Forty-nine years before Sunday night’s episode of “Mad Men,” Bob Dylan summarized it in 11 words: “a restless, hungry feeling that don’t mean no one no good.”
The only characters who didn’t have a bad night Sunday were the ones who stayed off camera, like Betty and Sally, and the ones who were so badly wounded last week, like Pete, that even a squirt gun might have finished them off.
The characters who did show up even got slapped around while they were having sex. And not in a good way.
At least viewers did get a sense why marijuana became so popular in the late 1960s. The only laugh moment in the show, aside from some of the fashion choices, came when Don and his artist Stan shared a joint and got into an argument over whether a hot dog makes you think of mustard or ketchup.
Stan said mustard. He was right. The point is that for light moments, that was as good as Sunday night got.
So let’s cut right to the beatdowns.
1. Megan was told her character in the soap opera “Berkshire Falls,” a maid, was getting a love scene.
In the soap world, this was big stuff, foreshadowing increased prominence. But uh-oh, she wasn’t sure Don would approve.
So she told him, even after he brushed off her attempt to use coq au vin as foreplay.
“I can tolerate this,” he said, “but I can’t encourage it.”
“You’re perfect,” Megan gushed.
Okay, given what we know of Don, maybe that was also a laugh line.
The day she filmed the scene, Don showed up on the set, for the first time ever.
When she finished, he followed her to her dressing room and sneered that he hoped she was planning to at least brush her teeth before she came home.
“You kiss people for money,” he told her. “You know what they call people who do that, right?”
She replied that she was “sick of you ruining it every time something good happens for me.”
Now if all this might sound like the Drapers were primed for some makeup sex, that’s half true. Don had makeup sex with Sylvia.
He tried to make it as cruel for her as possible, but even that didn’t work when she told him she was praying he would someday find peace.
When last seen, they were in the same position, horizontal, that had so infuriated Don when he saw Megan in it.
2. Joan fired a secretary, Scarlet, who slipped out of work for five hours and had another secretary, Dawn, punch her card.
Sounded bad for Scarlet and Dawn right up until it got worse for Joan.
Scarlet was Harry’s secretary. Harry first told Joan she couldn’t fire Scarlet. Then Harry burst into a partners’ meeting and told everyone in front of Joan that he should be a partner because unlike some people, he had earned it.
This was an impolite allusion to Joan being made partner because she slept with a client to save an account, and possibly the whole agency.
Awkward only started to describe the scene, and it got awkwarder when the other (male) partners all sort of agreed that they’d let Harry keep Scarlet.
Joan, humiliated, picked up her spirits by going out to a bizarre psychedelic club with really bad music. She was accompanied by her previously sensible and responsible sister Kate. At least one and maybe both of them may have had meaningless sex with random passing guys.
Kate’s guy was at least named Leo, foreshadowing “Titanic” by three decades.
3. Don, when he wasn’t forgetting that actors are hired to act, teamed up with Pete and Stan to create a hush-hush pitch for Heinz Ketchup.
It was hush-hush because their long-time point man at Heinz had been pushed aside by an obnoxious new kid – and much as they hated to deal with the new kid, he was the one they now had to sell, without their old pal knowing it.
As the Sterling Cooper Draper team left the hotel room where they delivered the pitch, who should be waiting as their follow-up act but Peggy and her boss at her new agency, Ted.
Don surreptitiously listened outside the door as Peggy prefaced her pitch with one of Don’s own favorite lines: “If you don’t like what they’re saying, change the conversation.”
Dude, that hurt.
4. It may have been an L for Don, but it wasn’t a W for Peggy. After she sucked it up to try to steal Heinz, knowing how that could affect the relationship with Don that she still values, she didn’t get the account, either.
Goliath J. Walter Thompson won it, leaving both Don’s crew and Peggy’s crew to meet again in the hotel bar, which Ted cracked had become “The Lonely Hearts Club.”
After Ted also lamented that Heinz had dangled “the tiniest piece of the pie” to let “the small agencies fight over it,” Don got to his feet and marched out, saying, “Speak for yourself.”
5. Dawn, who is Don’s secretary, also kept her job despite Joan’s obvious displeasure.
Keeping the job was good. But Sunday’s show also gave Dawn a girlfriend back uptown, to whom she could vent a little about being hired at a firm that was under pressure to find black faces.
Dawn’s friend, who is getting married, told Dawn none of the people at the agency were her friends. Dawn said she didn’t exactly agree, because even if they weren’t painting their toenails together, most of the workers there felt a bond of shared misery.
Crying in the bathrooms, stuff like that. Didn’t sound good.
Dawn said she had to keep the job, though, because her only option was to find a husband and that so far was a non-starter. She sure wasn’t going to find one at the agency, she said, and she didn’t have a chance among all the “harlots” at her church.
6. Ken, who was left out of the secret ketchup campaign loop, announced the agency had lost the rest of the Heinz account after their old pal there found out about the hush-hush pitch meeting.
7. Sterling Cooper Draper itself earned a $150,000 commission for creating a Joe Namath TV special designed to clean up the image of Dow Chemical.
Dow’s image was taking some hits because the company made the napalm — flaming jellied gasoline – that had increasingly become a weapon of choice for the U.S. in the Vietnam war.
The special, designed to reposition Dow as a maker of “family products,” underscored the increased attention “Mad Men” has been paying to the outside world this season.
Beyond Dow, we learned Don is against the war, but more interested in keeping his clients insulated from any negative associations.
We saw Don watching a TV show that referenced Robert Kennedy, no doubt foreshadowing future references to the looming assassinations of Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Joan’s and Dawn’s stories suggested things were hardly utopian for women and minorities in the American workplace.
And just for one final bad ’60s moment, Megan’s boss Arlene and her husband Mal took Megan and Don to dinner as a pretext for inviting them over to smoke some grass and maybe enjoy a little wife swapping.
Don and Megan resisted their hard-sell invite, Don largely on – ahem – principle and Megan despite her concern this could negative impact her future on “Berkshire Falls.”
Arlene seemed to take it well, though. When Don dropped by to watch Megan’s love scene, Arlene wandered up next to him to murmur, “You like to watch, too.”
It was that kind of night. Even creator Matt Weiner may have made an uncharacteristic minor slip. He had Joan making reservations at Le Cirque, which didn’t open until 1974.
By night’s end, anyone who only had a “restless hungry feeling” was getting off easy.
