We get a break from Betty this week, but Harry Crane is still in full force, as he now has the computer he has desperately wanted being setup in the office. Being that it’s 1969, this means an entire room is required for such a construction and the unsubtle choice of the Creative team’s workroom is the victim. That does not stop work from being done by Peggy though, as she gets a raise, a new project, and an unwilling Don to handle. Meanwhile, Mr. And the former Mrs. Sterling go on a hippie commune adventure, with hopes of rescuing their daughter. Sometimes it is nice to go outdoors, I suppose.
If each season of Mad Men is a novel – and since the show's literary aspirations are in its DNA, we've always seen it that way, with each episode.
AdvertisementLet’s start with the Sterlings. As it is hard not to be entertained by Roger in any situation, whether he is projectile vomiting in the office or going on an LSD trip (or of course going for humor via a performance in blackface), there is always a little something special to go with seeing him share time with his family, as it basically grounds his character. I would say the same for his interactions with Joan as well, but this week we are dealing with family affairs, which include a number of scenes with his ex-wife, Mona (continually played wonderfully by John Slattery’s real-life wife Talia Balsam.Their daughter, Margaret, has apparently run away to a hippie commune. Margaret’s husband, Brooks, is instructed by Roger to go bring her back, but he ends up in jail. Mona and Roger then go out to the country to retrieve their daughter themselves.
The natural chemistry that Slattery and Balsam have continues to work very well, with the two of them bickering over how to handle this situation, what things are like now, and so on, which is a great way to keep us up on who Roger wants to be, when he is not in his sex dens or planning out ways to get drunk with Don off-campus. AdvertisementBack to the offices of SC&P, the idea of societal evolution is certainly quite present this week, which is fitting, given the tile of this episode, “The Monolith,” which easily brings to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a monolith serves as a literal source of inspiration to primates. While various lectures from the likes of Bert and Freddy Rumsen (Freddy!) serve as more of an inspiration than say the giant computer being assembled in the office this week, the way things keep changing and growing provide the bridges needed to push Mad Men closer to the work environments of the future. The office is getting a computer.
Joan, Peggy, and Dawn are all women with plenty of involvement in this ‘man’s world’ of business. Hell, Peggy is given a raise and more responsibility, not necessarily because she earned it, but her skills are certainly not being overlooked either. So what is left for those who are not really needed?Don is now in the office of Lane Pryce, the office of a dead man, which this show happily points out. Much like how Lane found himself useless in a company he helped start, Don is told by Bert that the company has done just fine without him. Now it comes down to how Don can keep himself from becoming antiquated technology in the same way the computers that IBM replaces are. It is frustrating that we must force ourselves to get through Don making all the wrong and stubborn choices, before deciding that he needs to “just do the work,” if he ever wants to feel like a whole person, as far as work is concerned, again. In the end though, Don decides to soldier on.
He steps back from violating the rules he must follow and decides to take on this challenge of change.While there are only three episodes left for this half of season seven and Mad Men continues to be a show that moves at its own pace and is confident in throwing a character like Roger literally out in the wilderness and finding a way for that to connect with the rest of the show. A father-daughter bond broken up, with reasoning stemming from how the ‘daughter’ was treated and how she’s throwing that back at the ‘father’ addresses both main plots this week, with an attempt to still add the office politics, with some kind of end game likely in mind, as far as the show (and Harry Crane) are concerned.
All that said, the show continues to excel at deliberate pacing and confident character work in a way that finds me happy to count the stars, rather than let a computer do it for me. Aaron is a movie fanatic. He is from Orange County, California, but earned a degree or two at UC Santa Barbara. He describes himself as a film reviewer, writer, podcaster, video game player, comic book reader, disc golfer, and a lefty.
There are too many films, TV shows, books, etc. For him to list as favorites, but he can assure that the amount of film knowledge within his noggin is ridiculous, though he is always open to learning more. You can follow Aaron on Twitter @AaronsPS4, see what else he is up to at TheCodeIsZeek.com, and check out his podcast, Out Now with Aaron and Abe, on iTunes.
Electricity brings problems, says a hippie on an upstate New York farming commune to Roger Sterling in the fourth episode of Mad Men‘s seventh season, “The Monolith.” That’s a fairly accurate summary of Sunday’s episode: Roger is tasked with retrieving his daughter, Margaret, who goes off the grid to live in a free-loving, vegetable-growing utopia, while the arrival of a massive, early computer physically shakes up the SC&P offices and triggers a few personal crises within the agency.Let’s start with Roger. When Margaret leaves behind her husband and young son to join whatever cult-like group she alluded to in their season-premiere reconciliation brunch, he becomes the natural choice to retrieve her — not just because of his own dabbling in 1960s counterculture, but because Margaret’s choice is apparently the kind of selfish, reckless decision only a Sterling would make and understand. Coming along for the ride is Margaret’s mother, Mona, who makes a welcome return to the series here. With the exception of Joan, Roger has always had more chemistry with his ex-wife than any of the other woman passing through his life (it probably helps that John Slattery and Talia Balsam are real-life spouses), and it’s Mona, too, who delivers the best line of the episode: “These people are lost, they’re on drugs and they have venereal diseases.”.
