Season 7, Episode 9: "New Business"
ANNA PEELE: Hello, Tom! I hope you had a less expensive day than Don. There were the golf clubs, and the furniture, and, oh yeah, the check for a million dollars he gave to Megan. It was an echo of both the earlier scene where Roger gives the movers money to get out of the apartment with everything Don owns minus the closet of identical boxy suits he has ready to throw on for late-night sex visits (bribing people to go away being one of Roger's specialties), as well as Don's famous "That's what the money is for!" cash throw in Peggy's face. When did Megan get so angry at Don? And does he really think the zeros he kept writing... and writing... and writing absolve him of the sequined sin that followed him into the elevator with her drunk, gross husband?
TOM JUNOD: Okay, but before we get started, a message to Sea World.
"It's toasted." That company totally needs a Don Draper to say that the point of advertising is to take people's minds off what bothers them about a company—to "change the conversation," as Don said, a decade before his ex-wife could call him an "aging, sloppy, selfish liar," and then get paid for it.
Anyway:
Megan wasn't mad at Don. She was mad at the reliably revolting Harry. She was mad at... well, as the show's title says, at Men. But I so wished that she would have left the check on the table, not believing it was real. That would have been funny, and in keeping with the general mood of the episode, which was on the one hand a frothy French sex farce, complete with slamming doors and endlessly ringing phones, and yet another installment of Don sticking his head so far up the ass of his own nostalgia that he'll eventually be able to perform sexually only with the hooker who used to give him Hershey bars back in Pennsylvania. From the lingering look he threw at Betty to his meeting with Sylvia in the elevator, he is doomed to replay his life not in the 10 seconds promised to men falling out of buildings but slowly, very slowly, in the form of encounters with women who once found him devastatingly attractive and now find him... repellent? Irrelevant? A joke? During the episode, I kept wondering what Mad Men would have been like if instead of honing Don's enigmatic silences, Freaking Matthew Weiner directed him to speak to the audience a la Francis Underwood in House of Cards: "That waitress hates herself even more than I hate myself. I've got to have her!" Clearly, we're about to be introduced all over again to Suzanne, from season three, and then Bobbie, from season two, until at last he runs out of dark ladies and proposes in the season finale to Meredith, his secretary, who already acts like his ditzy sitcom wife.
Question: was he about to—or did he—propose to Diana?
AP: Didn't that Sea World commercial remind you of one of those videos where Scientology officials insist that they aren't holding the wives of defectors captive? "Everything is fine! We swear! We definitely aren't abusing any killer whales here!"
It seems impossible to me that Don would walk out of that meeting with Megan and think, You know what, I would love to do that again!, but if there's anything we've learned about Don over the last eight years it's that he is an improbable optimist. This was a hall of fame bad day with more bad news to come, and yet because he had thrown a hideous velvet duvet over the wine stain of his life in the form of a million dollar check and managed to blunder his way through a forgotten golf date and not vomit on Harry when he found out he'd tried to casting couch Megan, Don thought everything was okay: "I took care of everything." In what world has Don taken care of anything? He's so out of touch with reality he doesn't realize his apartment has been ransacked by a French Canadian vandal until he's standing in the middle of the nothingness. Don is more out of touch than Marie, who thinks Roger is going to be glad to hear from her again. Don is more out of touch than Betty, who thinks she wants a master's in psychology because people are always "seeking out [her] confidences" when she really just wants to be constantly reassured that everyone is as fucked up as she is. Don is more out of touch than Megan, who thinks he's the reason she can't get a job (yes, I know she quit her soap opera because he promised to move to California, but presumably she could have booked something else in the ensuing years). Don is more out of touch than Stan, who believes the fabulous Pima sleeping with him means she thinks he's talented. Don is more out of touch than Peggy, who was under the misimpression she was the only one Pima was selling. And Don is more out of touch than Harry, who thinks he can have sex with Megan without even eating lunch with her first. Is Harry the worst because he's as pathetic as everyone else but with zero charisma, or is Don the worst because he's starting to make me feel like I'm at dinner with my dad listening to the same story about his dad's shoe store for the 25th time?
TJ: I kept waiting for Don to sock Harry in the jaw in defense of Megan's honor, but no—he was preparing to pay off Megan, who fulfilled, to the letter, Sterling's predictions for her ("so she never said you squandered her youth and beauty?") and then taking Don's check not long after dear Maman commented that Don was treating her like a prostitute. So Megan was, I guess, the big winner of the episode, but it was also the first time that Matthew Weiner gave her the full Betty, making her sort of pathetic and sort of terrible at the same time. I mean, it was as if, in giving her the check, and the furniture, the show was giving her her walking papers. I wouldn't be surprised if we never see her again. One thing we will see again: Don's apartment, which is becoming more and more of a character as it's stained and emptied, more and more of an eerie and slightly malign presence. You know that Don prefers Diana's dump, and will wind up in something like it, even if he doesn't wind up with Diana herself.
