lol, no they did not.

Nice post.

That fantasy sequence at LAX followed by an episode full of emasculated, depressed Don is pretty sweet. I love that he hasn't even told Megan about his leave of absence.

i'm not in advertising, but my line of work has a similar focus on winning and keeping clients. i've generally found the business elements of drama in mad men on point and compelling.

Yeah, there are a lot of parallels to life in a law firm. Don't know if that's your profession, but that's how I feel.

I've read enough of these threads over the past few series to realise that that broken sliding door in Don's New York apartment has some kind of symbolic meaning. I'm just not sure what it was.

Perhaps it's his marriage. I mean he sees that it's broken, he doesn't really know how to fix it but then doesn't really try that hard either. In the end he just accepts that it's broken and almost embraces the consequences of that.

Ken took a shotgun blast of birdshot to the face.

One might say he's out in the cold after stepping through a liminal space characterized by brokenness.

Don ate TWO(!!) sandwiches this episode. Not sure what that means; for some reason I feel like he rarely eats on screen. I'd keep my eye on Don's eating habits/appetite/voraciousness throughout this season.

I know he's supposed to be Duck 2.0, but I really hate Lou (and I loved Duck).

Neve did look old but she still has her charming laugh.

I like Don living with Freddy and funneling him ideas.

On second thought they might not be living together, but I like Freddy bringing him a sandwich.

Angry Ken with his eyepatch is also great.

they've been shaving it back for years

Not that this is the most original prediction OAT but I really think Don might kill himself by the end of this season.

It seems to me that Mad Men, more than anything else, is structurally and thematically about Don's anhedonia. The series starts with Don engaging in debauchery that he took pleasure in, but had to suffer marital and professional consequences for. As the seasons have gone by, this pursuit of pleasure--in the form of affairs, business coups, risk-taking, alcoholism, etc.--has entered a sort of death spiral, as the consequences of Don's pleasure-seeking have become graver and the returns diminished.

At this point, Don seems near the end of the road. His rejection of Neve Campbell can be seen in a good light, like he's grown as a person, but I see it more as a symptom of the degree to which he's in despair and aware of it. He's a smart guy and he knows that one more affair will not bring him any real pleasure, or even much gratification at this point, but what else is there? He's the kind of guy who, for all his sophistication and intelligence, worships at the altar of absolutes. The Power and Magic of Advertising, caps intended, was one of those absolutes, and he's still going through the motions but it doesn't seem convincing. Likewise, Pussy in all its Incarnations, but the thrill seems to be gone there, as well. Don doesn't have Sterling's relativist resiliency--that is, Roger is similar to Don in many ways, but not saddled with the curse of needing everything to mean something. Don strikes me as the kind of person who, to survive, ultimately might need to find religion, and I don't see that happening.

It strikes me that, in many ways, the experience of watching the show traces and mimics Don's anhedonia. The thrill of watching Don behave badly in the early seasons has worn off for us at precisely the same rate it's worn off for him. I believe this is intentional--last season was reviled for being kind of boring and reiterating stuff we'd seen before, but that was the point. Don's affair with Sylvia had a boxed-in, desperate quality, and was enlivened only by artificial boundary-pushing, e.g. the D/S stuff in the hotel and recklessly screwing when their spouses are in the building.

All of which is to say that I don't see where Don can go, at this point, but out.

about 20-25 minutes in to this ep i got pretty sad because of how few episodes there are left, and how they are splitting it up. it's really hard for me to picture anything but an enormous feeling of 'meh' and frustration when this adjourns in 6 weeks time.

not that it matters at all, but the ratings for this ep were really bad.

anyway it was an ok episode, it's always pretty tough to get viewers up to speed on what everyone is doing and have it not feel a certain way, but i preferred it to the recent 2hr premieres which have really dragged. if anything though it just highlighted the enormity of the task ahead with regards to making this season feel satisfying and not disjointed.

ratings are terrible because every other show on TV is on. i'm not going to watch game of thrones and mad men in the same night, they are two wildly different shows, and which show am i more likely to be spoiled on by the internet? (of course, last week I did watch Mad Men first, but that's a rarity)

Clare: I don't know, I feel like death is an easy way out for Don. He's clearly sabotaged every relationship in his life that means something, but maybe there's a way back in to the company. I feel like Don can win a hollow victory against himself - kind of like the end of Casino, where Ace Rothstein goes back to doing what he always did, but ultimately learning that he's a much weaker person than he thought he was.

Y'all are dancing on Don's grave a little here I think.

A big reason the ratings sucked is they did a very poor job promoting the fact of the season premiere.

Right, but do you see him doing this? Don coming full circle, having learned he's just a schmuck like everyone else... idk, that seems very inconsistent with his character. He's perfectly happy to self-sabotage as long as it gets him somewhere new. But he's running out of new frontiers--California has always been sort of held out as this mythical afterlife kind of place (his dying ex-wife, Kinsey, etc.) that held the possibility of rebirth, but now it's corrupted by Megan and Pete Campbell and Ted.

I'm not saying I want him to kill himself, just seems increasingly plausible to me as the boundaries of Don's world close in around him.

Similar to Dick Whitman, Don is again kinda passing off as somebody else, but this time only using his name and not his whole identity and also this time not to get out of were he was (Korean War) but to get back from where he was kicked out. Freddy, of course, was also asked to take a leave of absence near the beginning.

What if the ad world does see Don as 'damaged goods'? Will he have to keep borrowing Freddy's name to get his work out?

Or hire/partner up with a young kid and send him to sell his work under a pen name, like a blacklisted writer?

I think your observation is spot on. I just rewatched the scene and it seems that the moment they kiss his fantasy ends and reality sets in.

SC&P don't want the "D" anymore.

The movie on TV that Megan asked about was Lost Horizon, I think, and one of the characters in the movie



Odds Don gets cirrhosis?

Gotta use a divine slo-mo shot when in LA.

Next on Mad Men:

I do, yeah, because there are two plausible alternatives - suicide or another identity change. And while we see him watching a lot of television, that's grist for an ad man (and indeed the copy he wrote for Freddy Rumsen seemed inspired and in the normal Don Draper mode, although maybe I'd have to re-analyze it).

Don does seem too pressed into his current identity to turn into Pete Campbell - Campbell seems to be an example of what can happen to someone who decides to cast their old self off. Now of course Campbell is probably miserable, but he's pretending to be a happier person, which is certainly a welcome change for him.

Did anyone mention that it's SC&P now? That seemed rather ominous.

I don't get why you guys hate Don so much. He's a flawed human being, he's not perfect. You act like he's Satan or something. This palpable contempt I don't really get.

Yeah Don's basically a good enough guy. Not father of the year but not terrible. He was a dick to Ted but that was hilarious, so I'll give him a pass. B+ human being all told.