, with Pete
on the outs with new girlfriend Bonnie and completely alienated with Trudy and
Tammy; Don’s marriage with Megan still dicey; and Peggy just sort of lost. On a
show where most of the characters have personal lives that are in the crapper,
the scene had a feel of the three of them finding a simple peace and getting
ready to team up to win the account. In a season with an overwhelming fatalism,
it was a needed message of hope.
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