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.