After last week’s episode, the baggage-loaded The Suitcase, one may just wonder when will they end up in bed?
If the writers have any sense, the answer will be: on the series’s final episode. Those two end up in the sack and the show will either jump the sack or be a televised version of Adam’s Rib. Or worse, a continuous festivus where the two air their grievances, as they did last week, timed to the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight:
The Wall Street Journal’s recap speculates,
Peggy’s hesitant about the ad, but she tells Don she likes it. Finally, she turns to go home and take a much-needed shower. As Peggy leaves, she asks Don whether he wants the entrance to his office to be open or closed. “Open,” he says. We’re pretty sure he’s not just talking about the door.
Alcoholism is now a central theme in the plot:
Don may be self-destructive, but no amount of anachronistic moralizing about health and drinking is going to get him to stop. He can’t stop until he finds his own reasons for doing so. Will he need to experience genuine tragedy (killing a man in a boat) before he can turn things around?
The thing that grabs you about Mad Men is not just the actors, the retro sets and clothes, and the soap opera plot; it’s also, as Walter Dellinger points out,
One of the many aspects of “Mad Men” that separates it from soap operas and other dramas is the extraordinary way in which it is so deeply situated in a real time and place. The almost perfectly realized world of early summer 1965 is not simply the period “setting” for this production: it is the prima materia of the drama itself.
Tonight’s episode is titled The Summer Man, and the preview features Miss Blankenship, whom I have learned to love,
“I’m telling you, I was blind, and now I see.”
Can’t wait for Miss Blankenship to dye her hair blue and stand next to Joan for contrast.
If you miss Mad Men on AMC, you can catch the episodes on iTunes.
Over in Argentina, Yanqui Mike has the Mad Men Mania, too.