Three episodes left in the season and last Sunday there were panic attacks in every form. Don had a panic attack, Lane gets kicked in the face by his own father, and Lucky Strike left Roger after Roger found out Joan is pregnant (is she still pregnant by episode’s end?). All the panics involved secrets in one form or another, and how secrets take a toll. Soap, 99.44% pure.
Last week’s episode had confrontation after confrontation,
The Wall Street Journal has embraced the Mad Men and not only has ‘Mad Men,’ Season 4, Episode 10, ‘Hands and Knees’: TV Recap, they also interviewed Lynn Shelton, who directed last week’s episode, and continue the weekly conversations, which are always enlightening: Walter Dellinger explains,
But my absolute favorite fact about the show is that the abusive Robert Pryce informs his son Lane that he will be staying at the Warwick Hotel until Friday. Warwick Hotel? That rang a bell. As readers are no doubt weary of hearing, I was a clerk in New York City in the summer of 1965. Although I couldn’t score a ticket to the legendary Beatles concert in Shea Stadium on Sunday night, August 15th of that year, I followed the daily saga of that week’s British Invasion of NYC. Especially memorable was the riot that occurred as a mob of (mostly) young girls surrounded the Warwick Hotel where the Beatles – and Robert Pryce! – were staying.
The mob scene at the Warwick occurred on the morning of Friday the thirteenth. It would have been well nigh impossible to exit the hotel that morning. Did the Pryces miss their flight to London? Or did Robert Pryce use his horrible skill with his walking-stick-as-weapon to beat their way through the chorus of teenyboppers-in-heat. (Their whole father/son thing seems to confirm the worst stereotypes of what British boarding school abuse leads to).
The preview for tonight’s episode doesn’t seem all that exciting, with Peggy being stuck in a car with the Communist guy, a most uninteresting character,
However, with the season finale getting close, Countdown to ‘Mad Men’: Are Don Draper and company on the ‘Eve of Destruction’?
Of course they’re not. If they did, we would stop watching.
In the meantime, here’s a shot of Christina Hendricks that ought to get me a spot on Smitty’s Rule 5 Sunday sometime,
