Mad Men: I’ll take anybody for a drink who wants one

Episodes like this one make it much easier for me to justify my love of Pete. Usually, when I announce that he’s my favorite character, I get a lot of quizzical, indulgent looks, like people are waiting for me to realize that I misspoke and mean to say Joan or Sal.

But we’ll come back to Pete later. First, let’s spend some time with Don and Betty.

A little time has passed since last week’s episode, and Don and Betty’s big fight is behind them. At Conrad Hilton’s direction, Don is traveling around the world visiting Hilton hotels for  some reason that probably has less to do with the three New York hotels he’s working on and more to do with grooming Don for a future with the Hilton empire. Betty and the Junior League have won their reservoir fight (which will apparently result in the entire Draper-occupied suburb drinking substandard water, not that anyone cares about that), prompting Betty to do an awesome little dance and consent to be kissed by Henry Francis.

Then, Don gets sent to Rome for a night, and Betty, after an initial refusal, decides to come along. I had forgotten that Betty used to model in Italy, but she did, and she fits right back in, speaking the language like a not-quite-native and having her cigarettes lit for her by random men. She then buys a new Italian outfit and gets the best hairdo we’ve ever seen on this show, and proceeds to engage in the most adorable interaction we’ve ever seen between her and Don (it involves two lecherous Italian men and Don playing the part of the one-night-stand-instigator a little too well).
But they’re back home the following day, and it’s clearer than ever that Betty’s frustrated with her overall lot in life. I guess what we’re seeing now is a more traditional manifestation of that same bug that was eating at her in season 1, maybe? In any case, she’s being a baby, as she’s wont to do, and taking it out on Don.

Which is not to say I blame her. There are many, many ways in which her lot in life sucks, even when Don is being the ideal husband, as he was this week. And sometimes you need to wallow in the fact that your life sucks. Yeah, she’s gorgeous, and she has a gorgeous house which she did not pay for, and a gorgeous husband who gives her everything she wants, and three adorable children who she only has to care for part-time. Plus, her best friend is Anne Dudek. But she’s bored as all heck. As she told Henry Francis last week, she has a whole toolbox full of skills she never gets to use. Not to mention the ten years or so of resentment she’s built up against her husband. And it’s not just the cheating, either – she’s got to be jealous of him for getting to go into work and be important and respected and creative and social all day. She got to be those things for a single night in Italy, and now it’s gone and for the rest of the summer she’s going to be all Madame Bovary, “Three weeks ago, I was there!”

So, anyway, back to Pete.

Trudy’s out of town for August, staying with her parents at Rehoboth Beach. Pete, naturally, has no idea what to do with himself, and winds up getting into a ridiculous situation involving the au pair down the hall and a wine-stained dress. He goes to exchange the dress and demands to speak to the store’s Manager of the Republic of Dresses, who turns out to be Joan. Yay! Well, Joan isn’t as psyched as I am. She tells Pete that she’s just filling in at the store temporarily, and that Greg is switching his specialty to psychiatry. Can you imagine his poor future patients? They’d be better off with that quack Betty poured her heart to back when she couldn’t formulate complete sentences. Anyway, I’ve never understood how medical specialties work, even after, like, 20 seasons of Scrubs, but I’m pretty sure this means Greg has to start over again as an intern. Which means Joan has several years ahead of her at the Bonwit Teller shop (at first I thought the label said Bonnie Tyler, hee). Poor Joan had to have known this was coming, and Pete might be oblivious enough to keep her secret for a little while, but word is inevitably going to get back to the girls, and then to Roger, which has to be Joan’s main concern.

Anyway, so with Joan’s as-usual-fabulous help, Pete saves the au pair’s day. Then, since she’s German, he offers her beer, Riesling, or schnapps (what did he do, look those up in an encyclopedia?). She resists, but eventually gives it up, as has many a pretty, mousy, immature girl before her (well, at least one anyway).

