Mad Men: The One Where Sex Messes Up Everyone’s Lives, and People Remind Us That It Sucked to Be Black and/or Gay in 1963

Uh-oh. We’re at that dangerous point in the Mad Men season. Nine episodes down, only four to go. It’s ticking away, our quality Sterling Cooper time. Soon, we’ll be left bereft until next August. I don’t know if I can handle it.

Also, before I get into this week’s review, I have to talk about last week’s episode again for a bit. Because I realized, on reflection, that I gave Pete a free pass for the thing with the German au pair, and I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t a clear-cut situation on any count, but there were complicating factors that I didn’t think about on first viewing. The au pair consented to sleep with him, yeah, but she was also probably afraid that Pete could get her in trouble with her employers, which could’ve led to her being sent home. Which makes the consent question dubious at best.

The problem is that I know, and like, Pete so much that that stuff never occurred to me, because it probably didn’t occur to Pete, either. But it should have, because it’s the reality of their respective situations. The au pair made a decision, yes, but there was clearly more going on there than a simple do-you-or-do-you-not-want-to-have-sex-with-Pete-Campbell thing, it wasn’t really as parallel as I had thought to the situation with Peggy in the pilot (which, for the record, also sucked, although for different reasons. And Peggy was probably a lot more naïve at the time than the au pair).

I would also like to point out, just one more time, for fun, that this show is complex and doesn’t take the easy way out with its storytelling. It would have been simple for the director to tell the actress playing the au pair to just, like, keep her eyes down for the whole bedroom scene, or something. Seriously, that subtle a difference would’ve made the whole scene much more clear-cut. But they didn’t go there.

And I would also like to point out that the show has worked for three seasons to make me adore Pete, and it succeeded, to the point where I now go around telling people he’s my favorite character on the show. And then it made him do something awful, and presented it in this confusing way that made me not even realize how awful it was until I thought about it for a long time. And it’s nice to watch a TV show that you want to think about for a long time. I don’t remember that happening since Angel. (Glee doesn’t count. Watching the “Rehab” video three times a day for two weeks in May does not equal thinking about a show’s, like, plot.)

Now, on to this week’s episode. Here’s what happened:

Don engages in more awkward flirting with Suzanne Farrell and then sleeps with her. Betty engages in awkward letter-based flirting with Henry Francis and then makes out with him, then breaks up with him. The douchey guy from Lucky Strike hits on Sal, gets rebuffed, and retaliates by ruining Sal’s career. Then it’s unclear exactly what happens, but it appears that Don orders Sal to sleep with Douchey Guy or else get fired, and that Sal then does indeed go and sleep with Douchey Guy.

Let’s start with Sal.

The Lucky Strike client in question is the son of the company founder we met back in the pilot episode, and he has a name, but I’m going to stick with calling him Douchey Guy. He’s one of the more repulsive characters we’ve seen on the show, and he’s clearly used to being given whatever he wants. There’s a bit of a problem when he and Sal disagree over how the commercial Sal’s filming should be shot, and then he tries to take the disagreement to the next level, as it were, and it actually threw me off for a second because every other time we’ve seen a guy attempt to hit on Sal, Sal has appeared totally into it. But he understandably isn’t into Douchey Guy, and then it gets complicated when Douchey Guy tries to get Sal taken off the account. Ultimately, Sal finds himself being forced to explain the situation to Don, expecting sympathy, which he doesn’t get.

