Mad Men Season 5 Episode 4

Mad Men Season 5 episode 4

What is Mad Men or any show about? I’m generally not one for boiling things down in such way. In general, television shows, good or bad, are primarily about the relationships between people. Procedurals are less bound by this convention, reliant as they are on action and suspense, less about the characters than about solving a mystery and bringing justice etc. However, at heart, they still need to have interesting characters and relationships in order to be worth watching. Plenty of television shows aren’t worth watching.

I don’t know what Mad Men is about. That’s a pretty crappy way to answer a question that you’ve posed. But I suppose if I’m to follow my own logic then the show is about people. And I suppose the show’s real meaning or what it’s about are then found in what the characters are dealing with. Friends is a show about finding someone to marry and having some laughs with friends. Seinfeld is a show about friendship and narcissism. Grey’s Anatomy is a show about helping people/seeing their anatomy. The fourth episode of Mad Men starts to offer some clues as to what at least this season will be about: death.

It’s familiar ground, death, certainly not the road less traveled. Though paradoxically it’s a road that nobody gets to travel down twice to tell us whether the evening wear is formal or business casual, the dinners light and airy or comprised of worms and mud. Various cultures and epochs of time have resulted in different postulations as to what exactly happens at that moment. Most have settled on the theory that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Papa New Guineau results in a funeral in western Texas, but the results haven’t been confirmed.

The episode is also about, Don, and Don’s propensity for sleeping around during his previous marriage. And therefore, it is about fear. The fear motif is introduced via the murder of eight nursing students in Chicago, and, in particular, the story of the one woman who survived when the murderer lost count. It’s strange how the mind of everyone turned to the one survivor rather than the slain, but that is what everyone pretty much does, which makes sense, the fear, and fear of death is the element that the living can grab onto. To be dead is merely to be dead. As Oscar Wilde said, “We die only once, but for such a very long time.”

The fear generated by this actual historical event in the lives of the characters on Mad Men was expertly employed during this episode. It is Don and Megan’s fear, made explicit by her verbally, that he will wind up running around on her. Don, sick as a dog, denies this but is haunted by his subconscious. He imagines that an old flame follows him home and seduces him. The confusing, and expertly played part of this scenario is that the viewer is roughly 75 percent sure that they are watching a fever dream, however, the other 25 percent is like, “wait, is that crazy lady really at his house?” The tension between the real and the imagined is heightened when Don strangles her to death after they sleep together. For me, even mostly suspecting that the scene was not real, it was one of the most stressful moments on Mad Men that I’d ever watched. The murder would have been a moral failing on the order that would have made liking Don Draper, which many of us do, damn near impossible. As he frantically tries to shove the body under the bed my heart was beating intensely fast. Did Mad Men just jump the shark? No. It didn’t. Because once you have a murder you spend the rest of the season/show talking and worrying about that murder. The characters all become caricatures revolving around a plot point rather than dynamically fleshed our realities. However, by shoving the body under the bed we get not only a reenactment of the Chicago murders, we also are introduced into Don’s raging battle with his sub-conscious mind in an incredibly visceral way. On the surface, he seems happy, but can he trust that happiness? Can he trust himself? Expertly played.

The sub plots also revolved around varying kinds of fear. Sally, unmoored from the wonderful parenting of Betty Draper is taken care of by her step-grandmother, who turns out to make Betty wind up looking like mother of the year. By the end of the evening, the grandmother has described her father kicking her across the room for no reason as good parenting, told Sally the details about the murders in Chicago, sits in a chair wielding a meat cleaver and gives Sally a sleeping pill to send her off into the night, where she too, like Don’s old girlfriend, ends up underneath the couch. The grandmother and Sally, so at odds throughout the episode are united in their fear.

The episode also deals with the various parental failings. Betty is described as letting Sally watch television all day during the summer. Don is the absentee father, who disapproves but isn’t around to change anything. The grandmother’s father booted her across the room for no reason to teach her about the world, and the grandmother is passing out meat cleavers and sleeping pills. I don’t think anyone has a subscription to Parenting Magazine on this show.

The other sub plot revolves around Peggy taking Don’s new secretary, Dawn, home to sleep on her couch. Dawn’s brother is afraid for her to ride home on the subway because of the riots and the muders. Thus, once again the murders in Chicago are the backdrop for character development. Peggy winds up spending the evening awkwardly trying to bond with Dawn, who is clearly uncomfortable, and pretty much spoils the whole gesture of saying, “we’re both different in that office,” by locking eyes with her over her purse before going to bed.

The other major plot deals with the return of Joan’s husband, Greg. The whole return is aided by Joan’s carping mother taking the baby away, so the two of them can have some quality time having sex/having Greg tell her that he’s signed up to head back to Vietnam for another year. This eventually winds up in the dissolution of their marriage, with Joan pointing out that he’s never been a good man, which is pretty much true from what the viewer has been shown. And yet, it’s hard not to feel that Greg is in a tough position. He has been cast as a bit of a wayward person who has finally found his calling in the army. And, he’s on the front lines of a war watching young men die in battle. It’s easy to see why he might feel pulled between country and home. However, as Joan pointed out, he has always kind of been a jerk.

This episode, more than any other, was about death. It was about fear. It was about the variety of ways that people try to combat fear. It’s compelling and strange to watch everyone flail around with meat cleavers or sub-conscious ex-lovers. It felt like a very good episode because it felt so familiar. I remember sitting with a baseball bat in my living room on many an afternoon convinced that someone else was in the house because of a small noise that I’d heard. We human beings are strange. This episode did a good job capturing that.