Mad Men: Don’t act like a stranger. We’ve got tea.

Wahhhh!!

I know this season of Mad Men has been all about change but this is too much change for me!

The Kennedy administration is over. Sterling Cooper is over. The Draper marriage is over. And I cannot handle it.

Even though most of the episode wasn’t as wrenching as most of last week, or as most of the season, even, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly sad at the end.

But anyway. All right. I’ll pull myself together. We only had two plots this week, so theoretically this should be a quick review.

At home, heartbreak. Betty is dead serious about getting a divorce and marrying Henry Francis. Don is left completely powerless. A lawyer friend of Henry’s advises Betty to go to Reno (apparently that was still being done in 1963, due to New York’s still old-fashioned divorce laws), so she decides to do just that. Don finds out about Henry, via Roger’s daughter Margaret of all people, and there’s a terrifying scene where he drunkenly confronts Betty about it, but then he remembers who he is (or who he wants to be) and gives in to Betty’s unrelenting desire that he move out. They tell the kids, and it’s awful. Then he moves into an apartment in the city and Betty gets on a plane with Henry and Baby Gene, and Carla moves in with Sally and Bobby.

At work, things are also scary, but it’s more exciting than depressing. Don finds out that both Sterling Cooper and its British parent company have been sold to that huge agency that tried to hire Don (and Betty the model) back in season 1. He convinces Roger, Bertram, and Pryce to break off and start their own company. This involves secretly recruiting a few of the best and brightest SC folks and accounts and stealing a bunch of files over the weekend. Then they set up camp in a hotel and call themselves Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The “skeleton staff” consists, so far, of our four partners, plus Peggy, Pete, Harry, and Joan, listed in order of difficulty obtaining them. Trudy has also voluntarily (and adorably) made herself a member of the club. (Apparently SCDP doesn’t need art, or perhaps Don is planning to handle that himself.)

So let’s start on the homefront.

I know Betty has good reason for wanting to end this marriage. I want to be on her side. I’ve always wanted to be on her side. But out of all the divorces I can recall seeing on screen this one felt the most painful. That scene where they told the kids – and they did that without having seen a million shows and read a million articles about how you’re supposed to have that conversation with your kids; man, living in 1963 sucked – was way, way up there in any list of the show’s most wrenching moments. (Sorry, I’ve still got to go with Joan leaving the flowers on her desk in “The Mountain King” for the number one spot.)

The scene in the bedroom where Don confronted Betty actually made me wonder, for the first time ever on this show, if they were holding back – if they would’ve had Don actually hit Betty if it hadn’t been a basic cable show. I know nonviolence is a hallmark of Don’s character but I also know that he was under extreme stress and when under extreme stress people do things they normally restrain themselves from doing. He was, after all, yanking her around and screaming at her with the door open and the baby ten feet away. I’m going to come down on the side, though, of assuming Matthew Weiner used that complete creative control he’s always bragging about and staged the scene he wanted to stage.

I’m still struggling to believe that the Drapers’ marriage really is over. I felt so much better a few weeks back when that lawyer told Betty she couldn’t get a divorce. I hadn’t thought about Reno. And Betty appears to have learned nothing about relationships or men or marriage from what happened with Don, because she barely knows Henry Francis, and still hasn’t introduced him to her kids, but when he assures Betty that he’ll provide for her and the kids and that she doesn’t need money from Don, she believes him. God, Betty has revealed herself to be so smart; how is she possibly falling for this crap? I know, I know, her daddy always taught her that a man would provide for her and her mother taught her that being pretty would always get her everything she needed and blah blah blah but come on, Betty, you’ve already done this once now. I’m not saying Henry doesn’t believe what he’s saying – all signs seem to indicate that he really does see himself having a future with Betty – but Henry is attached to a presidential campaign that even Betty knows is doomed, and yet she believes him when he says he can take care of her and the kids. Come on, Betty, use that college-educated brain!

And on a minor note, I’m confused – is Carla really moving into the Draper house for six weeks? Doesn’t she have her own family? I’m confused about why Don can’t live in the house for six weeks and at least help with the kids, rather than leaving them parentless altogether, but I think this is one of those complicated divorce things that makes sense to the people involved.

Anyway, let’s talk about the work stuff now, since that’s much more fun.

I know nothing about business and thought that having a contract meant you couldn’t just up and get fired, but apparently that’s not the case. Getting all three of the SC higher-ups out of their contracts is just a matter of having Pryce fire them. Even though they all hate Pryce, they agree when he demands to be made a partner. Then he proves to also have a lot of essential knowledge about how the business is run, which leads one to wonder who was doing that sort of thing before the PPL takeover, and then also leads one to conclude that maybe that was the reason SC in seasons 1 and 2 seemed to flounder around a lot. I was confused about how Pryce himself was going to be free to do all this, not realizing what had gone unspoken all along, which was that Pryce was going to get fired (excuse me, “sacked”) once all these machinations became known to the London overlords. And he did, in an awesome scene that fully redeemed a character who had been on the path to redemption since even before that dude got his foot chopped off. I just hope this means we get to see more of the fabulous Mrs. Pryce. I think she and Trudy would really hit it off.