Mona tries to assure Margaret that parenthood will ultimately fulfill her if she comes back to civilization, but a skeptical Margaret sends Mona running for the car when she brings up all the times Mona locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of gin to escape her maternal duties. Roger, on the other hand, is a little lost himself at this point, so he decides to keep an open mind, and the two have a grand old time together. They peel potatoes! They enjoy the natural rhythms of mother nature’s clock! They ponder gathering firewood and the meaning of labor in a non-hierarchical society! They smoke a little weed! And then, after one of Margaret’s lovers steals her away in the middle of the night for some barnyard hanky-panky, the father-daughter bonding comes crashing to a halt.There are number of reasons why witnessing his daughter’s nighttime activity would trigger Roger’s sudden suspicions about Margaret’s new lifestyle, but it’s likely he feels personally responsible for her choices and worries about a ripple effect — why else would he be so suddenly concerned with his grandson’s welfare?
As Roger seems to see it, the commune is just an opportunity to sleep around and avoid responsibility — actions that are, frankly, straight out of the Sterling playbook. So Roger angrily asks her how she could abandon her child, and Margaret turns right around and accuses of him of having done the exact same. Both look hurt, but their big blowout was a little unsatisfying considering how the underlying issues behind it were more or less laid out at the beginning of the episode, if not several episodes ago. Roger was an inattentive father who doesn’t know to express his feelings about his parenting regrets, and Margaret has some lingering daddy issues — it’s that simple. This wouldn’t be the first time a disappointing dad on Mad Men had a wake-up call when confronted with what he did to his kids, so maybe Roger will begin earnestly repairing all his damaged relationships. So far, though, this scene just seemed like an excuse to let John Slattery roll around in the mud.
Over at SC&P, Don’s return to working life isn’t off to a smooth start. He’s already out of the loop and showing up late, almost missing the ground-breaking ceremony for the agency’s new computer, which, as Roger points out, seems to only do “magical things, like make Harry Crane look important.” In one of the more heavy-handed instances of Mad Men symbolism, the man overseeing the installation, Lloyd, tells Don that “these machines are a metaphor for whatever’s on people’s minds.” Did you catch that? The episode in which Don must confront his own impending obsolescence also features a device that threatens to one day replace humans! But, more interestingly, the giant computer reminds viewers just how much physical space and power are intertwined in office politics. Up until this point in the season, Don had shown over and over again that he was a changed man, but mostly in the face of relatively minor temptations and inconveniences. Forcing him to work for Peggy, however finally offers the big test of whether he’s serious about progress after all. Don’s most redeeming quality has been his creative work, so while he can (sort of) curb his drinking, open up to his family and start making up for his personal shortcomings, working for Peggy — who’s clearly enjoying her newfound authority — reminds him of how far he’s fallen and how unnecessary he’s become.
So it’s not surprising that he takes the news of his new assignment poorly. He hurls a typewriter and throws a temper tantrum; he plays solitaire and reads books instead of going to meetings; he tries to get out of working for Peggy by pitching Lloyd’s computer business to Bert Cooper, who quickly puts him in his place; he steals vodka from Roger and gets wasted in the middle of day. While drunk, he makes a scene in the office in front of Lloyd and tries to hit up a baseball game with Freddy, but Freddy, who knows a thing or two about getting sober, takes him home and gives him some tough love. If you want your old job back, he explains, you have to behave like an adult and work for it. If you want the partners to stop rooting against you, just prove them wrong.The message gets through. Jon Hamm that Don is a man who takes two steps backwards for every step forward, yet the closing scene of him at his typing on his typewriter, sucking it up and promising Peggy the work she asked for, felt like it could have been the mid-season finale — a chapter closed, a new page turned. Writing for Entertainment Weekly two years ago, Owen Glieberman — of course Mad Men would end with Don working for Peggy, because what’s a better way to tell the story of Don’s demise than to put him directly under the supervision of the copywriter he basically discovered?But this isn’t the end of Mad Man at all.
In fact, there are three more episodes this season and another seven due next year. Don can still fail as a team player and drag her down, or maybe Peggy will pull him up to start their own agency (okay, that probably won’t happen, but Draper & Olson has a nice ring to it, right?). Either way, if it took four episodes of careful plotting to reunite Don and Peggy in the most eventful episode of the season, their relationship can only get more important and illuminating as the series winds down.