The thing that I liked best about Pima: she took photographs like Helmut Newton and dressed like Tom Wolfe. She did not, however, wear a hat, which—and I don't know if you saw this—Don did. Last week, when we were recapping our recap, we agreed that it was 1970, and so Don had doffed his hat for the last time. I was even rather glum about it. Imagine my surprise when the show opens up with Don making milkshakes for Bobby and little Gene is wearing the hat. Then Henry comes in and Don hightails it out of there but not before staring longingly at his ex and putting the hat back on. The hat—that supreme engine of nostalgia that has marked Don out of time and out of place in the '60s and now even in the Me Decade—was back, which means that Don has no choice but to keep turning back to the past until he returns to some primal "I grew up in a whorehouse" state of innocence.
AP: You're like Don: nothing I can say about your bizarre hat fixation will be as bad as what you're telling yourself about it. So unlike Megan, I will keep my thoughts on your age and general level of fastidiousness to myself.
Like most episodes of Mad Men, this one had the stink of death on it. This week it was left over from the premiere, when we found out Diana the diner waitress's nickname is "Di" and that she goes around talking like she's in a dream Don had after passing out in the bathroom at a funeral ("When people die, everything gets mixed up"). Peggy, Shirley the secretary, and Meredith the bobble head doll were all in orange, which I know from watching The Godfather: Part II before Mad Men means someone is dead. Don loves getting negged and trying to fix the fucked up women he's sleeping with, but as of the end of the episode, Diana finally pushed too far when she revealed, in the single room occupancy you wrongly believe Don is going to wind up in (he definitely hates himself but his method of self-flagellation has never been denying himself material pleasures), that one of her daughters died and then she abandoned the other, along with her husband. I actually feel like Don was into it (game recognizes game as elaborately tragic and selfish backstory recognizes elaborately tragic and selfish backstory), but with four episodes left and an entire hour devoted to women who no longer want to have sex with Don, I think we can expect some Peggy and Pete next week, not more Diana.
And speaking of women who have seen things we can't begin to imagine: Pima the photographer was played by Mimi Rogers, who joins Talia "Mona Sterling" Balsam as cast members who were previously married to the most famous men in the world: Tom Cruise and George Clooney.
Incredible-looking middle-aged women aside, I have one question for you, Tom: What was that golf plot line about? Was it just another occasion to show Don wasn't attuned to the circumstances of his life, or am I missing something? It's not like Mad Men to throw away two scenes like that.
TJ: The golf subplot—the frittering away of the golf subplot—was the only evidence I have ever seen that Weiner might be slackening his iron grip. Talk about the gun not going off: Don goes to the links in a dour gray suit, and instead of showing him sliding around the green in his white shirt and his Florsheims, the episode uses golf as an excuse to get him out of the house. I couldn't believe it. My feeling is that Weiner & Co. shot it, and then couldn't use it because the scene was too farcical and tipped the balance of the episode. Because the episode, in general, was exquisitely balanced, between the "C'est Si Bon" hijinks and death-haunted Don giving up on a woman even more lost than he is. It was pretty funny, in that "this is one crazy advertising agency!" way we've come to love, but it sure didn't end funny, with Don staring, once again, into the void.
Loved Mimi Rogers as Pima. Loved Mimi Rogers as Pima on a night when you decided to riff on Scientology. Was that accidental, or are you the Matthew Weiner of recaps, with nothing ever accidental until Don showed up late for a golf date?
AP: I'm season-one Don. I'm enigmatic, with an incredible head of hair and unparalleled sense of when to shut my mouth after saying something smart so you're left wondering: Is she brilliant, or totally full of shit?
TJ: Then I must be season-five Roger, staring out the window stark naked and tripping my brains out. You know, this season has a weird feel—what Mad Men season doesn't?—because the show seems to be constricting around Don, as it winds its way to a finish. First, Rachel Menken; now, Sylvia from downstairs: he's a Don for all seasons, living in some kind of simultaneity of TV time, and so the show is giving glimpses of many of its secondary characters, rather than providing fleshed out plot lines. But I can tell it's working, because Roger, for me, is always the measure of Mad Men's health. And tonight, when he dismissed his second-wife Jane's complaints about him during their divorce proceedings—"What career? She's a consumer!"—I was finally able to forget that Roger circa 1970 looks like Snidely Whiplash. And that's me, Anna: for some reason, I can't not notice when Don is wearing a hat. But in the middle of tonight's episode I stopped noticing Roger's new mustache. And that made me feel that all is right with the world—Matthew Weiner's world, anyway, if not poor Don Draper's.
AP: Mad Men is the best show on TV. Like a diner waitress to Don Draper, it is something that merits us staying up until 3 a.m. on a school night.
TJ: That must be why I just put on my good suit. Good night, Anna.
AP: Night, Tom.