The scenes where various members of the SCDP leadership recruited their new underlings were really the heart of this storyline, and oh, it was fun to see. Peggy turned down Don’s first recruitment effort (during which he didn’t recruit as much as order), forcing him to go begging at her (very cute) apartment on Sunday afternoon and give her that professional affirmation she’s been craving from him for three years now. I didn’t totally understand Don’s speech to Peggy about how their respective lives have changed, but I know it paralleled Peggy’s speech to Pete in the season 2 finale, and that was lovely.

Speaking of Pete, his recruitment scene was probably the best of all. Don and Roger, of course, had no particular interest in recruiting Pete himself, they simply needed the accounts he brought with him. (Oh, and by the way, I feel bad now for mocking Trudy last week for thinking Pete’s clients would follow him to a new agency. Apparently a good number of them will do just that, including the biggie, North Atlantic Aviation. It’s easy to forget that the Pete of season 1 was not the Pete of seasons 2 and 3 and that he’s been working hard at this job.) They do choose to go to him before Ken, though, and we aren’t told why, unless it really is for Pete’s forward-thinking tendencies (which seems like a legit reason to me, but of course I live in 2009 and so I know that Pete’s going to be right about these things; Don can only guess, and he still thinks it’s 1934). Don had no apparent problem giving Pete more of a sales pitch than he gave Peggy, and given how little he respects Pete that made me even madder, even though Roger and Don were laughing at Pete behind his back throughout the entire scene. Although really, I think Pete knows they were laughing at him, and he was willing to work with that. Pete has always been willing to work with that.

Meanwhile, Joan is back, having required nothing more than an off-screen phone call from Roger to get her on board, but Sal’s name was never even mentioned once, unless I missed it. I’m assuming Sal has another job by now in any case, and luring him back to SCDP wouldn’t be an easy feat given his last experiences with the S and D components. But I hope we don’t simply see him poking around in the new office in the season 4 premiere with no more than a throwaway explanation, because Don treated Sal worse than he treated Peggy, and that’s saying a lot.

The most notable omissions in the new staff, of course, are Paul and Ken, which the boys find out about on Monday morning when they arrive at the partially ransacked SC offices. I laughed at first when I saw Paul’s reaction, and then I felt bad for him, which is exactly the reaction Michael Gladis and Matthew Weiner intended for me to have. They are so my puppetmasters. But I really, really hope Paul and Ken aren’t gone from the show for good. (I didn’t really realize how much I liked Ken until last week, when he was fixing the space heater under the secretary’s desk, because you know, he’s a nice guy. For all his faults, he still wants to help secretaries get warm. I don’t see Pete crawling under anyone’s desk to fix a space heater. Yes, I see him helping au pairs get stains out of dresses, but then I see him demanding sex in return. But anyway.)

In order to be able to do the work for the accounts they’re bringing with them, the SCDP team has to break into the office over the weekend and physically haul, like, filing cabinets, full of logo files and negatives and other things that only Joan knows about, out of the place. So on the one hand, it’s just amazing to think of how incredibly complicated the logistics were of these sorts of things before electronic copies existed. But on the other hand it’s staggering to think that all of these people were comfortable doing this, and weren’t the least bit worried that they’d get sued. I know America hadn’t been ruined yet by all those evil baby-eating Democratic-voting trial attorneys who showed up later, but surely there were lawsuits even in 1963?

But anyway, apparently it works out, and they move into a hotel suite that’s serving as their temporary office. At the episode’s end, we see a lovely shot of the new team at work. Harry, off-camera, is doing paperwork and hating himself. Roger is lounging on a sofa reading the newspaper. Peggy and Don are typing (Don knows how to type! Who knew?). Joan is on her feet, setting up a rolodex. Pete is on the phone reassuring a client. Then Trudy comes bustling in with sandwiches. It’s a beautifully constructed sequence, and you know that every little gesture was planned (Matthew Weiner himself directed the episode). Then we get a shot of them relaxing, eating and laughing, and even though most of them didn’t particularly like each other three days ago, they’re clearly already becoming a family. And Don even smiles at them. Awww.

We end the season with a montage of the new SCDP and Don and Betty setting off into their new lives. I was clinging to the last few moments of the montage. Please, please, give us one more shot! One more character closure!

But it was over in seconds, and now we’re back into that ten-month drought until the next season, because AMC has no problem toying with our emotions since it keeps saving them money and earning them cred.

So fine then. I can handle it. Very good. Happy Christmas!

For another take on this episode, check out Very Good. Happy Christmas! by Matt DeGroot.

Season 3, Episode 13: Shut the Door.  Have a Seat (originally aired November 8, 2009)

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Photographs courtesy of AMC and Carin Baer