Two weeks ago, I said Don’s mopiness made him the least likeable he’d been in a while. This week upped that by about a hundred times when Don ordered Sal to sleep with Douchey Guy and/or fired him (again, it was unclear) and threw in a “you people” for good measure. In Sal’s final scene for the week, he’s calling poor poor Kitty from a pay phone on the gay cruising strip. I interpreted this scene as him going off to meet Douchey Guy, who wanted to meet at the gay cruising strip because hey, he’s a douchey guy. But the other interpretation that’s circulating seems to be that Sal has accepted his firing and is going off for some random consolation sex. Lovely. Man, it was awful to live in 1963. I assume it’s a coincidence that this episode aired on National Coming Out Day, because surely Matthew Weiner isn’t structuring his Very Important Storylines to line up with unofficial holidays (unless we were meant to take something from Connie’s plan to annex the entire world to his corporate brand as a metaphor for the journey of Christopher Columbus? Hey, check out me and my forced allegorical interpretations. I knew that lit degree would come in handy someday!). Anyway, I just hope that this episode was the dark moment of Sal’s life on the show, because if it gets much worse than this, I couldn’t handle it.

But let’s go ahead and count this as the first time that Sal, a character I don’t particularly like, has managed to make me cry. I mean, I don’t dislike Sal, and Bryan Batt is of course awesomeness personified, but I find the character irritating more often than not. Usually I get into gay characters/storylines on well-written shows (the last TV character to make me cry was Jack on Kings, that show that no one except me watched or remembers.) But while I sympathize with Sal, and I was intrigued by the bellhop/outing story in the season premiere, I wouldn’t particularly mind if he did wind up leaving Sterling Cooper. Which he certainly should do, even if he didn’t get officially fired. (Hey Sal, call Duck, I hear he’s hiring. Although you might have to put out there too, come to think of it.)

As a character, Sal just doesn’t do much for me. I don’t really care that much about his plight beyond the symbolism factor. He’s always been sort of like Freddy Rumsen for me: He’s there, and I get that he adds something to the show and to the SC team, and he can get a giggle and/or sigh out of me every now and then, but I’d rather spend my time with Peggy and Pete, or even Harry and Paul. And that season 2 episode where Sal tried to make a connection with Ken was one of the most uncomfortable hours of television I’ve ever experienced.

(As an aside, this is the second “you people” I can remember hearing on Mad Men. The first was Betty, last season, to Jimmy. At the time I honestly didn’t know what she was talking about, not having yet picked up on the fact that Jimmy was Jewish, so when he said “What people? You mean comedians?” I actually on the first viewing thought Betty did mean comedians. But anyway, someone remind me, have there been other “you people”s? Because it felt really familiar.)

(And as another aside, everyone at SC was freaking out this week because Lucky Strike is such a major client and Harry and Sal have put the account in jeopardy and blah blah blah. But didn’t Pete say last season that North Atlantic Aviation made like ten times more than Lucky Strike? Although, I mean, whatever, I’m just a woman, it’s not like I can understand business anyway.)

So, back to Don. When he isn’t being a homophobic prick this week, he’s kissing up to Connie and/or cheating on his wife, so, thanks again for giving us a deeply flawed protagonist, show, but I like Don better when he’s shooing away pesky Italians. Don and Connie are developing a really weird relationship that involves late-night moonshine drinking and Connie telling Don he likes him better than his own sons, followed by Connie sitting in the SC office in his cowboy hat telling Don that when he said he wanted a Hilton on the moon, he wasn’t being hyperbolic. So in the span of one episode, Don goes from hearing the best news in the world to being scolded in the same tone, and with the same level of justification, that Don unloaded on Peggy a couple of weeks ago.

So we shouldn’t be surprised, I guess, that he seeks out yet another of his pseudo-passionate pseudo-love affairs, driving to Suzanne Farrell’s house in the middle of the night and not bothering to be subtle with his overtures. Suzanne Farrell offers up her own analysis of Don’s motives in coming to her: “Because I’m new and different. Or maybe I’m exactly the same.” It’s a more direct line than we usually get on this show, which is helpful for those of us who do sometimes like being spoon-fed our storylines, lest we wind up seeing things from Pete Campbell’s point of view rather than our own and missing out on an entire huge swath of subtext. (Not that I’m still feeling bitter with myself for that one.)