Then Trudy comes back, and Pete nonverbally ‘fesses up within three seconds of her arrival. That look that he gives Trudy, the one that prompts her to figure out that he’d been a-cheatin’, made me want to give him a great big hug. It has the opposite effect on her, understandably. But then Pete offers up a non-apology apology, and that appears to be all it takes to satisfy Trudy. For a second I even thought he was going to tell her about Peggy and the baby, but not so much, at least not yet. But she has to find out. It has to happen this season. They’ve invested too much time and acting quality in this character to keep her in the dark. (And by the way, Pete’s announcement to the au pair that “I’m not going to get you in trouble” had me giggling for a long, long time. Especially since I seriously doubt Pete has ever even heard of condoms.)

Trudy is probably my favorite minor character on the show, and she’s actually a big part of why I like Pete so much, too, even though I still see her as an enigma. I smile every time we even get a hint that Trudy might show up, but I don’t have the slightest clue what her interior monologue sounds like. With some of the other characters (Peggy, Pete) their thoughts are written all over their faces whenever they’re on screen, and with others (Joan, Don) we’ve gotten to know the characters well enough through the writing and the subtle acting cues and the occasional vision/nightmare/flashback/hallucination that we can usually guess pretty well. But Trudy simply hasn’t had that much screentime, and Alison Brie is playing her so awesomely – she is the picture of grace and good breeding every single second she’s on screen, even when she’s sassing Pete for wanting to see Cape Fear three times – that we still don’t know what makes her tick.

My favorite Trudy moments are all about appearances, about the vibe she gives off. There’s her standing in her mother-in-law’s living room, trying desperately to think of something appropriate to say about the death of her father-in-law and only managing to come up with generic perky reassurances. There’s her trying desperately to share Pete’s sense of humor about that whole infertility thing for the benefit of the anonymous old white doctor. And with the dawn of season 3, there’s also the thrill she genuinely appeared to share with Pete when he told her he’d gotten the Head of Accounts job. Standing in her foyer with two top donors to the Met sitting in her living room for no apparent reason, dressed in one of her usual gorgeous get-ups, pearls in place and hair teased to just the right height, balanced perfectly on those high heels that she’s probably worn every day of her life since she was 14.

In 1960, every woman was supposed to aspire to be Trudy Campbell, 22 and beautiful and newly married to an up-and-coming ad exec with a pedigree that exceeds her own. The daughter of parents who don’t mind chipping in if it means their little girl gets to live in the high-rise of her dreams. I don’t know what Trudy does all day, other than hang out with Met donors and go shopping for fruit, but I’d like to think she and Francine meet up once a week and get manipedis and drink mojitos.

But even when Trudy lets her guard down, it’s hard to tell what she’s thinking. She cries so daintily, and recovers her composure so quickly. These are well-honed skills, of course, appropriate to a well-brought-up young woman (I’m so jealous, I can’t even describe). But it makes it really hard, as a viewer, to get inside Trudy’s head.

But that’s okay, because we know enough to care about her. We see Trudy via Pete. We know everything Pete does, including the stuff Trudy doesn’t know about, and we know exactly how his actions affect her. Her one dream (that we know of) hasn’t been realized, and apparently won’t be, unless she seeks out Peggy’s baby in foster care and takes him in (which I wouldn’t put past her – even if it means Pete leaving her, which it might).

Also this week: Pete hangs out in his office reading Ebony after hours (for the articles, I’m sure). Hildy is the opposite of me when it comes to mosquitoes (and don’t feel sorry for her, those girls do whatever they want). Paul is putting his Princeton degree to use figuring out the best techniques for shooting ketchup-filled water balloons across great distances (and to think, this is the guy we’re counting on to explain the civil rights movement to Bertram Cooper). Sally is coming to terms with her budding heterosexuality and learning all the wrong lessons from her unfortunate female role model. Oh, and speaking of minor characters, remember how last week I was desperate to know more about Don’s new secretary? Well, a friend pointed out to me that she isn’t unnamed after all. She’s Allison, the same woman who hooked up with Ken back in Nixon v. Kennedy in an even less classy manor that people usually hook up in the Sterling Cooper offices. Come on, hon, you can do so much better. Just stay away from the psych wards for a while.

Next week, Connie has an impulse, and he acts on it. Oh, and shut up, Roger.

Season 3, Episode 8: Souvenir (originally aired October 4, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of AMC and Carin Baer