What a trip.
Yes, this week’s episode was chock full of trips—physical, metaphorical, and psychedelic. The characters moved from place to place, in and out of reality, and in and out of themselves. As Jane Sterling’s therapist urged, each of the characters experienced “living together in the truth,” although this new-found truth was only positive for some. We saw glimpses of these characters’ hearts this week, and some of what we saw was bleak and horrifying. This was one of the finest episodes that the show has produced in a long while, with incredibly on-point writing, unique art direction, and of course, truly fabulous styling.
This episode, more clearly than ever before, shows that Peggy has evolved into Donald Draper, 2.o. She is high-functioning in the office–brilliant and talented the way Don is–and all over the place at home, lashing out at her well-meaning boyfriend and doling out sexual favors to strangers in darkened movie theaters. In a meeting with an unresponsive client, after giving a gorgeously written and emotional pitch, she looks the client dead in the face and tells him off for his dullness. “Do you know how often people come in here and look at work and feel something? Almost never. You have to run with this. It’s young, and it’s beautiful, and no one else is gonna figure out how to say that about beans.” It’s a spellbinding scene, a dose of Don brilliance in the vein of his “I’m not here to tell you about Jesus” moment in season 1, but because Peggy is a woman, it doesn’t go over well with the client. Peggy is up against a whole other set of obstacles (her gender and youth being the foremost examples) that reduce her to a haughty little girl in the eyes of her clients. She exits the meeting and takes a nap on her office couch in a shot clearly referencing the show’s pilot, in which Don falls asleep on his couch, awash in his own mind. She runs off to a dark movie theater, as Don was likely to do back in the day, and has a drug-hazy sexual encounter with a stranger. This is a shocking act for Peggy that only serves to draw an even more defined connection between her and Don. She is dressed sharply and masculinely in a beige, black. and white ensemble with clean square lines—a costume choice that recalls men’s suiting and especially Don’s particular smoothness.
The episode then shifts to Roger Sterling’s marriage, which is deteriorating faster than we can keep track. Jane, dressed in one of the most fabulous outfits the show has ever seen (an I Dream of Jeannie-inspired white pantsuit with cutouts, plentiful diamonds, and big hair) takes him to a dinner party that quickly becomes an LSD trip. Their trip is brilliantly photographed, with subtle special effects that thankfully avoid any technicolor cliches. They discover that both of them know that their marriage is over. Roger wakes up happy and relieved, quickly ending the marriage with his shocked and unsuspecting wife.
Perhaps the episode’s most disturbing plot line, however, concerned Don and Megan and their trip upstate to Howard Johnson’s. Megan’s mind is clearly at the office with Peggy, where her work is being presented, but Don is still deep within his honeymoon mindset and whisks her away on a road trip for orange sherbet and one big, messy fight. Megan’s coral and white ensemble, which she has worn before on the show, clashes unpleasantly with Howard Johnson’s bright orange, showing her discomfort in her setting. Megan’s biting retort to Don’s embarrassed lash-out (“Why don’t you call your mother?”) provokes a typically Don reaction, and he drives away, leaving Megan alone to fend for herself. It seems as though Don’s new happy-go-lucky persona is not bone-deep. After frantically waiting for her upon his sheepish return, Don returns home to a locked door and a furious Megan. What follows is a disturbing scene: Don kicks the door in and chases Megan around the apartment at a dead sprint, destroying their possessions and knocking her down in a tackle before apologizing. Both Don and Megan are dressed starkly, in dark darks and white whites. The lines between them are drawn; the truth is clear. Don’s demons are still alive and well, and may be even worse than we thought. He struggles against them, reconciling the fight with Megan, but it’s clear that the honeymoon is over. When Bert Cooper berates Don for his poor performance as of late, we see just how far Don has fallen on a professional level. The entire office passes by him, alone in the glass-windowed conference room, Megan and the creative team walking one way and Peggy walking the other. Is Don’s way of things becoming outdated? What does this mean for SCDP?
And where the heck is Betty this season?
