Mad Men S7 E12: Lost Horizon

As predicted, Don is unhappy being a little fish in a big creative pond at the staid gray offices of McCann Erickson. He’s one of a dozen creative directors in a board meeting for Miller Lite. Another guy makes a pitch that sounds almost like his, with a similar cadence and emotion, but it’s regimented and a little soulless. There’s a nice shot of Don looking out a window at a plane flying past the skyscrapers. He’s lost sight of the horizon and needs to be free so he starts running, looking for …

Christ, not the waitress again. Why, Don? Why would you drive all the way to Wisconsin to find this woman who clearly didn’t want to be with you? It backfires anyway as her ex-husband tells Don he lost her to the devil. Don drives farther to escape the future. He hates his job, his kids get along fine without him and he has nowhere to live. He’s as adrift as the Major Tom of “Space Oddity.” He’s already taken a fake name so he might as well run away again to escape Don Draper like he did to escape Dick Whitman.

I’m sure he’s going to the west coast. The most daring thing Mad Men could do is not show Don at all next week and freak out the viewers before showing him settled somewhere else in the last episode. 

Joan ends up running, too. She is deeply unsatisfied at the new firm, paired up with a doofus who ignores her instructions and makes the faux pas of inviting a wheelchair-bound client to go golfing at Augusta (which Joan wasn’t allowed to play on back then anyway). She complains and gets paired up with the sexist Ferg. At Sterling Cooper and Partners, she was a respected partner but on the new totem pole, she’s just a “girl” no man will work for.

Jim Hobart is unmoved by Joan’s complaints and wants to pay her $500,000, half of what she is owed, to go away. She threatens to sue, invoking the ACLU and Equal Opportunity Employment and Betty Friedan and correctly saying that she would be the first of many women who would stand up and follow her example of not accepting the sexist treatment there. APPLAUSE. That was a thrilling moment to watch. It was Joan’s character attaining self-actualization after a decade. I’ve always loved how they subverted expectations for her from the beginning. From the surface, she looks like a party girl and you might assume she’s a ditz but she’s always been highly competent and savvy and proven herself many times over. Joan has to an extent always used femininity and whatever tools she had at her disposal to get ahead but she also has her bedrock strengths to rely on. She’s one of the people on the show that I admire.

It was a victory to see Joan stand up but it’s bittersweet to see her agree with Roger that she should cut her losses, take her money and leave. She grabs the two things that are indispensable, a photo of her son and her rolodex, and takes the job and shoves it. It’s a tragedy that she didn’t go even further than she did in standing up but I can’t blame her for having had enough and wanting to enjoy her life a little more. Maybe she’s on to something better. I don’t know if this is the last we’ve seen of Joan Holloway Harris but if so, this was an appropriate ending for the tone of the show — a character walking up to the precipice of change and then walking back. I’d still like to see a postscript for her in the last two episodes.

On the other end is Peggy, who runs toward something. It was some obvious symbolism that her new office at McCann wasn’t ready for her yet. Of course she and Roger are the last two left at the old office to turn out the lights. At first, I thought the eerie organ music was a little cheesy but I loved the reveal that it was Roger playing it. I also loved Peggy roller-skating around like Peggy Fleming. It made a certain sense to have these characters together because they both value the old firm tremendously for different reasons — him for past glories and her for future ambitions.

At the end, Peggy is off to a new start, with Bert’s Japanese octopus painting tucked under her arm as a provocation. I wanted to stand up and cheer at the sight of Peggy strutting through her new office, sunglasses on her face and cigarette in her mouth. Once she carried a box of belongings through the old firm, a nervous ex-secretary grateful for a break. Now she acts like she owns the place. This is one person more than ready for the future.

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.