Mad Men recap: season seven, episode five – The Runaways

Spoiler alert: This blog is for those who are watching season seven of Mad Men. Don't read on if you haven't seen episode five.

Catch-up with Zoe Williams' episode four recap

This is an office made out of people who have problems with authority …

For a while it seemed as though this might be the Political episode , the bit where the personal bleeds into the public. Betty's querulous self-righteousness becomes a prim pro-Vietnam position. Lou's conservatism slips into a malevolent paternalism, halfway between headmaster and sadist ("I'm gonna tuck you in tonight," he says to Don. It has a chilling quality. I could feel my brain tagging it to include in a nightmare later).

Henry's benign paternalism flips into unimaginative dismissal. All seven series have been mainly about gender, but I've rarely heard anything as openly sexist as "Keep your conversation to how much you hate toast clumps in the butter, and leave the thinking to me." His usual courtesy has gone the way of all courtship rituals. That's gallantry all over, isn't it? Not so much a quality in itself, as a hood for the bigotry that everybody knows is underneath it. Like a Klu Klux Klan mask, it's scarier than the face.

And ranged against it, the anti-authoritarians themselves, Peggy, Michael, Sally, Megan, Amy (Megan's daft friend), Harry … So human but so dispiritingly flaky, the way humans are: anti-authoritarian until they're at a loss, and then as rule bound as everybody else.

But actually that wasn't the half of it. Was this the most eventful episode of the series so far – or just the one in which the most happened to the characters I most care about? Or do I just care most about whoever happens to be in each episode? These are questions I end up asking quite a lot.

Don didn't say that much about your situation, apart from the obvious …

Don and Megan are back together. She answers his calls like a wife, and he has the irascible impatience of a husband, even after they'd just had a threesome. This is a classic Mad Men compliment, to spare us the obviousness of the rapprochement, and simply reinstate the marriage, with a new toxicity.

His "niece" (actually Anna's niece, of course) Stephanie is pregnant by a no-good-nik, inevitably, since she says "bread" instead of money, and also wears a lot of crochet. Megan's welcome was edgy and peculiar – an elaborate hostess-ship, alienating in its generosity, almost lordly, like an aristocrat acting the suburban housewife in a game of charades, or a person on the edge of a nervous breakdown (grilled cheese? A bath? Anything you want! Spaghetti? Meat? ANYTHING).

The point of this vignette was Megan's jealousy turned sour, I thought. When Megan turns out Stephanie for her crime of shrugging, and saying "I know his secrets", you at least begin to sink a line into the depth of her bitterness. For a second, I couldn't credit the sheer meanness; I kept having to rewind, to see if there was something I'd missed, like, I don't know, a patch of breastmilk on her bathrobe. But Stephanie got it instantly. "Nothing happened between us," she says, pointlessly, making a brilliant stab at that vague stage of pregnancy where conflict is slightly beyond you.

Megan later does sexy dancing with a man whose facial hair is meant to suggest that he is also sexy. Don is annoyed, and I thought of Midge Daniels, the beatnik, whose affair with Don came to an abrupt end when he saw her near another man and noticed they were in love. There was none of that grace or profundity here, just a run-of-the-mill display from her and sexless pride from him. I can see this marriage ending quite unpleasantly.

Peggy has made up with Julio, the grumpy kid from upstairs. I found this cheering, but you know how this happens in Mad Men. They soften you up with some inconsequential sweetness. Then they amputate something.

That nipple….

Michael Ginsberg has had the huge misfortune of suffering a florid psychotic episode at a time when all they had to cope with that sort of thing were some leather straps and electric shock treatment. Peggy's face as they wheeled him away reminded me of that grim scene after she's had Pete's baby; unable to think or even see properly, drugged to the tits by mean nuns. At least Ginsberg didn't go nuts in the 50s, I guess.

It's a nose job, not an abortion

Betty's maternal credit rating takes another dramatic hit as she hurls out her improbable intention to break her daughter's arm after Sally arrives home with a smart mouth and a nose that isn't, in fact, broken. She's on a negative alert. By the end of this road, she'll be at junk-mother status, mark me.