We're halfway through Season Four of the best damned drama since "The Sopranos," and at this rate it's going to be a five-alarm miracle if Don Draper gets out of this season with his life - let alone his job and what's left of his family - intact.
Roger Sterling is dictating his memoirs, and his indulgences of reminiscence about the beginning of his affair with Joan and his first meeting with Don allow us unexpected but sacred glimpses of How It All Began. While filling watchers in on key backstory components, it's also a clever device to outline the fact that history is very much repeating itself; Don's increasingly reckless behavior rings eerily reminiscent of Roger's troubles at the onset of the series.
Fantastically, we get to see the Don from years long past when he was just a sales guy at a fur shop, doing anything and everything he could to get a shot at the prestigious life on Madison Avenue. He slips his ad portfolio into the box that contains Joan's first mistress-toren fur from Roger, and after the ad man angrily throws away the inappropriately-placed notebook he spends weeks unsuccessfully trying to get Sterling to meet with him.
Don's relentless, however, and after showing up cold-call style to Sterling Cooper’s building, we're witness to the first of hundreds of early-morning cocktails as he coerces a reluctant Roger to buy him a drink and pick his brain. One drink becomes several (you should know this game by now), resulting in Roger hiring the inexperienced fur guy on a drunken whim, only to be faced with the potentially disastrous reality the next day. The worst part? He doesn't remember it.
Back in the present (of the '60s, that is), Don and Peggy are interviewing Danny Siegel, a smug kid riding the nepotism train (he's Jane Siegel’s cousin and therefore a married-in burden to Roger) as far as it'll take him. His entire portfolio contains exactly one idea for an ad campaign: calling any given product the “cure for the common" ...something. Greyhound, for example, is “the cure for the common bus," and so on. Don ridicules him and brushes his silly ideas away like a persistent gnat - but remember this kid. Don will soon wish he had.
He orders Peggy, who's growing increasingly frustrated with everyone's dismissive, credit-hogging attitude towards her, to hole up with Stan, SCDP’s pretentious art director, to hammer out their differences (he's an unprofessional, arrogant hack, she's not) and brainstorm an ad for Vicks cough drops.
Stan’s a would-be beatnik too consumed with his own pretentious narcissism to offer anything productive, but acts as if the world is his roll of toilet paper. Sprawled on the hotel bed with a Playboy, he tells Peggy that reading the mag inspires him, since he believes that nudity is natural and beautiful. But Peggy wouldn't understand that, he sneers, because she must be ashamed of her own body. And if she's not, she should be.
Peggy, who's far and away the most kickass, level-headed character in the series, calls his bluff and strips completely nude.
“I can work like this," she says, after calling the pompous art director chickenshit. "Let’s get liberated.” You can't help but cheer as Stan sheepishly disrobes as well, then squirms uncomfortably and fails miserably to act unfazed by the naked, confident woman before him. There's a dead giveaway clearly in view.
Peggy righteously revels in it, rubbing his face in all the "freedom" bullshit he'd been spewing until he finally gets hastily dressed, telling his colleague that she’s won her own prize: “for smuggest bitch in the world.”
Meanwhile, the entirety of New York’s advertising elite is in attendance at the Waldorf for the CLIO awards (the ad world equivalent of the Oscars), including a few faces we've not seen much of lately. Pete runs into Ken Cosgrove, who we eventually learn will be returning to the fold at SCDP. And as the ceremony kicks off, none other than a drunken Duck Phillips has to be escorted out after making an ass of himself.
Roger, Don and the rest of SCDP are up for a prestigious CLIO award for their ad for Glo-Coat (note the parallels to the show's Emmy win just hours earlier), and a win would mean cemented standing among the ranks of respect within the advertising community. A fleeting moment of monumental significance took place when the Glo-Coat ad was announced as the winner and Don stood up to receive his award; Joanie had been holding Roger's hand under the table for support as the nominees were announced, but gripped Don's identically with her other hand moments before the win was clinched - another indicator of the parallel roles the two men play, even with women. As Don stood to step to the podium and collect the statuette, he turned and kissed Joan briefly, but fully on the mouth - and she reciprocated.
The potential plot bombshell was immediately overshadowed by the ceremony celebration, but a look of discomfort and subtle resentment flashed across Roger's face as he caught the liplock, possibly legitimizing the ten thousand jigawatt "WHAT IF?!" that flash through our minds: Don, the show centerpiece, a brilliant talent rattling rapidly to his own self-inflicted demise, finally taken in and saved by Jessica Rabbit's hotter, smarter sister, one woman strong enough to kick Draper's ass, the one he could never effectively lie to, the one who knows him easily as well as he knows himself. Don and Joan, Madison Avenue's new power couple.
But I digress. That's for future episodes to decide, and it's more than a hunch telling me that the writers aren't going to allow the two most magnetic characters on the show to fall into a will-they-or-won't-they narrative, a la Jim and Pam (or Tony and Angela, if you're old). Everyone at SCDP is rightfully celebratory when Glo-Coat is announced a winner—so elated that Don, who’s sloshed even by Don standards by now, decides they should go back to their office to meet with representatives from Life Cereal.
Thankfully, the Life guys are a bit tipsy themselves, having dealt with a travel nightmare and waited for the ad men to arrive back at the office. This saves a rambling, sloppy Don from making too big an ass of himself as he pitches slogan after slogan to them off the cuff in rookie fashion, until he finally hits the winning catchphrase? “Life: The Cure for the Common Breakfast.” Don’s drunk enough to believe the hopelessly cliche line/device is actually his, and not the exact same line he ridiculed the snotty little nepotism recipient during his interview earlier in the day.
That's the end of even drunken grace for Don, who then proceeds to get shot down by Faye Miller at a bar, goes home with a woman he’s just met and wakes up 36 hours later with someone else entirely, unable to remember a thing. It's the ringing phone that wakes him, Betty on the line, furiously informing him that he’s two hours late for visitation with his kids. As he's getting up to wash up for the onset of an inevitable sledgehammer hangover, Doris - we (and he) know that's her name because of the name tag on her waitress uniform on the dresser - calls him Dick. As in Dick Whitman, as in the man nobody in this part of the world is supposed to have any idea exists. He broke cover to the fish-in-a-barrel waitress he'd just met.
Man, this guy is losing control.
Doris leaves with Don still in the shower, and soon he passes out on the couch only to be awoken hours later - night this time - again, by a woman. This time it's Peggy, who’s been trying to get a hold of him all weekend and finally made a house call. She informs him of his idea plagiarizing at the Life meeting - which Don can't remember at all, but the client is insisting on keeping. The only way to fix things? By hiring the smug little green sonofabitch, that's how. Oh and one more thing Don has no recollection of: ordering Peggy into the hotel room with Stan.
The crystalline symmetry between Don's downward-spiraling life and Roger's past is poetically telling, particularly of the paths that lie ahead. Roger's fully aware of the road Don's on, because he's been there. He landed at the bottom. But you can see in his eyes that a good part of him wants to see Don fall.
As Don does fall ever more victim to his vices, the stakes are getting higher. He's swinging for the fences, and somehow it's still working - but barely. The Life slogan was too close. Too sloppy. The next time we're going to see something far more severe.
Check out my previous "Mad Men" episode recaps from Season 4 below.
Review: Mad Men 4.07 'The Suitcase'
Review: Mad Men 4.05 'The Chrysanthemum and the Sword'
Review: Mad Men 4.04 'The Rejected'
Review: Mad Men 4.03 'The Good News'
Review: Mad Men 4.02 'Thank You For Bringing My Keys'
Review: Mad Men 4.01 'Public Relations'
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