A more astute observer of the show than me (I’ve now forgotten who, so sorry, I can’t link to it) pointed out that in the season premiere, Don’s one-night stand with that flight attendant, who was blonde and not all that bright on the surface and otherwise reminiscent of Betty, was a bit of a departure for Don. In the first two seasons, Don preferred his adultery long-term, with emotional connections and brainy brunettes. Now, to hear Suzanne Farrell tell it, he’s going right back to that pattern. It’s funny, because I remember in season 1 thinking Don really was going to leave his family for Rachel, and Don thought so too. It really did appear, for an episode or two back then, that Don had found the love of his life and would’ve been happy if he only could’ve married Rachel. Now, though, it’s so hugely clear that Don is never going to find the love of his life, and is never going to be happily monogamous, until he starts talking to himself and dealing with his demons, which he is never going to do. So it’s going to be serial adultery with brainy brunettes until he gets old and ugly and/or Betty leaves him. And of course, in the latter case, he’ll probably just find another pretty blonde wife and then have more serial adultery with brainy brunettes. I love how this show alternates between showing us how Don has it all and showing us how much it sucks to be Don Draper / Dick Whitman / Generic 60s Everyman.

And in any case, it’s hard to be all that mad at Don this time for cheating, seeing as how Betty is far too busy with her own pseudo-love affair to care what Don’s up to. She makes it very clear that she wants to sleep with Henry Francis, but apparently is only willing to do so in her very own home on her very own fainting couch. She goes so far as to throw a heavy object at him; Henry, being a true man of 1963, does not take this as a bad sign but in fact as a sign of lust (accurately, as it turns out. I hate that Betty is so predictable.) But Betty refuses to go all the way, as the kids say. I really hope the Henry Francis plot is over now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he offers up his own version of drunk-dialing Harry Crane to get back at Betty. (And how awesome would it be if that retaliation took the form of Henry actually drunk-dialing Harry Crane? I’m sure the writers could find a way to make that work. Come on, Matt, I have faith! You did the lawnmower thing already, you’re invincible!)

Also this week: Peggy only has a few lines, and I’m getting ready to go into Peggy withdrawal here (there are only four episodes to go! What’s she going to do, get pregnant by a priest? Elope with Duck? Attempt to seduce Don (hey, she’s a brainy brunette too)?). All she really had to do this week was maintain some really weird eye contact with Don that I couldn’t figure out. I’m going to assume we’re just meant to get from it that Peggy Sees All. There’s also very little Pete, sadly, and too much Roger, by both my and Don’s standards (I enjoy John Slattery, and I like Roger when the writers are giving him comedy to do, and I feel for him when he’s in romantic / prostitution scenes, but I hate hate hate seeing him actually work). We also got a glimpse of the old, scared Harry. Which was funny, like hanging out with an old friend, even as it was sad to see him regress. And we got some more Harry tidbits: He works late, hangs out voluntarily with Paul, will happily sell out a colleague to suck up to a client, and is required to watch every prime time TV show, or at least Perry Mason, and make sure all the clients’ commercials are shown. Sucks to have lived before they invented interns. Or Tivo. Oh, hey, and by the way, is Pete the one character on this show who doesn’t smoke? How is it possible I didn’t know this before? Oh, Petey.

This week also gave us the most overt references to the civil rights movement than we’ve seen so far this season, with radio airings of both the I Have a Dream speech (Don doesn’t think children can understand it. Maybe they can’t, but I still had to memorize it and recite it in third grade. Do you think Don can ever conceive that one day kids Sally’s age will be memorizing and reciting that speech every February?) and the funeral service for the four little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. (Betty offers Carla a day off, but ponders whether the deaths mean maybe the Civil Rights Act shouldn’t be passed. Um… because it’s the Civil Rights Act that’s causing the hate? I don’t know, I like Betty but it’s best to just cover your ears and go la la la when she tries to talk politics.)

So, this week’s discussion question: Who does it suck to be more – Sal, or Carla? (Personally, I’m going with Sal this week, but probably Carla in the long term.)

Season 3, Episode 9: Wee Small Hours (originally aired October 11, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of AMC and Carin Baer