Mad Men Season 5 Episode 3

Certain nights you drive home with the music on high, singing along to songs, poorly,  which is the only way you know how. You dance in the car within the confines of your seat. Rain is falling in the dark, but you know your skin wouldn't even feel it. This is an act of transcendence, of futility, as all are. And even though you know that this gesture will fall short of the arising you seek, a part of  you wants to take a picture of this moment, so you can put it an envelope, and mail it to soeone you used to know who lives in Kansas now, with three dogs, you'll attach a note that says, "This is the person I have always been." 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 3

The third episode begins like a punch line to a joke, with Henry Francis calling upstairs for Betty. It was easy to forget that she was part of the show during the first two episodes. She spent no time on screen and her last parting with Don at the end of Season 4, signaled a break from the show that we’d started with. It was easy to imagine that the break would be permanent. And yet, here was the Betty episode.

In order to talk about the Betty episode we first have to talk about January Jones. Once a show becomes popular, as Mad Men has, the actors and actresses suddenly become minor celebrities. With celebrity comes the offer of movies, commercials, hot air balloon flights with ice sculptures (I may have made the last one up) etc. And, eventually the actors and actresses will take on a role, something different than what we’ve seen from them before. Christina Hendricks shows up in Drive, and you can stumble across her in old episodes of Firefly as well, where she plays an as- kicking conniving thief. You can watch Jon Hamm making a fool of himself on 30 Rock, or Bridesmaids, or SNL. While I always feel a bit silly watching Don Draper act like a cad, I’m reassured by it because I realize that Jon Hamm is an actor, playing a role. I realize that Christina Hendricks is as well. And that takes us to January Jones.

The problem with watching January Jones in any other movie is that you suddenly realize that she operates at one register. Suddenly, what seemed a well-acted first season, culminating in her walking out back to shoot some birds, now feels like exactly the sort of performance she’d give if she was imbued with mutant powers. As a viewer, you watch season 1 and can see the echoes of Betty Friedan, of a woman living at the periphery of her philandering husband’s life, and her distance, her iciness, even her poor parenting seem like a natural outgrowth of her alienation. It makes her seem kind of like a wonderful actress. I suppose I should have picked up on the warning signs when her voice didn’t moderate at all during the brief almost fling with someone else’s fiancée during her riding lessons. The problem is her voice. The instrument that makes Jennifer Lawrence able to seem 30 when she’s twenty one, makes January Jones sound like she’s perpetually arriving from a state of having just been unthawed, one can see her playing a mean Han Solo, and because of that cold voice, she needs to add extra emotion into her acting, and she’s just too damn expressionless and pretty to make you believe she’s suffering all that much. I realize that it’s unfair to blame her acting on her beauty, but it ain’t helping. It’s hard to picture anything could ever go wrong when her face and skin always look so exquisite. In this case, her beauty is doing her no favors.  I’m trying to watch the show imagining that I don’t know that JJ operates on one level. If I do that, I can almost enjoy her. (Her finest moment in this episode is reaching over and having a second bowl of ice cream and managing to seem about as satisfied with herself as any person has ever been despite her concerns about her weight).

The Betty episode primarily centers around her scare with cancer. The scare highlights, rather well, the difficulty of two people deciding to separate after many years of marriage. It’s clear that Don is shaken by the news, and that Betty feels it necessary, in some small way, to turn to him, which feels entirely believable. It also leads both of the new spouses to question the motives behind Don and Betty’s calls. And yet it is so obvious to the viewer that so much has passed between these people that it would be nearly impossible for the two of them to pretend as though it didn’t matter.

The other main plot of the episode is an attempt to get the Rolling Stones to sing a song for Heinz. The attempt is so patently wayward, that the only tension arrives when Don briefly talks with a teenager girl waiting to see the Stones. He quickly diffuses the sexual tension that she tries to bring about and begins questioning her about her like of the Stones, which is the first sign that he is remotely invested in work. I don’t think I was ready for an entire season of Don cooking pancakes and mooning after his wife, so I was glad to see a bit of that old flame, even if it does come with requisite burnings.

SCDP also retains the services of Mowhawk Air courtesy of the fine workings of Pete Campbell. He slides a subtle dagger into Roger by moderately putting him in charge of the account. And, thus we continue to see the ascendancy of Pete and the decline of Roger, which is also evidenced in his retrograde view of Don’s new black secretary. It seems clear to me that he’s turning into a bit of a dinosaur, but I hope they hold on to him since he always has the best lines. “Get me a good looking version of, Don.”

The final piece of the puzzle is the hiring of a Jewish copywriter. In case you’ve forgotten this is the season where we deal with racial and religious tension. We’re not even remotely approaching Downton Abbey territory, but it will be interesting to see how much of a role these tensions play in the upcoming season. I say this because as interesting as ethnography is, what’s really interesting are the dynamic characters that we’ve seen evolved through the first four plus seasons.